The D-Day cover of the New Yorker from 1944 might be the best in the whole history of the magazine :: "Rea Irvin (August 26, 1881 â May 28, 1972), was an American graphic artist and cartoonist. Although never formally credited as such, he served de facto as the first art editor of The New Yorker. He created the Eustace Tilley cover portrait and the New Yorker typeface. He first drew Tilley for the cover of the magazine's first issue on February 21, 1925. Tilley appeared annually on the magazine's cover every February until 1994.[1][2] As one commentator has written, "a truly modern bon vivant, Irvin was also a keen appreciator of the century of his birth. His high regard for both the careful artistry of the past and the gleam of the modern metropolis shines from the very first issue of the magazine ..."[3]" :: [Robert Scott Horton]
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ÂŤ As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. [âŚ]
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon âendless repetition,â designed to make the fictional plausible [âŚ].
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. [âŚ]
The final mode is misplaced faith. [âŚ] Once truth [becomes] oracular rather than factual, evidence [is] irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that âunderstanding is useless, you have to have faith. [âŚ]â Â
Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klempererâs descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to âabandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the FĂźhrerâs greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.â Âť
â Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
