I have a longstanding fascination with the Soviet Union. There are a lot of different reasons for that: some political and some artistic and cultural.
So on twitter I follow “Soviet Visuals” which features old propaganda posters and other oddities from the Soviet era. Whoever runs it must have seen Spicer’s press conference because they had a great example of crowd manipulation today:
This is a photo of Lenin speaking to a crowd in Petrograd (which then became Leningrad and then became St. Petersburg) in 1920.
Here is crowd for the same speech in “Krasnaya Niva” journal, 1924:
Perhaps the most famous example, and one that inspired the notion of “unperson” in the book 1984 are the following two pictures of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, the notorious head of the KGB. It was Yezhov who staged the show trials in the 30’s.
It never occurred to Yezhov that Stalin wouldn’t want anyone alive who knew of the crimes of the 30’s and the lies upon which they were built. But Yezhov was himself executed, though ironically he was briefly made head of the Moscow waterworks after being deposed as head of the KGB.
After his execution the picture was changed – and poof – no Yezhov.
There is a comical aspect to all of this. To CNN’s headline White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds
But it isn’t funny. Dictators obsess about crowd for a reason. Trump sent his Press Secretary to lie for a reason. Trump is having his press conferences take place in the midst of staffers who applaud and will ultimately shout down difficult questions.
So what happens when things go wrong, because the always do? What depths is Trump will to go to. One cannot by this point believe that Trump has any belief that what is true and what is not.
As Orwell wrote in 1984:
He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except–!
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. `If I wished,’ O’Brien had said, `I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston worked it out. `If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’ Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: `It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a `real’ world where `real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
I think we all know that Trump supporters don’t actually care if what Trump says is true or not – they are more than willing to believe the lie.
And that is what really scares me. In 1984 believers were created from torture.
But Trump doesn’t need any of that. His followers don’t resist his lies, they embrace them without prompting.
