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Why Authoritarians Must Control the Arts
The first thing authoritarians attack is not speech — it’s imagination.
On a crisp spring evening in 1937, deep inside the Berghof — the mountaintop hideaway of history’s worst failed artist — Adolf Hitler sat grinning in the glow of a film projector. His eyes, usually trained on invading Poland or Wagner’s baton, were fixed instead on a dancing mouse. Not just any mouse. The Mouse. Mickey.
The film was a gift from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s sycophantic propaganda minister and part-time Disney fanboy. And while the Nazis were busy torching modernist canvases and declaring jazz a form of “cultural Bolshevism,” Hitler was chuckling at Steamboat Willie.
That’s right. Steamboat Willie. The same dictator who banned Charlie Chaplin for being both funny and foreign was cozying up to a cartoon rodent born in Hollywood and voiced by Walt Disney — a man who…ahem, just so happened to be dogged by whispers of anti-Semitism.
Curious? Very.
The juxtaposition is grotesque and weirdly perfect: a regime allergic to artistic freedom swooning over a big-eared export from America’s most dream-drenched studios. It’s almost too on-the-mouse-nose, like fascism doing cosplay as childhood nostalgia.
