Hitler and the 'Big Lie'
It has been repeated so often that virtually no one bothers to challenge it: Adolf Hitler created and used the "Big Lie," one of his many evil techniques. As holds true for so many things we are told, this belief, too, must be examined to see the underlying truth.
In "Mein Kampf", Hitler wrote:
But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall [of Germany in WWI] precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice. All this was inspired by the principle -- which is quite true in itself -- that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper stata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.
From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. He (Schopenhauer) called the Jew "The Great Master of Lies." Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.
Clearly, Hitler is not advocating the use of the "Big Lie," and, far from creating it, he in fact is ascribing the "Big Lie" technique to the Jews and Marxists. The "Big Lie" technique is Hitler's in the same fashion that Halley's Comet is Halley's -- not because either man was the inventor, but rather because he was the discoverer.
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Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. James Murphy, translator.
Or
Page 231 of the
Page 232 of the Houghton-Mifflin edition.
The term propaganda is derived from the Latin propagare, to propagate, to reproduce, to spread, with the meaning, to transmit, to spread from person to person. Propaganda is short for Congregatio de propaganda fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), a committee of Roman Catholic cardinals established by Pope Gregory XV in l622 organized as a missionary group which proselytized for conversion to Roman Catholicism. A modern definition is the systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, or practices, meant to further a particular cause or agenda and weaken that of another; it is a systematic effort to manipulate attitudes, beliefs, or actions by the use of symbols. It is commonly used to describe any deceptive or distorted accounts, usually as a dismissive, disparaging, and pejorative term, which in its broadest sense, can be and is applied to any account one does not agree with. In its purest and essential form, propaganda consists in the manipulation of symbols----words, pictures, signs, and images. At its most pure level, words and language, and indeed, even thought can be dispensed with. Merely a stimulus or image is all that is required to produce the desired response.
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The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. Propaganda has only one object, to conquer the masses. Every means that furthers that aim is good; every means that hinders it is bad ... You can make a man believe anything if you tell it to him in the right way ... Nothing is easier than leading the people on a leash. I just hold up a dazzling campaign poster and they jump through it... |
1. Propagandist must have access to intelligence concerning events and public opinion. 2. Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority. a. It must issue all the propaganda directives b. It must explain propaganda directives to important officials and maintain their morale c. It must oversee other agencies' activities which have propaganda consequences 3. The propaganda consequences of an action must be considered in planning that action. 4. Propaganda must affect the enemy's policy and action. a. By suppressing propagandistically desirable material which can provide the enemy with useful intelligence b. By openly disseminating propaganda whose content or tone causes the enemy to draw the desired conclusions c. By goading the enemy into revealing vital information about himself d. By making no reference to a desired enemy activity when any reference would discredit that activity 5. Declassified, operational information must be available to implement a propaganda campaign 6. To be perceived, propaganda must evoke the interest of an audience and must be transmitted through an attention-getting communications medium. 7. Credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false. 8. The purpose, content and effectiveness of enemy propaganda; the strength and effects of an expose; and the nature of current propaganda campaigns determine whether enemy propaganda should be ignored or refuted. 9. Credibility, intelligence, and the possible effects of communicating determine whether propaganda materials should be censored. 10. Material from enemy propaganda may be utilized in operations when it helps diminish that enemy's prestige or lends support to the propagandist's own objective. 11. Black rather than white propaganda may be employed when the latter is less credible or produces undesirable effects. 12. Propaganda may be facilitated by leaders with prestige. 13. Propaganda must be carefully timed. a. The communication must reach the audience ahead of competing propaganda. b. A propaganda campaign must begin at the optimum moment c. A propaganda theme must be repeated, but not beyond some point of diminishing effectiveness 14. Propaganda must label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans. a. They must evoke desired responses which the audience previously possesses b. They must be capable of being easily learned c. They must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations d. They must be boomerang-proof 15. Propaganda to the home front must prevent the raising of false hopes which can be blasted by future events. 16. Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level. a. Propaganda must reinforce anxiety concerning the consequences of defeat b. Propaganda must diminish anxiety (other than concerning the consequences of defeat) which is too high and which cannot be reduced by people themselves 17. Propaganda to the home front must diminish the impact of frustration. a. Inevitable frustrations must be anticipated b. Inevitable frustrations must be placed in perspective 18. Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred. 19. Propaganda cannot immediately affect strong counter-tendencies; instead it must offer some form of action or diversion, or both. Based upon "Göbbels' Principles of Propaganda" by Leonard W. Doob published in "Public Opinion and Propaganda; A Book of Readings edited for The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues." |
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The failure of new psychology texts is not to include information on propaganda techniques. These methods were in every text book following World War II, when there was great concern about the methods used by Hitler to control German citizens. Now they are out of fashion and excluded from the textbooks, although the techniques continue to be used extensively. There is the appeal to fear, in which the propagandizer creates a belief in the existence of a crisis so severe that any action at all seems reasonable to use to prevent the predicted dreadful consequences. Hitler persuaded German citizens that Jews were going to destroy the Aryan race; today an assortment of fear mongers encourages excessive fear of global warming, collapse of the health care system and so on.
