Joseph Goebbels Quotes

It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.

Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place...

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time,or as the greatest criminals

If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction..

Man only honors what he conquers or defends.

Man is and remains an animal.Here a beast of prey, there a housepet, but always an animal.

You can’t change the masses. They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies. Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling. Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its "people's sovereignty" the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

A lie once told remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth,” the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels memorably claimed.

The truth is always stronger than the lie.

The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.

At night I sit in my room and read the Bible. In the distance, the sea roars. Then I lay awake for a long time and think of the quiet, pale man from Nazareth.

Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked … Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.

Putin and his siloviki] operate in accordance with the simple principles of Joseph Goebbels: Play on the emotions; the bigger the lie, the better; lies should be repeated many times….Unfortunately, it works.

Devotion, fervor, longing! Those are my pillars. We have to be the bridge to the future.

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.

The Jew is immunized against all dangers: One may call him a scoundrel, parasite, swindler, profiteer, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a Jew and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: "I’ve been found out".

I'm so despondent about everything. Everything I try goes totally wrong. There's no escape from this hole here. I feel drained. So far, I still haven't found a real purpose in life. Sometimes, I'm afraid to get out of bed in the morning. There's nothing to get up for.

Berndt handed in a plan for the occultist propaganda to be carried on by us. We are getting somewhere. The Americans and English fall easily to this kind of propaganda. We are therefore pressing into service all star witnesses of occult prophecy. Nostradamus must once again submit to being quoted.

What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.

The woman is the teacher of the youth, and therefore the builder of the foundation of the future. If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre. The best place for the woman to serve her people is in her marriage, in the family, in motherhood.

Więc powstań narodzie, i niech rozpęta się burza!(Nun, Volk, steh auf, und Sturm, brich los!)

It's necessary to exterminate these Jews like rats, once and for all. In Germany, thank God, we've already taken care of that. I hope that the world will follow this example.

Nadejdzie dzień, gdy kłamstwa zawalą się pod własnym ciężarem, a prawda ponownie zatriumfuje (Eines Tages werden die Lügen unter ihrer eigenen Last zusammenbrechen, und die Wahrheit wird wieder triumphieren)

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. —Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Deutsches Reich

It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. —Joseph Goebbels

As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death – this is the task of this young generation.

A fourteen-year-old lad crouching with his bazooka behind a ruined wall on a burned out street is worth more to the nation than ten intellectuals who attempt to prove that our chances now are nil.

Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives.

Wysoko na niebie biała chmura formuje się w kształt swastyki (...)Znak opatrzności!? (Droben am Himmel formt sich eine weiße Wolke zum Hakenkreuz. Ein Zeichen des Schicksals?)

What you get, you don't want, and what you want, you don't get. David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (Focal Point Publications, 2014), Pp. 67

His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.

My camp counselor won’t even let me read during lunch. She says it’s because reading is antisocial, but I think it’s because she’s actually Joseph Goebbels.” “Who’s that?” “Nazi. Burned books.

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise. Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

world knew nothing of this. The illusion surrounding the Olympic Games was complete, the deception masterful. Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their

In the end, though, Joe Louis would have the last laugh. He would indeed fight Max Schmeling again, two years later, and Schmeling would last all of two minutes and four seconds before his corner threw in the towel. Joe Louis would reign as heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1949, long after Joseph Goebbels’s charred body had been pulled out of the smoldering rubble of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and laid next to those of Magda and their children.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents’ version biased. In doing that, Goebbels had not only created a compelling vision of the new Germany but also undercut the Nazis’ opponents in the West—whether they were American Jews in New York City or members of Parliament in London or anxious Parisians—making all of them seem shrill, hysterical, and misinformed. As thousands of Americans returned home from the games that fall, many of them felt as one quoted in a German propaganda publication did: “As for this man Hitler. . . . Well I believe we should all like to take him back to America with us and have him organize there just as he has done in Germany.

