(241)S11E3/9: My Struggle with Mein Kampf
I wanna start off here with a prologue of sorts. It's a little bit of a divergence from the core episode, so I'll make sure to put time stamps in the show notes if you'd prefer just to skip it. I recorded this main episode several months ago, but as I started to finalize the schedule of when I would release everything, I realized that I could have this episode land on a very special day and commemorate someone who is a hero of the Christian faith for me, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This episode is releasing on April 9, 2023 at dawn, Berlin time, to commemorate the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who stood up to propaganda, lies, and deception of none other than Hitler and who paid for it with his life. He died at dawn exactly 78 years ago from the moment of this episode's release.
Derek Kreider:While the episode is dedicated to exploring the propaganda of Hitler, I thought there'd be no better place to discuss the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For while Hitler was a masterful propagandist, there were a few like Bonhoeffer who saw right through him almost from the start. When a whole nation when much of the world was capitulating to Hitler or not taking him very seriously, Bonhoeffer was digging in for a fight for truth, a fight which ultimately cost him his life. But the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is more complex than that of a simple, clear, good versus evil, so obvious with our 2020 hindsight, of course. Bonhoeffer himself lives on in modernity as a tool of propagandists.
Derek Kreider:Probably, the prime example of this would be in the famous Bonhoeffer biography written by Eric Metaxas and lauded in the evangelical world as a fantastic work of scholarship. While I did enjoy Metaxas' work in storytelling, I couldn't help but notice how we framed Bonhoeffer so differently than I received him from other biographers and from the various letters and works that I'd read of Bonhoeffer myself. The story that I had heard growing up and a story representative of the Metaxas brand of Bonhoeffer was that there was, Bonhoeffer, this great theologian who got a little bit too idealistic in his prime. He flirted with ideas like pacifism and social justice for a while, but then he snapped back to reality when he realized that the world didn't work on theological idealism. It's basically the story of the European Reinhold Niebuhr.
Derek Kreider:Now this led Bonhoeffer to engage in a plot to eventually assassinate Hitler. And while he wasn't successful in his assassination attempt, Bonhoeffer's bravery and being willing to stand up to Hitler, violently, mind you, which is the only real true way to stand up to tyrant, is a model that we should all be willing to follow. The Bonhoeffer of my evangelical world was one who was meant to represent us. He was someone who held our theological convictions and railed against the liberals as Bonhoeffer supposedly did during his studies at Union Theological in the States. Bonhoeffer was also someone who clearly saw good and evil and was willing to stand up and be persecuted by the culture and the government.
Derek Kreider:And finally, Bonhoeffer was willing to embrace violence because he, like one of his mentors during his time in the states, Reinhold Niebuhr, recognized that the real world called for a consequentialist morality, and ends justify the means. Isn't this representation of Bonhoeffer just evangelicalism in a nutshell? It's how we view ourselves. We perceive ourselves as theologically astute and correct, as bastions against liberal progressives in the social gospel, as those who see evil so clearly, as those willing to stand up to evil, as those persecuted on all sides by culture, and as those who know which moral compromises are able to be christened as good in fighting evils which we identify as greater. We imagine that Bonhoeffer represents us.
Derek Kreider:His stand was our stand, the stand that we would make, should it happen again. Unfortunately, from a taxes in the broader evangelical community, Bonhoeffer is much more complicated than he's often presented. Bonhoeffer embraced social justice and frequently railed against religion and religious teachers while identifying with prostitutes, murderers, and children. He enjoyed his time at Union Theological Seminary. And while he did rail against the vacuity of certain aspects of literal theology, he also found his experience quite robust in certain areas, such as peace theology.
Derek Kreider:In fact, another very big yet largely unknown peace activist came out of Union Theological and only missed Bonhoeffer by a few years. Andre Trocme of La Chambon, France was responsible for standing up to the Nazis and nonviolently saving up to 5,000 Jews who passed through his village. And you can find a great mini podcast on on this entitled City of Refuge. Anyway, Bonhoeffer was a very committed individual to peace and seemed to remain committed until the end of his life, as can be seen not only in his writings, but also which is reflected in the circumstantial evidence in that, as far as I'm aware, Bonhoeffer didn't have access to any of the known plots to kill Hitler. You can check out the book, Bonhoeffer the assassin, for this circumstantial and theological case.
Derek Kreider:Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer, like all of us, had significant questions about various aspects of his theology and and his actions as he faced significant trials and just unimaginable historical circumstances. He certainly questioned what he would do if given the opportunity to kill Hitler, and he talked with many who would unquestioningly pull the trigger if they could. Yet even in Bonhoeffer's toying with the idea of killing and his communication with potential conspirators, he recognized that his choosing to kill, even to kill someone like Hitler, would constitute a sin for which he'd require forgiveness from God. These sorts of nagging conversations and questions followed Bonhoeffer into prison where he expressed extreme frustration with the religiosity and the vacuity of so much of Christianity, as Bonhoeffer had been let down not only by much of the church in Germany, but also much of the ecumenical church who refused to stand up to Hitler or who did so far too late. Bonhoeffer, at times, longed for what he termed a religionless Christianity.
Derek Kreider:So how does that jive with the evangelical model of Bonhoeffer? The real Bonhoeffer considered himself a pacifist who thought killing was wrong and would be a sin even if he ended up feeling the need to actually engage in it. He continued to encourage others to conscientiously object, and he sought a position in the government which would ensure that he didn't have to kill. The real Bonhoeffer had many friends and mentors from the black church and the liberal church, both at home and in Germany and, abroad in the United States. Bonhoeffer did see Hitler's wickedness very early on, yet the fighting point was in regard to Hitler's attempt to co opt the church for the nation.
Derek Kreider:Bonhoeffer refused to let that Erastianism, that nation mingling and corruption of the church, happen. In this regard, Bonhoeffer refused the position of court prophet, getting closer to the evil in order to supposedly stop it, and he ended up being a wilderness prophet from the very start. While one may want to paint Bonhoeffer as a very simple individual to represent their group, he doesn't fit very neatly into anyone's box, conservative or liberal. A pacifist willing to kill? A conservative liberal?
Derek Kreider:A theologically brilliant man who spent time teaching children and conversing with the worst of sinners? Someone who thought that works or the social gospel, you might call it, was part of what made the theological gospel whole? You needed both a solid faith and good works to be a true Christian. And, of course, Bonhoeffer was someone who railed against the institutional church while writing treatises on discipleship and a life together in community. How do you get more complex and enigmatic than that, holding these seemingly opposed ideas together?
Derek Kreider:Sadly, it's no surprise where propaganda leads individuals in groups. Metaxas' work is almost 15 year old years old now, and we can see how far evangelicals and Metaxas himself have fallen. A few years ago, I read an article that I think sums up the situation so well. It was penned by a conservative evangelical that you may well know, Rod Dreher. He was writing to call out Eric Metaxas and his extremism along with a lot of other conservative evangelicals, and he was calling Metaxas and conservatives who pull back on their, political fervor and just their blindness to propaganda.
Derek Kreider:There's a a really succinct quote that I wanna pull out from the article, but I wanna encourage you to read the whole thing written by Dreyer. It's it's very good. So Dreyer here quotes Metaxas as saying, quote, we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood because it's worth it, end quote. So after highlighting that quote from Metaxas, Dreyer goes on to respond where he says, quote, there's no way around it, and it grieves me to say it. Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump's presidency, and he doesn't care that Trump's lawyers have not been able to prove it in court that Trump had the election stolen from him.
