The Word
by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
Originally, I drafted this article with a preface about the story Michael Hastings recently broke on BuzzFeed about an amendment to the latest defense authorization bill that would “legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences.” However, as I worked on it this morning, our very own poet laureate and research librarian extraordinaire Elaine Magliaro cut me off at the pass with her own excellent article on the subject. So instead of repeating the points she makes which illustrate why understanding propaganda is important, I will refer you to her post “How about Some Government Propaganda for the People Paid for by the People Being Propagandized?”
Now that the kid gloves have come off regarding the governmental efforts to control your mind by controlling both your information and how you receive it, let’s discuss the nature of propaganda. Now more than ever, it is important to know the basics of how propaganda works. Since words are the basic building block of the English language, we’ll start with asking what is propaganda, look at some general history of the practice, consider the importance of meaning of words, the ideas of connotation and denotation, and the process of selecting “value loaded” words.
What is propaganda? Webster’s defines the word as follows:
propaganda \ˌprä-pə-ˈgan-də, ˌprō-\, n.,
1 capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions (ed. note: Not relevant, but interesting.)
2: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
3: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect
But that’s not exactly what people feel when they hear the word, is it? Why do most people have a negative reaction to the word “propaganda”? After all, by definition, “propaganda” is much like the verb “to persuade” in meaning.
persuade \pər-ˈswād\, v., v.t.,
1: to move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action
2: to plead with : urge
Etymologically speaking, the word “propaganda” is fairly new as a political science term. “Propaganda” didn’t come into common use as a political science term until World War I. Even then it was not a pejorative in use like it is today. The word originated (some would say unsurprisingly so) as shorthand referring to the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregatio de Propaganda Fide or the “congregation for propagating the faith”. This committee of cardinals was established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions. The word “propaganda” is the feminine gerund of the Italian verb “propagando” which in turn is derived from the Latin verb prōpāgō, meaning “to propagate”.
propagate \ˈprä-pə-ˌgāt\, v., v.t.,
3a : to cause to spread out and affect a greater number or greater area : extend b : to foster growing knowledge of, familiarity with, or acceptance of (as an idea or belief) : publicize c : to transmit (as sound or light) through a medium
Clearly the largest distinction between persuasion and propaganda is that propaganda is a form of large scale persuasion. Persuasion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Changing someone’s mind is a better tactic than violence. Persuasion is at the heart of society’s pillar and replacement for self-help justice and dispute resolution, the adversarial court system. Persuasion is an alternative to coercion.
So what is propaganda? It’s a tool to change people’s minds. Like any tool, it is capable of beneficial use and horrific misuse. This makes understanding how the tool works critical if you want to recognize (and possibly work to prevent) its misuse.
If that is the case the word originally had no pejorative use, then why do most people have an automatic negative reaction to the word “propaganda”? This brings us to the ideas of connotation and denotation. Plainly put, denotation is a direct specific meaning; the literal meaning of a word and nothing more. Connotation is a “something” suggested by a word or thing; an implied meaning. I suggest the negative connotation for the word “propaganda” comes from both the negative denotation built in to the word itself (part of the definition is “for the purpose of helping or injuring” and injury carries the negative notion of harm to self and/or others) and the recent historical use of propaganda to dastardly ends culminating to create an implied negative meaning beyond the definition. The denotation of a word is not the direct province of the propagandist. They have to know what the words actually mean, but that is of limited value to them. The edge of the propagandist’s knife so to speak lies in the connotation of words. More on that topic as we move along. In the 20th Century, we have seen what truly evil injury propaganda is capable of inflicting on a society. To know how we got to today, it is important to have a bit of historical perspective.
Historically, the idea of propaganda has been around as long as there have been society and governments. For example, in ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh Ramses II claimed a great victory over the Hittites in the Battles of Kadesh (possibly the largest chariot battle in history). The two most common forms of Egyptian records of the battles are known as “The Poem” and “The Bulletin”. Both are found carved into multiple sites in Egypt, all built or expanded upon by Ramses II – one of the greatest builders of ancient Egypt. “The Bulletin” is found on seven different temples or monuments and eight total sites have “The Poem”. When you add numerous other references on papyrus and in tangentially related carvings, this makes the Battles of Kadesh one of the best recorded battles of antiquity. The tale told is of an overwhelming victory for Ramses II and Egypt.
