The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

in Art, Books, History | March 3rd, 2022

George Orwell lives on, to vary­ing degrees of apt­ness, in the form of the word Orwellian. David Lynch has, with­in his life­time, made nec­es­sary the term Lynchi­an. Though few of us will leave such adjec­ti­val lega­cies of our own, we should at least aspire to do so, and that task requires look­ing back to the orig­i­nal mas­ter: François Rabelais. Mer­ri­am-Web­ster defines Rabelaisian as “marked by gross robust humor, extrav­a­gance of car­i­ca­ture, or bold nat­u­ral­ism.” Rabelais expressed this sen­si­bil­i­ty at great length in La vie de Gar­gan­tua et de Pan­ta­gru­el, a pen­ta­l­o­gy of elab­o­rate satir­i­cal nov­els pub­lished from the 1530s to the 1560s — and more recent­ly endorsed by Harold Bloom, Joseph Brod­sky, Hen­ry Miller, and Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.

Rabelais died in the 1550s, hence the still-unre­solved ques­tions about the author­ship of the fifth and final Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el book: was it com­plet­ed from his notes? Was it, in fact, a fab­ri­ca­tion by anoth­er writer?

Such was the pub­lic’s hunger for the Rabelaisian that mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent “fifth books” were pub­lished. The sat­is­fac­tion of that same insa­tiable demand seems also to have moti­vat­ed the pub­li­ca­tion of Les Songes Dro­la­tiques de Pan­ta­gru­el ou sont con­tenues plusieurs fig­ures de l’in­ven­tion de maitre François Rabelais. This slim vol­ume, writes the Pub­lic Domain Review’s Adam Green, “is made up entire­ly of images — 120 wood­cuts depict­ing a series of fan­tas­ti­cal­ly bizarre and grotesque fig­ures, rem­i­nis­cent of some of the more inven­tive and twist­ed cre­ations of Brueghel or Bosch.”

There is no main text, just a pref­ace where­in pub­lish­er Richard Bre­ton writes that “the great famil­iar­i­ty I had with the late François Rabelais has moved and even com­pelled me to bring to light the last of his work, the dro­lat­ic dreams of the very excel­lent and won­der­ful Pan­ta­gru­el.” Yet, as Green explains, “the book’s won­der­ful images are very unlike­ly to be the work of Rabelais him­self — the attri­bu­tion prob­a­bly a clever mar­ket­ing ploy.” You can view these amus­ing and grotesque images at the Pub­lic Domain Review, and in the con­text of the book as pre­served at the Inter­net Archive. “Be warned,” says Intrigu­ing His­to­ry, the artist “seems to enjoy the use of a lot of phal­lic imagery, along with frogs, fish and ele­phants.” But who is the artist?

“The cre­ator of the prints is now wide­ly thought to be François Desprez,” writes Green, “a French engraver and illus­tra­tor” who pub­lished a cou­ple of sim­i­lar­ly imag­i­na­tive sets of images with Bre­ton in 1567. Who­ev­er made them, these Rabelaisian wood­cuts remained sur­re­al enough through the cen­turies to catch the eye of none oth­er than Sal­vador Dalí, who in 1973 paid trib­ute to them with a set of lith­o­graphs of his own. (You can see more exam­ples at the Lock­port St. Gallery.) As far as the title, an exe­ge­sis at Poe­mas del río Wang offers a clar­i­fi­ca­tion: “Dro­lat­ic is an adjec­tive of dream,” and so “we must ask what kind of dream is this. It is cer­tain­ly the dream of rea­son, as it gives birth to mon­sters” — mon­sters, as a satirist like Rabelais well under­stood, not alto­geth­er unlike our­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Behold Fan­tas­ti­cal Illus­tra­tions from the 13th Cen­tu­ry Ara­bic Man­u­script Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Minutes

in History | March 3rd, 2022

A new explain­er from Vox:

On Feb­ru­ary 24th, Rus­sia launched a mil­i­tary inva­sion of Ukraine. Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin called it a “spe­cial mil­i­tary oper­a­tion,” but the scale of the attack shows this is a full-scale war that has already caused more than 100 casu­al­ties and forced more than half a mil­lion Ukraini­ans to flee their homes.