Propagandists also use appeals to prejudice, often enhancing the appeal to fear by fanning existing prejudices. All societies have scapegoats who are fair game for attack, including in the Another method is semantic generalization, in which one word or phrase becomes equated with another, for example "gun control" with "gun control legislation," so that listeners come to believe that gun control legislation will produce gun control. In fact legislation often produces only the appearance of having solved a problem, rather than actually solving the problem. Another propaganda technique is to promote an "unassailable noble cause," like capital gains or family values, or for the Nazis, the purification of the Aryan race. In the name of a sufficiently noble cause, people will permit no end of tyranny. The gratuitous assertion is also useful. In this a claim is made, and repeated until it is believed. Making up statistics and repeating them can be an effective use of gratuitous assertion.
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The Lure of Pseudoscience
These two proto-Nazi parties were created by the Thule Geselleschaft, with its symbol the swastika derived from Indian iconography. This organization was a rabidly anti-Semetic and anti-Communist Bavarian branch of the Germanenorden, a fellowship interested in the study of the origin, history, and culture of the Aryan peoples. ("Aryan" in this context is equivalent to today's term "Indo-European": a major group of languages with a shared ancient historical connection). The Germanenorden combined "secret society" aspects of Freemasonry with the turn-of-the-century movement of Theosophy, a religion combining then-current natural historical sciences (especially historical geology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and archaeology) with occult mysticism.
Lack of free and open discourse between domestic and with international researchers meant that the debate and dialogue necessary for critical evaluations of ideas could not go on.
Ideas lacking in critical merit, but which made the policies or ideologies of the State look favorable, would be officially promoted; those which made the policies or ideologies of the State could be dismissed, made illegal, suppressed, or simply regarded as "unpatriotic".
Not all pseudoscientific claims are wrapped in politics. For example, the claims that a rotting plesiosaur carcass was found by a Japanese fishing vessel in 1977 continue to be made, even though it was established in 1978 that it was just the remains of a dead basking shark! The media widely reported the "dead plesiosaur" hypothesis, but did not follow up on the results of the investigations that showed a much less exciting answer.
Pseudoscience can be promoted for financial reasons. Pulp science fiction magazine publisher Ray Palmer (of Amazing Stories) ran a series of letters by Richard Shaver in the 1940s. Shaver claimed that during WWII he had wandered into the Hollow Earth, which was populated by four-foot tall bald grey deranged robots called "deros", who flew around in disk-shaped ships, caputered people, probed them, and released them with mind-controlling implants. Shaver's letters caused Amazing Stories' sales to soar, and others began to write in about their own similar experiences! In Spring 1948 Palmer (under the pseudonym "Robert N. Webster") started publising Fate magazine, dedicated to the "Shaver Mystery" and similar paranormal tales. The feature article of issue one was the story of Kenneth Arnold and the "flying saucers". The popularity of Fate led to many similar magazines: some professionally produced, others privately made "fanzines". At least some of the latter were actually created as hoaxes. Gray Barker, head of Saucerian Publications and known UFO photo hoaxer, invented the "Men In Black" in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. More recent hoaxers that created entirely new pseudoscience legends include crop circles and Charles Berlitz's Philadelphia Experiment and revivals and retroconditioning of the Atlantis story and of the Roswell Incident.
A famous pseudoscience movement of the 20th Century was the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis. It claimed that the legends of ancient people interacting with heroes and gods who taught them skills and knowledge were actually a partial record of encounters with aliens.
As archaeologist Kenneth Feder points out, Ancient Astronaut proposer Erich von Däniken suggests that alien knowledge was necessary for building numerous structures throughout history in
Part of the appeal of pseudoscience is that the audience is let in on the "Big Secret" that the "Authorities" don't want them to know!
