Government by distraction

[nancylebov]

From They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

I recommend reading the whole excerpt.

Reference found at Orcinus, though for some reason, the link there for They Thought They Were Free doesn't work from there.