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"Dem Congressman Stands by His Comparison of GOP Propaganda Lies to Goebbels Propaganda Lies"

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COMMENT #1 [Permalink]

... Ernest A. Canning said on 1/20/2011 @ 4:10 pm PT...



I'm not sure I agree with you on this one, Brad.

Cohen invoked Goebbels because the methodology of American hard right propaganda is strikingly similar to the techniques employed by Goebbels ("Big Lie") or, for that matter, Mein Kampf, wherein Adolf Hitler argued:

All effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand…Propaganda had to be continuous and unvarying in its message. It should never admit a glimmer of doubt in its own claims, or concede the tiniest element of right in the claims of the other side.

That technique was exposed by Robert Greenwald, for example, when he demonstrated in Outfoxed how the Fox "News" anchors were given a daily memo which instructed on the message of the day.

In one segment, a chorus of voices, one after another, sang “flip-flopper” to describe John Kerry. These voices included not only Fox anchors but members of the Bush administration.

While, when viewed in succession in Outfoxed, the “flip-flopper” segment is amusing, there is nothing funny about the impact of simplistic messages spread over a 24/7 news cycle. Staying "on message" through repetition of simplistic slogans did not begin with the Bush regime or Fox "News" but with Mein Kamp.

The problem is that bogus comparisons to Nazis are so common that we've reached the conclusion that every comparison is invalid and amounts to a per se stepping over the line.

Not every comparison to the techniques employed by the Nazi regime invokes the Holocaust, though perhaps a more apt descriptor of 21st Republicans was provided by former VP Henry Wallace on 04/09/1944: