Nu este asa, pentru ca teoria conspiratiei este unul din mecanismele prin care cetatenii sunt infantilizati si redusi la 'popor', dependent de niste parinti care sa il protejeze de dusmani si sa ii asigure linistea sufleteasca, exprimandu-i frustrarile si mangaindu-l pe cap. Aceste mecanisme sunt usor de contra-argumentat punctual, dar schimbarea de paradigma dureaza sute de ani, at best (ex. razboiul rationalismului iluminist and the vengeful return of the Illuminati)
In alte cuvinte, constructia altei realitati, a papusarilor, utila propagandistic si catastrofica pentru buna functionare a unei societati (social capital anybody?), dezvoltare economica si sociala etc. Pentru argumente mai detaliate, la nivel de individ cel putin, intrebati un psiholog. Eu am mai gasit multe citate, dintr-o carte draguta care poate fi foarte usor gasita cu google and other.
Teaser quote: "Radical anti-Semitism rested on the belief that the Jews were a cohesive, politically active subject—that is, a group united on a global scale by racial bonds that transcended any allegiance to nation-states. In the Nazi view, this powerful and autonomous entity, international Jewry, controlled assorted stooges and accomplices who served its evil interests."
The JEWISH ENEMY NAZI PROPAGANDA DURING WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST
Jeffrey Herf, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, ISBN 978-0-674-02738-1 (pbk.)
Why did European, especially German, anti-Semitism, which had never led to an effort to murder all of Europe’s Jews before, do so between 1941 and 1945 in the midst of World War II? What changed to make anti-Semitism a rationale for mass murder rather than for a continuation of centuries-old patterns of persecution? The answer lies in what Hitler and his leading propagandists and ideologists had to say about the “Jewish question” in the midst of the war and the Holocaust and in their efforts to shape the narrative of events through propaganda in the controlled press. Rather surprisingly, in view of the vast literature on the subject, The Jewish Enemy is the first book to examine in depth the Nazis’ paranoid anti-Semitic account of the world war. Their story of an innocent Germany besieged by international Jewry intent on its “extermination” served as both the public announcement of and the justification for the Final Solution.
In the jargon of historians, this is a work of modified intentionalism. That is, it examines the ideological intentions of key political actors in the historical conjuncture that was World War II. The Holocaust, however, was not the inevitable outcome of the continuities of German, or of European, history. The long tradition of elite and popular anti-Semitism created a climate of indifference in which the murderers could operate but did not per se inspire a policy of mass murder. The historians’ search for ideological origins has taken us toward but not to the Final Solution.
For it was only in the historically specific circumstances of the war that the most radical and paranoid current of European and especially German anti-Semitism, which Hitler had adopted from the beginning of his political activities, became the key to the German dictatorship’s explanation of ongoing events and thus a causal factor in the evolution of the Holocaust. Hitler and his associates had long believed that anti-Semitism offered the explanatory framework for world history. First in 1939, then still more in 1941, and on up through the last days of the Nazi regime, he and his leading propagandists argued that it was necessary to “exterminate” the Jews before they were able to exterminate Germany and the Germans.
What is characteristic of Nazi propaganda is less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events. —E.H. Gombrich, Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts, London, 1969
A quarter century later, Gombrich wrote that Nazi propaganda had created a mythic world by “transforming the political universe into a conflict of persons and personifications” in which a virtuous young Germany fought manfully against evil schemers, above all the Jews. The Jews were the cement for this myth, first in the political battles within Germany and then on the international plane. It was “this gigantic persecution mania, this paranoiac myth that [held] the various strands of German propaganda together.” Gombrich concluded that what characterized Nazi propaganda was “less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events.”3 During World War II, the propaganda of the Nazi regime repeatedly asserted that an actual political subject, an actor called Jewry or international Jewry, was “guilty” of starting and prolonging the war and that a Jewish international conspiracy was intent on exterminating Germany and the Germans. These statements rested on a paranoia inherent in the Nazis’ radical anti-Semitism. In the context of World War II, these beliefs transformed the centuries-old European anti-Semitism from a justification for traditional forms of persecution into what the historian Norman Cohn called a “warrant for genocide.”
