The Power of Propaganda
From Hitler to Israel to the USA, good liars can change the world
“Whoever controls the narrative, controls the world.” Caitlin Johnstone
One guy who wanted to control the narrative and the world was Adolf Hitler, leader of the German National Socialist Party (Nazis,) killer of millions of Jews, Poles, Romani, gays, and other people he deemed inferior. He rebuilt the shattered German economy and military and set out to conquer the Western world. Although ultimately defeated, he did so well that other nationalists and fascists have followed his playbook ever since. They’re doing it now in Israel and in the USA.
When Hitler started in politics in 1919, he became director of propaganda for the German Workers Party, which later became the National Socialists. In his book Mein Kampf, he wrote that propaganda is the single most important factor in a movement’s success. It was more important even than organizing, because you have to attract people to a cause before you can organize them, and then you have to keep them motivated.
In Mein Kampf Ch. 6 “On War Propaganda,” Hitler laid out what makes effective propaganda. If you look at his rules, and then look at Israeli propaganda in their wars, you will see that the Zionists have become Hitler’s best students and imitators.
I will summarize Hitler’s rules, as he was kind of a long-winded writer.
● Keep it simple — target the uneducated masses (Hitler’s term), not the intellectual elites. Most people don’t have the education, time, energy, or interest for thorough explanations. Propaganda is advertising.
● Appeal to emotions, not reason. Emotions have powerful physical effects. They can energize people or demoralize them. Hitler recommended having psychologists evaluate the probable emotional response to propaganda and make it as strong as possible.
● No balance — everything goes the same way; everything is black and white. The enemy is always evil, we are always heroes. There are not two sides to the story. We’re right and they’re wrong. “The task of propaganda is not to make an objective study of the truth,” he wrote, “and then set it before the masses with academic fairness. Its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.”
● Identify one enemy. More than one opponent discourages and confuses people. Blame everything on the one enemy. For Hitler it was Jews. Although he mentions many other enemies of Germany in his book, in his propaganda it was always the Jews.
● Never admit to being wrong. You can revise some details when confronted with the truth, but only to confirm how trustworthy your basic arguments are.
Early in the National Socialist rise, Hitler hired Joseph Goebbels as their Propaganda Minister, while Hitler himself moved on to be the leader (Fuhrer.) They must have had some interesting conversations, out of which came a couple more rules.
● Hitler wrote, “A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.” Social psychologists have confirmed this pattern and call it the “Illusory truth effect.” If we hear something often enough, we start to think it must be true. I would add that a lie repeated for long enough becomes history. Children grow up with it, and soon anyone who challenges it is a conspiracy theorist or a nutcase.
Propaganda doesn’t have to be lies. If truth is on the leaders’ side, fact-based propaganda is actually better. But since it is used to promote war, most propaganda is based on lies.
● Make your lies big. Hitler said the masses will distrust small lies, because they can imagine themselves telling such fibs. But they can’t imagine telling huge lies that completely distort reality, so they think those stories must be true. Goebbels admired English propaganda. “The English,” he wrote, “follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”
● Control the language. The same act can be portrayed as a monstrous crime or a heroic deed, depending on word choice. British journalist Jonathan Cook gives the example of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. “There were more than 500 Palestinian villages wiped from the face of the earth by Israeli bulldozers and army sappers,” he writes. “This procedure was popularly known in Israel as “making the desert bloom,” (a phrase I often heard as a child.)
Zionist propaganda
Israel, the US, and to be honest, most governments follow Hitler’s laws of propaganda. Look at the present slaughter of Gaza. The one evil enemy is Hamas. We’ve all heard the story. They are ‘terrorists;’ they are ‘animals.’ They rape; they murder babies. Their attacks are unpredictable and unprovoked, the result of their evil nature. They are corrupt and don’t care about their own people, only about killing Jews. You can’t negotiate with them; you have to kill them.
