Alan Bullock Quotes

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.

I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

The strategies and assumptions [of the propaganda model] are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model.... The goal of the propaganda model is simply to achieve efficient indoctrination, and it therefore tends to regard the assumptions of the democratic model as inconvenient obstacles to efficient communication.

The worst thing our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.

All the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to "save civilization" from the Jews, from Communism and from democracy -- thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed.

Love of totalitarian propaganda is more evil than hatred.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

Nothing can excuse the cruelties of Communist Russia, though in the East torture does not provoke revolt as it would in the West.

It wasn't fun to go to school, because we had to wear these blue things around our necks. We had to join the Pioneer Society, and we had to salute with our hands over our eyes. Even then, I was thinking for myself. I thought this wasn't so different from the way the Nazis had conditioned people.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

[…] the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”

One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.

Such an atmosphere is un-American, the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the police state's propaganda line.

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.