Ukraine and Russia’s con­flict goes back to 2014, when Rus­sia invad­ed and annexed Crimea and Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratist forces took over parts of south­east­ern Ukraine’s Don­bas region. But to under­stand the full con­text behind the inva­sion, it’s impor­tant to go even far­ther back, to the time when Europe’s cur­rent-day divi­sions began, and see how that shaped Europe’s pow­er bal­ance today.

To under­stand the cur­rent conflict’s his­to­ry in less than 10 min­utes, watch the video above.

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Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Conversation Hosted by The Atlantic, Featuring Anne Applebaum, Tom Nichols & Jeffrey Goldberg

in Current Affairs, History | March 2nd, 2022

“After years of threats, Vladimir Putin’s Russ­ian forces invad­ed Ukraine—culminating in the largest attack against one Euro­pean state by anoth­er since the Sec­ond World War. What hap­pens now?”

Above, you can watch a wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion host­ed by The Atlantic, fea­tur­ing Anne Apple­baum (Pulitzer-prize win­ning his­to­ri­an), Tom Nichols (U.S. Naval War Col­lege pro­fes­sor), and Jef­frey Gold­berg (edi­tor-in-chief of The Atlantic) as they exam­ine “the glob­al reac­tion, the effec­tive­ness of sanc­tions, and how to address the rise of author­i­tar­i­an­ism and ongo­ing threats to democ­ra­cy.” It’s also worth read­ing Apple­baum’s lat­est piece, “The Impos­si­ble Sud­den­ly Became Pos­si­ble.”

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How Aladdin Sane Became the Most Expensive Album Cover Ever — and David Bowie’s Defining Image

in Art, History, Music, Photography | March 1st, 2022

If you search for David Bowie on Spo­ti­fy, a famil­iar icon pops up: the man him­self, eyes closed, made up with a death­ly-look­ing pal­lor and a red-and-blue light­ing bolt across his face. This is the pho­to on the front of Bowie’s sixth album, 1973’s Aladdin Sane. “Per­haps more icon­ic than the music inside,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Trash The­o­ry video essay above, “it stands as the Mona Lisa of album cov­ers.” It was also, at the time of pro­duc­tion, the most cost­ly album cov­er of all time: this was at the behest of Bowie’s man­ag­er Tony Defries, who sus­pect­ed that spar­ing no expense on the image would moti­vate RCA, his label, to spare no expense pro­mot­ing the album itself.

One might call this a bold move for an artist like Bowie, who had only just made it big. In the ear­ly years of his career he’d racked up fail­ure after fail­ure: with 1971’s Hunky Dory, a kind of dec­la­ra­tion of com­mit­ment to musi­cal and artis­tic “changes,” he had a suc­cès d’es­time, but not until the fol­low­ing year did he become a bona fide star.

The vehi­cle for that trans­for­ma­tion was the album The Rise and Fall of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars, which intro­duced the lis­ten­ing pub­lic to its title char­ac­ter, an androg­y­nous rock­er from out­er space. Through­out his sub­se­quent year and a half of tour­ing Bowie took the stage in full Zig­gy glam regalia, inhab­it­ing the char­ac­ter so ful­ly that he even­tu­al­ly began to ques­tion his own san­i­ty.

Though young British audi­ences could­n’t get enough of Zig­gy and the Spi­ders, reac­tions across the Unit­ed States were rather less enthu­si­as­tic. There, says the Trash The­o­ry nar­ra­tor, “they were not the type of British rock that rock radio played: hard-hit­ting, riff-heavy behe­moths like Led Zep­pelin or the Rolling Stones. But this indif­fer­ence was shap­ing what Bowie want­ed to do next.” His expe­ri­ence of Amer­i­ca inspired a new, hard­er-edged per­sona, Aladdin Sane. Zig­gy Star­dust “was a vision of the best a rock star could be, an inspi­ra­tional fig­ure, while Aladdin was more about fame’s dark­er under­bel­ly, fil­tered through imag­ined Amer­i­cana and futur­is­tic nos­tal­gia” — and the char­ac­ter need­ed a look to match.

