A Voice from the Past and Its Unsettling Relevance to Our Modern Society

I read some quotes about propaganda from a book. The quotes were translated to English from the original language in which the book was published. Below are some of these quotes:
 
“The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
 
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function. . . consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. . .
 
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.
 
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
 
The function of propaganda is . . . not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth…and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.”
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​I read these lines, and I felt a chill running through my body. I was shocked by the blatant disregard for the truth in these words, and the Machiavellian approach the writer has towards people (the masses) which the writer feels can be manipulated like sheep by appealing to their emotions and not their intellect. And this was not some sort of “secret manual” circulated within the confines of a shadowy cabal of individuals. This was a book that was available publicly and became a bestseller in its time. Now, granted, the quotes I presented are specifically about war propaganda, but the writer of the book used its precepts to gain a lot of popularity and rise to a position of preeminence in society.
 
Some people reading this would probably say, “Well, duh, it’s propaganda, what do you expect?” Propaganda is the sort of thing associated with a country, state, organization, or group. However, I find some disquieting parallels between what is written in these quotes and the dynamics regarding the spread of information in our society at the level of the individual. I have seen social media accounts from QAnon proponents, antivaxxers, climate change deniers, and others that seem to have incorporated several of the precepts espoused in these quotes into their strategies.
 
The individuals behind these accounts manipulate the emotions of others pressing all the right buttons. For example, Q Anon proponents post about child abuse (a very emotional subject) and then combine this with far-fetched conspiracy theories. Antivaxxers post about healthy people they claim to have been hurt by vaccines (another emotional subject) and then mix this with exaggeration, innuendo, and lies about vaccines. Climate change deniers will turn any initiative to curb greenhouse emissions into a conspiracy to restrict personal freedom and control people, which is, again, a highly emotional issue. They all do this ignoring valid and at times obvious criticisms. In fact, the majority of these accounts do not engage in debates. Their goal is not to “weigh and ponder” or “educate”. They use their platforms to promote, as the author of the quoted text wrote, their “own right, always and unflinchingly”. And it works. Many of these social media accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. This is an audience that spreads their message, buys their merchandise, and generates them income.
 
It is my opinion that applying the maxims embodied in the quotes I presented at the beginning of this post cannot be healthy for society. When large groups of people with the capacity to vote, petition their government, and make a difference are manipulated to become disengaged from reality by accepting innuendo, exaggerations, lies, and conspiracies as truth, we face the real danger that their fictions will end up being imposed on others at the county, state, or even national level.
 
As I stated at the beginning of this post, I felt a chill running through my body when I read the quotes from the book. Of course, the fact that I find parallels between what the quoted author states and what people on social media are doing is bad enough. But the real reason I felt the chill was because I knew the identity of the author of the quotes. The book from which these quotes are taken and translated was published in Germany in 1925. Its tittle was Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and its author was Adolf Hitler.
 
It is not my intention to imply that the individuals doing what Hitler suggested have read his book and are knowingly applying his propaganda methods. I just think that Hitler’s ideas have permeated the broader cultural landscape of our societies where they have been applied and perpetuated over time by various entities. The methods used to manipulate people by one of the most successful tyrants and mass murderers in the history of humanity are alive and well with us today.

The image from Deviant Art by peterock72 is used here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 License.
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