There’s only one problem with that depiction.
It is most certainly a lie at worst and an exaggeration at best.
Hittite records, although not as numerous, all tell the tale of a Hittite victory. Archaeological evidence is inconclusive. One of the two parties is lying and possibly both. Most modern historians have come to the conclusion that the battle likely ended in a draw. Given that, why did Ramses II carve his non-existent victory into stone? Propaganda is the answer. Ramses II wanted the reputation as a strong military leader even if the reality wasn’t so glorious. So he fluffed the details and spread the word that “Ramses II Kicks Ass!” Unless you were at the Battles of Kadesh, who were you to argue with a Living God? Then realizing that his chances for immediate military exploits were practically nil, Ramses II did what any respectable Pharaoh would do and a secondary exercise in propaganda: he returned to the building spree he started as a young man. Some would say the greatest building spree in the history of the ancient Egypt. Just like the Romans after him, Ramses knew that impressive buildings were a kind of psychological warfare – non-verbal propaganda geared at projecting the power of the throne to the masses, but more on this at a later date. The focus here is language and the basics of propaganda.
In the beginning, there was the word. Those with the word were limited. If they could not speak directly, they were limited by how many manual physical copies they could get out to the masses and how many of the masses could read. Then came the printing press in the 15th Century. When Guttenberg invented it, one of the early adopters of the technology was the Holy Roman Empire. By the end of the Renaissance, book making was industrialized to the point that printer/binders could produce between three and four thousand pages per day: a hundred fold increase in production compared to the most prolific of scribes. Books and written material went from rare treasures to common items. As knowledge became democratized, the use of printed propaganda grew in unison: public notices, political flyers and proto-newspapers became cheap and abundant.
The 20th Century was in some ways a Golden Age for deploying propaganda. Unlike any previous age, the 20th Century was the age of mass communications. Industrial mass printing of newspapers, radio, television, telephones and the Internet radically changed the way humans communicate. The word became King and the picture became Queen. Even illiteracy wasn’t the barrier it had posed to the ancient world as the spoken word supplemented the written and the truism that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is a truism for a reason. Even physical handicap was less of a barrier to getting the message out as those blind to the printed word and picture and deaf to the spoken word now had the channel of communication created by the 19th Century invention of Braille. As propaganda is large scale persuasion, mass media provided a natural accelerant. What had previously been a candle of propaganda became a bonfire necessarily becoming a political science term in common usage. The 20th Century saw probably the most devastating use of propaganda to date on any population. Propaganda was instrumental to both the Nazi war effort and their social engineering that allowed them to industrially murder six million Jews, Roma, homosexuals and handicapped. Propaganda was key to the crimes of the Khemer Rouge. Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Castro’s rise to power in Cuba. The wrongful, misguided and likely illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq. These are a few of many examples where propaganda has been used to either garner public support for ethically wrong actions by government or obfuscate the truth to aid the guilty from being brought to justice. This point will be addressed further in a later column, but it goes a long way to explaining how a word of neutral value became a word of negative value due to recent history.
We are still left with the word. As far as the word “propaganda” proper, we know what it means. We know where it comes from. We know the goal of propaganda in general. That leaves us with word choice and the idea of “value loaded” word and how it relates to propaganda. What are words loaded with? They are loaded with implication. This is why connotation is the edge of the propagandist’s knife. Word choice is critical. As I noted earlier, the denotation of a word is not the direct province of the propagandist. The edge of the propagandist’s knife so to speak lies in the connotation of words. However, knowing the proper denotation of words – i.e. having a large vocabulary – puts one at a tactical advantage against the propagandist. If one knows the actual meaning of words, it becomes more difficult for the propagandist to use connotation against you.