Shot by Bri­an Duffy, described in the San Fran­cis­co Art Exchange vide0 above as “a very eccen­tric and incred­i­ble pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” the Aladdin Sane cov­er was print­ed with a sev­en-col­or sys­tem unprece­dent­ed in the medi­um. (Up to that point, four-col­or had been the stan­dard.) Accord­ing to Trash The­o­ry, Bowie described make­up artist Pierre Laroche’s light­ning bolt “as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of schiz­o­phre­nia, and more specif­i­cal­ly, his split feel­ings about his 1972 Amer­i­can tour.” (The shape came from the logo on a Nation­al Pana­son­ic rice cook­er in Duffy’s stu­dio.) Though the result has become, in the words of cura­tor Vic­to­ria Broack­es, “prob­a­bly the most rec­og­niz­able sym­bol in rock and roll,” Bowie nev­er actu­al­ly assumed this look onstage; ahead of him, there still lay four more decades of changes to go through.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Space Odd­i­ty,” “Heroes,” “Life on Mars” & More

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recre­ate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

50 Years of Chang­ing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Ani­mat­ed GIF

Lego Video Shows How David Bowie Almost Became “Cob­bler Bob,” Not “Aladdin Sane”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the Uncensored Original Version of “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (1976)

in History, Music | February 28th, 2022

Through­out his six-decade-long career, Bob Dylan has tak­en up quite a few caus­es in his songs. In the 1960s he was espe­cial­ly giv­en to musi­cal accu­sa­tions of mis­car­riages of jus­tice like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” which he record­ed less than two months after the assas­si­na­tion of Medgar Evers. But he kept it up even in the 70s, as demon­strat­ed by his 1976 album Desire. “Here comes the sto­ry of the Hur­ri­cane,” he sings on its open­ing track, “the man the author­i­ties came to blame for some­thing that he nev­er done: put in a prison cell, but one time he could have been the cham­pi­on of the world.”

This “Hur­ri­cane” is, of course, for­mer star box­er Rubin Carter, who’d been con­vict­ed for a triple mur­der at a Pater­son, New Jer­sey bar a decade ear­li­er. Today, many know the sto­ry of the Hur­ri­cane from the epony­mous Den­zel Wash­ing­ton-star­ring Hol­ly­wood biopic. By the time that film came out in 1999, Carter had long since been exon­er­at­ed and made a free man, but when Dylan sang of his hav­ing been “false­ly tried,” and “obvi­ous­ly framed,” the man was still serv­ing a dou­ble life sen­tence. It was Carter’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy The Six­teenth Round, writ­ten in prison, that inspired the lit­er­ar­i­ly-mind­ed Dylan to cham­pi­on his release.

Writ­ten with song­writer-psy­chol­o­gist Jacques Levy, Dylan’s col­lab­o­ra­tor through­out Desire, “Hur­ri­cane” still today sounds as if it pulls no punch­es, deliv­er­ing a host of can-he-say-that moments in its sev­en min­utes. But in truth, says Far Our Mag­a­zine, “Dylan’s ini­tial vision for the track had been a lit­tle dif­fer­ent before the lawyers at Colum­bia Records began paw­ing over the lyrics. While many of Dylan’s claims of racial injus­tice are there in plain sight, the men in suits were more con­cerned with the lyrics imply­ing that Alfred Bel­lo and Arthur Dex­ter Bradley (the two lead wit­ness­es of the orig­i­nal case) as hav­ing ‘robbed the bod­ies’ ” of Carter and acquain­tance John Artis’ alleged vic­tims. Giv­en that they had­n’t been accused of steal­ing from any corpses, Colum­bia feared that the impli­ca­tion would draw a law­suit.

