NAZIS GOT TO POWER FROM SNIPPETS OF HISTORY… And This Is Still Going On
Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” start with pages of tendencious history from snippets representing the French as torturers of Germany. The Nazis propaganda pretended that Germany’s travails came from the unjust Versailles Treaty, a double lie (the Treaty freed Eastern Europe Slavic countries from German rule, exploitation and racism, so it was not unjust, and it had little to do with the Depression of 1929…)
How does disinformation work? Mostly by pretending that snippets are the whole story. A mathematical equivalent would be to divide by zero, and then forget to mention that’s not allowed, because, once one has divided by zero, anything can be deduced, right or wrong…
In 2024, the most popular historian in the USA (as measured by how many millions listened to him) is a young, reconstructed Nazi. He was given a two hours interview by Tucker Carlson (who was pretty good when directed by Fox News, but now tends to live too much off UFOs and the like…)
How does the young US Nazi of 2024 do to be listened to by millions? A measured tone, lots of play with his expressive hands with nearly inverted thumbs, and reinterpreted snippets of history, which, cut out of context, are… factually correct. Inform with truths turned into lies by removing context! The Nazis themselves and Hitler most prominently, were adept at this. Hitler while offering food to his guests, often gave graphic accounts of the slaughter of animals in an effort to make his dinner guests shun meat and the Nazis’ efforts for animal welfare were real, well advertized and made into laws which perdured and became global. The Nazis fostered pretty successfully, for years, inside Germany, the idea that Nazism was humanism.
The Nazis have long observed that the Nazis made peace proposals (first shoot, then offer peace). Yes, at some point, in part, more or less publicly, nearly explicitly, etc. After killing a few millions and occupying most of Europe, seeing that they were nevertheless going to lose in the fullness of time, because they could not possibly win, indeed, the Nazis, or at least some of them, somewhat, made peace proposals. So the young 2024 US Nazi runs away with that, forgetting the context… which was that the Nazis had launched a war that was not going to end up well for them. Superficialists opine that Britain was alone after France made a ceasefire with the Nazis. They forget that Britain had her empire with her, including India which had voted for war against Hitler in 1939 (in spite of the frantic opposition of Gandhi’s Hitler self-declared friend). Also most of France was the French empire, and it was not controlled by Nazis. As it turned out less than two years after the ceasefire, Free French armed forces played a crucial role in Africa in the defeat of the Nazis and Italians there. Bir Hakeim was a battle akin to Thermopylae, and was celebrated by both Churchill and… Hitler (but there were 3750 French troops, half of them died… but they won… saving the British 8th army…)
The young Nazi snippet historian interprets this by drawing the conclusion that:”Churchill is the real villain of World War Two”.
Actually Churchill got on board as Prime Minister when the war was fully on: Churchill became Prime Minister more than 8 months after France and Britain had declared war to Nazi Germany. The Nazis and the Kremlin had invaded Poland, killing and assassinating millions. The Nazis had invaded Norway where they had committed atrocities, lost capital ships and fought the French and the Brits. The Nazis had also invaded Denmark and a few months later the Nazis invaded Netherlands and Belgium. In the Netherlands, to force surrender, the Nazis had leveled the center of the city through carpet bombing…
Then, when the invasion of France happened in such a way that the best French forces and the British expeditionary force were going to be cut off, Churchill became PM.
In other words, .
Another method of propaganda is talking about the talk, metatalking instead of talking. Hitler was very good at that, and “Mein Kampf” is full of it, to the point of cynicism.
Contemporary Nazis present the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order (the original Nazis used that method with WW1). Immediately, crafty 2024 influencers present mythologizing as necessary, to create national unity, a common mood, and thus something natural, which cannot be, and should not be avoided… This is already the trick used by wokism itself: reasoning with reason should not be an objective because there are reasons to believe that reason is immoral as it prevents the rise of the tribe (proto-Nazi philosophers such as Herder rolled that one out already in the 18C)… (So vote for Kamala although there is plenty of evidence she believes only in herself, and will say whatever it takes to get elected, even if she said the opposite of what she said before, as Hitler did, and most politicians do… And as far as the stakes being less high, we have nukes now…).
The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued the young Nazi historian , is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately. (The Nazi historian, who even looks like a Nazi from central casting, has a name, Darryl Cooper, but I avoided mentioning it, because it’s irrelevant and gives him too much advertising…]
This rhetoric flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts. Now this is what rhetoric does. Socrates’ already blasted rhetoric because it does not require you to know about the subject matter about which you talk… Thus it’s not really art, or ‘craft, it requires no knowledge of the subject matter in question. But knowledge is a prerequisite for virtue. Rhetoric instead persuades people not by arguing from knowledge or truth but by telling them what they want to hear, thus not improving their knowledge, hence their virtue… (That’s in the first part of the Gorgias, a “sophist” philosopher Plato was determined to ridicule…)
So the young Nazi makes his audience feel brave and savvy for imbibing truths de-contextualized to the point of absurdity. He proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable, fakely both sided way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe…. And where did Cooper get that idea from? It is absolutely not original. The Nazis themselves! Hitler himself, at the time and all along, presented himself as an apostle of peace and justice, a defender of minorities… Hitler trying with heroic efforts to avoid war and saving the Jews (from themselves) was exactly what the Germans heard in the 1930s and 1940s…. So Cooper may sound original, but he is exactly repeating mainstream Nazi propaganda…
Hitler’s 6 October 1939 Reichstag speech:
My chief endeavor has been to rid our relations with France of all trace of ill will… I have always expressed to France my desire to bury forever our ancient enmity… I have devoted no less effort to the achievement of Anglo-German friendship… To achieve this great end [of peace], the leading nations of this continent will one day have to come together in order to draw up, accept and guarantee a statute on a comprehensive basis which will insure for them all a sense of security, of calm – in short, of peace… It is equally impossible that such a conference, which is to determine the fate of this continent for many years to come, could carry on its deliberations while cannon are thundering or mobilized armies are bringing pressure to bear upon it…
Our 2024 Nazi US snippet historian claims with a straight face that the “villain” Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them (they should have planned better says Cooper, admitting a bit of Nazi guilt here…). Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on X, where the two hours interview of the Nazi was shown…. though Musk later deleted the tweet.
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Savvy readers of my own historical reconsiderations may object that I have made even more incendiary critiques of history. Right. But I was not just repeating Nazi themes. Actually I view the Nazis as sadistic, bloodthirsty ignorant imbeciles who got completely manipulated by their fake friends, the (mostly) US plutocrats who were delighted to have in Nazi Germany (and also the USSR) dictatorships they could exploit even better than the more democratic US.
In my own method, although snippets are useful to guess global truths, they can do so only in light of the full extent of all available knowledge… So reconsideration of history does not come from mutilating history, but from its exact opposite… ADDING snippets which contradict the mainstream, not by just blasting holes in it (although that can help) but by adding dimensions to it….
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Those who only learn snippets from history will themselves become snippets.
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We live in strange times when inadapted morality gives great opportunity to “influencers” fostering the worst demons, insuring amazing mental degeneracy…
Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 