The parallels to that dark time are becoming harder and harder to ignore. It's not just the obvious similarities, like Brown Shirts busting up public meetings and ostentatiously going armed everywhere. Nor just the ugly demonizing rhetoric pinning a scapegoat in the pitiless glare of nonstop invective.
There's also media consolidation. Weimar Germany had its very own Rupert Murdoch, Alfred Hugenberg, who owned a lot of radio stations and newspapers and used them to bring Hitler to power. Controlling the public communication channels and discrediting those who don't tell the story you want spread are time-honored tactics, and have hardly needed updating for our time.
Hugenberg ultimately changed his mind about the horror he'd helped birth, but by then it was too late. Goebbels was firmly in charge, and revealed Hugenberg as a mere amateur by becoming the intellectual fountainhead of the next half century's commercial and political prpopaganda industries. It's only recently, with the advent of the Internet, that the Big Lie has finally had to give way to the strategy of Net of a Million Lies for pride-of-place as the propaganda technique of our age.
Frankly, I think I'd prefer the one-on-one battle of the Big Lie to being pecked to death by ducks on the Internet. Our Lilliputians just might win that way.
Current Events » in reply to Defining Decoherence
I hear you
The whole thread (32 posts)
- Obama nominates Elena Kagan for SCOTUS...and so it begins.
- "Socialism and Re-distribution of Wealth"
- Re: Obama nominates Elena Kagan for SCOTUS...and so it begins.
- Looks like we dodged a bullet.
- Just noticed again...
- Re: ..and so it begins.