Dylan had pre­vi­ous­ly exhib­it­ed a dev­il-may-care atti­tude about such mat­ters in his protest songs: “I should have sued him and put him in jail,” grum­bled an aged William Zantzinger, the real-life attack­er in Dylan’s “The Lone­some Death of Hat­tie Car­roll.” But this time Dylan acqui­esced to the lawyers. Return­ing to the stu­dio with mem­bers of his Rolling Thun­der Revue, he laid down a new ver­sion of “Hur­ri­cane,” cen­sored but musi­cal­ly even hard­er-hit­ting (below), that did make it onto Desire. In the video at the top of the post, you can hear the orig­i­nal, which is longer, slow­er, and more raw in every sense. In the event, the expur­gat­ed “Hur­ri­cane” still got Dylan sued, but by a dif­fer­ent wit­ness: Patri­cia Valen­tine, who lived above the bar where the killings occurred and insist­ed that she did not, in fact, see “the bar­tender in a pool of blood.” Even a future Nobel Prize win­ner, it seems, isn’t safe to take a bit of poet­ic license.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Bob Dylan Per­form “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” His Damn­ing Song About the Mur­der of Medgar Evers, at the 1963 March on Wash­ing­ton

“Tan­gled Up in Blue”: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

Bob Dylan Releas­es a Cryp­tic 17-Minute Song about the JFK Assas­si­na­tion: Hear a “Mur­der Most Foul”

Bob Dylan Goes Punk on Late Night with David Let­ter­man, Play­ing “Jok­er­man” with the Lati­no Punk Band, the Plugz (1984)

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Pop Songs with Nar­ra­tive: Pret­ty Much Pop (#69) Dis­cuss­es Tunes Rang­ing from Bob Dylan’s “Hur­ri­cane” to “The Pina Cola­da Song” with Songwriter/Author Rod Picott

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why Russia Invaded Ukraine: A Useful Primer

in Current Affairs, History | February 27th, 2022

Why did Rus­sia launch an unpro­voked war in Ukraine and risk cre­at­ing a wider glob­al con­flict? If you haven’t close­ly tracked the ambi­tions of Vladimir Putin, this primer offers some help­ful con­text. In 30 min­utes, the video cov­ers the geopo­lit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal back­sto­ry. As you watch the explain­er, it’s worth keep­ing one thing in mind: For years, Euro­pean nations have long resist­ed bring­ing Ukraine into the NATO fold, pre­cise­ly because they knew it would trig­ger a con­flict with Putin. And there had been no recent plan to revis­it the issue. All of this sug­gests that Putin has high­light­ed the NATO threat (amply dis­cussed in the video) because it would pro­vide him a use­ful pre­text for an inva­sion. There was hard­ly an immi­nent threat.

If you’re look­ing for oth­er ratio­nales not cov­ered by this video, you could focus on two rea­sons pro­vid­ed by Hein Goe­mans, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester: Putin “wants to reestab­lish direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, by annex­a­tion or by pup­pet-regimes, a Russ­ian empire—be it the for­mer USSR or Tsarist Rus­sia. A sec­ond pos­si­ble answer has to do with the role of domes­tic Russ­ian pol­i­tics, which the stan­dard lit­er­a­ture on con­flict takes very seri­ous­ly: Putin has seen what hap­pened in some for­mer Sovi­et suc­ces­sor republics and the for­mer Yugoslavia, sev­er­al of which expe­ri­enced ‘Col­or Rev­o­lu­tions’ and democ­ra­tized. Indeed, it was a Col­or Rev­o­lu­tion in Ukraine in 2014, which Putin mis­char­ac­ter­izes as a mil­i­tary coup. He wants to pre­vent more of these rev­o­lu­tions and pre­vent a demo­c­ra­t­ic encir­clement of coun­tries around him, which could pro­vide a safe haven for Russ­ian dis­si­dents who’d be dan­ger­ous to Putin’s polit­i­cal sur­vival. Both of these goals over­lap in the sense that he is seek­ing regime change, which is a dan­ger­ous game.”