For example, consider the use of media outlets like NPR that made a public and conscious decision to refrain from reporting on “torture” – a word with extremely negative denotation and connotation – and instead choosing to use the euphemistic language “enhanced interrogation”. Everyone with a conscience thinks torture is a bad thing and torturers are ethically abhorrent people. It’s not only a Federal crime, cruel and unusual punishment is specifically barred by the 8th Amendment of the Constitution. The word choice here is designed to clearly shift public attitudes from “those guys need to be prosecuted as criminals” to “maybe they aren’t so bad after all”. NPR (aided by the Bush Administration no doubt) chose words with a neutral/positive value load compared to the word “torture”. Connotation plays to your emotional response over your rational response. When the word choice becomes more subtle, the damage of connotations can be even more insidious. Compare:
- war – limited police action
- conquest – liberation
- famine – widespread hunger
- pestilence – outbreak
- death – casualties
Be aware and suspicious of word choice, certainly. Especially when dealing with adjectives as they have by their nature a great capacity to carry connotation. However, it is equally important to consider the speaker. When evaluating something you suspect is propaganda, ask these questions:
- Who is the speaker?
- What does the speaker want from me?
- What advantage does the speaker gain from my agreement or lose from my disagreement? And vice-versa?
- Does the speaker represent other interests that may not be obvious?
- Why is the speaker giving this message now?
What is your first line of defense against propaganda?
Be aware of the meaning and choice of words. To that end, work to strengthen your vocabulary. Buy a “Word A Day” calender or download an app for your phone, use a website or download a tickler program for your computer.
Always question the message and the messenger as well as any who may have sent the messenger. Practice reading with emotional detachment and a critical eye to not only what is said, but how it is said and by whom.
Keep in mind that propaganda is a tool. It is inherently neutral. The good or evil is found in the intent of the speaker and their desired actions and/or reactions on your part.
What is your first line of defense against propaganda? You are. And that is my unhidden message to you: Wake up. Civilization calls. The world is what we make it.
The next article in this series will address methodology, strategy and tactics in deploying propaganda.
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
The Propaganda Series;
Propaganda 105: How to Spot a Liar
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Streisand Effect and the Political Question
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Sound of Silence
Propaganda 104: Magica Verba Est Scientia Et Ars Es
Propaganda 103: The Word Changes, The Word Remains The Same
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Holly Would “Zero Dark Thirty”
Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Child’s Play
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Build It And They Will Come (Around)
Related articles of interest;
here’s a better review/overview of Herbert Hoover’s “Freedom Betrayed” than the poorly cobbled quotes I posted earlier —
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10838171-freedom-betrayed#other_reviews
QUOTE
1. War between Germany and Russia was inevitable.
2. Hitler’s attack on Western Democracies was only to brush them out of his way.
3. There would have been no attack on the Western Democracies had they not supplied the guarantee to Poland in March of 1939.
4. This Poland guarantee was the greatest blunder in British diplomatic history.
5. There was no sincerity on either side of the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pack made in August, 1939.
6. Neither the US nor any part of the Western Hemisphere was ever in danger of invasion by Hitler.
7. The danger of US invasion was lessened further by Hitler’s invasion of Russia.
8. FDR, knowing 6 and 7 by November 1940 (election time), had no reason to put the US in the war to ‘save Britain’ or to save the US from invasion.
9. The use of the US Navy for undeclared war on Germany (in 1940 and 1941) was unconstitutional.
10. There were secret military agreements with Britain possibly as early as January, 1940.
11. The war with Japan was deliberately provoked.
He has few good things to say about FDR, Churchill, or Stalin, and wanted us to stay out of the war. He saw FDR as incompetent at best. Because of Hoover’s position, he had access to a number of ‘insiders’ who shared with him details of what was really going on.
. . .[The book] does supply adequate documentation (much of it based on diplomatic papers) to support his theses… this is much more a diplomatic history, than a military one.
Those that propose WWII as the ‘Good War’ need to supply extraordinary evidence to justify the slaughter that left 50 to 70 million dead. This book shows that Hoover sided with those who wanted nothing to do with that slaughter.
