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Hannah Arendt & the Politics of Truth
It's important to remember that Hannah Arendt wrote "Truth and Politics" as a
response to the reaction she received from publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem.
What most worried her was a form of political propaganda that uses lies to erode
reality. Political power, she warned, will always sacrifice factual truth for
political gain. But the side effect of the lies and the propaganda is the
destruction of the sense by which we can orient ourselves in the world; it is
the loss of both the commons and of common sense.
