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Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule, where the fictitious quality of everyday reality makes propaganda largely superfluous. In their prepower stage the movements can never afford to hide their true goals to the same degree – after all, they are meant to inspire mass organizations. But, given the possibility to exterminate Jews like bedbugs, it is no longer necessary to propagate that Jews are bedbugs; given the power to teach a whole nation the history of the Russian Revolution without mentioning the name of Trotsky, there is no further need for propaganda against Trotsky.

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.

These figures are taken from Victor Kravchenko's book I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 2946, pp. 278 and 303. This is of course a highly questionable source. But since in the case of Soviet Russia we basically have nothing but questionable sources to resort to – meaning that we have to rely altogether on news stories, reports and evaluations of one kind or another – all we can do is use whatever information at least appears to have a high degree of probability. Some historians seem to think that the opposite method – namely, to use exclusively whatever material is furnished by the Russian government – is more reliable, but this is not the case. It is precisely the official material that is nothing but propaganda. [Fotnote 29]

Whereas anti-Jewish sentiments were widespread among the educated classes of Europe throughout the nineteenth century, antisemitism as an ideology remained, with very few exceptions, the prerogative of crackpots in general and the lunatic fringe in particular.