Derek Kreider:He told Charlie Kirk that he's willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case even among friendly judges, end quote. Now what is really interesting about this article is that if you go up and you look at the date of when it was written written, it was, it was penned on December 10, 2020. Now think about that. This is less than a month until the January 6th insurrection staged by conservatives. Many who were so called Christians, even holding bibles and, you know, having crosses and all kinds of things.
Derek Kreider:The irony here is that Bonhoeffer wrote a book about a man who saw through propaganda and the promise of violence, considering only as a last resort and a sinful one at that, the use of violence. Yet Metaxas and his group have hijacked Bonhoeffer as a propaganda tool to sanction their violent rhetoric and actions. They're standing up for their conservative values and for their country just like Bonhoeffer did. How insane is that, That Bonhoeffer is being used as one of the heroes held up for a nationalistic platform whose use of violence is by no means a last resort. Now there's a lot to dig into and consider when it comes to Bonhoeffer, but I don't think there's anything to consider more than that the propaganda that still surrounds him.
Derek Kreider:That being said, I do wanna point out that, one other aspect for you to tuck away until towards the end of our season, and I'm gonna keep saying it throughout the season until we finally get to a full episode on it. But I think that one of the ways that Bonhoeffer avoided being pulled into the propaganda trap was discipleship. I'm I'm gonna say over and over again throughout the season that discipleship, I think, is the propaganda killer. And it's fascinating to me that Bonhoeffer, someone who so early and so clearly saw through Hitler when many others didn't, is that Bonhoeffer's famous works, which are read by the world round and touted as masterpieces of Christian thought. What are his works?
Derek Kreider:The cost of discipleship or just discipleship and life together. Essentially, 2 books on discipleship and community. Bonhoeffer valued human beings so much, he didn't think that he should kill them. None of them. So much that he didn't, think it a waste of his theological brilliance to spend time teaching children.
Derek Kreider:He valued people so much that he didn't think it a waste of time or a threat to his reputation to talk with murderers and prostitutes and find it wonderful, and to find them more holy than those who called themselves Christians yet were vain. Bonhoeffer valued people so much that he was willing to risk his life by using his position to save others. Bonhoeffer recognized the value of other, and he saw the heart of Christianity as a discipling community. I don't at all think it's a coincidence that someone so focused on true discipleship and love of other is the person who saw as clearly as he did and as early as he did. In this sense, perhaps what we see with good is akin to the antithesis of how Hannah Arendt described evil in her famous work Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Derek Kreider:Arendt, as she watched the the trial of the barbarous Nazi murderers, was taken aback in the courtroom by how banal these characters were. I mean, they they're just, like, everyday people. There's nothing hideous or monstrous about them, just about what they did, but they're they're normal. And this is something that was backed up by the Rorschach tests and the psychological tests administered to the Nazis, which were standing trial at Nuremberg. They were intelligence overall, but relatively ordinary people who committed such great atrocities.
Derek Kreider:Yet isn't it the same with individuals like Bonhoeffer, a man who valued a very banal and simple life and things like teaching children or valuing the practice of prayer, silence, or singing in a community? These are simple, ordinary, seemingly trivial things that can't possibly amount to much. They can't change the world, can they? Yet they did, and they do. There's great power in the banality of evil, a simple evil that can end in genocide.
Derek Kreider:But that evil only arises because it is because it is not met with the banality of good. Those who take simple steps both to insulate themselves from the tendrils of propaganda, but also to sever those tendrils as they take root around them. Evil prevails often not because the wicked do so much wickedness, but because most people do nothing. As we prepare to get into this episode proper, I hope that you'll remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer on this day. But I also hope you'll incorporate Bonhoeffer into your cloud of witnesses and allow him to disciple you.
Derek Kreider:Don't you go and co opt him for some agenda that you have or to make yourself feel good about some views that you hold. Allow him to speak for himself. And as you're discipled by ordinary men and women like Bonhoeffer, those who made ordinary decisions and struck the structured their life around what truly mattered, I pray that you'll develop an ability to see truth more clearly. So without further ado, let's dive into one of the greatest propagandists of the last 100 years, The man who Bonhoeffer stood up against, Adolf Hitler. Welcome back to the 4th Way podcast.
Derek Kreider:I wouldn't consider myself a superstitious person. Now, I don't believe that black cats walking in front of me are going to curse me or anything like that. But at the same time, I still find myself trying to avoid stepping on cracks if I can help it, and trying not to walk under ladders if I think about it. While I don't believe in superstitions, the idea of them still guides some of my actions, even if those actions that they guide are relatively trivial. I have to say that building up the initiative to read Mein Kampf was sort of the same for me as purposefully trying to step on a crack or knowingly walking under a ladder.
Derek Kreider:I intellectually knew that it wasn't a bad thing to do, and, in fact, I I thought it was a good or necessary thing to do. Yet I felt uneasy about opening up the book and starting it, almost as if doing so would make me cursed. But once I got into the book and started, it got easier to read as I continued. But even then, I was constantly paranoid about people seeing what I was reading or about what others might think if they found out that I was reading or had read Mein Kampf. I felt like I, all of a sudden, had some burden hanging on me, like a a Scarlet Letter or something.
Derek Kreider:The Scarlet Letter. Maybe maybe I should change that. Maybe the best way for millennials to understand this would be the Voldemort effect. You know, Voldemort from Harry Potter. You know, he was so reviled and so feared that people refused to even say his name.
Derek Kreider:It wasn't refusing to say his name like, you know, we do with modern mass shooters in an attempt to refuse giving them the spotlight. Now the Voldemort effect, it was this refusal to say his name out of fear. Fear that Voldemort still had power. If there are any in, in the older crowd, the boomers, maybe the McCarthy days might be a more applicable analogy for you. You know, back then, there was this fear that if one was an integrationist, if one denounced the war, or if any other number of things that, you know, the anti communist decided to to be against, that one might be viewed as a communist or unpatriotic, which are essentially the same thing.
Derek Kreider:Right? So whether it's McCarthyism or the Voldemort effect, I think this these things are a lot like the story of Hitler and Mein Kampf. Now in the minds of most people, Hitler represents this utter absolute evil and an anomalous evil at that. In McCarthy sense, we want to distance ourselves from Hitler. He's in this category other from us.
Derek Kreider:Now, of course, what Hitler did was horrendous, but not everything that he did was horrible or wrong. And the horrible and wrong things that he did in fact do, he did for a reason. Understanding Hitler's thought process can be insightful in preventing another Hitler. Likewise, the situation is a lot like Voldemort in that while we all know that Hitler is dead, even more dead than we knew Voldemort was because we don't believe in magic sorts of things, that that are gonna be able to bring him back to life. We know that his spirit, Hitler's spirit, is not dead.
Derek Kreider:His spirit's alive and well in followers of his ideology. We think that if we ignore Hitler and don't name him or don't read his book, that his thoughts, won't be given attention, and he won't be able to reincarnate in the horcruxes that he's created in white nationalist societies across the world. Now in my assessment, I think this is a terrible combination of ideas, which leads to the suppression of Hitler's work in Mein Kampf. What ends up happening is that it's this this ideology ends up leading to, persecution, condemnation, stigmatization, of any perceived association with Hitler, and that prevents the study of his ideas in the path which resulted to its ascendency. It stops the study of of a portion of history that's extremely significant.
Derek Kreider:I think Sun Tzu can enlighten us here as to why this is such a problem. In, his famous book, The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a 100 battles. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. By reading Mein Kampf, I got to know Hitler and his ideology, an ideology which persists even to today just a little bit better.
