Tuesday, April 8th, 2003
GEITNER SIMMONS has an excellent post on the fantasist nature of Iraq’s dying Baathist regime’s war claims – a segment:
“The Iraqi information minister’s shameless resort to peddling fantasy as truth gives a telling indication about what everyday life is like in authoritarian societies. In Saddam’s Iraq, such incessant disregard for the truth is the norm.
What a burden it must be to try to carry on a thoughtful, rational existence in a society where one’s rulers routinely remove the truth as a normal consideration of life. The pushing out of truth removes the oxygen vital to an honest intellectual life “
Geitner really beat me to the punch today with an important point. This need to impose fantastical versions of reality seem to be part and parcel of totalitarian states ( or their intellectual advocates here in the West). Recall William Shirer’s descrption of life and politics in the Fuhrerbunker in the last day’s of the Third Reich or the dialogue between O’Brien and Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love. As an undergraduate I remember one of my profs during the Glasnost era was a member of a joint American-Soviet historical commission – the Soviets had so revised their records in this instance to conform to shifting Party lines that they needed the help of American historians to sort through the entanglement of lies and deceptions
