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myths in politics

Wednesday 21st of January 2026

Fascism Fascism proposed the notion of truth that transcended reason and was incarnated in the myth of the leader. The myth was literally embodied in the person of the leader. For fascists, incarnation was the opposite of representation. Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Fascism The prominent fascist leaders of the twentieth century — from Mussolini to Hitler — regarded lies as the truth incarnate in themselves. This stood at the center of their notions of power, popular sovereignty, and history. An alternate universe where truth and falsehood cannot be distinguished rests on the logic of myth. In Fascism, mythical truth replaced factual truth. Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Myths in poltics The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology — authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle. Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works © 2023 Kwiple.com
Myths in politics A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Myths in politics Reason and facts are sacrificed to opinion and myth. Demonstrable falsehoods are circulated and recycled as fact. Narrow minded opinion refuses to be subjected to thought and analysis. Too many now subject events to a prefabricated set of interpretations, usually provided by a biased media source. The myth is more comfort- able than the often difficult search for truth. Gary Hart, Huffington Post, July 10, 2012 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Myths in politics To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by law. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins — stories meant to suggest that every- one in, say “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.” Jill Lepore, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Myths in politics The will of the people is a myth not because the general run of people are ignorant and short-sighted, but because people are diverse and there are different and often incompatible ways of combining their opinions. “The people” is made up of a pluralty of people, and there is no simple way of getting from the plural to the singular.  Albert Weale, The Will of the People  © 2019 Kwiple.com
 
Post-truth Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. … Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. Timothy Snyder, New York Times, January 9, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com