“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
The current issue of the Economist has some dangerously shocking poll results:
20% of American poll respondents aged 18-29 think the Holocaust is a myth! Another 30% of young Americans said they do not know if it is a myth!
28% of young Americans think that Jews have too much power in America.
32% of Americans aged 18-29 get their views from TIK TOK.
Not all is admirable on the epistemic front for older Americans. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 40% of US adults held the view that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. "
So, we would seem to have a young cohort ripe for antisemitism, with some of their elders surely open to Christian Nationalism. Totalitarianism comes in so many forms.
Peter T.
