We are sentient beings. What we see. what we hear, what we digest with our minds by reading alter us in small and large ways.
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one's inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda. (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich 247-8)
That is well-written, it is pretty fair, as fair as he can be with himself. A little defensive: "No one who has not lived..." Yes. We are sentient beings. But, as he acknowledges, he was the rare resident in the Third Reich who had access to "the facts." He had an "escape" from the "steady diet" of propaganda; the propaganda was not his exclusive diet, as it was for German citizens. He was not a German citizen, not a captive, he was a resident who worked there. It was his job, nothing more. He could have left Nazi Germany anytime he wished; he could have asked CBS, his employer, to station him somewhere else, in "London, Paris or Zurich." Why did his mind not take the impress of "the facts" from the BBC, etc. so deeply that the "steady diet" of propaganda could not? What "certain impressions" did the propaganda make on his mind? In which matters was his mind "often misled." He offers no details. He seems to write here, after the war, that he realized while he was living and working in the Third Reich that he was being "taken in." Yet, his unexpurgated diaries betray one who was taken in and who didn't realize it at the time. This was not uncovered by a scholar until 2013. The unexpurgated version of "Berlin Diary" has never been published.
We are sentient beings. We are sentient beings tipped at the head with a divine flame which empowers us exclusively among sentient beings to discriminate between false and true impresses.
