A Lying World Order - Birmingham

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SYMPOSIUM: RHETORIC AND TERROR
A Lying World Order: Deception and the Rhetoric of Terror

Peg Birmingham
It is not often noted that the problem of deception occupies a
central place in Hannah Arendts analysis of totalitarianism. At
the outset of Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of
anti-Semitism, imperialism, or radical evil, she raises the issue of
deception, considering the difference between ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality:
Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their universal art of changing the mind by arguments (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth, but aimed
at opinions which by their nature are changing, and which are
valid only at the time of the agreement and as long as the
agreement lasts, (Theatetus 172). ...The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the
ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument
at the expense of truth, where as the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.1
In these early pages of Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt

claims that the characteristic that sets totalitarianism apart from
tyrannical and dictatorial regimes is precisely the sophistic victory at the expense of reality, which she argues institutes a lying
world order or what also might be deemed radical deception.
Indeed, her discussion of radical evil cannot be understood apart
from her continuing preoccupation with the problem of this particular kind of political deception. When Arendt writes in 1945,
The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe, she is indicating in the strongest
terms possible that the problem of radical evil is by no means
eradicated with the defeat of totalitarianism, and this in large
part because of its inseparable link to radical deception, which
for her has nothing to do with what we understand by falsehood,
error, or even the deliberate liethe ways in which deception in
all its guises is traditionally distinguished from truth. Falsehood
and error are the opposites of truth, while a deliberate lie is the
intentional dissimulation of the truth. Radical deception is something else altogether.2
Conflating reality with truth, Arendt argues that philosophy
itself opens the door to the possibility of a lying world order. In
her essay 1945 titled On the Nature of Totalitarianism, she writes,
If Western philosophy has maintained that reality is truthfor
this is of course the ontological basis of the adequatio rei et
intellectusthen totalitarianism has concluded from this that
we can fabricate truth insofar as we can fabricate reality: that
we do not have to wait until reality unveils itself and shows us
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its true face, but we can bring into being a reality whose
structure will be known to us from the beginning because the
whole thing is our product.3
Arendt makes the same point in another 1945 essay, The Seeds
of a Fascist International:
It was always a too little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda
that it was not satisfied with lying but deliberately proposed to
transform its lies into reality.... For such a fabrication of a lying
reality no one was prepared. The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more
or less common to propaganda everywhere and of every time.
The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old
Occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and
made that true which until then could only be stated as a lie.4
Arendt gives an example of this confusion of reality and truth,

namely, arguing with a potential murderer over whether the
future victim is dead or alive. For the murderer to say that the
victim is dead only requires shooting the person. She argues that
counter-proposals are senseless because all the person has to do
is to shoot in order to create the very truth that is being argued
for: This is the spirit in which the Nazis destroyed Germany
in order to be proved in the right: an asset which may be of the
greatest value for their future activity. They destroyed Germany
to show that they were right when they said the German people
were fighting for its very existence; which was, at the very outset, a pure lie.5 A more contemporary example is the present
Administrations claim that Al Qaeda is operating out of Iraq,
which at the outset was a lie used to justify the invasion of Iraq,
but now because of the war is a true statement. For Arendt, these
two examples illustrate how radical deception introduces a mutation into the history of the lie: One can say that to some extent
fascism has added a new variation to the old art of lyingthe
most devilish variationthat of lying the truth.6
In what follows, I want to argue that the problem of a lying
world order and, therefore, the threat of totalitarianism is even
more urgent today than Arendt conceived of in her lifetime and
this precisely because of the ways in which politics today is
characterized by the activity of lying the truth, and this no
more so than in the present rhetoric of the war on terror. In
other words, if Arendt is correct in her analysis of totalitarianism
and its use of radical deception, and I think she is, then the present rhetoric of the war on terror in which lying the truth is
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L E A R N I N G F R O M A R E N D T S AT TA C K O N C L I C H
standard practice has ironically increased rather than diminished
the threat of fascism with its actual force of terror. In conclusion,
I will argue that Arendts understanding of comprehension, that
is, the ability to face up to reality, is the basis for all judgment
whether understood as reflective or phonetic. In other words,
comprehension testifies to factual truth and therefore is the first
order of political judgment, providing the ground for all political
judgments that are made on its basis.
I. Factual Truth as the Condition for Politics

