You Gotta have a Boogyman

Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Jules Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, and some propaganda.

A very good friend, DD, turned me onto Slate's amazing article, How Hitler Conquered Germany, a cautionary tale in terms of how people can be manipulated through the artful use of propaganda.

Propaganda was the operational method of the Third Reich, the idea that projected the ideology. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, told the Nuremberg Tribunal “that what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”5 Hitler was a magician of illusion. The cultural historian Piers Brendon has described propaganda as the “gospel” of Nazism and notes that Goebbels “liked to say that Jesus Christ has been a master of propaganda and that the propagandist must be the man with the greatest knowledge of souls.”

The other part of this twisted philosophy is the fact one must have a boogeyman in order to solidify the notion of us against them, something akin to the US using Russia as the boogeyman in order to continue funding the MIC, aka the Military Industrial Complex, while bankrupting the country.

The essence of the Nazi propaganda method was repetition. Goebbels argued that the skill of British propagandists during the Great War resided in the fact that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them.13 Historian Baruch Gitlis has argued that: “Wherever the German turned, he met his most ‘dangerous enemy,’ the Jew,”14 and that “while he walked in the street he encountered posters and slogans against the Jews at every square, on every wall and billboard. Even graffiti greeted the German at the entrance to his dwelling: ‘Wake up Germany, Judah must rot!’”

Goebbels channeled Bernays without question. Propaganda, written in 1928, was the blueprint Goebbels needed to enable Hitler to conquer Europe.

Edward Bernays the "godfather" of Goebbels