Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining here is not that
each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special
therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather
that small numbers of people will have so much control over new
stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work
major changes in collective attitudes.
We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-91, when
Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in
the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally - granted
commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intelligence
data - to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not
myself an admirer of Mr Hussein, but it was striking how quickly
he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard
of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for
generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we
that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always
reside in responsible hands?
Another contemporary example is the 'war' on drugs where the
government and munificently funded civic groups systematically
distort and even invent scientific evidence of adverse effects
(especially of marijuana), and in which no public official is
permitted even to raise the topic for open discussion.
But it's hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever.
New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations
of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann
Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky's History of
the Russian Revolution into the USSR, so our colleagues could know
a little about their own political beginnings. By the fiftieth anniversary
of the murder of Trotsky (Stalin's assassin had cracked Trotsky's
head open with a hammer), Izvestia could extol Trotsky as 'a great
and irreproachable* revolutionary', and a German Communist publication
went so far as to describe him as
fight[ing] for all of us who love human civilization, for whom
this civilization is our nationality. His murderer . . . tried, in
* Suggesting that the authorities have learned nothing from their history, except
substituting one historical figure for another on the list of Irreproachables.
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