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The Nazis perfected that technique to quell it's citizens into submission.
" “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
Hitler's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels
Hitler is the arch propagandist of our time. These are examples of his strategy in attempting to mold the opinions and attitudes of his intended victims to his own purposes. Division, doubt, and fear are the weapons he uses within one nation and among Allied countries arrayed against him. His purpose is summed up in his own phrase-to sow "mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecision, panic."
The Nazis established a ministry of propaganda. They licensed and cataloged German newspapermen to keep them in control, suppressed or "integrated" unfriendly newspapers, and as the crisis developed in Europe, expelled foreign correspondents who sought to tell the truth of what went on in Germany. They took over the broadcasting system and every other agency that bore a relationship to the cultural life of the people.
Whether the propagandist works in a peacetime or wartime situation, he uses certain tools to mobilize opinions and attitudes. What are these tools?
An important one is suggestion. Another word for it is stimulation.
The propagandist tries to stimulate others to accept without challenge his own assertions, or to act as he wants them to do. The idea of using suggestion or stimulation as a propaganda device is that it will lead a public to accept a proposition even though there are not logical grounds for accepting it. The propagandist usually tries to side-step critical reactions from his audience, and therefore suggestion is one of his most important tools.
How does the propagandist use this tool?
By making broad and positive statements. By presenting his statements in simple and familiar language. By refusing to admit, or even suggest, that there is another side to the question. Hitler's brutal and direct suggestion that the Jews sold out the German people in World War -the "stab in the back," the Nazi propagandists called it-is an example of this kind of propaganda. Another example is the repeated Nazi propagandist assertion that Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt are "warmongers."
Suggestion is a highly developed art in commercial advertising. An obvious example is the flat declaration that some brand of vitamin will remedy "that tired and run-down feeling."
A second propaganda tool is only a subtler form of suggestion. This tool is the use of hints, insinuations, or indirect statements.
Next time you listen to John McCain speak at one of his Straight Talk ' town hall ' meetings, listen carefully and become aware of the misdirection signs of what/who they are trying to DEFINE through their repeated talking points that becomes part of an overall control-strategy using 24 hour media outlets to saturate and deliver their message. Zip poll samples are conducted immediately to gage & analysis the key trigger-point impact with voter attitudes. Its a low frequency 'piped-piper' tactic used to sway and confuse perceptions and views of the masses at large. Be careful when someone tries to convince you that you're thirsty when in fact, you're not.
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