Arendts distinction between truths of reason and factual truth
is difficult to sort out because almost always her language commits the very glide that she critiques Western philosophy for,
namely, confusing truth with reality, again a confusion at the very
heart of the ontological supposition, adequatio rei et intellectus.
Her very term factual truth reveals her confusion, or, more precisely, her imprecision. Truths of reason, she argues, are necessary: two plus two equals four, or a square has four sides; they are
coercive insofar as the truth of the mathematical or geometrical
statement is not gained through persuasion. Rational force alone
coerces me to assent to the truth of these claims.
Factual truths, on the other hand, are characterized by their
contingency; they have no necessity; they could have been
otherwise. Arendt writes, ...facts have no conclusive reason
whatever for being what they are; they could always have been
otherwise, and this annoying contingency is literally unlimited.7
They are the result of action, which could have happened in ways
other than it did. There is no necessity to actionthis is what
makes it what it is, unexpected and unpredictable, the beginning
of something new. To stay with Arendts examples, there was no
necessity that compelled Germany to invade Belgium in 1914.
Nor was there any necessity to Frances not being a victorious
superpower at the end of WWII. In each case, it could have been
otherwise. Germany could have stayed home. France could have
acted with a more valor. The problem we run into is that we
usually view action from the point of view of its completion
rather than its inaugural moment. After the war, the invasion can
no longer be otherwise; it cannot be undone. The same can be
said for the actual performance of France in World War II. To
focus on the events necessity, that is, the inability to undo it once
done is to miss the profound contingency of the act itself. Indeed,
the paradox is that that the event possesses both a stubborn
thereness and an inherent contingency. In Truth and
Politics, Arendt states: And the surest sign of the factuality of
facts and events is precisely this stubborn thereness, whose
inherent contingency ultimately defies all attempts at conclusive
explanation.8
For Arendt, the contingency of factual truths makes them
most like doxa. Yet, for all of Arendts insistence on the public
space as a space of doxa, she is not one who celebrates doxa over
factual truth. She insists on the distinction between the two.
Doxa is always open to persuasion, and there is always a plurality of doxa that together make up the public space as a space of
opinion. Factual truths, on the other hand, while political in
nature, are not strictly speaking part of the public space, if by
that is meant the space of persuasion, contest, and debate. I can
try to persuade you for the next many months that Belgium
invaded Germany, or that France was a great superpower after
the war, but even if I succeed in changing your mind, I have not
thereby altered the reality of what occurred. The best way to
destroy factual truths, however, is to reduce them to so many
opinions which can then be easily dismissed as just another
opinion open to dispute, contest, and interpretation; Arendt
argues that ...facts and opinions, though they must be kept
apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same
realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different
interests and passions can differ widely and still be legitimate as
long as they respect factual speculation.9
Even though factual truth and opinions occupy the same
realm, namely, the public space, they are in different locations.
Factual truth provides the limits to the public space as a space of
action and of contested and debatable opinions. In this way, they
function more like laws that provide the walls of the public
space. Factual truths, she argues, are not lawful walls, but the
very ground of reality upon which the public space is enacted. At
the same time, it is not possible to prove factual truths in the way
that one can prove a geometrical theorem. In keeping with its
appearance in the common world, Arendt argues that the factual
truth requires witnesses to establish the fact of its appearance: it
is always related to other people, it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent
that it is talked about.10 Like the play that has no spectator, so
too, without the testimony of witnesses, the event or fact has no
reality. Without this testimony, there are no factual truths and
thus no public space whatsoever. In other words, factual truths
give us the ground of reality, the very condition for the public
space. This ground is extremely fragile. The testimony of the
witness is easily discredited and in the case of dispute, only
other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked,
and settlement is usually arrived at by way of a majority; that is,
in the same way as the settlement of opinions disputesa wholly
unsatisfactory procedure, since there is nothing to prevent a
majority of witnesses from being false witnesses.11 This last
raises further questions: who is the credible witness? Whose
testimony establishes factual truth? I will return to this point at
the conclusion of these remarks.
While factual truth requires the testimony of the witness, factual truth itself is beyond reach in the stubbornness of its sheer
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thereness. Thus Arendt writes, Even if we admit that every
generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no
more than that it has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective, we dont admit the right to touch
the factual matter itself (Arendt 1977a, 238239).12 Certainly
the factual matter is never totally transparent and it is in its very
nature to withstand further elucidation. Here it is important to
distinguish between interpretation and manipulation. As the
above passage indicates, for Arendt each generation has the right
to its interpretation of the facts; each generation must engage in
the hermeneutical task of establishing the meaning of the facts
and in this way factual truth will for each generation take on a
new hue and tone. Manipulation, on the other hand, is literally
a handling of the matter itself. In other words, manipulation is
not concerned with the meaning of factual truth (hermeneutics),
but actively transforms the matter into something else entirely. In
this way, it resembles the work of the carpenter who handles
the wood in a way that produces a chair. Manipulation is a
poiesis that handles the factual matter is a manner that produces
a new, albeit it deceptive reality. Arendts distinction between
poiesis and praxis is helpful in grasping the difference between
manipulation and action. While manipulation appears to be
an action insofar as it introduces something new, it more closely
resembles poiesis insofar as its real intent is to produce a new
(although deceptive) reality using as its means ideology and
image-making.
II. Elated Citizenry: Self-Deception, Manipulation,