Corporate media consistently call the Gaza violence the “Israel-Hamas war,” instead of a war on Palestine, although Israel is killing ten times as many Palestinian civilians as Hamas fighters. When people criticize or try to stop the bombing and starvation, they are told the violence is all Hamas’ fault. Occasionally, larger, darker enemies (e.g. Iran, worldwide antisemitism) are hinted at, but the immediate blame always falls on Hamas.
No nuance — The fact that the Israeli government has actively supported Hamas for years is never brought up. Nor is the inexplicable failure of the IDF to respond for hours after the Hamas incursion started, or the 15 years of blockade and bombing Gaza has suffered or how many Israeli dead were active duty military (at least 30%,) not civilians or how many civilians were actually killed by the IDF, not by Hamas. Those facts would just confuse the masses.
The media doesn’t report all the statements by Israeli officials calling Palestinians animals, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, turning it into a wasteland, pushing the people into the Sinai desert, or saying there are no civilians there. Those statements would distract from the “self-defense” argument.
Blatant appeals to emotions. We see pictures of crying Israeli children or naked dead women, or of parents grieving over a dead child. We read stories about beheaded babies or babies roasted in ovens, none of which were ever discovered. But once those emotions are triggered, they don’t go away, and people are left crying for vengeance.
Of course, pictures of the far greater number of dead and grieving Palestinians are rarely shown.
Never admit to being wrong — After weeks of saying al-Shifa hospital was a Hamas headquarters, and providing no supporting evidence, they destroyed the hospital, killing dozens of patients, medical staff, and refugees. They took it over and found no evidence of Hamas being there, just a few empty tunnels Israel itself had built when they occupied Gaza in the 1980s.
Did they admit to being wrong? Of course not; they destroyed several more hospitals as “Hamas control centers” without bothering about evidence or a cover story.
American propaganda
The USA has always relied on propaganda, just as Israel does and Hitler did. They needed cover stories to win support for their grievous crimes against Indians and Africans. So, propaganda told the world slave life wasn’t so bad. The Native Americans were savages who needed to be destroyed or moved out of the way.
Imagine if the slaves on plantations had had smartphones and could send videos of their conditions out to the world. Would slavery have lasted so long? Imagine the Cherokee podcasting from the Trail of Tears. That’s what is happening in Gaza now.
Propaganda didn’t stop with the Civil War or the Indian wars. Who can forget Saddam’s (nonexistent) WMD, or Gaddafi’s (nonexistent) rape squads? We recently had five years of Russiagate, where the evil Russian enemy Vladimir Putin was responsible for all manner of bad things in America. Anyone who criticized a Democrat or anything American was a Putin puppet or a Russian agent. People were smeared and lost their jobs. The Russia hate finally led to the disastrous proxy war in Ukraine, which was portrayed as all Putin’s fault. The end result: the US spent billions, Russia won, and a whole generation of Ukrainian men were destroyed.
In 2023, we have a master propagandist in Donald Trump, with his ability to press people’s emotional buttons. He portrays immigrants as an invading army of rapists and drug dealers, saying white Americans are under attack and need him to fight for them. We’ll see how it works out.
Propaganda in three steps
1. Put out an emotionally triggering story. Tell it as many ways as you can on as many platforms as you can. Your story can be true, or it can be wildly improbable and unsupported by evidence. It doesn’t matter. Many will still believe.
2. When people challenge your story with facts, don’t dispute them. Just call them conspiracy theorists and keep telling your own version. Israel has the added tool of calling doubters antisemitic. If you’re in power, you can ignore the critics and let the media censor their “disinformation.”
3. When a story stops getting people’s attention or rousing their emotions, move on to another equally loaded story.
That is how it’s done. We can overcome propaganda by not believing everything we see or even believing what we already think. The great gift of the Internet is that we can always find other sources that might be more truthful. Talking with friends and neighbors might also help free us from a narrow propagandized view of the world.
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