One always feels the need to wash one’s hands after being forced to deal with the methods of U.S. interventionism. It is so unpleasant and filthy that one shudders. When one hears the pious nonsense of the Jewish-led world plutocracy over the radio or reads it in the press, one need only to look behind the scenes to feel pity for the miseries of mankind. That such a man has the impudence to judge us, to call on God and the world as witnesses of the purity of his deeds, to incite war and send innocent people singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” to battle for his filthy financial interests can only fill anyone with even the most primitive sense of decency with the deepest horror. Were there only such people in the world, one would have to despise humanity. "Mr. Roosevelt Cross-Examined", 30 November 1941

The Führer was in need of some good news. In four months, Hitler had lost one eighth of his fighting men on the battlefields of North Africa and the eastern front. Fleets of bombers were tearing German cities and industries to shreds. Germany was now losing the underwater war: forty-seven U-boats were sunk in May, triple the number sunk in March, thanks to the code breakers’ pinpointing the “wolf pack.” Hitler blamed his military leaders. “He is absolutely sick of the generals,”24 Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary. “All generals lie. All generals are disloyal.

Autarky was central to the Nazis’ political campaigns, and the theme of freeing Germany from its dependence on a hostile world clearly struck a chord with voters. The canny party propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1932 that a nation that couldn’t manage to get control over the “necessary space, natural forces and natural resources for its material life” would inevitably “fall into dependence on foreign countries and lose its freedom.” The outcome of the First World War and the nature of the postwar world had proven this clearly, he claimed. “Thus a thick wall around Germany?” he asked. “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.

Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the opening of the Second World War. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS were practicing Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on, and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant.) Human beings and institutions are imperfect, to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid proof that holy institutions are man-made.

Una mentira repetida mil veces se convierte en una verdad

If we are attacked we can only defend ourselves with guns not butter

This is the secret of propaganda: He, who is the target of propaganda, should be completely immersed in the ideas of propaganda, without him ever noticing, that he is being immersed. Das ist das Geheimnis der Propaganda: Den, den die Propaganda fassen will, ganz mit den Ideen der Propaganda zu durchtränken, ohne dass er überhaupt merkt, dass er durchtränkt wird.

Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of war.

Ich gehe rüber zur Tauentzienstraße, ein Pappschild unter dem Arm, das ich am Europacenter anschlage wie einst Luther seine Thesen in Wittenberg. Dort stehe ich, und kann nicht anders. Ein paar Leute bleiben stehen und sehen sich an, was das auf dem Pappschild steht. "Das Romanische Café" steht da, "ist die Stätte der höchsten intellektuellen Verfeinerung und der tiefsten sozialen Ignoranz; die Stätte anekdotische Selbstbefriedigung, wo Aphorismen aufeinander Jagd machen, kopulieren und kleine Witze in die Welt setzen. Das Romanische Café ist die Stätte, wo jedes normale Wort in den Verdacht gerät, dem Unterbewusstsein einer Amöbe entsprungen zu sein; die Stätte, wo Friedrich Gundelfinger den Finger verlor und daher nicht auf den jungen Journalisten namens Joseph Goebbels deuten konnte, der mit bösem Lächeln und einem kleinen Notizblock auf den Knien zu Füßen des zelebrierten und entfingerten Gundolf saß. Das Romanische Café ist die Stätte, wo Pegasus mit Aperçus gefüttert wurde, bis er nicht mehr krauchen konnte…" Ein Herr mit Pfeife bleibt eine Weile vor dem Pappschild stehen. "Das mit Goebbels ist mir neu". Sagt er und bläst mir Pfeifenrauch ins Gesicht.

Empowered by the Enabling Law, Hitler launched a political blitzkrieg, destroying what remained of German democracy. He began by abolishing local assemblies and replacing provincial governors with Nazis. He sent SA thugs to brutalize political opponents and, when necessary, cart them off to newly opened concentration camps. He disposed of the unions by declaring May 1, 1933, a paid national holiday, then occupying union offices throughout the country on May 2. He purged the civil service of disloyal elements and issued a decree banning Jews from the professions. He placed theater, music, and radio productions under the control of Joseph Goebbels and barred unsympathetic journalists from doing their jobs. To ensure order, he consolidated political, intelligence, and police functions in a new organization, the Gestapo.