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It is well known that German Fascists transformed their buffoonish leader, Hitler, from a national joke into Der Führer of the Reich by means of a) securing moneys from large industrialists and financiers (they liked his extremely rightwing ideas on race, labor, religion, nationalism, capitalism, imperialism, etc) and b) by using multiple propaganda hoaxes in order to sway domestic opinion. As we shall see, this is a technique learned by the Nazis from the masters of such things in the US (Hitler credited the development of the Final Solution to his study of US treatment of Native Americans), and something that was then perfected by the US after it recovered and reconciled with its mad dog Nazi assets during the Cold War. 1918: USSR: Communists eat babies!? Bolsheviks seek to conquer world! International Jewry grabs power in Russia!? Reds to start war in India next! Socialism and incest: partners in Sin! So ran the newspapers, every day, in every city, after Czarist absolutism was broken by popular resistance, no thanks to the US. Wilson’s administration used such imbecilic pretenses in a failed attempt to strangle bolshevism in its cradle, as one imperialist from a different genocidal nation put it. Of course, the real motives behind western intervention weren’t mentioned: Capital Capital Capital Capital.
1945 : Japan: Event - nukes; Propaganda Lie -saving Japanese and American lives; Bitter Truth - self-serving genocide and terrorism to intimidate Stalin. Only assholes can believe the US story here.
1964: Vietnam: the USS Maddox got hit by some lightning, but LBJ thought it?’ be a good idea to bow before the banking cartels, the Seven Sisters, the Pentagon, and crusty McCarthyoids, thereby inventing the notion that the (repeat the old script) Red North ruthlessly invaded the Free South, or at least they ruthlessly attacked an innocent US naval vessel in international waters. Turns out that there was no attack, that the ship was in Hanoi’s waters, and was not-at-all-innocently deploying special forces and other anti-communist swine into the North for the normal roster of Kapitalist Karnage.
1973: Chile: Commies are gonna get us! Or so it was said by flag-waving retards. The unfortunate truth: a democratic regime thought it was allowed to use its own resources for its own benefit. The US disagreed with Allende.
1981: Nicaragua: Commies are gonna get us! Or so it was said by flag-waving retards. The unfortunate truth: a democratic regime thought it was allowed to use its own resources for its own benefit. The US disagreed with Ortega.
1983: Grenada: Commies are gonna get us! Or so it was said by flag-waving retards. The unfortunate truth: a democratic regime thought it was allowed to use its own resources for its own benefit. The US disagreed with Bishop.
1986: Libya: Evil Terrorist Nation! Quit doing Terrorist things! We will bomb you! Turns out that the Libyans weren’t responsible, after all, for the acts of terror of which they’d been accused. Hmm? A high publicity bombing mission right in the middle of the Iran-Contra Affair? What a coincidence! And at a time when Gorbachev was making peaceful overtures and the US was in danger of having no enemies? Amazingly coincidental!
1989: Panama: They said that Noriega was an Evildoer Drugdealer! You must go Evil Doper! USA All The Way! Humanitarian Intervention! We should mention that Noriega was attempting to institute some democratic reforms and social services, had been a CIA asset, and largely oversaw US drug smuggling and could document his and US involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. But why trouble anyone with the facts? Especially the fact that the true meaning of the words Operation Just Cause is that US Delta Force teams secretly attacked US Army units so that the US could claim Panamanian terrorists are shooting us!?
1991: Kuwait: The famous dead babies hoax, which was revealed to be a lie. Other tidbits: Kuwait had provoked Iraq in numerous ways; Iraq got approval from its imperial master, the US, before invading; Bush had personal investments in the region; and US strategy had long called for a way to control the Gulf States directly. With the USSR gone and the Kuwait-Iraq border dispute, the US now had both pretext and opportunity.
1992: Bosnia: never mind all of the dead Serbs. Instead, check out this photo! The Evil Serb Evildoers have Evilly put some guy in a concentration camp at Trnopolje! Look at the barbed wire! Look at how starved he is! Oh wait a minute - looks like that the barbed wire is around someone’s shed, that the photographer is in the shed, that the starving guy is a refugee on the outside of the barbed fence, that the headline Belsen 92 is a lie, that there were no concentration camps, and that the entire series of US operations in the early 1990s were resurrected Nazi policies on Yugoslavia, which still maintained some socialistic economic policies. Well, I’ll be damned: another humanitarian intervention for Kapitalism.
1993: Somalia: Yet another humanitarian intervention? Thing is, the famine was nearly over, the US wasn’t anywhere near where it had been, the Somalis already hated the US for thrusting Barre on them, and the US was only there now for 1) oil prospecting, 2) uranium mining, 3) military basing, 4) public relations, and 5) a paid advertisement? for the Pentagon, in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell’s cynical phrase..