Having read Rothbard’s ‘The Great Depression’, I had earlier formed a negative opinion of Hoover. This book redeems him.(less)
END QUOTE
I’m guessing for your next act, Herr Goebbels, you’re probably going to call a concentration camp something like “enhanced accommodations”.
As for this project?
It aims to teach people how to easily identify people like you, you Nazi apologist.
Your entire posting here has been nothing more than an exercise in cherry picking, deflection, misdirection and apologetics on behalf of those po’ ol’ misunderstood Nazis.
Being able to identify propaganda is the first step in being able to fight propaganda, but especially propaganda that seeks to rationalize away horrific acts such as the Holocaust which killed 6,000,000 Jews and as many as 11,000,000 in toto by blaming the act on someone other than the guys holding the keys to the gas chambers.
I was busy this morning and operating from memory so I decided to verify some dates now that I had a bit of free time. Indeed, I did mistake the dates of the AJC call for boycott, but in context you’ll see exactly how ridiculous comparing it to “an act of war” really is:
January 30, 1933. – Hitler becomes Chancellor.
February 27, 1933 – Reichstag burns – likely at the hands of the Nazis themselves.
February 28, 1933 – The Reichstag Fire Decree is issued, suspending the civil rights of Germans.
March 21, 1933 – Hindenburg signed two decrees put before him by Hitler. The first decree granted full pardons to all Nazis currently in prison. The second decree allowed for the arrest of anyone suspected of maliciously criticizing the government and/or the Nazi Party. A third decree (signed only by Hitler and Papen) creates special courts to try political offenders. These courts are conducted in the courts-martial style, without a jury and usually with no counsel for the defense.
March 22, 1933 – Dachau opens.
March 24, 1933 – Hitler becomes der Führer with the signing of the Enabling Act by the newly reconstituted Reichstag.
April 1, 1933 – Nazis stage boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.
April 11, 1933 – Nazis issue a Decree defining a non-Aryan as “anyone descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. One parent or grandparent classifies the descendant as non-Aryan…especially if one parent or grandparent was of the Jewish faith.”
April 26, 1933 – The Gestapo is created by Hermann Göring.
May 10, 1933 – Book burning! Everyone bring marshmallows.
July 14, 1933 – The Nazi Party is declared the only legal party in Germany.
August, 1933 – AJC leads a general boycott of German goods.
November 24, 1933 – The Nazis pass a “Law Against Habitual and Dangerous Criminals”, which allows beggars, the homeless, alcoholics and the unemployed (read: the poor) to be sent to concentration camps in addition to political prisoners.
Malisha, saying “I refute that” is not an argument, it is an assertion. You need some facts and logic to undermine my argument.
The facts are not on your side.
I will, however, not undermine your non-refutation by citing the facts until you have the opportunity to provide a real argument. Fair is fair, after all; it’s just the kind of guy I am.
re your comment –
” Ask Germans today if they liked being united by Hitler around the wonderful heroic Christ-type hero, Talkingback. Ask a LOT of them.”
first of all, the Christ-type hero was Siegfried, from Wagner’s opera. Didn’t want you to get the impression Hitler was cast as the Christ type.
——-
here’s something intriguing, Malisha, this contrast in the social and psychological well-being of Germans vs Israeli Jews.
In The War of Our Childhoods author Wolfgang Samuel interview 27 people who, like him, were children in Germany during the war. As children, they experienced firebombing, starvation, separation and loss of their parents, some even witnessed the rapes of family members.
Samuel concludes: “”My focus. . .is on the astounding ability of a generation of German children to emerge from debilitating circumstances as sane and productive human beings.”
Contrast that first-person testimony with the observations of Israeli-born & educated psychologist Avigail Abarbanel. She wrote, in “Israel’s Growing Insanity,” that it is a “mainstream view” in Israel today that they are “facing a danger of annihilation.” (Be aware that actual holocaust survivors are by now in the minority; most Israelis are a generation removed from the holocaust.)
Abarbanel continues, “When a person’s perception of reality is completely out of touch with reality itself, we begin to get an uneasy feeling that something might be wrong with his or her mind. Where is the evidence that the Jews, right now are facing a “real danger of complete annihilation”?