We demand for every working man work and bread! For the people, a place to live. No democrat has the right to deny these. We want action! We demand war against the profiteers, peace with the workers! We demand a solution to the Jewish question. We Want all foreign races out of German life, We demand an end to the German parliament. We want a leader above the mob. We demand death sentences for crimes against the people! To the gallows with the profiteers and money-lenders!

As early as April 1940, Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, denounced Superman as a Jew. The weekly SS newspaper lambasted Jerry Siegel as “an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York…. The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and an underdeveloped mind ‘Superman.’”Goebbels went on, “Woe to the American youth, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.” And swallow they did: One in four American soldiers carried a comic book in his back pocket during World War II.

We, however, will have nothing to explain or to regret. We have proved in danger that our loyalty to the fatherland and the Führer was genuine. We did what we promised. Neither good fortune nor ill fortune changed us; we remained what we always were, and what we will remain until death calls us: fighters for the eternal Reich of the Germans, which has withstood the storms of two millennia, and which has been so hardened in this war that it will be able to withstand the storms of two more millennia. In good times, we stood by its side with festivals and songs. In hard times, our hands and our hearts, and if need be our lives, belong to it. “Kämpfer für das ewige Reich ,” Das Reich, 8 April 1945

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS DISMISSED Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons as being full of “excuses” and devoid of information. “But no sign of weakness,” he acknowledged in his diary on Friday, May 9, adding: “England’s will to resist is still intact. We shall therefore have to continue attacking and chipping away at her power position.” Goebbels confessed in his diary to feeling a new respect for Churchill. “This man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning,” he wrote. “If he had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today. And I believe that he will give us a few more problems yet. But we can and will solve them. Nevertheless, he is not to be taken as lightly as we usually take him.

Ripetete una bugia cento, mille, un milione di volte, e diventerà una verità», pare dicesse il ministro della propaganda Joseph Goebbels quando illustrava, come uno chef orgoglioso della propria ricetta, la lista degli ingredienti per una efficace informazione totalitaria. Ricetta applicabile anche oggi, tanto più che i supporti su cui può correre una notizia, vera o falsa che sia, sono infinitamente più veloci di quelli dei tempi del ministro della propaganda del Reich. Così veloci che l’eventuale lavoro di ricerca e smentita risulta inutile, superato dalla velocità di immissione di sempre nuove bugie nel sistema. Smontare una bufala quando la gente già parla d’altro è inutile: una battaglia persa, o comunque a perdere.

Das ist das Geheimnis der Propaganda: Den, den die Propaganda fassen will, ganz mit den Ideen der Propaganda zu durchtränken, ohne dass er überhaupt merkt, dass er durchtränkt wird. This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

Rather than suffering from any individual mental pathology, Goebbels held to a view of the world that he shared with much of the population. In the economic chaos after the humiliating Versailles treaty that concluded the First World War, there were millions like him in Germany. He welcomed the Nazi regime not only because it offered material benefits of various kinds but because it validated impulses that were curbed in the civilisation the Nazis set out to overthrow and destroy. The joy of a type of communal solidarity that was based on hatred of minorities; the pleasure of having these minorities in one’s power and subjecting them to persecution; the delirious sense of release that comes from surrendering personal judgement and serving an autocratic leader – these were satisfactions that Nazism, at its peak, provided not only for Goebbels but for a majority of Germans.

Und wenn Stalin seine Ge­neräle erschießt, dann brauchen wir das nicht einmal zu tuen. Ob wohl Stalin allmählich auch die Juden liquidiert? Vielleicht nennt er sie nur, um die Welt zu täuschen, Trotzkisten. Wer weiß? Jedenfalls sind wir nun mit Rußland verbunden. Wir haben bisher nur Vorteile davon gehabt. Der Führer hat Stalin in einem Film gesehen, und da war er ihm gleich sympathisch. Da hat eigentlich die deutsch-russische Koalition begonnen".