and the Rhetoric of Terror
As is well known, the characteristic for Arendt that most
defines Eichmann is his inability to speak in anything but
clichs. Less discussion has been paid to her observation that
Eichmanns use of clichs is dependent upon a kind of psychological elation that literally permits him not only to not confront reality, but at the same time never to confront himself.
Indeed, the latter is the condition for the former. Her discussion
of Eichmanns elated self-deception occurs in her analysis of the
duty of the law-abiding citizen. While attention has been paid to
Arendts analysis of the role of duty for the law-abiding citizen,
it is not often noticed that her analysis of the dutiful citizen concludes with a discussion of the inseparability of Eichmanns
sense of duty from his resistance to the temptation to do good:
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most
people recognize itthe quality of temptation. Many
Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob,
not to let their neighbors go off to their doom...But, God
knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.13
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The resistance to temptation occurs through the fascist imperative

of obedience and sacrifice; it is an imperative delivered most forcefully by what Eichmann terms the winged words of Himmler,
who was the most gifted, Arendt argues, at solving the problem of
consciencethe desire to resist evil. The effect of these winged
words on Eichmann was one of elation in which the slogans and
watchwords were no longer felt to be issued from above but instead
self-fabricated: ...and you could see what an extraordinary sense
of elation it gave to the speaker the moment it popped out of his
mouth.14 Indeed, Arendt points out that whenever the judges tried
to appeal to his conscience, they were met with elation, and they
were outraged as well as disconcerted when they learned that the
accused had at his disposal a different elating clich for each period
of his life and each of his activities.15
Eichmanns voice of conscience was not silencedit was carried away, caught up in the voice of another; his voice had literally been voiced over with the voice of Himmler and in the
process felt self-fabricated. The elated voice of conscience tells
Eichmann to ignore his own desire and dutifully carry out the
law of the land:
And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the
voice of conscience tells everybody Thou shalt not kill, even
though mans natural desires and inclinations may at times be
murderous, so the law of Hitlers land demanded that the voice
of conscience tell everybody: Thou shalt kill, although the
organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is
against the normal desires and inclinations of most people.16
Eichmanns all too easily voiced over voice of conscience, an

elated voice in which he identifies with both the law and the
desires of the fuhrer, reveals the way in which clichs and rhetoric are first a device of self-deception and only afterwards allow
for the deception mutation of reality through the manipulation of
factual truth. Eichmann elated voice of conscience is accomplished, Arendt argues, by the use of clichs, rhetoric and stock
phrases (Himmlers My Honor is my Loyalty) which go so far
as to turn basic instincts such as the instinct of pity whereby we
recoil at the suffering of others back upon the self: The trick
used by Himmler...consisted in turning these instincts around, as
it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would
be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties...17
Arendt suggests that clichs and stock phrases are effective
because they address the desire for the superlative, that is the
desire for omnipotence. Himmlers slogans and rhetoric
produce in Eichmann a sense of omnipotence, of being part of a
larger order that promises with its hellish fantasies an allpowerful, stable and predicable world. Indeed, in a 1951 letter to
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Jaspers, Arendt suggests that the totalitarian vision of hell is an
attempt to establish an omnipotent presence on the earth itself.
Arendt calls this desire for omnipotence the madness for the
superlative, a madness that brings God down to earth in the figure of a particular omnipotent individual. Arendt is clear in her
letter to Jaspers that this madness for the superlative is very
different from the desire for power found, for example, in
Hobbes. For Hobbes, the desire for power remains comparative,
relative to the power of other human beings. On the other hand,
the desire for omnipotence is a rejection of plurality altogether in
favor of being one, a godlike power on earth that desires
absolute rule.
Arendt locates the appeal of totalitarian ideology with its
claim of carrying out the law of nature or history in the longing
for a fixed and stable identity in a stable and predictable world:
Just as fear and the impotence from which fear springs are
antipolitical principles and throw men into a situation contrary
to political action, so loneliness and the logical-ideological
deducing the worst that comes from it represent an anti-political
solution and harbor a principle destructive for all human livingtogether....The ice-cold reasoning and the mighty tentacle of
dialectics which seize you as in a vise appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be
relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the
strident avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a
mans identity outside all relationships with others.18
Fascist ideology promises a ready made, unified identityfixed,