Derek Kreider:I also learned more about myself as I began to view Hitler not as some inhuman anomaly who is unlike me, but as a human who is just like me, an individual formed by experience who makes a series of decisions, good or bad. Hitler wasn't inhuman, nor did he do anything inhuman. As my wife's problem of evil professor, doctor Clay Jones, says about atrocities and great evils, they're not inhuman. They're what humans do. You only have to take a cursory glance at history to know that this is true, whether it's seeing the atrocities and genocides that are playing out today or looking at ancient leaders like Genghis Khan and the millions that they slaughtered.
Derek Kreider:Likewise, you only have to delve a shallow way into your own heart and into your own thoughts to know that were your experiences and some of your decisions just a little bit different, that there are seeds of great evil and hatred inside of yourself. So reading Hitler's Mein Kampf has been invaluable to me, and I hope my exposition of it will be invaluable to you. With that preface out of the way, let's talk about why I'm placing this episode here in this season. I'd originally intended to record this episode for our section on the government, as Hitler's Germany and his political power would relate very well to that. However, I have so much material to pull in regard to government, and so much from mine comp actually dealt with race that I I thought placing it in our section on race in our propaganda season would be the best place to put it.
Derek Kreider:My hope is that this episode will be a capstone to our section on propaganda and race while simultaneously being a solid review of the principles of propaganda and a stepping stone into our next section. It is truly amazing how good Hitler was with propaganda, considering that it was a relatively new focus during his time, gaining engagement and study in World War 1, which started only 7 years prior to Hitler's first edition of Mein Kampf. Yet even then, Hitler clearly had a solid grasp on how to implement propaganda. And reading Mein Kampf after reading Elul's propaganda makes me think that Elul basically just read Mein Kampf and formulated his book on Hitler's philosophy. I don't really think that, and maybe, But it is uncanny how much of the Allul's content is covered by Hitler.
Derek Kreider:So I think this episode on mind conf would be a great episode to show where racism can lead to in the real world and to recap how propaganda functions. But to do so in a real world example of its implementation by a master propagandist. I think that's all the preliminaries for now, so let's go ahead and jump into the meat of this episode. My expectations for Mein Kampf were that I would basically be introduced to the ramblings of a crazed madman. I expected that the book would be a pure diatribe of a lunatic against Jews where he advocated their mass extermination.
Derek Kreider:I think that's part of the reason that I didn't ever care to read this work before. I already knew Hitler, and I knew his thoughts. So why did I really need to read his book? Yet listening to the Q1 to 3rd of the book, I found that Hitler was a very intelligent guy. I also discovered that his situation was something that a lot of moderns could empathize with.
Derek Kreider:One of the main things that Hitler bemoans throughout the book is Germany's position in the world. This position is the result of 2 major issues. First, Germany's unfair or harsh treatment in the Treaty of Versailles from World War 1. And the second is Germany's unfair position as a result of imperialism. In regard to the first issue, the Treaty of Versailles, most who know anything about history understand this point.
Derek Kreider:Everybody knows that that Germany was treated harshly and, retaliated against this. World War 1 was a mess to begin with, and the allies snatched up territory, messed up relations in the Middle East with things like the Sykes Picot agreement, and were pretty unethical overall. One of the things that the allies did was to harshly punish Germany. Their surrender conditions just weren't livable. And in the eyes of Hitler, who is probably correct on this point, the conditions were made so horrible that France, was able to end up snatching up and benefiting from one of the wealthiest regions of Germany.
Derek Kreider:And that only exacerbated Germany's dire situation. So Germany was set up for failure from from the beginning of the treaty. The Treaty of Versailles was, in some ways, just intra imperialism. It was imperialism within Europe. That was the first way in which Germany was disadvantaged and and felt like they were treated unfairly, which they probably were.
Derek Kreider:The second way that Germany was disadvantaged was in regard to imperialism globally. Now Hitler is constantly bemoaning a need for more land for the people of Germany who have less space to work with than many other nations who have a smaller population. Hitler's frustrated that Germany's foreign territories have been taken by other European nations and that Germany doesn't have much land to work with beyond its borders. Germany is at a disadvantage to other European nations because the other nations were better oppressors than Germany. Now on the second point of Hitler's, you probably don't feel all that bad for him and for Germany, and rightfully so.
Derek Kreider:Imperialism sucks and is evil, and I don't feel too bad for a guy bemoaning the fact that his country, didn't succeed at oppressing others. Right? But at the same time, I think that it helps to highlight the complexity of Hitler's situation here. Yes. Hitler is evil.
Derek Kreider:But in casting him and the Axis powers, or what would be the Axis powers as this archetype of evil, we completely overlook our group's evil, which oppressed and created evils like Hitler. You know, Belgium alone killed an estimated of 10 to 15,000,000 Congolese in its imperial reign, and their actions weren't condemned by Europe until Hitler was 20 years old. If you wanna see what King Leopold's imperialism was like, just search up images of the Belgian Congo. One of the most powerful images that comes from this time is where you see this father sitting on a porch of a plantation holding a severed limb of his child in his hands and staring at it as the Belgians cut off his child's arm because it was a punishment for him not fulfilling his work quota. And that's just one tiny nation, Belgium, in one tiny sliver of history that is able to to do this to one other nation, 10 to 15000000 Congolese.
Derek Kreider:Europe, through imperialism, stole material resources and stole people themselves, not to mention killing and slaughtering them through the slave trade. A great book that explores this is how Europe underdeveloped Africa, and it goes into lots of fantastic but horrible details of, you know, what happened on the continent of Africa and and how that bleeds into today. Europe got rich off of and still gets rich off of Africa and the Middle East as a result of imperialism. Hitler knew that German, Germany was seriously disadvantaged because of what the rest of Europe had done and was continuing to do. Hitler, this terribly evil man, wrote Mein Kampf at a time when taking territories, exploiting people, murdering people was how everyone was advancing their nations, or at least was up to that point.
Derek Kreider:And he was frustrated that Germany was a low man on the totem pole here. So we can and should condemn Hitler, definitely. But to do so from a position of superiority, to elevate the holocaust of the Jews, which was half to a third as bad as the Holocaust of the Congolese, that's propaganda. We are selective in the evils that we teach about, careful that our own groups and our own actions aren't placed in the spotlight. Hitler was a horrendously evil man, but his actions were just a drop in the European bucket of atrocity, and his actions were created, instigated, or made possible because of other European actions and atrocities leading up to this time.
Derek Kreider:Interestingly, we also know that Japan's Imperialism was also a direct result of European Imperialism. There's a great book on this called The Internationalists, and I did an episode on it, at the end of our season on nonviolence. So, I'll link that in the in the notes and just kind of give a a quick recap here. Basically, the US, through military threat, forced isolationist Japan in the 1800 to open its borders for trade. When Japan did this, they ended up sending people out to learn at Western universities so that they could learn about the new world that they were exposed to now and how to function and thrive in that world.
Derek Kreider:In this, Japan learned about how Europe functioned, and they realized that they were far behind the curve. So what did Japan do? Well, they began to conquer as the Europeans had done, but they ended up getting slapped on the wrist by sanctions and embargos by hypocritical Europe and the United States. Knowing how the west worked, as Japan was forced to open its borders a century earlier, Japan understood the how economic sanctions worked too, To trade with 1 group and then to cut off another group through sanctions and such to refuse trade with them was a declaration of war under the laws of Hugo Grotius, who had run European affairs for the last several 100 years. Now Japan was threatened at gunpoint to trade under this assumption.