Every evening they announce that they want punch our nose, us and all the other Nazi pigs. Sure, you want to, but doing it is something rather different, gentlemen! The whole affair has a certain tragicomic tone. The Jews talk as if they were really strong, but soon they have to move their tents and run like rabbits from the approaching German soldiers. Qui mange du juif, en meurt! One could almost say that anyone with the Jews on his side has already lost. They are the best pillar of the coming defeat. They carry the seed of destruction. They hoped this war would bring the last desperate blow against National Socialist Germany and an awakening Europe. They will collapse. Already today we begin to hear the cries of the desperate and seduced peoples throughout the world: “The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!” The court that will pronounce judgment on them will be fearful. We do not need to do anything ourselves. It will come because it must come. Just as the fist of an awakened Germany has struck this racial filth, the fist of an awakened Europe will surely follow. Mimicry will not help the Jews then. They will have to face their accusers. The court of the nations will judge their oppressor. Without pity or forgiveness, the blow will strike. The world enemy will fall, and Europe will have peace. "Mimicry", Das Reich, 20 July 1941

IN BERLIN ON SATURDAY MORNING, Joseph Goebbels focused his regular propaganda meeting on how best to take advantage of what he believed must certainly be a rising sense of dread among England’s civilian population. “The important thing now,” he told the gathering, “is to intensify as far as possible the mood of panic which is undoubtedly slowly gaining ground in Britain.” Germany’s secret transmitters and foreign-language service were to continue describing the “frightful effects” of air raids. “The secret transmitters, in particular, should marshal witnesses who must give horrifying accounts of the destruction they have seen with their own eyes.” This effort, he instructed, should also include transmissions warning listeners that fog and mist would not protect them from aerial attack; bad weather merely confused the aim of German bombers and made it more likely that bombs would fall on unintended targets.

Who is it that drives the Russians, the English, and the Americans into battle and sacrifices huge numbers of human lives in a hopeless struggle against the German people? The Jews! Their newspapers and radio broadcasts spread the songs of war while the nations they have deceived are led to the slaughter. Who is it that invents new plans of hatred and destruction against us every day, making this war into a dreadful case of self-mutilation and self-destruction of European life and its economy, education and culture? The Jews! Who devised the unnatural marriage between England and the USA on one side and Bolshevism on the other, building it up and jealously ensuring its continuance? Who covers the most perverse political situations with cynical hypocrisy from a trembling fear that a new way could lead the nations to realize the true causes of this terrible human catastrophe? The Jews, only the Jews! They are named Morgenthau and Lehmann and stand behind Roosevelt as a so-called brain trust. They are named Mechett and Sasoon and serve as Churchill’s moneybags and order givers. They are named Kaganovitsch and Ehrenburg and are Stalin’s pacesetters and intellectual spokesmen. Wherever you look, you see Jews. They march as political commissars behind the Red army and organize murder and terror in the areas conquered by the Soviets. They sit behind the lines in Paris and Brussels, Rome and Athens, and fashion their reins from the skin of the unhappy nations that have fallen under their power. “Die Urheber des Unglücks der Welt,” Das Reich, 21 January 1945

9 October 1943 Regarding the Jewish question, he [Himmler] gives a very unadorned and frank picture. He is of the conviction that the Jewish question can be solved by the end of this year. He advocates the most radical and most severe solution, namely to exterminate Jewry, bag and baggage. Of course, if brutal, this is a consistent solution. Because we must take on the responsibility of entirely solving this question in our time. Subsequent generations will doubtlessly no longer dare address this problem with the courage and obsession as we are able to do today.