For a deep­er dive into the impe­r­i­al ambi­tions of Putin–his attempt to recon­sti­tute the Russ­ian Empire–read this eye-open­ing inter­view with Fiona Hill.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

West Point Expert Gives Ukraini­ans Advice on Con­duct­ing Effec­tive Urban War­fare Against Russ­ian Troops

Why is Ukraine in Cri­sis?: A Quick Primer For Those Too Embar­rassed to Ask (2014)

Why Putin Wants Alex­ei Naval­ny Dead

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es 

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Are You a Fascist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality Test Created to Combat Fascism (1947)

in History, Politics | February 25th, 2022

A man of var­i­ous accom­plish­ments, Theodor Adorno is per­haps most wide­ly known as the very image of the mid­cen­tu­ry Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­al in exile. After his Jew­ish back­ground got him forced out of Nazi Ger­many, he spent fif­teen years in Eng­land and the Unit­ed States. Despite his geo­graph­i­cal dis­tance from the trou­bles of the Con­ti­nent — and even after the end of the Sec­ond World War — he under­stand­ably remained very much con­cerned with the nature of not just Hitler him­self but all those who sup­port­ed him. This led to such stud­ies as his 1947 essay “Wag­n­er, Niet­zsche and Hitler” as well as (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Berke­ley researchers Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levin­son, and Nevitt San­ford) the 1950 book The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty.

The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty’s best-known tool to diag­nose the tit­u­lar per­son­al and social con­di­tion is a quan­ti­ta­tive sys­tem called the “Cal­i­for­nia F‑scale” — the F stands for fas­cism — which pro­duces a score based on a sub­jec­t’s response to a set of propo­si­tions. “To cre­ate a per­son­al­i­ty test that actu­al­ly revealed latent author­i­tar­i­an­ism, the researchers had to give up on the idea that there’s a strong link between anti-Semi­tism and author­i­tar­i­an­ism,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Annalee Newitz. “Though their expe­ri­ences with the Holo­caust sug­gest­ed a causal con­nec­tion between hatred of Jews and the rise of fas­cism, it turned out that peo­ple with author­i­tar­i­an ten­den­cies were more accu­rate­ly described as eth­no­cen­tric.”

These would-be author­i­tar­i­ans also, as Adorno and his col­lab­o­ra­tors’ research found, “tend­ed to dis­trust sci­ence and strong­ly dis­liked the idea of using imag­i­na­tion to solve prob­lems. They pre­ferred to stick to tried-and-true tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of orga­niz­ing soci­ety.” Oth­er ten­den­cies includ­ed “super­sti­tion, aggres­sion, cyn­i­cism, con­ser­vatism, and an inor­di­nate inter­est in the pri­vate sex lives of oth­ers.” All these find­ings informed an F‑scale test which con­sist­ed of the state­ments below. For each state­ment, par­tic­i­pants had to select one of the fol­low­ing options : “Dis­agree Strong­ly,” “Dis­agree Most­ly,” “Dis­agree Some­what,” “Agree Some­what,” “Agree,” or “MostlyA­gree.”

  1. Obe­di­ence and respect for author­i­ty are the most impor­tant virtues chil­dren should learn.
  2. A per­son who has bad man­ners, habits, and breed­ing can hard­ly expect to get along with decent peo­ple.
  3. If peo­ple would talk less and work more, every­body would be bet­ter off.
  4. The busi­ness man and the man­u­fac­tur­er are much more impor­tant to soci­ety than the artist and the pro­fes­sor.
  5. Sci­ence has its place, but there are many impor­tant things that can nev­er be under­stood by the human mind.
  6. Every per­son should have com­plete faith in some super­nat­ur­al pow­er whose deci­sions he obeys with­out ques­tion.
  7. Young peo­ple some­times get rebel­lious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and set­tle down.
  8. What this coun­try needs most, more than laws and polit­i­cal pro­grams, is a few coura­geous, tire­less, devot­ed lead­ers in whom the peo­ple can put their faith.
  9. No sane, nor­mal, decent per­son could ever think of hurt­ing a close friend or rel­a­tive.
  10. Nobody ever learned any­thing real­ly impor­tant except through suf­fer­ing.
  11. What the youth needs most is strict dis­ci­pline, rugged deter­mi­na­tion, and the will to work and fight for fam­i­ly and coun­try.
  12. An insult to our hon­or should always be pun­ished.
  13. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on chil­dren, deserve more than mere impris­on­ment; such crim­i­nals ought to be pub­licly whipped, or worse.
  14. There is hard­ly any­thing low­er than a per­son who does not feel a great love, grat­i­tude, and respect for his par­ents.
  15. Most of our social prob­lems would be solved if we could some­how get rid of the immoral, crooked, and fee­ble­mind­ed peo­ple.
  16. Homo­sex­u­als are hard­ly bet­ter than crim­i­nals and ought to be severe­ly pun­ished.
  17. When a per­son has a prob­lem or wor­ry, it is best for him not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheer­ful things.
  18. Nowa­days more and more peo­ple are pry­ing into mat­ters that should remain per­son­al and pri­vate.
  19. Some peo­ple are born with an urge to jump from high places.
  20. Peo­ple can be divid­ed into two dis­tinct class­es: the weak and the strong.
  21. Some day it will prob­a­bly be shown that astrol­o­gy can explain a lot of things.
  22. Wars and social trou­bles may some­day be end­ed by an earth­quake or flood that will destroy the whole world.
  23. No weak­ness or dif­fi­cul­ty can hold us back if we have enough will pow­er.
  24. It is best to use some pre­war author­i­ties in Ger­many to keep order and pre­vent chaos.
  25. Most peo­ple don’t real­ize how much our lives are con­trolled by plots hatched in secret places.
  26. Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and con­flict.
  27. Famil­iar­i­ty breeds con­tempt.
  28. Nowa­days when so many dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple move around and mix togeth­er so much, a per­son has to pro­tect him­self espe­cial­ly care­ful­ly against catch­ing an infec­tion or dis­ease from them.
  29. The wild sex life of the old Greeks and Romans was tame com­pared to some of the goings-on in this coun­try, even in places where peo­ple might least expect it.
  30. The true Amer­i­can way of life is dis­ap­pear­ing so fast that force may be nec­es­sary to pre­serve it.