Derek Kreider:So when the US sanctioned Japan, they declared war with them under the old European rules of warfare, the Groudian rules. And this was prior to Pearl Harbor, mind you. So Japan and Germany were both created in the forge of European imperialism, and then the rest of Europe decided to change the rules of the game to lock in their territorial wins. Now what am I saying here? That this terrible game of imperialism shouldn't have stopped?
Derek Kreider:No. Of course not. It was it was terrible, and it had to stop, and I'm glad that it did. But we have to understand that Hitler was not anomalous. He was exemplary.
Derek Kreider:He is he is a model example of what was going on up to this this point in history. He is not an anomaly, and he was playing by the the old rules of the game. He was just the last one to do so, and we decided to remember him and his evil as opposed to the other evils that our group and our allies, and the rest of Europe were involved in. It's great to be able to distance ourselves from evils and to view ourselves throughout history as this benevolent group. And so Hitler ends up being a scapegoat in some ways for that.
Derek Kreider:So I say, remember the evils of Hitler, but, also, let's remember the evils of everyone else too. So sorry. I know that's a little bit of a tangent getting into Japan and such, but I think that it's it's a really important foundation to understand here. We need to understand that Hitler and evil isn't anomalous, but often has an explanation. Even if that explanation isn't a good justification for what ended up happening.
Derek Kreider:When we refuse to understand evil men like Hitler and when we make their actions inexplicable, crazy, or anomalous, we often do so because we don't really like the explanation that explains. Usually, that's because the explanation is us and our group and involves us in some way as as far as being complicit. So at this point, we know that Hitler's actions have an explanation. He feels exploited and disadvantaged, and he seeks to gain power for Germany in the way that Europe has been gaining power for centuries, conquest and the expansion of empire. That's wrong.
Derek Kreider:Those in those actions are morally wrong, but they're understandable. I think what makes Hitler's story so hard for us to digest isn't so much his methodology, because, you know, the rest of Europe was doing that kind of thing, and it kinda makes sense. We don't like that he was doing it to other European nations, but, you know, we can kinda get that. What's harder for us to digest about Hitler's genocidal actions is the racial ideology which fueled this. Now the second third of Mein Kampf is particularly filled with this ideology.
Derek Kreider:It's like you're reading Hitler and you understand where he's coming from and how Germany has been mistreated. And then all of a sudden, he brings the Jews into the mix. And you're like, where did that come from? Like, Hitler talks about his appreciation of science and facts, yet the whole Jew conspiracy is just insane, and he never never grounds it at all in in his work. It's just pure assertion.
Derek Kreider:So we have a problem with Hitler's ideology, and rightfully so. We can understand King Leopold killing 10 to 15000000 people for pure economic gain. Even if we resent that and and disapprove and find it morally repugnant, we still understand, okay, he's trying to get rich. I get that. We can understand how killing 500,000 Iraqi children for oil, I mean, weapons of mass destruction is, is justified.
Derek Kreider:But to kill people because they're racially inferior just doesn't make sense. And that's the ideology of a lunatic. But was it really the ideology of a lunatic? At the time of Mein Kampf's first edition, slavery was just over 50 years abolished in the United States, The practical slavery still existed in the form of sharecropping and convict leasing, not to mention the rampant discrimination and all of the lynchings taking place. Black people were viewed as ontologically inferior by many, if not most people, And it wasn't just a southern thing.
Derek Kreider:In 1906, Oda Benga, a black man, was put on display in the Bronx Zoo. This era was right in the middle of figuring out and manipulating the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution, which presented itself in some forms, as eugenics. And the ideas that Hitler had about race and inferiority and superiority, they weren't unique to Hitler. In fact, 3 years after Hitler wrote the first edition of Mein Kampf, in 1927, the United States Supreme Court ruled that those they deemed mentally unfit, namely poor people, they didn't want to reproduce, could be forcefully sterilized. And this is where that famous quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes comes from, which says, one generation of imbeciles is enough or something to that extent.
Derek Kreider:Now Buck versus Bell, this is a real actual Supreme Court case written 3 years after Hitler's first edition of Mein Kampf in the United States. Eugenics. Now, sure, Hitler may have taken the ideology of eugenics farther than others in terms of its violence and scale, but his ideology was a worldwide ideology adhered to by many. There are inferior races, which both evolution and genetics attest to. That's what people thought.
Derek Kreider:Hitler was just the first one to make us real at those implications because unlike the genocides and racisms of the United States, Hitler attacked the powerful and killed a group revered in other nations. And perhaps more importantly, Hitler lost. There's a reason when we use the word Holocaust that we think of Hitler rather than Andrew Jackson or King Leopold. And it's not because Hitler necessarily slaughtered more than either of them or had a more abhorrent ideology. It's because he picked a fight with fellow oppressors, and he lost.
Derek Kreider:To kill the Congolese or the Native Americans, that's one thing. You know, that that disappears in history. But to kill Europeans and Jews, well, sometimes Jews, that's a different story for us, right, in our version of history. Hitler picked on the wrong people, and he lost. And as we know, the winners write history.
Derek Kreider:So we've come to discover that Hitler's methodology and his ideology weren't really all that unique in the grand scheme of things as compared to the rest of Europe up to that point in history. But before we link this up to propaganda specifically, we we need to address one more thing. Because in Hitler's flawed ideology and desire for Germany's good, you know, we we realized that there are a lot of people with flawed ideologies and aims, yet some moral compass keeps them from from doing the types of things that Hitler did or from from choosing to do evil. So what what enabled Hitler to take this methodology and this ideology and to act on it? Now as I was reading Mein Kampf, the way that Hitler was writing reminded me very much of another German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Derek Kreider:Now I'm not a philosopher nor a Nietzsche or Hitler expert, and I know some people probably are already holding their breath and, like, cringing in advance here because they're scared of what I'm gonna say. I did a little research on the Internet, so I'm an expert now. But, seriously, I I I did a little bit of research, because because I was, like, I don't know. I I'm not gonna just blame everything on Nietzsche, because I know a lot of Christians like to do that kind of thing. Blame everything immoral on Nietzsche.
Derek Kreider:But I was I was kinda looking things up, and and I looked up Hitler's connection to Nietzsche to see if that there if there was a connection. And, you know, a lot of philosophers who love Nietzsche were defending him and saying that Hitler really misunderstood Nietzsche. Nietzsche wasn't anti Semitic, and he wasn't a a pure you know, for a pure race like Hitler was. And, you know, they give they give quotes and things and talk about how Nietzsche's sister kind of hijacked his estate and all that. And they show quotes from Nietzsche that kind of shows that he wasn't anti Semitic, and he wasn't all for a pure race.
Derek Kreider:Okay. That's all well and good. I'm not gonna go there. But there are definitely some aspects of Mein Kampf other than these atrocious ideas, which seem awfully close to Nietzsche. Now Hitler may have misinterpreted Nietzsche in regard to the ends, you know, this idea of pure race and such, but it sure looks like he embraced Nietzsche's means in a sense.
Derek Kreider:What do I mean by that? Well, Nietzsche wrote about the Superman and this idea that there are better individuals out there who are just stronger and smarter and ought, people ought to pursue that. Don't be held back by the weak. Right? And there's quite a lot in Nietzsche which encourages power and war and and focuses on elevating self and looks down on charity and helping the weak.
Derek Kreider:Right? Hitler also talks over and over about getting rid of objectivity in, in place of subjectivity. Like, subjectivity is better, especially in terms of convincing others to one side. And this is the real power and and the truth that we have to work with is subjectivity. Now these all of these ideas here, they come up over and over and over again in Mein Kampf.