static, without contradiction and utterly reliable in a world characterized by the same qualities. In still other words, the madness for the superlative, Arendt argues, is mirrored in the elated
desire of the individual human being who also wants to reject the
plurality (the two-in-one) at the very heart of the self in favor of
a completeness, an integrity promised in submitting to a fantasy
of omnipotence. And what better evidence of this madness for
the superlative than Eichmanns last clich in which he elatedly
tells his audience, I will remember all of you, as if he could
continue to speak from the grave.
In her essay, Lying in Politics, written ten years after her
trial report, Arendt has not changed her mind on the role selfdeception and its desire for omnipotence plays in creating a lying
world order. Certainly, her analysis of the immense role clichs,
image-making and public-relations played in creating what
Ellsberg called the process of internal self-deception has lost
none it urgency for todays political world:
...it is as though the normal process of self-deceiving were
reversed; it was not as though deception ended with selfdeception. The deceivers started with self-deception...they
were so convinced of overwhelming success, not on the battlefield, but in the public-relations area and so certain of the
soundness of their psychological premises about the unlimited

possibilities in manipulating people, that they anticipated general belief and victory in the battle for the peoples minds.19
For Arendt, this unprecedented type of psychological manipulation serves as the basis for an entirely defactualized world in
which the distinction between fact and fantasy disappears because
this manipulation is played out at the level of the mind and not the
body, the latter being unable to remove itself from the world: The
reason reality did not catch up with them is that the goals pursued
by the United States government were almost exclusively psychological that is, matters of the mind. A generation raised on imagemaking was particularly susceptible to public-relations campaign
can-do when it becomes a matter of the psychological manipulation of peoples hearts and minds: Image making as global policynot world conquest, but victory in the battle to win the peoples mindis indeed something new in the huge arsenal of
human follies recorded in history.20
Moreover, the lies of the Nixon Administration, she argues,
were for domestic consumption in order to keep intact an
image of omnipotence.21 She argues that the entire purpose of the
webs of deceptions and lies was to create a specific state of
mind. Most important for this state of mind was the constantly
repeated clich of the mightiest power on earth, behind which
lurked the dangerous myth of omnipotence.22 Certainly this is
also true of the present administrations rhetoric of the war on terror and its web of deceptions surrounding that war, most notably,
the invasion of Iraq. Frank Rich in his recent book, The Greatest
Story ever Sold, offers an unrelenting analysis of how lies, clichs,
and the rhetoric of terror were used to sell the Iraqi war. Rich cites
Michael Deaver, former Chief of Staff to Reagan: They understand the visual as well as anybody ever has. They watched what
we did, they wrote the book... They understand that whats around
the head is as important as the head.23 Significantly, and this is
part of its rhetoric of terror, this is an administration that is explicitly anti-realist in its policies. In what he argues is the single most
revealing paragraph anyone has reported on the Bush administration, Rich recounts Ron Suskinds conversation with a presidential aide who informed Suskin with great condescension that a
judicious study of discernible reality is not the way the world
really works anymore...Were an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality.24
The question is why the American people were and perhaps
still are so willing to believe the deceptions? Here Arendts analysis of the elated Eichmann is helpful. In the weeks and months
following 9/11, the Bush administration used old western phrases
such as dead or alive, as well as coined new ones such as the
axis of evil. All resonated with an American public that felt vulnerable and was all too ready to believe the rhetoric of omnipotence (and goodness) put forth by the Bush administration. This
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rhetoric surrounding the war on terror is an example of the
desire for the superlative and its ensuing sense of omnipotence;
it is a rhetoric that reassures the American public that theirs is still
a safe, predictable, and intact world and that the United States is
still the shining city, indeed, the fortress, on the hill. Certainly
Arendt is not suggesting that the Nixon Administration was a fascist regime; nor would it be at all correct to suggest the same
about the present US administration. What profoundly worries
Arendt in 1971 as she analyzes the Pentagon Papers, and what
should equally worry us today, is the use of clichs, slogans, and
psychological manipulation to create an elated citizenry whose
hearts and minds are caught up in an ideology of omnipotence
that allows for the fabrication of a lying world order. As we saw
above in her analysis of totalitarianism, this manipulation and
fabrication was the condition for fascisms rise to power.
Arendt ends her essay, Lying in Politics, with a reflection on
the importance of a free and uncorrupted press which she points
out had throughout the long Vietnam war published piecemeal
much of the material in the Pentagon Papers: What has often
been suggested has now been established: so long as the press is
free and not corrupt, it has an enormously important function to
fulfill and can rightly be called the fourth branch of government.
Whether the First Amendment will suffice to protect his most
essential political freedom, the right to unmanipulated factual
information without which all freedom of opinion becomes a
cruel hoax, is another question.25 Her ending is prescient and
raises the question whether this is still the case today where the
issue is not so much with the vitality of the first amendment (this
is not without worry) as it is with the journalists themselves.
During the summer before the invasion of Iraq, Rich points out
that [n]etwork television journalists, the primary source of news
for most Americans, barely raised questions at all. The White
House was so accomplished at managing the press that it
couldnt resist bragging about it own slick moves in much the
way a Hollywood producer might brag about his cynical marketing plans for a cant-miss summer blockbuster.26 One need only
to recall a giggling Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson on Good
Morning America just days after the Iraq invasion, both almost
flush in their happiness on our success in Iraq, to wonder
whether Arendt was far too optimistic in her view that the
American press is up to the task of offering its public unmanipulated factual information which as we have seen in this essay
is the fundamental condition of the public space.
III. Comprehension as Judgment:

