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On Fascist Lies
I punched some of those precise liars in the face. The witnesses approved my relief, and fabricated other lies. I didn’t believe them, but I didn’t dare to ignore them. JORG E LUI S B ORG E S
The most famous fascist propagandist, the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, is often misquoted as saying that repeating lies was central to Nazism. This misquotation has led to an image of a fascism fully conscious of the extent of its deliberate falsehoods.1 Is deception at the center of fascism? Do liars believe their own lies? Are they cognizant of falsity? When Goebbels said that Hitler knew everything, and that he was a “[t]he naturally creative instrument of divine destiny,”2 did he actually have a reality-based notion of knowledge? This is complicated. In fact, having once faked and then published news about an assassination attempt on himself, Goebbels then “published” it as fact in his diaries. In these diaries, not written for public consumption but published many years after his death, he also noted the “success” of his speeches after they were celebrated by the media he controlled.3 Was Goebbels lying to [ 11 ]
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