"Describing the allure of such reality-denying propaganda, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had fled Nazi Germany and eventually immigrated to the US in 1941, described how Germans, lost in "an ever-changing, incomprehensible world . . . are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer
bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects. . .What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part."Instead of "evidence," whether fake or real, what people were looking for was a larger sense that they were special, that they were surrounded by enemies, that they were part of a common destiny. Fealty to the leadership became a value in itself. The Nazi leadership could often change their policies - at one moment the USSR was an ally; the next moment Germany war at war with it - but such inconsistencies didn't matter, thought Arendt. In a world where Germany was portrayed as being surrounded by malign, deceptive, endless conspiracies, the leaders duty was to lie:
"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood . . .they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. . .
The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the movement: "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes of world politics - i.e. world-wide cheating - as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war." (pp 90-91, emphasis added)