Close to forty thousand Germans gathered in front of Berlin’s opera house on May 10, 1933, as a parade of swastika-wearing students and beer-hall thugs carrying torches tossed books into a huge bonfire. Ordinary citizens poured forth carrying volumes looted from libraries and private homes. “Jewish intellectualism is dead,” propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his face fiery, yelled from the podium. “The German soul can again express itself.” What happened in Germany in 1933 was not just a brutality perpetrated by thuggish leaders and abetted by ignorant mobs. It was also, as Einstein described, “the utter failure of the so-called intellectual aristocracy.” Einstein and other Jews were ousted from what had been among the world’s greatest citadels of open-minded inquiry, and those who remained did little to resist. It represented the triumph of the ilk of Philipp Lenard, Einstein’s longtime anti-Semitic baiter, who was named by Hitler to be the new chief of Aryan science. “We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew,” Lenard exulted that May. “Heil Hitler!” It would be a dozen years before Allied troops would fight their way in and oust him from that role.41 Le

Uno de los grandes inspiradores de estos métodos es el sociólogo y psicólogo francés Gustave Le Bon, cuya obra Psicología de las masas fue aclamada por el dictador italiano Benito Mussolini e inspiró a Joseph Goebbels y, sin duda, a Hitler. El libro, publicado a finales del siglo XIX, no ha perdido nada de su actualidad. Analiza la metamorfosis del individuo cuando se funde en una multitud, lo cual reduce considerablemente sus facultades de reflexión y de voluntad propias: «Desvanecimiento de la personalidad consciente, predominio de la personalidad inconsciente, orientación mediante sugestión y contagio de los sentimientos y las ideas en un mismo sentido y tendencia a transformar inmediatamente en actos las ideas sugeridas, estas son las principales características del individuo en una multitud. Ya no es él mismo, se ha convertido en un autómata al que su voluntad ya no guía». Ante estos mecanismos, un cabecilla puede manipular fácilmente a una multitud. Tiene que utilizar términos que hacen emerger imágenes fuertes, señala Gustave Le Bon, tiene que impresionar, favorecer las pasiones y los deseos de los que lo escuchan, satisfacer el gusto de las multitudes por la leyenda, confundir las fronteras entre lo inverosímil y lo real y, sobre todo, renunciar a cualquier razonamiento. Entonces conseguirá de ellos abnegación, sacrificio de sí mismos, sentido del deber e incluso que renuncien a valores humanos profundamente anclados, hasta el punto de considerar el

Listen to some words: Today Christianity stands at the head of this country. . . . I pledge that I will never tie myself to those who want to destroy Christianity. . . . We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit—we want to burn out all the recent immoral development in literature, theater, the arts and in the press. . . . In short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess the past . . . few years.2 Take these words at face value. Do they resonate with you? Here is what one listener said upon hearing them: “This . . . puts in words everything I have been searching for, for years. It is the first time someone gave form to what I want.”3 I suspect many would say the same. There are thousands of people who, upon hearing these words spoken, would cheer and agree and say amen. The words are Adolph Hitler’s, and the listener was someone in the audience who made that comment to Joseph Goebbels in 1933. Goebbels was Hitler’s minister of propaganda and clearly a very good one. Hitler’s words sound like they are inspired by Christian faith and morality. Listeners assumed a certain kind of person stood behind them. But Hitler’s words masked the deception behind them so that those listening, without knowing the character of the man, heard what they longed for but what never came to fruition. What did come was the extermination of millions, the destruction of countries, and evil that has affected generations. The words were said to manipulate the audience whose longings the Third Reich understood well. Hitler deliberately deceived the people and drew them in, calling forth loyalty and service. And he got it, not just from the general population but also from the German church. Words full of promises that cloaked great evil were tailored for a vulnerable culture.