Derek Kreider:Now maybe Nietzsche didn't apply his ideology in the same manner that Hitler did, and he wasn't anti Semitic and for, eugenics and all that stuff. And perhaps, Nietzsche rationalized not acting on the absurd conclusions of his moral system. But it certainly seems that he provided Hitler with the moral excavator to demolish any semblance of morality, which may have held him back from taking his views to an extreme end. Now this isn't at all blaming Nietzsche for all Hitler type acts. Right?
Derek Kreider:What's King Leopold's excuse? Because he's living under Christendom. Does does Christianity lead to that? Well, yeah. Certain forms of it does.
Derek Kreider:Forms that, have different, particular views on the state and violence and other sorts of things. Most certainly, they do. And so we might be able to thank oh, I'm getting myself in hot water here. We might be able to thank people like, Augustine and Aquinas for advancing certain ideologies, which, make state violence possible. We can certainly thank Hugo Grotius.
Derek Kreider:Oh, Constantine. I gotta say Constantine. People would be mad if I didn't mention him. And then, of course, Donald Trump. If the water is hot, you might as well make it boiling.
Derek Kreider:Right? So, definitely, there are versions of Christianity, which, like Nietzsche, tear down moral barriers that should be there. So for any philosophers out there, this isn't dissing Nietzsche and saying everything he said was bad. This is just saying it seems like Hitler, used Nietzsche as a moral excavator, but people use lots of different things for moral excavators. So we'll we'll just leave it there.
Derek Kreider:We now have a pretty good glimpse of the groundwork that was laid in creating someone like Hitler. There's a great deal of injustice done to him or to Germany. There's a great need that the German people faced and needed to figure out how to fulfill that need. There's a great deal of injustice in the world that those in power exemplified and perpetuated in various atrocities and oppressions around the globe. There were scientific arguments purportedly showing the inferiority of certain groups of people, and those views were implemented by the most powerful and godly, end quotes, nations of the day.
Derek Kreider:And there were philosophical ideas which provided a means whereby Hitler could jettison any last bits of what we'd consider moral decency. The United States was doing it in their racial policies and implementing eugenics rulings in the courts and running a eugenics program that helped Hitler create his own program. It was the perfect storm for creating someone like Hitler who really wasn't very anomalous at all. He was the natural product of a society and time where this type of thought abounded. He just didn't get to write our history books.
Derek Kreider:So he's the face of evil for us. Now with that foundation set, let's dive into the specifics of what how Hitler executed his ideology. What made him so good at moving the masses? It was amazing to me that not only did Jacques Ellul seem to draw from Mein Kampf, whether he actually did or not, But there is also a section in the book which reminded me a lot of dark of David Graeber's analogy, which I provided at the beginning of the season. In that analogy, Graeber talks about how all power is really wielded either as violence, information, or charisma.
Derek Kreider:You basically either coerce, compel, or charm. Interestingly, Hitler has what I think equates to a very, very similar outline when he describes how authority is grounded. Hitler argues that authority is derived from power, tradition, and popularity. And the more you have of each category, the better. Power seems, in my mind, to equate to Graber's violence and popularity to Graber's charm.
Derek Kreider:Tradition is the one category which might be a little bit more of a stretch to correlate with with Graber's information, though I think that link might be a little bit clearer than it initially appears. Just think about how Hitler wielded the information of the German past to produce pride in them or to the continued Jewish threat to Germany. Or if you're from the United States, think about how many want to elevate the founding fathers to create a mythical vision of our founding and avoid any besmirching of our nation's beautiful birth narrative. If you can't even see that, then just look up the apotheosis apotheosis, however you say it, of Washington. It's, it's a painting housed in the US Capitol building, which depicts Washington seated among the gods.
Derek Kreider:And if my limited Greek understanding holds, this idea of apo and theosis literally means towards the gods or essentially becoming a god, something to that extent. So tradition, both in terms of mythologizing and elevating our group, as well as demonizing our enemies and what we believe about them, those are huge in terms of authority. You control the information of your identity. A war on terror leads to a society accepting things like the Patriot Act and ignoring true Patriots like Edward Snowden or the House Intelligence Committee on Torture. And the mythologizing of our past leads to the election of a reality TV show personality based on making America the wonderful godly nation that it used to be.
Derek Kreider:Tradition surely is a control of information as we shape our persona and our enemy's persona in order to control the masses. So Hitler, it seems, was not only reading Jacques Ellul, but also David Graeber. He knew how to gain authority through the masses. But I'd I'd be remiss if I didn't defend Hitler just a little bit now. I think it's easy to see Hitler as a wielder of propaganda who just purposefully manipulated and misguided the masses of the German lemmings right off a cliff.
Derek Kreider:But don't forget what Elul taught us. The wielder of propaganda who is sincere is far more likely to succeed than one who is lying purely to manipulate. In this regard, I think Hitler was extremely sincere. Not only did he truly believe the ideology that he was espousing, but he also truly cared about the people that he was propagandizing. Hitler is explicit about his plans for propaganda throughout his book.
Derek Kreider:He doesn't really try to hide anything. And this is in part because he viewed propaganda as a good thing, as education, essentially. It's sort of like indoctrination today. While the term has negative connotations a lot of times, and we don't want our kids indoctrinated with something like racist ideologies, we do, in another sense, want our kids indoctrinated. We might want them indoctrinated with a moral ethic or a work ethic or a Christian worldview or civic responsibility, patriotism, any other number of ideologies that one might view as a good thing.
Derek Kreider:Whatever it is, we all want our kids to be indoctrinated in some form or fashion, or educated would probably be the word that we'd use if we're doing it. Yet we don't want them indoctrinated by others. The same is true here with propaganda. Hitler is very clear as to his intent with propaganda and his methodology because he viewed it as an educational tool when wielded by those who held the truth, namely himself and his party, while it was a tool of manipulation and falsehood when wielded by others. So Hitler, in my book at least, gets 100% for sincerity.
Derek Kreider:He really did believe this stuff, and he really did think that he was doing good for his people. In fact, Hitler actually surprised me in that he was extremely progressive in many ways. He made me kinda nervous because I'm I'm getting, like, a third or a quarter of the way through the first part of the book. And I'm, like, I actually like some of the things that Hitler is saying, and that there wasn't really much. There's just a few comments and things about Jews or races that weren't good.
Derek Kreider:But the 1st quarter to 3rd really wasn't wasn't that bad. And there were a lot of not a lot, but there were some things that Hitler was saying that I liked or agreed with. Now, Hitler bemoans the plight of the working class masses and how they're taken advantage of. He hates that pregnant women have such a hard time and are exposed to dangerous work environments. Now I can envision Hitler being all for paid maternity leave today.
Derek Kreider:I don't know if he would be, but I think he would be at least for the German people anyway. Hitler thought the poor were taken advantage of and were often products of their environment, continuously getting knocked down by their circumstances. Hitler thought the idea of universal pay would be good, even though he recognized that this was probably idealistic. Nevertheless, he thought the ideal should be pursued. He also is very against materialism and the pursuit of pure capital.
Derek Kreider:I was pretty amazed at how there was a significant sense of class injustice that Hitler recognized. So he really did care about the oppressed, and I I loved that part about Hitler. Yet I suppose it shouldn't be all that much of a surprise because his platform was a socialist one. It's just that Hitler's socialism, and here's the part where I diverged significantly, only extended to a particular group of people. Yes.
Derek Kreider:The oppressed, but the oppressed Aryan, the oppressed German workers. Hitler truly did care, and he truly did believe the stuff he said, if you're a German Aryan. Now in order to accomplish his goals, Hitler had to educate society and gain power, and he knew that this had to happen through the masses. So he had great ideas. Right?