Abarbanel traces the roots of this detached-from-reality phenomenon to the profound identity-confusion Israeli Jews experience, and traces THAT identity crisis to “the neurotic Zionist movement. She explores how this Israeli Jewish psychological crisis manifests itself in the sham “peace process,” and, most tragically, how it has damaged the lives of Palestinians.
AS mentioned above, it is not actual holocaust survivors who exhibit this phenomenon, it is second and third generation Israeli Jews who do so. That means they have been TAUGHT — propagandized, if you will — to believe that they are about to be annihilated.
While the myths of German culture united the German people, and enabled children who lived through the horror of war to emerge as “sane and productive human beings,” the core myths of today’s Israeli Jews are not only not unifying them as a people but are even fragmenting their own sense of integrated personhood.
http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/growing-insanity.html
Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex, has said ” “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Or in other words, a guilty conscience has a surprising way of manifesting itself through aggression and claims to victimhood.” ”
Which cohort, Germans or Israeli Jews, has been forced to confront reality and acknowledge guilt? And consistent with Dr. Rex’s analysis, as well as the observations of Dr. Abarbanel, which group manifests “aggression and claims to victimhood?”
And for Gene H and this propaganda project — what role does propaganda play in maintaining a psychologically dangerous state, and is such a state best resolved by enabling it or by confronting reality?
Summary:
Jews are responsible for all the evil in the world, they want our women, and God wants me to defend myself from “the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.” (The quote also from Mein Kampf.)
This was all in 1925-26.
“The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
“If we consider how greatly he has sinned against the masses in the course of the centuries, how he has squeezed and sucked the blood again and again; if furthermore, we consider how the people gradually learned to hate him for this, and ended up by regarding his existence as nothing but punishment of Heaven for the other peoples, we can understand how hard this shift must be for the Jew.” – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: ‘by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.'” – Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 published July 18, 1925
Talking, you tried to restate what you were saying to clean it up a little, but if you want me to refute what you have now said (I wouldn’t even BOTHER to refute what you previously said), here we go:
You said:
I do argue that the Jewish boycott of Germany 1933-1938 was a deliberate act of provocation, to suit zionist goals of transfering German Jewish wealth to Palestine because otherwise the zionist project would go bankrupt.
I refute that. It is absurd. I don’t care if you think my saying that is a sign of weakness on my part or not. The German Jews had no design of going to Palestine with their wealth — nor did their wealth GET TO PALESTINE via Auschwitz and Dachau. The design was Hitler’s design to transfer their wealth to HIM and HIS and to kill them. From 1933 to 1938 the Jews tried to protest and prevent that, but alas, they were too WEAK to do so. If you don’t like me weakly calling you names don’t go public with some crap like that.
btw Malisha, don’t put words in my mouth. Refute the claims I made, not the ones you make up.
I do argue that the Jewish boycott of Germany 1933-1938 was a deliberate act of provocation, to suit zionist goals of transfering German Jewish wealth to Palestine because otherwise the zionist project would go bankrupt.
If you can refute that argument, have at it. If you destroy the facts and logic of my argument, as a rational person, I must acquiesce to your counter-argument.
Name calling is not a refutation. It’s a sign of weakness.
Interesting that you mentioned Son of Sam in your otherwise completely logic- and substance-free rant.
His hangout was the estate of Sam Untermyer, who, with Rabbi Stephen Wise, engineered the Jewish boycott of Germany from 1933-1938.
The problem with your rationale — or lack of same, Malisha, is that it does not provide any information on what went wrong and how, so that the same situation does not arise again — to ensure that “Never again” thingy.
Following your line of reasoning, which is, all that needs to be known is that “Hitler was evil,” in order to ensure “Never Again,” all that needs to be done is to eliminate all Hitler-types.
How do you identify a Hitler-type?
Benjamin Netanyahu says, frequently, that “Ahmadinejad is Hitler, and it’s 1938.” Based on this claim, Netanyahu has been seeking the destruction of Iran, since at least 1986 (I recognize that you don’t like to read what people write and think, other than that Hitler is evil, but it is useful to read what Benj. Netanyahu has written — in 1979 he defined the protocols for what we are now living out as the Global War on Terror. Iran was Enemy Number One. nb. In 1979, Ahmadinejad was an anonymous 23 year old civil engineering student).