Facing up to Reality
As we have seen, for Arendt, our only remedy for a lying
world order based in large part on clichs and rhetoric is to
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establish factual truth through the testimony of witnesses. Upon

this testimony, the public space stands or falls. In conclusion, I
return now to the question raised above, namely, who is the credible witness? Who offers the credible testimony that establishes
factual truth? I submit that the answers to these questions move
us from the epistemological domain to the aesthetic. In other
words, the credible witness and its testimony has as its first condition a sense of the real. Arendt gives us a clue as to how we
might begin to think this sense of the real in her remarks on
comprehension in the Preface to the First Edition of The Origins
of Totalitarianism when she speaks of submitting to the shock
of reality:
Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous,
deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining
phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact
of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It
means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden
which our century has placed on usneither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.27
The credible witness is one who faces up and testifies to the

givenness of factual truth. Certainly, this is a task Arendt sets for
herself both in The Origins of Totalitarianism as well in
Eichmann in Jerusalem wherein her trial report attempts to tell
the truth in the face of the spectacle of the Jerusalem court.
Comprehension therefore is the first order of judgment, prior
to either phronetic or reflective judgmentusually the two ways
in which Arendts theory of judgment is understood.
Comprehension, the facing up to and testifying to the shock of
reality provides the ground for both types of judgment because
both depend upon factual truth to do their work. Without a sense
of the real, the Kantian enlarged mentality of the sensus communis would not be able to distinguish between the work of the
imagination and sheer fantasy. And without a sense of the real,
phronesis would never be able to recognize the reality of the singular situation that calls for the virtuous response.
This brings us finally back to the initial topic of this essay,
namely, radical deception and its link to radical evil. Recall that
for Arendt radical deception introduces a mutation into the history of the lie: One can say that to some extent fascism has
added a new variation to the old art of lyingthe most devilish
variationthat of lying the truth.28 In its most devilish version, the lie becomes a phenomenon which is possible through
what Arendt calls the criminalization of reality. The phenomenon of the lie, radical deception, occurs when crimes create a
lying world order in which appearance of the lie replaces the
appearance of reality. Arendt discusses the criminalization of
reality in one of her last essays on Palestine, just after her break
with Zionism (a break inaugurated by the refusal of the Zionists
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to recognize the factual truth, the givenness of Arabs in
Palestine) in a letter to Judah L. Magnes, editor of Commentary
on the refugee situation created when thousands of Palestinian
Arabs were expelled by acts of terrorism from the newly
declared state of Israel, acts of violence, which she points out
created the truth of the Zionist position, namely, there were
relatively few Arabs in Palestine. She ends her letter with an eloquent reflection on the ethical task in a world like ours, a
world that has ...long outgrown sinfulness and entered a new
stage of criminality. It is a reflection on what we can cling to
when reality is now created by criminality. She writes,
...uncompromising morality has suddenly changed its old function of merely keeping the world together and has become the
only medium through which true reality, as opposed to the distorted and essentially ephemeral factual situations created by
crimes, can be perceived and planned. Only those who are still