Derek Kreider:Great great ends that he was pursuing, but he couldn't get there by himself. He had to convince the masses. Now the masses were a focus for two primary reasons. First, they had the most significant need and therefore would be looking for a solution and salvation. Hitler didn't want complacency.
Derek Kreider:He wanted action, and you only get action from people who have needs. Second, we learned in our season on nonviolent action that it takes a very small percent of the population to create a revolution and to transform authority. Hitler identified this number as 1 tenth of the population. He said, you know, if I can get 1 tenth of the population, if I can get 10% of people who are really committed, like, that's all it takes. But we've actually learned that the number is actually quite a lot smaller than that.
Derek Kreider:I think Chenoweth says, like, any any revolution that's over 3%, like, doesn't fail something to that extent. Now when you aim at the masses, you have a much larger pool to draw from, and your chances of reaching that tipping point for revolution and a power shift are significantly greater. And though we see this very thing in our our political parties today, fear is stirred up in the masses in the masses, and the most vulnerable groups usually have the propaganda directed towards them. Right? They're they're presented with a political savior.
Derek Kreider:Why why the most needy group? Because they're the the ones most likely to seek action and do something. So, I mean, we've seen this recently with MAGA and immigration, and we saw it in the postbellum South when the poor whites were stirred up against blacks. It's history on repeat, yet Hitler, I wouldn't say is the maybe first one to realize this type of thing, but he really understands how this stuff works. And whereas, I think sometimes a lot of other people who implement this kind of thing, maybe just kind of do so naturally and don't understand what they're doing.
Derek Kreider:But Hitler really, really knew what he was doing in in aiming his propaganda. There's one big problem with Hitler's plan, though, because if you remember from a rule, we know that education is imperative to propaganda and exposure, but that exposure largely comes through education. How are the lowest in society, especially at at this time when, maybe schooling wasn't as ubiquitous? How are you gonna get the lowest in society who have the least access to education? How are you gonna get them propagandized?
Derek Kreider:Hitler didn't have the access to or the power to change the education educational system at that time. So how how was he gonna educate the masses? Now in this regard, Hitler was brilliant. Hitler recognized the power of speech and explains how he got in front of crowds and how those crowds swelled as his renown grew. Hitler explains that verbal speech is much more powerful than written speech for a number of reasons.
Derek Kreider:First, he said one can see the expressions of an audience and get a feel for how they're responding to a speech and change tone, information, provide rebuttals, or do whatever one has to do in real time. You just can't do that in writing. In this way, Hitler could tailor his speeches and change his speeches on the fly based on the audience that he was speaking to. Doing the same thing in a lengthy written work was was much more tedious and ineffective, and it just couldn't happen in real time. 2nd, Hitler said what we all know that people are lazy, and they don't want to do the work of reading.
Derek Kreider:That was true even back in the day before we bemoaned millennials or whatever generation z, whoever is alive now, bemoaned them only being able to comprehend 2 minute YouTube videos or memes or TikTok videos, whatever. No. What is true today was true in Hitler's day. Right? He recognized that people were lazy.
Derek Kreider:Now maybe they were a little bit less lazy, or maybe they just had less entertainment because Hitler says, you know, they won't read a a work, but they'll come out and listen to me speak for hours. Okay. May maybe we're more lazy today. I'll I'll give us that. But, people were still lazy back then.
Derek Kreider:3rd, Hitler understood that there were other factors influencing emotions, and he argued that he controlled even the time of day that he gave a speech. He tended to stay away from giving speeches in the morning. I forget his exact explanation of of what this was, but he recognized that speaking at night was much, much better for the crowds than speaking in the morning. Hitler understood that verbal speech was extremely powerful because he could more easily access people and particularly the parts of people that mattered, their emotions. Hitler time and time again rails against objectivity and says that it is the subjective that's important.
Derek Kreider:You will much more easily change a person's opinion who's committed to an ideology because of reason than you will if they are committed out of emotional attachment. That's something really powerful to come to contemplate right there, something that we we don't think intuitively is true. But Hitler recognized it as true, and I think we really do know that is true. It's a lot harder to leave a belief if your community is wrapped up in that belief and you have good memories, in that belief system and and whatnot. Emotional attachment is huge.
Derek Kreider:And I I mean, I think this also goes back to, on the structure of Scientific Revolutions where Kuhn talks about paradigm shifts and how, you know, we don't we don't change our beliefs if we're 51% sure, right, from something that we've held for a long time. We have to we have to actually get up to 60 or 70 or 80% certainty in order to change a belief. Right? To tip the scales, it takes more than 50%. And now in the scientific community, that's probably more than just an emotional attachment.
Derek Kreider:That's there's a lot going on there. But in terms of a lot of the things that we believe, I think it works the same way, but it's it's because of what Hitler identifies here. We have this emotional attachment, and it's gonna take more than, you know, 51% certainty that we're wrong to change our beliefs because we have we have more invested than just rationality into those beliefs. So Hitler, in his speeches, sought to create an emotional attachment for the masses who are in need of a savior, and he was happy to be their savior. There's a lot of what Hitler says here, which reminds me of another book which describes the exact sort of situation.
Derek Kreider:In the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author describes how our culture has lost our ability to consume literature and how television has caused us to lose some of the thinking skills which come along with a literary mind. The book recognizes many of the same things that Hitler identified and discusses the dangers of living in a society which embraces nonliterary information as its major source of information. And, of course, this also correlates to Elul's technological society. And what's crazy about the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was that, it it was written in 1985 and the technological society in the 19 sixties, both well before the Internet age really took off. And what is said in these works holds true today, and and some of it's very, prescient, prophetic.
Derek Kreider:And, you know, a lot of the things that it says are are true much more today than they then then they even were back then. So I recommend those books. So Hitler not only identified how the masses could be educated through propaganda, but he also explained why the privileged classes failed to sway the masses. Now this is a vital piece of information to note as success often lies not only in doing the right things, but in avoiding doing the wrong things. Failure often teaches us how to be successful.
Derek Kreider:What Hitler identifies as the privileged class's failure is that they don't know the masses at all, and they don't speak to them. The aristocracy, the privileged classes had no relation with the common individual and didn't know how to relate to the commoner's emotions and needs. Hitler capitalized on this by being able to connect in his speeches with the lower class while pushing out the reverence, and authority for the elite. And he would meet the commoners where they were, like, in beer halls and all kinds of places. He would go to them, and he would use the media that they were using or that that would engage them and overcome their laziness.
Derek Kreider:Now this misalignment of the elite with the masses is is a very very common issue throughout history. Since we're putting this episode at the end of the section focusing on race, I thought it would only be fitting to bring up the great debate between Booker t Washington and W. E. B Du Bois. Now these 2 black men were obviously against racism, but they took 2 very different approaches.
Derek Kreider:Du Bois was more for pushing against race racism, and he wanted a well educated black elite to lead the way, a group he called the Talented Tenth. Du Bois founded the NAACP and sought to fight for black interests. At the other end of the spectrum, you have, Washington, and he had a more lay low approach or tread drawn approach. I don't know what you'd call it. He thought that if blacks were educated and simply lived a good life and exemplified a good ethic, that they could prove their worth and that they they weren't really inferior.
Derek Kreider:Yet neither of these approaches were really in touch with reality. I think Du Bois growing up in the north and, you know, focusing specifically on the elite was clearly a problem and seemed like he was out of touch, in some ways. But then Booker c Washington, you know, this this guy, wrote the book Up From Slavery. He while I like what he was trying to do, I couldn't stand the book Up From Slavery. I really liked Du Bois's book, but Washington's book just came across to me as extremely arrogant and focused very much on, you know, like, well, look what I did.
