Beating Disinformation - a model from WWII

Ecosse77055

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday March 06, 2024 · 3:08 PM PST

2024/03/06 · 15:08

A recent article in the Guardian highlights the work of Sefton Delmer in countering Nazi propaganda during WWII.

The Man Who Tricked Nazi Germany

While the article is worth reading, here is the recipe.

Undermine the MAGA monopoly over peoples strongest most violent urges by creating stories to turn the propaganda back on the propagandists.
People your stories with MAGA hierarchy and spread over them a slime of strong public criticism as foul as that which they had used.
Push their propaganda one step further into the ridiculous.
Engage people around their own personal interests.
Understand your target audience’s world.
Understand MAGA gripes and be useful to them.
Make them feel part of a community that looks after their interests better than MAGA.
Get them to make a series of autonomous conscious steps to engage.
Encourage them to invent roles for themselves.

Delmer created a series of characters similar to Sargeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes to apply these principles.

The Guardian author goes on to say that there are many small initiatives that already pioneer this approach such as Hearken and vTaiwan.

It’s not too late.

More Nazi Comparisons

Ecosse77055

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday June 19, 2018 · 5:11 PM PDT

2018/06/19 · 17:11

THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY

Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
By Benjamin Carter Hett

This book was reviewed by Timothy Snyder in the New York Times on June 14, 2018 and makes some new-to-me comparisons with Germany in the ‘30s.

Read the book review

I am not a great fan of comparisons with the Nazis. For one thing, they don’t provide us with the tools to resolve the present situation. However, the points made provide wide similarities to then and now.

The salient points that the book and reviewer makes that struck me are:

We take for granted that the Germans of the 1930s were quite different from ourselves, and that our consideration of their errors will only confirm our superiority. The opposite is the case.

The Nazis, in Hett’s account, were above all “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.”

As Goebbels put it, “We want to build a wall, a protective wall.”

Their core constituents, Hett indicates, were Protestants from the countryside or small towns who felt themselves to be the victims of globalization.

As Hett capably shows, the Nazis were the great artists of victimhood fiction.

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