able to disregard the mountains of dust which emerge out of and
disappear into the nothingness of sterile violence can be trusted
with anything so serious as the permanent interests and political
survival of a nation.29
Here then is first order of political judgment in a world such
as ours where clich, rhetoric and ideology have developed to
such a point that we are in danger of a lying world order wherein
the criminalization of reality has rendered it difficult, if not
impossible, to distinguish between truth and a lie because reality
itself has largely been replaced by a lie. In such a world, the first
task of political judgment is to bear witness to the givenness of
factual truth, to recall evidence and give testimony to what has
happened, to undertake the work and discipline of facing up to
and bearing reality. In short, it is to do what Arendt says
Herodotus was the first to do, namely, to say what is: no human
world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it
will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what
Herodotus was the first to undertake consciouslynamely,
legein ta onta, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance
in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to
testify to what is and appears to them because it is.30
Peg Birmingham is a Professor at DePaul University and the author
of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights and co-editor (with Philippe
van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics.
Endnotes
1. Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, p. 9.
2. Arendt, H. (1994b). Nightmare and Flight. In J. Kohn (Ed.),
Essays in Understanding. New York: Schocken Books, p. 134.
3. Arendt, H. (1994c). On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An
Essay in Understanding. In J. Kohn (Ed.), Essays in Understanding.
New York: Schocken Books, p. 354.
4. Arendt, H. (1994d). The Seeds of a Fascist International. In

J. Kohn (Ed.), Essays in Understanding. New York: Schocken
Books, p. 14647.
5. Arendt, H. (1994d). The Seeds of a Fascist International. In
Books, p. 145.
6. Arendt, H. (1994a). Approaches to the German Problem.
In J. Kohn (Ed.), Essays in Understanding. New York: Schocken
Books, p. 111.
7. Arendt, H. (1977b). Truth and Politics. In Between Past and
Future. New York: Penguin, pp. 24243.
8. Arendt, H. (1977a). Between Past and Future. New York:
Penguin Books, p. 257.
Penguin Books, pp. 23839.
13. Arendt, H. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, p. 250.
Harcourt, Brace and Company, p. 478.
19. Arendt, H. (1969). Lying in Politics. In Crises of the
Republic. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Company, p. 35.
23. Rich, F. (2006). The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline
and Fall of Truth. New York: Penguin, p. 57.
Harcourt, Brace and Company, p. viii.
28. Arendt, H. (1994a). Approaches to the German Problem. In
Books, p. 111.
29. Arendt, H. (1978). The Jew as Pariah. New York: Grove
Press, p. 217.
37

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GS 16-2_06.

SYMPOSIUM: RHETORIC AND TERROR

A Lying World Order: Deception and the Rhetoric of Terror

In these early pages of Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt

The Good Society, Volume 16, No. 2, 2007

Arendt gives an example of this confusion of reality and truth,

Copyright 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

I. Factual Truth as the Condition for Politics

SYMPOSIUM: RHETORIC AND TERROR

II. Elated Citizenry: Self-Deception, Manipulation,

The Good Society

The resistance to temptation occurs through the fascist imperative

Eichmanns all too easily voiced over voice of conscience, an

Fascist ideology promises a ready made, unified identityfixed,

soundness of their psychological premises about the unlimited

Volume 16, Number 2, 2007

SYMPOSIUM: RHETORIC AND TERROR

III. Comprehension as Judgment:

The Good Society

establish factual truth through the testimony of witnesses. Upon

The credible witness is one who faces up and testifies to the

4. Arendt, H. (1994d). The Seeds of a Fascist International. In

Volume 16, Number 2, 2007

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