During the war he debriefed people interrogated by the Gestapo to figure out ways to resist and briefed other resistance fighters with what to expect. Its obviously impossible to "resist" many things on that level, for example the threat of having your family put into Sippenhaft with you. While other mechanisms, especially on a societal level, are much more easily countered. You can summarize his approach with "knowledge is power". So the book is using the same approach he applied during the war and which he had recommended since, that true and honest information in an open society is the best medicine against a rise in totalitarianism and the resulting corruption.
Its an approach you should be familiar with when it comes to combating the different methods of propaganda, psychological warfare or information operations. Or simply cognitive biases. Once you describe how they work, you are primed to recognize them when you come across them. Which hopefully reduces their effectiveness.
To give an example, there is the rather famous quote concerning the title:
>“Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced "…" was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion into which they had been brought — the state in which nothing had any validity "…" they simply did not know what was what.”
Recognizing that this is an actual tactic, aimed at creating a predictable reaction is rather helpful to break out of that predetermined path for your thoughts.
In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed - we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption.
In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times.
In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white piece of paper.
If you're trying to say current day Russia is the same as current day US or EU then you're way off line.
I see it different, and to the comment one level up...we have the illusion of democracy, which takes the oppression of opposition to a whole new level.
In fact, this episode of Freakanomics talks about The Politics Industrial Complex and how The Media is on the inside of that bubble. In short, without a healthy and objective Fourth Estate there is no democracy. Add in the duopoly one-party choices and it gets even worse.
There's more to democracy than getting to vote. What we're living is the Orwellian defintion of democracy.
I also heard it said on another reputable podcast - I think it was "How I built this" - that the top corporate guest of the Obama WH was Google. I'm trying to verify that. This looks close enough.
It's odd that a POTUS who sold hope would be so closely aligned with a surveillance company.
See also: "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" for a look behind Google's public facing narrative.
The Pentagon keeps failing its audits, to the tune of trillions of dollars, and the people are silent. Trillions? If it walks like corruption and talks like corruption...well we all should see where this is going. Yet, zero opposition to this?
I think you are smart and insightful person. There's too many of "yes we could be better but we are still the best while those other suck beyond improvement unless we fix them" East and West, left and right. I hope to fix my country and I hope you fix yours. Maybe we even come together and fix them both. But I hope some won't attepmt to fix my country again with dropping depleted uranium bombs on civillians in the name of democracy.
That we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption is applicable to any society, on any level of corruption. It was not too late for Netherlands under nazis, it is not too late for anyone.
>In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed
This is laughably biased. Whatever his defects, the election of Trump was if anything a much better example for democracy in action than the forced-along Biden election in which as much as possible of the mainline media and tech companies did everything possible to ensure it went that way.
Trump legitimately upset the applecart by winning (even if it was an electoral college victory, it was nonetheless part of how the system formally works) and surprised many people including a majority of the media landscape fully against his campaign. Because you detest that particular president's politics (im no fan of them either in many ways) doesn't make it an antidemocratic step backward..
Trump recently called for the constitution to be suspended… and constantly banging on about the stolen election… he is anti democratic.
With him in power we would have eventually slid into fascism.
The reason he won back then is in a large part due to the misinformation campaigns supported partly by Russia, see Cambridge Analytica with the psychographic targeting etc.
For a functioning demographic you need well informed citizens.
Luckily us the people rejected the crazy views of trumpeteers.
>The reason he won back then is in a large part due to the misinformation campaigns supported partly by Russia, see Cambridge Analytica with the psychographic targeting etc.
I call bullshit on that. The progressive side of US politics and society badly discredited itself with its endless harping about Russian electoral manipulation. They spent years doing this without ever putting forth any credible, concrete evidence and in other cases ignoring evidence that showed connections between Russian officials and their preferred political affiliations. This latter event to the point that now, we have several major media outlets being forced to admit the importance of the Hunter Biden laptop story that they previously sneered at after the New York Post made it very public. The levels of partisan absurdity only grow more laughable.
Much of this, I suspect pushed by a near hysterical desire to find an external cause for millions of Americans who voted for him (for whatever numerous reasons of their own) not listening to the preaching by their supposed superiors in the major media outlets and social feeds.
How many people right on this site frequently talk about how difficult it is to convince people through online advertising even when the spending is in the billions by agents that know a lot about individual's preferences because of online habit tracking. And then at the same time we're supposed to believe that tens of millions of Americans were brainwashed into voting against their own preference by a Russian manipulation campaign run by a government that has repeatedly shown itself to be inept at so many things (war most recently), with a relatively modest budget, limited personnel and a general cultural divide between the mentalities of the perpetrators and all those average Trump voters in the U.S.
The entire accusation reeks of idiotic nationalistic elitism justifying a profound disdain for a huge percentage of the U.S population that "refused to listen" (to progressive arguments against Trump).
There is a difference between trying to convince someone to spend money on your product vs trying to convince someone that your worldview and ideology is the right one (Trumpism) by using language that resonates with your values.
You wouldn’t be able to convert a progressive to become a Trumpist, but try it on folks on the fence and the probability is higher.
Same happened in the UK with Brexit. A weak West benefits Putin. The Russians have a lot of experience with disinformation campaigns. Look up Operation Infektion. Luckily it failed. The West is now more united, due to Putin’s miscalculation with the Ukraine war.
Its an approach you should be familiar with when it comes to combating the different methods of propaganda, psychological warfare or information operations. Or simply cognitive biases. Once you describe how they work, you are primed to recognize them when you come across them. Which hopefully reduces their effectiveness.
To give an example, there is the rather famous quote concerning the title:
>“Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced "…" was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion into which they had been brought — the state in which nothing had any validity "…" they simply did not know what was what.”
Recognizing that this is an actual tactic, aimed at creating a predictable reaction is rather helpful to break out of that predetermined path for your thoughts.