Splinters

It is really no exaggeration when it is said that the media today form a kind of Fourth Reich. The language of the media--an almost impenetrable language, which you cannot escape and which is extremely despotic. Of course one can live nonetheless. It should not be over-dramatised--but maybe it does intervene in the existence of the individual or confine it. At least it often appears to get close to that. And, in contrast to the Thousand Year Reich, which only lasted 12 years, here there is no end in sight. This language of the Fourth Reich will carry on for more than a thousand years. It will go on until the end of the world, unfortunately, and the hammering will become more and more impenetrable.

From a three-year-old interview with the great Paris-based Austrian writer Peter Handke (scroll down to the unemboldened text). He then defines a soft totalitarianism administered by journalists and public intellectuals, the secular priesthood like Bernard-Henri Levy and Alain Finkelkraut: They are blind; they are the new Tartuffes.