The Commissar Vanishes. Sobering indeed. What was the Kundera novel that began with the Czech communists editing out the photograph of a Communist leader who had been purged? It is extraordinarily disturbing, the authoritarian tendencies of this group, their deliberate manipulation of reality, their false folksy populism mixed with demagoguery. We've seen these tendencies in history before. This goes beyond overreach to examples from regimes abroad that have not been remembered benignly in the history books.

Update: My friend Andras points us to David King's "brilliant" book, "The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia." And to the accompanying online exhibit, here.

(Left) Stalin with the Commissar Nikolai Yezhov -- and (photo on the right) with Yezhov removed, after he was shot in 1939/1940. (More on Yezhov here).

Update II: Matt Yglesias reminds us that the Kundera book is, appropriately enough, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

And no, it hardly needs to be said, I am not equating the Bush administration's behavior with Stalin's crimes, thank you very much. But the Bush White House's consistent efforts to manipulate reality, distort the truth, operate in secrecy, evade public scrutiny and Congressional oversight, subvert Constitutional checks on executive authority, to outright lie, and now to disappear photographs that would be politically damaging go beyond normal political public relations and spin. They are reminiscent of the propaganda tactics used by authoritarian regimes and driven by the same impulse: to deceive, to manipulate, all in the name of protecting, and as demonstrated in the NSA domestic spying story, expanding power -- power that increasingly is not being projected abroad, you'll notice, but here at home.

(Thx to AR, BH, and MY).

Posted by Laura at January 26, 2006 02:01 PM