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

By the same token, the failure to control Hitler after he was released from prison looks unreasonable only with the certainty of hindsight. Through the mid-1920s, he was banned from speaking in most German states, but as time passed and memories of the putsch receded, the bans began to be lifted. After all, Hitler was now pledging to abide by the rules of legality, and how, in a democracy, could a politician be denied the right to be heard, no matter how insidious his message, if he stayed within the bounds of the law? Who—and by what authority—had the right to silence him? Saxony, at the start of 1927, was the first large state to lift the speaking prohibition and was followed by Bavaria and others. The last to do so was the all-important state of Prussia, by far the largest in the federation (“whoever possesses Prussia possesses the Reich,” Goebbels said). It held out until after the September 1928 elections, when the Nazis won a paltry 2.6 percent of the vote, but after that dismal showing its prohibition looked untenable, a restriction based on bad faith and sheer partisan politics. Such a feeble electoral result brought the question of free speech in a democratic system into clear focus. In 1928, the Nazis seemed less a threat to democracy than a spent force, while the Weimar Republic seemed to have put down genuine roots. Real wages were rising. Unemployment had dropped dramatically. Industrial production had climbed 25 percent since 1925. “For the first time since the war, the German people were happy,” one journalist wrote. The astute political economist Joseph Schumpeter said in early 1929 that Weimar had achieved an “impressive stability” and that “in no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.” The real threat to democracy during these good times appeared to be not Hitler or his party but any bans on the leaders of political organizations. Of course, two years later, after the Nazis had grown to become the second largest party in the Reichstag, it was too late to outlaw them.

I believe that history has meaning. The misfortunes that have struck us cannot destroy this faith. I am certain that the Führer will find a way out of the dilemma, and that only then will the outwardly lost meaning of this war be renewed. The tests that we have to withstand today are enormous and put the German people through trials it has only seldom faced in its history. Nonetheless we must stand firm, or else everything will be lost. This war will be decided one second before midnight. Should we lay down our weapons before that, things can only go against us. Each of us knows what that would mean. Our enemy has told us that himself often and openly enough so that no one any longer can have the least doubt. If one of us now and again forgets that in the midst of the war’s events and surrenders himself and the nation to common disaster, he must be taught better by friendly reminder or firm warning. It is no time to forgive weakness or faintheartedness. Our focus is entirely and only on our people, which is in the midst of a severe life crisis. Only we can resolve this crisis. If we succeed, we win everything; if we fall, we lose everything. “Risking One’s Own Life“, Das Reich, 15 April 1945.

A fierce battle was taking place at Tobruk, and nothing thrilled him more than spirited warfare and the prospect of military glory. He stayed up until three-thirty, in high spirits, “laughing, chaffing and alternating business with conversation,” wrote Colville. One by one his official guests, including Anthony Eden, gave up and went to bed. Churchill, however, continued to hold forth, his audience reduced to only Colville and Mary’s potential suitor, Eric Duncannon. Mary by this point had retired to the Prison Room, aware that the next day held the potential to change her life forever. — IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.” — ON SUNDAY MORNING, a low-grade anxiety colored the Cromwellian reaches of Chequers. Today, it seemed, would be the day Eric Duncannon proposed to Mary, and no one other than Mary was happy about it. Even she, however, was not wholly at ease with the idea. She was eighteen years old and had never had a romantic relationship, let alone been seriously courted. The prospect of betrothal left her feeling emotionally roiled, though it did add a certain piquancy to the day. New guests arrived: Sarah Churchill, the Prof, and Churchill’s twenty-year-old niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill—“looking quite beautiful,” Colville noted. She was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attaché in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond. “It was obvious,” Colville wrote, “that Eric was expected to make advances to Mary and that the prospect was viewed with nervous pleasure by Mary, with approbation by Moyra, with dislike by Mrs. C. and with amusement by Clarissa.” Churchill expressed little interest. After lunch, Mary and the others walked into the rose garden, while Colville showed Churchill telegrams about the situation in Iraq. The day was sunny and warm, a nice change from the recent stretch of cold. Soon, to Colville’s mystification, Eric and Clarissa set off on a long walk over the grounds by themselves, leaving Mary behind. “His motives,” Colville wrote, “were either Clarissa’s attraction, which she did not attempt to keep in the background, or else the belief that it was good policy to arouse Mary’s jealousy.” After the walk, and after Clarissa and Captain Hillgarth had left, Eric took a nap, with the apparent intention (as Colville

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. — Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents’ version biased.

