05-18-2019, 05:24 PM
People are vulnerable to propaganda especially when the Other Side is completely shut out of the debate.
![[Image: 210814de-ec41-40ba-ba56-50a5cac28c58.jpg]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/210814de-ec41-40ba-ba56-50a5cac28c58.jpg)
"The Jewish nose is crooked at its tip. It looks like the number 6."
...as if a crooked nose is somehow more objectionable than an ideology of soulless cruelty. I have encountered some nasty antisemites on the Web, and I have told them that despite being about half German and Swiss (the rest largely English, Welsh, and Scots-Irish, and no Jews) something like
"If I had to choose between being a Jew and a Nazi like you, I would be a Jew because as a Jew I could keep my cultural and moral values. That would be the easiest decision that I could possibly make". I fit three Jewish stereotypes on the Web (as a liberal with a German-sounding surname, and I need not relate the third), so I am hardly surprised that neo-Nazis wish that they could gas me.
The best defense of Jews would have been for Jews to show that they were normal people, that they were not an organized conspiracy (the war criminal Ernst von dem Bach admitted that the concept of a Jewish plot was provably false when he admitted to Polish prosecutors that the Jews did not even have a news service to guide such a plot), and that the "Jews" most objectionable to German Christians (the "Jewish Bolsheviks") were themselves rogues -- and that the fault of the "Jewish Bolshevik" was in not being Jewish enough (the position of Sir Winston Churchill). Jews may have been much of the population of small-business owners, but small-business owners who cannot manipulate prices are the true heroes of capitalism.
The problem for the Jews was that they had no means for which to counter the propaganda of such a swine as Julius Streicher whose racist bilge loses all credibility under a simple challenge. The totalitarian order of Nazi Germany denied Jews the right to act as normal people. The controlled mass media and the corruption of formal education within a totalitarian state corrupt people who cannot know anything else.
"The Jewish nose is crooked at its tip. It looks like the number 6."
...as if a crooked nose is somehow more objectionable than an ideology of soulless cruelty. I have encountered some nasty antisemites on the Web, and I have told them that despite being about half German and Swiss (the rest largely English, Welsh, and Scots-Irish, and no Jews) something like
"If I had to choose between being a Jew and a Nazi like you, I would be a Jew because as a Jew I could keep my cultural and moral values. That would be the easiest decision that I could possibly make". I fit three Jewish stereotypes on the Web (as a liberal with a German-sounding surname, and I need not relate the third), so I am hardly surprised that neo-Nazis wish that they could gas me.
The best defense of Jews would have been for Jews to show that they were normal people, that they were not an organized conspiracy (the war criminal Ernst von dem Bach admitted that the concept of a Jewish plot was provably false when he admitted to Polish prosecutors that the Jews did not even have a news service to guide such a plot), and that the "Jews" most objectionable to German Christians (the "Jewish Bolsheviks") were themselves rogues -- and that the fault of the "Jewish Bolshevik" was in not being Jewish enough (the position of Sir Winston Churchill). Jews may have been much of the population of small-business owners, but small-business owners who cannot manipulate prices are the true heroes of capitalism.
The problem for the Jews was that they had no means for which to counter the propaganda of such a swine as Julius Streicher whose racist bilge loses all credibility under a simple challenge. The totalitarian order of Nazi Germany denied Jews the right to act as normal people. The controlled mass media and the corruption of formal education within a totalitarian state corrupt people who cannot know anything else.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.