You can take the test your­self here. But don’t take it too seri­ous­ly: the F‑scale “has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cized by many psy­chol­o­gists because it is a bet­ter indi­ca­tor of con­ser­vatism, an old-fash­ioned out­look, and a ten­den­cy to say ‘yes’ to any­thing rather than as a mea­sure of author­i­tar­i­an­ism,” write Fer­di­nand A. Gul and John J. Ray in their 1989 paper “Pit­falls in Using the F Scale to Mea­sure Author­i­tar­i­an­ism in Account­ing Research.” That aside, any rea­son­ably intel­li­gent sub­ject can eas­i­ly fig­ure out the motives of the test itself. Nev­er­the­less, as Giz­mod­o’s Esther Inglis-Arkell writes, it offers an occa­sion to con­sid­er whether “you’re super­sti­tious, con­formist, or any oth­er awful thing that will cause you to go out one morn­ing and annex some­thing” — no less a con­cern now, it seems, than it was in Adorno’s day.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Theodor Adorno & His Cri­tique of Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

Toni Mor­ri­son Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Coun­tries to Fas­cism (1995)

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

in History, Politics | February 24th, 2022

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to pow­er in the ear­ly 1930s. Para­mil­i­tary gangs ter­ror­iz­ing the oppo­si­tion, the incom­pe­tence and oppor­tunism of Ger­man con­ser­v­a­tives, the Reich­stag Fire. And we learned about the crit­i­cal impor­tance of pro­pa­gan­da, the delib­er­ate mis­in­form­ing of the pub­lic in order to sway opin­ions en masse and achieve pop­u­lar sup­port (or at least the appear­ance of it). While Min­is­ter of Pro­pa­gan­da Joseph Goebbels purged Jew­ish and left­ist artists and writ­ers, he built a mas­sive media infra­struc­ture that played, writes PBS, “prob­a­bly the most impor­tant role in cre­at­ing an atmos­phere in Ger­many that made it pos­si­ble for the Nazis to com­mit ter­ri­ble atroc­i­ties against Jews, homo­sex­u­als, and oth­er minori­ties.”

How did the minor­i­ty par­ty of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the Ger­man peo­ple so thor­ough­ly that they would allow and par­tic­i­pate in mass mur­der? Post-war schol­ars of total­i­tar­i­an­ism like Theodor Adorno and Han­nah Arendt asked that ques­tion over and over, for sev­er­al decades after­ward. Their ear­li­est stud­ies on the sub­ject looked at two sides of the equa­tion. Adorno con­tributed to a mas­sive vol­ume of social psy­chol­o­gy called The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty, which stud­ied indi­vid­u­als pre­dis­posed to the appeals of total­i­tar­i­an­ism. He invent­ed what he called the F‑Scale (“F” for “fas­cism”), one of sev­er­al mea­sures he used to the­o­rize the Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Type.

