This is very good. I know it requires clicking on Twitter. I have no way around that. Subtitles should be on.
What it refers to is an idea I mentioned on Twitter yesterday when I said:
We live in a surreal world where calling out fascists is, apparently, much worse than being a fascist.
https://twitter.com/g_gosden/status/1633806786133127168?s=20
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It’s the same as calling a racist a racist. tThey hate it. I have never understood why. If those people think it is wrong to be a fascist or a racist (which they must do if they object to being called one), why don’t they just stop thinking and acting like one?
Hilarious.
But let’s unpick the importance of the message here:
The good Nazi/Fascist:
1. Denies what they are.
2. Makes what they are, the normal, the everyday, the accepted.
3. Makes the objection/objector the exception.
Fair? Good?
Correct
This sort of denial and reversal is akin to victim blaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
Yes
Carl Schmitt – the Nazi philosopher said:
‘Sovereign is he who makes the exception’.
You can see how at once sublime and how aggressive that is in the fascist mindset in the video above.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you might as well treat it as if it was a duck.
On a related note to this blog (and clip) and your earlier blog about Fascism and the truth it’s well worth watching this short piece by Chris Hayes (MSNBC yesterday evening). https://www.msnbc.com/all (The Tucker Carlson villain origin story).
It starts from what’s going on with Fox and the defamation case brought by Dominion in the US (which clear and definitively demonstrates beyond any doubt that Fox is a propaganda channel), but it expands into an eye opening piece on truth in the media and why people on the right cannot handle the truth, only nonsense that supports their biases. The excerpt of Tucker Carlson talking about truth and being booed at a CPAC meeting is gob-smacking.
Of course, this state of affairs is much more well developed in the US, but with GB News and so on in this country, and the established right wing media in this country, it only time before we get to the same point.
Worth watching
Thank you
Well sourced, Mr Horrocks.
Chris Hayes: “You can’t sell accurate reporting to the right wing base. Ther’s no money in it.” (if I transcribed it accurately). And there we have it.
You think this probably only applies to the US? Think again. Then think again.
Oh, and while everybody is distracted by boats, they are delaying HS2 north of Birmingham. Of course they are. It will never happen.
What starts in London, stays in London. What stays in London is spent in London. They only tell you something else, probably about ”levelling up” nobody knows where, in the right wing press (and it sets the agenda for terrestrial broadcasting). This is how it works in Britain.
I think you transcribed accurately
“We live in a surreal world where calling out fascists is, apparently, much worse than being a fascist.”
And where an Australian citizen can – aided immensely by the smears and vilification of a liberal intelligentsia and its media – be detained for over a decade and psychologically destroyed by the Swedish and above all British Governments at the behest of their Washington overlords while his own and equally craven government scarce lifts a finger. His crime? Calling out the war crimes of the US empire, by any quantifiable measure the most tyrannical regime on earth.
Off topic? Only if we fail to do as E M Forster urges, and Only Connect …
Spot on with the subtitles, thank you so much!
On Monday, Traute Lafrenz died in South Carolina at the age of 103.
Traute Lafrenz was the last surviving White Rose. There is something unspeakably sad in that her death merited so few words in the Guardian.
Would I have had the courage to be a White Rose? I don’t know. That scares me.
That was what I thought too
She was incredibly brave
Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
From chapter VI – ‘War Propaganda’
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.
When there is question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.
The more modest the scientific tenor of this propaganda and the more it is addressed exclusively to public sentiment, the more decisive will be its success. This is the best test of the value of a propaganda, and not the approbation of a small group of intellectuals or artistic people.
The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.
That this is not understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity or mental inertia.
Once we have understood how necessary it is to concentrate the persuasive forces of propaganda on the broad masses of the people, the following lessons result therefrom:
That it is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a manifold system of scientific instruction.
The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped
formulas.
These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.
If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way.
Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.
Frightening
The result is three word slogans
Frightening
The result is three word slogans
Indeed, as seen since the use of ‘skivers and scroungers’ 13 years ago to ‘get Brexit done’, ‘make Brittain better’, ‘hands face space’ and even Liz with her ‘growth, growth, growth’.
Makes you wonder what books they all read and therefore who they look up to.
Indeed: lowest common denominator, sentiment not reason, an appeal to feelings, arresting the attention, appealing to hearts not minds, a few bare essentials, expressed in stereotyped formulas, persistently repeated.
It is how you sell breakfast cereals and cars, and intolerance and genocide.
Hence the success of the Tories 3 word slogans!
I’ve never read it before, and have no real desire to read it now, but for those who wish to see this in context, where it is frankly much less lucid than the extracts above, here is a translation of the whole sorry chapter from that damnable book:
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/monsters/drake/Lecture%20Notes/mein_kampf_by_adolf_hitler.htm
Know your enemy. Because they are doing their damnedest to press your buttons and those of others too.
A very intelligent piece of comedy. Nevertheless I spend most my time these days in Spain, holidaymakers forget that this is the country with some of the largest mass graves in western Europe. Keep it amicable
Oops!
So true, and those promoting fascism online will also control any online debate and block anybody who tries to post calling them out for what they are. You see it all the time.