Derek Kreider:You can do it too. It it's almost and and he I don't know. Maybe that's a little bit unfair, because I know that he does say that he got fortunate in in some of the, you know, breaks that he got. But it just seems like Washington is kind of disconnected from from reality in that he doesn't understand that there are a lot of people who don't get those breaks no matter how hard they work. And so, anyway, Du Bois and Washington are are engaged very differently, but both seem to be somewhat disconnected from reality.
Derek Kreider:And I think you see this really, really clearly in somebody who's become one of my my favorite civil rights activists, Robert f Williams. So I'm I'm currently about halfway through this book. I've read his autobiography, Negroes with Guns, which was great. But, actually, I'm enjoying the biography of him more called, Radio Free Dixie, because Williams is a super humble guy. And, there's a lot of details that you don't get in his book that you get in the biography where where, the person that covers all these details in this background and, like, man, he is so much cooler than I thought he was.
Derek Kreider:And what where I'm at in in, Radio Free Dixie at the moment is you see that that Williams is working on this this case, trying to defend these 2 boys and then ends up defending 2 women who are who have accused attackers of attempting to rape them. And they, of course, you know, lose their cases. But but through working through these cases, you have you have Williams, who is a NAACP president, chapter president, and he's fighting the NAACP who over and over and over again, the book highlights, like they were just so out of touch with, the Black working class or, you know, the what what the plight of those who are in fear of lynching and who are being fired and all this stuff. And and they were timid. They didn't they wouldn't they didn't want to touch cases that dealt with, you know, sexuality because that was a huge taboo in the South.
Derek Kreider:And, so you know, sexuality because that was a huge taboo in the South. And, so getting involved with those case in those cases was was no good. There's all kinds of stuff in there about just how out of touch, you know, people or groups like the NAACP, which was, I think, in parts, founded by W. E. B.
Derek Kreider:Du Bois, just how out of touch with the masses they were and how how they just people couldn't relate. But when Williams came along and he started to advocate and he he was a worker and he was a part of the community and he did know the needs and he he did push back and he, like, people would rally around him. So it's just it's fascinating, you know, that this idea that, Hitler, kind of touches on here is something that you see over and over and over again. This idea that a lot of times the leaders are out of touch with the masses, and, what the masses are eventually going to end up following is going to be somebody who pushes that button that they need pushed to, somebody who relates to them, who speaks their language, who identifies their needs, and provides for them. And that's the danger of a populist.
Derek Kreider:You know, Williams was a great guy, it seemed like to me, who who was able to use that power for good. Hitler, not a great guy. Terrible guy who used it for evil. So whereas Williams was able to use his charisma and such for good, we know that Hitler used his charisma and information or his popularity and tradition, if we're gonna use Hitler's terms, in order to gain power, and he completed the triumvirate of authority there. Popularity, tradition, and power.
Derek Kreider:It's interesting that right around the time that Hitler was realizing how authority and control functioned, so was the rest of the world. Now this is something that I I want to explore in an episode and interview later, but I think it's worth bringing up now. Now Alex Carey, in his book, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, recounts a brief history of how the powerful took the risk out of democracy. Because if you're a ruler, democracy and opinion of the masses is a very big risk for you. Public sentiment can change quickly.
Derek Kreider:We know that it did it in several South American countries, which resulted in us having to assassinate some leaders to make sure that, you know, corporations and and economic interests were protected. If you have the power, you want to wield it as you'd like rather than for it to be controlled by the wills of the people. So prior to the 19 twenties, what's really interesting is that there were a lot of labor strikes in the US, and many of those ended up resulting in deaths. Sometimes quite a lot of deaths. You're like, how did how did that many people get killed?
Derek Kreider:And, like, the businesses and things like they just got away with killing people? Because and and, of course, you know, the the strikers would shoot back and or start shooting. So, it's not just the companies. But, you know, as the as the companies implemented strike breakers, people who would, you know, be ready to kill, to to violently break up strikes, it just wasn't a good scenario. You had lots of people getting killed.
Derek Kreider:But with the advent of propaganda or at least the the realization of its power, strike breaking started to disappear. So after World War 1, you see strike breaking decrease more and more and more until it just kind of goes away. Corporations began to focus on ideas like patriotism and unity of nation, especially because many of the workers that they were paying really low wages to were immigrants. Thus, the Independence Day that we celebrate today was actually called Americanization Day, and holidays focusing on workers like the May 1st International Workers Day, which revolved around the deaths of workers in the Haymarket Affair in the United States, that was transformed into Loyalty Day, a day in which US citizens were to reflect on the blessings of the United States and to reaffirm their loyalty to it. So at the same time, Hitler was hijacking Germany for his agenda, so corporations were implementing propaganda in the United States.
Derek Kreider:By doing this, corporations not only began to avoid reactive assertions of power through violence, but could actually preemptively avoid conflict by gaining power through information and charisma, or as Hitler would say, tradition and popularity. Thus, we see during the early to mid 1900, strike breaking and violence decreased, patriotism and American mythologization increased, and corporate power balloons off the charts. That's how we arrived today at a time in the US where workers have little influence on corporations and constituents have little influence in government. And that's probably because the corporations and politicians are essentially the same people, something Smedley Butler recognized all the way back in the 19 thirties in his famous book, War is a Racket. We know that through lobbying, government votes align with corporate interests almost perfectly and have almost no correlation to constituent desires.
Derek Kreider:And that's in large part because the corporate world played the game a little bit differently than Hitler did. See, Hitler was seeking to change things. He was seeking an uprising. He wanted action. To do that, one has to passionately mobilize people.
Derek Kreider:The problem with this is that the Fuehrer, which the Fuhrer caused with his fervor, was overt and bellicose. To cause the type of change that Hitler wanted created a tidal wave that couldn't go unnoticed. He stepped on a lot of toes, to put it kind of softly. Hitler had contemplated, solving Germany's problem in other ways, and he he just might have been able to solve some of the problems that he identified in terms of economics and and struggling workers. But in Mein Kampf, Hitler stresses that he refuses to solve the economic issues until the political issues are solved.
Derek Kreider:He's explicit about the idea that if the people are satisfied economically, they will become complacent and diluted ideologically, and nothing will get done politically then. They will lose their momentum. Reminds me of what God warns the Israelites about in in regards to the promised land as he tells them as they're about to go in, that when they go in, their bellies are gonna be filled and with all the blessings, and they're gonna forget about God and become complacent. So Hitler knew that he had to keep politics at the forefront, and he had to keep the people needy, lest they become complacent and immobile. But here's the thing about the corporate sector in the United States.
Derek Kreider:Their implementation and propaganda, in that, they're not trying to mobilize people. They don't want anything to change. They want the masses to remain immobile while the corporations lobby, legislate, and exploit. Their form of propaganda is much more insidious. It's legertamine.
Derek Kreider:It's getting you to look at patriotism and mythology while demonizing the immigrant. It's getting you to ignore exploitation and right infringement and focus on your safety. It's getting you to pine after the newest thing and to chase materialism's booty rather than to be engaged in something meaningful and real. It's getting you to identify with a brand rather than with the community in which you live. There's so much to talk about in the corporate sphere, but, you know, I'll I'll leave it at this for now.
Derek Kreider:Just know that many corporations and Hitler have a lot more in common than you might think that they do, not only in terms of how they wield propaganda, but also in terms of people killed and exploited. The corporate world's ideology might be different. They may seek wealth rather than a particular race's demise, but objectifying others under death for one reason doesn't make them any less dead than objectifying them unto death for a different reason. Now it may seem more evil to be gassed in a concentration camp than worked to death in a slave labor camp or killed by cancer as the result of drinking toxic water from a company's dump site. But it all ends up the same, doesn't it?