Nazi diplomacy rules the world, without love or poetry.

Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, “If you repeat a lie a thousand times, people are bound to start believing it.

Principio de orquestación. La propaganda debe limitarse a un número pequeño de ideas y repetirlas incansablemente, presentadas una y otra vez desde diferentes perspectivas, pero siempre convergiendo sobre el mismo concepto. Sin fisuras ni dudas. Si una mentira se repite suficientemente, acaba por convertirse en verdad. Principios de propaganda de JOSEPH GOEBBELS

Since the 2001 Amerithrax Anthrax spore “attacks,” HHS has increasingly been horizontally integrated with the intelligence community (see Chapter 21) as well as with the Department of Homeland Security to form a health security state with enormous ability to shape and enforce “consensus” through widespread propaganda, censorship, “nudge” technology, and intentional manipulation of the “Mass Formation” hypnosis process using modern adaptations of methods originally developed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels [417

IG Farben deserves a special place in hell, a space next to Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. Not only did IG Farben operate a factory with prisoners of a concentration camp, this international chemical company manufactured Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, the poison that killed over a million people in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Injection Cocktail for Patient A He alone is responsible for the inexplicable, the mystery and myth of our people. —Joseph Goebbels43

Und er war »ziemlich beeindruckt« von Joseph Goebbels und hob die »Aufrichtigkeit und Offenheit« des nationalsozialistischen Propagandachefs hervor.

By 1977, Institutional Investor declared that “indexing is likely to be an idea whose time will pass.”38 At any rate, there was widespread skepticism that ordinary investors would ever adopt index funds. After all, they were completely unaware of the research being pumped out by academia on the poor average performance of their mutual fund managers, and anyway, who would want to just settle for mediocrity? “It seems unlikely that the public will ever embrace buying the averages in this way, since individuals usually seek dramatic gains, not a market-linked performance many equate with mediocrity,” the industry magazine wrote.39 Fouse later jokingly quoted the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to explain why the general public was slow to cotton on: “Only small secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity.

Propaganda vs. Truth "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." ~ Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, Nazi Germany "If you tell a big enough truth that people would prefer not to hear and keep repeating it, people will despise you, think you're fucking crazy and try and hang you by your balls." ~ Beryl Dov, Hated Minister of Truth, Hello Poetry

During these last few years when I was immersed in postmodern academic texts, I was repeatedly reminded of a certain diary entry by a young Ph.D., a novelist and playwright, in 1924. “I believe that The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion are a forgery,” he wrote. “I believe in the intrinsic but not the factual truth of the Protocols.” That was Joseph Goebbels, a decade before he became the Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda.

Zojuist een rijmpje geschreven over een stokje in de wind.

La propaganda debe limitarse a un número pequeño de ideas y repetirlas incansablemente, presentadas una y otra vez desde diferentes perspectivas, pero siempre convergiendo sobre el mismo concepto. Sin fisuras ni dudas. Si una mentira se repite suficientemente, acaba por convertirse en verdad. Principios de propaganda de JOSEPH GOEBBELS

Esos ataques y el empeño de crear una realidad alternativa han sido siempre una parte constitutiva del fascismo, desde la gran mentira de los Goebbels en adelante.

