“Four years of political murder” was also the title of a book published in 1922 by the statistician Ernst Julius Gumbel (1891-1966). Referring to the enormous rise in politically motivated murders that had taken place between 1918 and 1922, Gumbel collected his data with meticulous precision; he counted 354 murders committed by the radical right and 22 murders committed by the radical left. He also pointed out that the criminal prosecution of radical right and radical left murders differed fundamentally: 326 murders carried out by radical right perpetrators remained unpunished whereas this was true for only four left-wing motivated murders. The average sentence for a radical right murder was four months imprisonment and a two Reichsmark fine, Gumbel computed. A radical left perpetrator typically faced 15 years in prison or a death sentence. Although the victims came from all parts of society and sometimes were, like Rathenau, even members of the acting government, the murders were accompanied by a climate of acceptance.
“Fascism says nothing’s true. Your daily life is not important. The facts that you think you understand are not important. All that matters is the myth ― the myth of one nation as together the myth of the mystical connection with the leader.
“When we think of “Post-truth,” we think it’s something new. We think it’s something at campuses. We think it’s something irrelevant. Actually, what post-truth does is it paves the way for regime change. If we don’t have access to facts, we can’t trust each other. Without trust, there’s no law. Without law, there’s no democracy.
“So if you want to rip the heart out of a democracy directly, if you want to go right at it and kill it, what you do is you go after facts. And that is what modern authoritarians do.
“Step one: You lie yourself, all the time. Step two: You say it’s your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step three: Everyone looks around and says, “What is truth? There is no truth.”
“And then, resistance is impossible, and the game is over.”
— Trevor Noah interview with tyranny expert, Timothy Snyder.
