Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, after its fall, across the Atlantic to the United States.
Soon after the war she wrote a remarkable reflection on the events that led up to Adolf Hitler’s domination. In her work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she observed: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” Control ideas and you control people.
One of the first steps of a totalitarian regime is to censor media and destroy freedom of expression. Soon after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the new government established their General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets which began the programme of destroying dissent. Mussolini established his dictatorship in Italy by first creating his Ministry of Press and Propaganda which, within five years, banned all alternative political parties and took control of the press. China, Cambodia and North Korea have all seen similar patterns of oppression.
