Nous devons cette formidable citation, terrifiante d'actualité, à la politologue allemande naturalisée états-unienne Hannah Arendt (14 octobre 1906 - 4 décembre 1975), connue pour ses travaux sur le totalitarisme, la modernité et la philosophie de l'histoire.
Et elle est extraite d'un entretien de 1974, avec l'écrivain français Roger Errera (03 décembre 1933 -12 août 2014), sur la question du totalitarisme, lisible, dans son intégralité, en anglais, sur le site du Centro de Estudos Hannah Arendt de Sao Paulo (Brésil) :
"Lies
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed ; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed ? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please".
Sources : wikipedia.org et hannaharendt.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/