Ahmadinejad does not have the powers that Hitler had — he has no control over the military, but that counts for little since Iran has an extremely small military — it’s strictly defensive. It’s defensive, not “forward-leaning,” like the US, because Iran has no expansionist or extra-territorial ambitions, as Germany did under Hitler.
The largest population of Jews in the Middle East lives in Iran, where they have lived prosperous and secure for longer than Jews have lived anywhere else in the world.
Jews in Iran are not threatened. In fact, several years ago, Israeli organizations offered to pay Iranian Jews to move to Israel, but very, very few, if any, Iranian Jews took up the offer; they preferred their life in Iran.
If Ahmadinejad so hated Jews that he wished to kill them, why not start out just down the street in Tehran?
In order to cast Ahmadinejad as “evil,” it has become necessary for propagandists (this blog IS about propaganda, after all) to distort a phrase that Ahmadinejad has repeated. The distorted version is “Israel must be wiped from the face of the earth” which is then twisted to, “All Jews must be killed.”
The actual statement is, “Zionism [a political movement, like Communism] will disappear from the pages of time,” meaning that like Communism, zionism will fail of its own internal contradictions.
Increasingly, Israeli and American Jews are also predicting the eventual collapse of zionism, because it cannot sustain its internal contradictions.
______
But meanwhile, based on inflammatory and distorted rhetoric — “Ahmadinejad is Hitler, Hitler is evil, therefore, Ahmadinejad is evil, therefore Ahmadinejad/Iran must be made to suffer therefore the Iranian people must be made to suffer; in fact, unless the evil regime in Iran ‘changes their behavior,’ we should bomb their cities, town and people” –the propagandists are carrying out the delusional and irrational scheme that they have concocted: Iranian civilians and scientists are assassinated for the ‘crime’ of working in their own country. Iranian children are deprived of the food they need to develop normally, because of actions taken on the basis of irrational rhetoric/propaganda.
Do you have a problem with that?
TB-2-C-Span, your question about whether it’s OK to say Jews did wrong is completely ridiculous, offensive and obviously a way to try to illogically defend the fact that you were saying — over and over again in one way after another — that the Jews murdered by the Third Reich had done wrong and that justified their murders.
Own up. You’re allowed to believe that. Just don’t try to say something that offensive, stupid, ignorant and illogical and then try to defensively turn it into something else.
Self defense is still allowed, your royal highness, and pronouncements to the contrary belong in the basket of “idiotic pseudo-ideas” that has already been woven by a million wrong-doers.
I half expect you to point out that Son of Sam was a Jew so the Holocaust was OK.
Ask Germans today if they liked being united by Hitler around the wonderful heroic Christ-type hero, Talkingback. Ask a LOT of them.
MM –
One of the points with which I disagree is that “Hitler managed to exploit” German grievances.
Hitler did not “exploit” German grievances, he calmed them.
Case in point: Before and as Hitler came to power, Freikorps were still running wild. It was they who were harassing Germans and Jews.
In a series of lectures on Machiavelli and the uses of power, prof. Dennis Dalton asserted that Bush I failed to use power properly; he should have killed Saddam in 1991. “Today, Bush is out of office and Hussein is still ruling Iraq,” Dalton said. A leader has got to be willing to employ judicious killing.
The night of long knives can be studied in the same way: there were bad actors who were still terrorizing the civilian population — including Jews — in Germany; Hitler had to eradicate them. So he did; iirc he personally killed Rohm. The assassinations were necessary, targeted, and disciplined.
Case in point: When Hitler came to power, the German economy was in a shambles. Unemployment was off the charts, a certain circumstance for unrest, violence, and expressions of resentment of those who did have wealth — Jews were among the wealthier in Germany.
What did Hitler do to “exploit” that situation?