Arendt, on the oth­er hand, looked close­ly at the regimes of Hitler and Stal­in and their func­tionar­ies, at the ide­ol­o­gy of sci­en­tif­ic racism, and at the mech­a­nism of pro­pa­gan­da in fos­ter­ing “a curi­ous­ly vary­ing mix­ture of gulli­bil­i­ty and cyn­i­cism with which each mem­ber… is expect­ed to react to the chang­ing lying state­ments of the lead­ers.” So she wrote in her 1951 Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, going on to elab­o­rate that this “mix­ture of gulli­bil­i­ty and cyn­i­cism… is preva­lent in all ranks of total­i­tar­i­an move­ments”:

In an ever-chang­ing, incom­pre­hen­si­ble world the mass­es had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe every­thing and noth­ing, think that every­thing was pos­si­ble and noth­ing was true… The total­i­tar­i­an mass lead­ers based their pro­pa­gan­da on the cor­rect psy­cho­log­i­cal assump­tion that, under such con­di­tions, one could make peo­ple believe the most fan­tas­tic state­ments one day, and trust that if the next day they were giv­en irrefutable proof of their false­hood, they would take refuge in cyn­i­cism; instead of desert­ing the lead­ers who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the state­ment was a lie and would admire the lead­ers for their supe­ri­or tac­ti­cal clev­er­ness.

Why the con­stant, often bla­tant lying? For one thing, it func­tioned as a means of ful­ly dom­i­nat­ing sub­or­di­nates, who would have to cast aside all their integri­ty to repeat out­ra­geous false­hoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and com­plic­i­ty. “The great ana­lysts of truth and lan­guage in pol­i­tics”—writes McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Jacob T. Levy—includ­ing “George Orwell, Han­nah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us rec­og­nize this kind of lie for what it is.… Say­ing some­thing obvi­ous­ly untrue, and mak­ing your sub­or­di­nates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly star­tling dis­play of pow­er over them. It’s some­thing that was endem­ic to total­i­tar­i­an­ism.”

Arendt and oth­ers rec­og­nized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvi­ous lie makes it clear that you’re pow­er­less.” She also rec­og­nized the func­tion of an avalanche of lies to ren­der a pop­u­lace pow­er­less to resist, the phe­nom­e­non we now refer to as “gaslight­ing”:

The result of a con­sis­tent and total sub­sti­tu­tion of lies for fac­tu­al truth is not that the lie will now be accept­ed as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bear­ings in the real world—and the cat­e­go­ry of truth ver­sus false­hood is among the men­tal means to this end—is being destroyed.

The epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on what­ev­er the leader said, no mat­ter its rela­tion to truth. “The essen­tial con­vic­tion shared by all ranks,” Arendt con­clud­ed, “from fel­low trav­el­er to leader, is that pol­i­tics is a game of cheat­ing and that the ‘first com­mand­ment’ of the move­ment: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as nec­es­sary for the pur­pos­es of world pol­i­tics, i.e., world-wide cheat­ing, as the rules of mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline are for the pur­pos­es of war.”

“We too,” writes Jef­frey Isaacs at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “live in dark times”—an allu­sion to anoth­er of Arendt’s sober­ing analy­ses—“even if they are dif­fer­ent and per­haps less dark.” Arendt wrote Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism from research and obser­va­tions gath­ered dur­ing the 1940s, a very spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal peri­od. Nonethe­less the book, Isaacs remarks, “rais­es a set of fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about how tyran­ny can arise and the dan­ger­ous forms of inhu­man­i­ty to which it can lead.” Arendt’s analy­sis of pro­pa­gan­da and the func­tion of lies seems par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant at this moment. The kinds of bla­tant lies she wrote of might become so com­mon­place as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrel­e­vant sideshow. This, she sug­gests, would be a mis­take.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins of the Word “Gaslight­ing”: Scenes from the 1944 Film Gaslight

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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