File:Hannah Arendt.jpg

October 14, 2020

Emily Haber @GermanAmbUSA

German Ambassador to the US

• https://twitter.com/GermanAmbUSA/status/1316351793446768641

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One of her many legacies: Totalitarianism can flourish where people systematically refuse to engage with reality, and are ready to replace reason with ideology and outright fiction.

Re: the 'Transformation of facts into opinions'

Everyone does not have a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has right to his opinion

Perhaps the most striking and frightening aspect of the German flight from reality is the habit of treating facts as though they were mere opinions. For example, the question of who started the last war, by no means a hotly debated issue, is answered by a surprising variety of opinions. An otherwise quite normally intelligent woman in Southern Germany told me that the Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig; this is only the crudest of many examples. Nor is this transformation of facts into opinions restricted to the war question; in all fields there is a kind of gentlemen’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion—and behind this is the tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter. This is a very serious thing, not only because it often makes discussion so hopeless (one does not ordinarily carry a reference library along everywhere), but primarily because the average German honestly believes this free-for-all, this nihilistic relativity about facts, to be the essence of democracy. In fact, of course, it is a legacy of the Nazi regime.

—Hannah Arendt, "The Aftermath of Nazi Rule—Report from Germany," Commentary, Oct 1950

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