IG Farben deserves a special place in hell, a space next to Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. Not only did IG Farben operate a factory with prisoners of a concentration camp, this international chemical company manufactured Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, the poison that killed over a

Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I. Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect. Ethnic minorities had been swollen in western Europe after the 1880s by an increased number of refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. Political and cultural subversives—socialists of various hues, avant-garde artists and intellectuals—discovered new ways to challenge community conformism. The national culture would have to be defended against them. Joseph Goebbels declared at a book-burning ceremony in Berlin on May 10, 1933, that “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.” Though Mussolini and his avant-garde artist friends worried less than the Nazis about cultural modernism, Fascist squads made bonfires of socialist books in Italy. The discovery of the role of bacteria in contagion by the French biologist Louis Pasteur and the mechanisms of heredity by the Austrian monk-botanist Gregor Mendel in the 1880s made it possible to imagine whole new categories of internal enemy: carriers of disease, the unclean, and the hereditarily ill, insane, or criminal. The urge to purify the community medically became far stronger in Protestant northern Europe than in Catholic southern Europe. This agenda influenced liberal states, too. The United States and Sweden led the way in the forcible sterilization of habitual offenders (in the American case, especially African Americans), but Nazi Germany went beyond them in the most massive program of medical euthanasia yet known.

NATURE OF THE ENEMY, wartime propaganda. BROADCAST HISTORY: June 16–July 14, 1942, CBS. 30m, Tuesdays at 8:30. PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Charles Vanda. Nature of the Enemy, though it ran for only a month, was a staunch example of the nature of wartime broadcasting. It spotlighted each week a different Axis leader, dramatizing the record of his “cruelty and treachery.” Among the subjects: Joseph Goebbels, “father of German lies,” and Alfred Rosenberg, “Nazi philosopher” and proponent of “racial purity” as a German right of conquest.

The canny party propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1932 that a nation that couldn’t manage to get control over the “necessary space, natural forces and natural resources for its material life” would inevitably “fall into dependence on foreign countries and lose its freedom.” The outcome of the First World War and the nature of the postwar world had proven this clearly, he claimed. “Thus a thick wall around Germany?” he asked. “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.

If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.” —Joseph Goebbels

The propaganda maestro of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, famously declared that the capital would be gay and happy—or else. Orders from Berlin specified that the Hôtel Ritz would be the only luxury hotel of its kind in occupied Paris.

With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as ‘the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state’. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God’s gift to eavesdroppers.

in this final hour of the war, we were not being troubled again by my awful Mitford cousins, some of whom had been pro-Nazi during the war and one of whom had actually married her husband at the home of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance no less.

The loudest voices to be heard were those of the increasingly popular far right. In March 1927, the rising National Socialist (Nazi) party, under its local leader Joseph Goebbels, sent 600 men to the Ku’damm in a show of strength. The Romanisches Café was attacked and ransacked, and guests and passers-by were beaten. Another attack, in 1931, saw 1,500 Nazi party supporters take to the Ku’damm at Jewish New Year, shouting anti-semitic slogans and attacking people as they left a synagogue. Jewish-run businesses were targeted and their customers assaulted.

pode-se dizer que, até à entrada na guerra dos russos e dos americanos, as imagens que temos da guerra foram encenadas para toda a eternidade por Joseph Goebbels.

This exchange is what an unconditional surrender sounds like. It is the ultimate form of diplomatic coercion. The city of Berlin had been turned into rubble. The defeated country was at the mercy of its enemy. Coercion was the means by which unconditional surrender was obtained. Under the circumstances, diplomatic prowess was meaningless. Only military superiority mattered. A few hours after the unsuccessful negotiation attempt, Chancellor Joseph Goebbels committed suicide. On the next day, 2 May 1945, Gen. Hans Krebs, Chief of the General Staff (OKH), also committed suicide. The above conversation is noteworthy for two things: (1) The Russian side had the power to exterminate the German side, and (2) there was absolutely no negotiation or diplomacy. Valeriano and Maness would do well to review the conversation between Krebs and Chuikov. In a future war the victorious side will dictate the peace to the defeated side in the exact manner described above. This stems from the nature of modern weapons. Such weapons are made to produce decisive results. They are made to engender capitulation and stop all arguments, all negotiations, all half-measures. Atomic bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result was the surrender of Japan. Diplomatic power is weak when compared to atomic power. In fact, the illusions of diplomatic power must work against those states that favor negotiation over and above measures strictly undertaken to assure military success.