Derek Kreider:Whether it's for an ideology of materialism or of nationalism. It ends with death, oppression, and exploitation. But, like I said, enough of that talk. We'll we'll hit more on this in the next section of the season on corporations and such. For now, I want to just wrap up this season by highlighting some of the major takeaways from mind comp, which I felt like had a strong overlap with Elul's assessment of propaganda.
Derek Kreider:So number 1, there's a core of truth. Elul recognizes that propaganda is most effective if if it has a core of truth. In fact, the more truth, the better. And this is exactly what we see in the Garden of Eden with the serpent as well. We're in the desert where Satan tempted Jesus.
Derek Kreider:Telling half truths or 3 quarter truths is much better than telling an outright lie. Hitler affirms the same concept when he discusses the ineffectiveness of Germany's propaganda in World War 1 compared to the Allied propaganda. Hitler declares that Germany's problem was that they made the Allies out to look like dunces and buffoons. But when the Germanies faced them in battle and found them to be competent and fierce, the Germans lost face faith in their leaders, like a kid finding out that their parents have lied to them about Santa all these years. The allied propaganda, on the other hand, portrayed the Germans as barbaric and murderous, which was very easy to believe when you see your friends getting blown up by them and you see the carnage that they cause.
Derek Kreider:Chances are that the German in the trench across the way is just an average Joe like you, but it's really easy to continue seeing them as barbaric. It's believable. So while both allied and German propaganda were largely untrue, it wasn't apparently clear that the allied propaganda was false without doing more investigation. I think this type of thing is very similar to conservative Christianity's portrayal of the LGBTQ community. Many conservatives have bemoaned the utter immorality of the LGBTQ community, railed against them during the AIDS epidemic, and said that transgendered and gay individuals are pedophiles.
Derek Kreider:But when you meet most LGBTQ people, you find that they're extremely kind and lovable. When younger Christians come out from under their protectionist parents in church and go get to know an LGBTQ person only to discover that they've been propagandized on a lie, then it can shatter their faith because many of the conservative platforms build themselves around railing against that community and almost equate that position with the gospel itself. Propaganda founded on a lie or untruth is not good. The more truth you have, the better. A second principle of propaganda that we see in mind comp is the idea of polarization.
Derek Kreider:Eluele touched on this in his work and explains that polarization is vital to propaganda. There needs to be a clear enemy, and there needs to be a clear party line position in place. Hitler hits on this concept when he argues for the idea that his party must be kept pure. Of course, Hitler meant this, in that he wanted to keep it free from Jews and other groups he detested, so pure in blood. However, Hitler also meant this in terms of keeping the party pure by making sure that those who were in the core group were fanatics.
Derek Kreider:They had to be all in. They had to be radical. That's the reason that he gave for making his messages so radical. He kept his messages radical to ensure that his closest followers were radical. Hitler even gives props to the Catholic church for how it runs on a similar concept.
Derek Kreider:He notes that because the leadership and priests are celibate, they don't have any progeny to take their place. There's no nepotism or half hearted inheritance. There's no dilution. All new clergy are those who are interested of their own accord because they've been convinced, propagandized, not because their father was a priest. They believe it.
Derek Kreider:This concept also reminds me a bit of Jesus when he told his disciples to drink his body and his eat his body and drink his blood. And a lot of them did what? They walked away. And I think there's a huge amount of truth in Hitler's observation here, and Christians bemoan this all the time. While we don't want to be persecuted, we recognize that the quality of the persecuted church tends to be much higher than in comfortable materialistic places.
Derek Kreider:And that goes back to Hitler saying that he didn't want to solve the economic problems because then nobody would be motivated by the idea for the ideology. There's a lot to be said about maintaining a radical message in regard to having quality followers who are willing to bear their crosses. Unfortunately, while Jesus used his principle to build a self giving church, Hitler used it to destroy. Beyond Hitler's polarization in ensuring that his party was radical in one direction, he also employed a secondary form of polarization. In Mein Kampf, Hitler argues that it is dangerous for a leader when they are assailed by a number of different opponents.
Derek Kreider:Everyone knows the age old strategy, divide and conquer, and Hitler argues that when someone sees that there are a number of enemies dividing, and dissenters against you, that it raises doubts in the minds, as to the leader's strength and correctness because you see a lot of enemies assailed against you. But Hitler had a solution to this, and that he said, this leader should lump all of the enemies into one group. Find some commonality and and, you know, make them one enemy. If instead of having 5 enemies, there's only 1 enemy, the leader has only 1 front to fight on and seems more in control. Maybe Hitler should have taken that idea of 1 front more seriously.
Derek Kreider:Anyway, I think a perfect example that we have seen of this throughout American history and continuing in conservative circles today is the accusation of Marxism. One may face an opponent on race issues, gun issues, abortion issues, gender issues, and the list goes on. Those are all very complex and different discussions and issues, and having adversaries in each of those areas is challenging. But if one can simply lump them in to a group and call them all Marxist or liberal, then the issues don't really have to be discussed because we don't discuss those types of things with Marxist. The third way in which Hitler overlaps with the law is in regard to the idea of Mithridatism or the idea that one becomes immune to a poison over time.
Derek Kreider:Hitler says something very profound about propaganda when he says that propaganda must say very little, but it must say it a lot. I think that's one of one of the best propaganda quotes, that that Hitler had. Say very little because the people are too lazy to consume it, but say it a lot. Inundate them with it. Hitler recognizes the importance of saturating a group with propaganda, both to educate them to one's own ideology as well as to inoculate them against the opposition.
Derek Kreider:4th, Hitler, like Elul, recognized the importance of using a variety of sources for propaganda. Spew a lot of propaganda and do it as many in as many modes as possible. While Hitler favored speaking engagements, he also recognized that hitting the masses with other forms of media as well was was good. However, he argued that any written work should be kept short and should use pictures. They should be simplified.
Derek Kreider:I'm pretty sure Hitler would love memes. 5. Finally, Hitler asserted that propaganda's aim was to succeed, not to be idealistic, which is something that Elul points out several times. Propaganda is the means to educate a group on an idea and to spur them on to action. We can see this in regard to Hitler's assessment of allied propaganda versus German propaganda in World War 1.
Derek Kreider:Hitler's issue with German propaganda wasn't that it was untrue, but that it didn't work like the untrue allied propaganda. While Hitler was sincere about the goals that he pursued and the idea ideology he espoused, he recognized that propaganda was a vehicle to achieve those ends, not some idealistic concept to be elevated above the end itself. There was a whole lot jam packed into this episode. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Mann Kampf and gaining some insight into Hitler and propaganda, and I hope that this episode was beneficial for you as well. It's absolutely vital that we understand history like this because we're fools to think that we can't be blinded to modern atrocities like the Germans were.
Derek Kreider:On that issue, let me recommend 2 great books to help you see how ordinary Germans, people like you and me, carried out Hitler's plans. Check out the books Ordinary Men and They Thought They Were Free to give you a glimpse into the propagandized people of World War 2 Germany, and also to help you recognize that it could happen to you and me. Remember that propaganda either makes atrocity possible, or it makes it unbelievable. It either prepares a group to commit atrocity, or it insulates them from the belief that their group could ever do such a thing. So you don't fall into either ditch.
Derek Kreider:You need to understand propaganda. And to understand propaganda, you need to learn from the masters of it. That's all for now. So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
Derek Kreider:This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.