1999: Kosovo: Humanitarian intervention!? Now for something completely different. Racak, Srebrenica, Izbica, Trepca -all more complicated than they seem, as according to numerous international organizations, the FBI, and so on…… Ethnic cleansing? Only if we are talking about the cleansing of Serbs by NATO. And the banner hoax here: the Serbian MIG allegedly attacking civilians, is revealed as a fraud in state-press photos, which obviously display English writing on the alleged fuselage.
2001: Afghanistan: Evil Terrorists got us! We will get them back! Of course, the true story is much more complicated, involving US complicity, deception, and strategic planning at all levels, as noted in the recent historical record.
2002: Iraq: Evil! Smite Evil! Get oil! Did I say oil? I meant that Evildoer tried to kill my daddy! One excellent hoax, besides the manufactured general threat rhetoric, is the alleged 15 kg of weapons-grade uranium recovered in Turkey in mid 2002, allegedly bound for Iraq from Eastern Europe. Too bad that this weapons-grade uranium has Made in West Germany written on it in English.
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Wars and conflicts begin in the minds of men and women. Before there is a war of bullets and bombs, there is a war of ideas. Images and ideas emerge first. Before one kills another human being, one has to rationalize killing, to explain killing, to justify killing. The first casualty in war is the truth. |
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You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month. |
Information Control For Social Manipulation The news and entertainment we consume, and thus our thoughts and opinions, are shaped not just by the media and entertainment corporations but by governments, their agencies and the military-industrial complex
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One night, probably in 1880, John Swinton, then the pre-eminent New York journalist, was the guest of honour at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:
(Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.) |
help of a Big Lie For more than half a century, Bertelsmann, which controls Günter Thielen, chairman of the commission of historians behind the research, expressed "sincere regret for the inaccuracies the commission has uncovered". His statement stopped short of an apology. A corporate history prepared for the group's 150th anniversary in 1985 claimed that Bertelsmann was shut down by the Nazis because of the religious convictions of its chairman at the time. The report concluded that the company, which was founded in 1835 in the town of "The legend that Bertelsmann was closed down because of resistance to the Nazis smoothed the way for the [postwar] occupation authorities promptly granting the firm a new licence to publish," the report said. Bertelsmann's rapid inter national expansion has been assisted by the goodwill of Jews in the business community and on regulatory bodies who accepted the company's version of its Nazi-era role. That is particularly true in the Ironically, the investigation was triggered by the award to Bertelsmann of a prize offered by a Jewish-American organisation. In a 1998 speech of acceptance, the group's chairman at the time, Thomas Middelhoff, said it had published banned literature and that the Nazis had imprisoned Bertelsmann managers for not toeing Göbbels' propaganda line. Hersch Fischler, a freelance historical researcher, published an article in a Swiss magazine challenging that version of events. His researchers were instrumental in the decision to set up an historical commission three years ago. The panel found that Bertelsmann's sales had grown by 2,000% as it switched from publishing religious and school books to supplying popular literature for German soldiers. Before the closure, it had supplied the army with some 19 million books blending entertainment and indoctrination. It also tapped into the youth market and was responsible for, among others, the Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth. The commission also found that the firm used Jewish slave labour at printing plants in |
Politics, in all its forms, is bankrupt. The notion that we can safely and successfully hand over the management of our daily lives and the setting of priorities to a political class or elite is thoroughly discredited. Politicians cannot be trusted, regardless of the system in which they operate. No set of constraints, checks, and balances, is proved to work and mitigate their unconscionable acts and the pernicious effects these have on our welfare and longevity. Ideologies - from the benign to the malign and from the divine to the pedestrian - have driven the gullible human race to the verge of annihilation and back. Participatory democracies have degenerated everywhere into venal plutocracies. Socialism and its poisoned fruits - Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism - have wrought misery on a scale unprecedented even by medieval standards. Only Fascism and Nazism compare with them unfavorably. People are voting with their feet. Most elections draw to the ballot boxes and the polling stations less than half the electorate. Three models seem to be emerging as the dominant forms of future politics: Anarchism Participatory democracy
- both destructive (mob rule and coups) and constructive (people power, especially in In certain countries, mainly in the West, a disenchanted and uninterested citizenry will relegate power and vest it in various oligarchies, forfeiting its decision-making prerogatives altogether and permanently in return for material welfare and personal safety. |