This is from “My New Order, a collection of Hitler’s speeches, a sequel to Mein Kampf,” 1941: (the following is commentary by Raoul de Sales, ed. & comm)
“Besides having promised his followers that Germany would become strong again, Hitler had also promised to cure all the evils of the postwar period, and first of all unemployment.
Now that he was in power, it was not only natural but predetermined that these two promises should be fulfilled at once and merged into one single objective.
It was always to be one of Hitler’s greatest boasts that of all civilized countries Germany had been the only one to find a cure for this world evil, unemployment. Naturally he gave credit for this achievement to the transformation of society by the National Socialist Revolution. Unemployment was cured, according to him, as soon as the concept that the wealth of a country was not in its gold or its capital, but its powers of production and its labor, was accepted. . . .And there is no disputing the fact that the system evolved by the German economists and financiers under the pressure of necessity did succeed in producing an apparent recovery which baffled the world.”
(otoh, This is the Gang That Is Going to Save the World Economy?
case #3: In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that the Kaiser played off first Christians against Catholics, then Catholics against Christians. Hitler observed that this tactic resulted only in dividing the nation against itself; his vision was for a Germany united around their common cultural inheritance, which, as R H S Stolfi explains, Hitler believed could be found in music and opera. No, Hitler did NOT unite Germans against Jews, but around Norse/German mythology.
Oh that demon Hitler, uniting the German people around the Christ-type hero Siegfried.
If evil things were done, and they had–and have– a material impact on world events, and they were done by Jews, is it permissible to point that out?
Are Jews immune from accountability for their bad acts because they are Jews?
An example: A 31 year old Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated because he worked in an Iranian nuclear technology program that functions under IAEA oversight within the parameters of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. His wife is now a widow and his young son will grow up without his father.
But Zalman Shapiro, whose company, NUMEC, is alleged to have illegally supplied enriched uranium to Israel’s secretive nuclear weapons program, lives in a luxury condominium in the Midwest and is on the board of a local Hillel. He has been firewalled from prosecution by action of a former U.S. senator.
So what is the standard: it’s okay if you’re Jewish; it’s deadly if you’re Iranian?
A few inaccuracies in your timeline, Gene H —
“Considering the antisemitic tide that the Nazis rode to power and the campaign of violence against German Jews, socialists, communists and other Nazi opponents that began in January of 1933 when Hitler took power and that on January 30, 1933 the Nazi regime declared a boycott on all Jewish businesses and products, it is hardly surprising that seven months later Jews might call for a boycott of German goods.“
a. The “campaign of violence against German Jews . . .” —
A participant at Mondoweiss explained that there was not really a “campaign of violence or persecution against German Jews in the 1933-1938 era; there was a campaign of discrimination. http://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/on-the-sidewalk-in-hamburg-hier-wohnte.html#comment-452344
b. the Nazi party did NOT “declare a boycott on all Jewish businesses on Jan 30, 1933.” On Mar 24, 1933, Jews declared a boycott on all German exports/imports. The Jewish boycott lasted until about 1938.
In retaliation, on April 1, 1933, Nazis declared a one-day boycott on Jewish businesses.
c. “seven months later” — meaning August 1933? By that time, zionist groups expanded and reinforced the boycott on German goods. They sought, and received, participation in the ‘Jewish’ boycott from leaders of Roman Catholic and Christian/Protestant denominations.
Talkingback, I don’t care how many pages ANYONE wrote, or writes, at any time at all, if it’s in support of an idiotic pseudo-idea that has been used by murderers to not only justify their criminal behavior but to foist off onto their victims the blame for it. There’s stuff like that all over the world and whoever wants to believe it can, without implications for the rest of us.
Here’s an idiotic pseudo-idea: The Jews of Europe produced such trouble in Germany that Hitler was forced to institute the FINAL SOLUTION in order to either keep his people from being starved and destroyed or to punish the perpetrators of a great plot to annihilate the German people, women and children first.
And all variations on that theme, the same: Idiotic pseudo-ideas.
Hitler was guilty of what he did without mitigation; Nazis were (and are) guilty of what they did (and do) without mitigation.
You can spout off to the contrary using any number of sources, pages, rants, citations, or other useless incunabula; feel free.