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Faced with expressions of such views by Nazi Germany’s national political leaders, most contemporary Marxists, liberals, and conservatives of the time, as well as a good number of postwar scholars, were skeptical that the Nazis truly believed their own propaganda. And yet an examination of modern political culture draws attention to the causal significance of many irrational and illusory ideological perspectives. In the case of Nazi Germany, historians have amply documented what Saul Friedlander has called Hitler’s early “redemptive anti-Semitism,” which combined paranoid fantasy about an all-powerful international Jewry with promises of redeeming and saving Germany from that pernicious influence.5 Ian Kershaw notes “the all-devouring manic obsession with the Jews” that Hitler displayed in his beer hall tirades in Munich just after World War I.6 This obsession is evident in a speech to a Nazi party meeting of April 6, 1920, when Hitler said, “We don’t want to be emotional anti-Semites who seek to create a mood for pogroms. Rather, we are driven by a pitiless and fierce determination to attack the evil at its roots and to exterminate it root and branch. Every means is justified to reach our goal, even if it means we must make a pact with the devil.” Hitler was the central, decisive historical actor driving events toward the war and the Holocaust. Yet the propaganda of the Nazi party and Nazi regime presented Hitler and Germany as merely responding to the initiatives, injustices, and threats of others. It was a propaganda that trumpeted innocence and self-righteous indignation and turned the power relations between Germany and the Jews upside down: Germany was the innocent victim; Jewry was all powerful. From 1933 to 1939, the translation of anti-Semitic ideology into a policy of persecution was presented as a justified response to what the Jews had done to Germany and the Germans. On January 30, 1939, a distinct shift occurred, as Hitler depicted the war that he was preparing to launch as the last in a long series of acts of aggression by international Jewry against Germany. According to Hitler’s paranoid logic, the Jews had launched the war so that the Nazis would be compelled to wage a war of retaliation against the Jews of Europe. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, Hitler made his first unequivocal public threat to exterminate (that is, murder)—not merely to remove, deport, or defeat— “the Jewish race in Europe” in the event that “international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe” brought about a new world war. He publicly repeated the genocidal prophecy on at least six subsequent occasions between January 30, 1939, and February 24, 1943.16 In contrast to his public practice between 1919 and 1939, in the ensuing years Hitler spoke and wrote with unprecedented clarity, bluntness, and frequency about acting on his threats to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
He cast himself in the role of the prophet: the outbreak of World War II was further proof that international Jewry had indeed been out to destroy Germany and the Germans.
Hitler and his leading propagandists were able to entertain completely contradictory versions of events simultaneously, one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim.17 Grandiosity and paranoia were two poles of one fanatical ideology.18 The Nazis projected their own aggressive and murderous intentions and policies onto their victims, the Jews most of all. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno captured this aspect of Nazism when they wrote in 1944 that the “blind murderer has always seen his victim as a persecutor against whom he must defend himself.”19 From beginning to end, the narrative of paranoia displayed in the propaganda accompanied and justified the Nazi regime’s grandiose war of aggression and its genocidal policies.
The radical anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany’s wartime propaganda also constituted an interpretive prism through which Nazi leaders viewed and misconstrued events as they unfolded. Indeed, the misperceptions of reality deriving from the anti-Semitic agenda contributed to major blunders and eventually to the Allies’ ability to defeat the Nazis, albeit at horrendous cost. In The Jewish Enemy, I examine the process of translating anti-Semitic ideology into a narrative and tailoring the weekly and daily news to fit that narrative. Like other practitioners of paranoid politics before and after, the Nazis believed they had uncovered deep secrets of modern history and politics, secrets that the great mass of humanity, mired in events, failed to grasp. At the same time that they entered an utterly mythic world, they convinced themselves and millions of others that their Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda) was educating the masses about the people behind the scenes and the realities that were the driving force behind events. Within the “delirious discourse” of radical anti-Semitism, all riddles were solved, all historical contingency was eliminated, and everything became explicable.
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Radical anti-Semitism rested on the belief that the Jews were a cohesive, politically active subject—that is, a group united on a global scale by racial bonds that transcended any allegiance to nation-states. In the Nazi view, this powerful and autonomous entity, international Jewry, controlled assorted stooges and accomplices who served its evil interests. One way in which this view of a Jewish global conspiracy was distinct from less radical, and nongenocidal, forms of Jew hatred was the relative lack of importance it attached to Jews’ presumed physical appearance. Indeed, the Nazis claimed that the Jews were experts at camouflage and that as a result a massive effort at “public enlightenment” was needed to expose them and their aim of world domination. If not identified and destroyed, the Nazi propagandists feared, Jewry would annihilate the German people. As a result, Hitler and his associates publicly declared on numerous occasions that they would “exterminate” Jews before the Jews could exterminate the Germans. The idea of a Jewish a conspiracy was popularized by the mass publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the decades preceding the Nazis’ arrival in power. The accomplishment of the Nazi propagandists was to bring the idea of this conspiracy up to date and to flesh it out with the names and faces of recognizable prominent figures in mid-twentieth-century Europe and the United States. The theory of an international Jewish conspiracy supplied answers to such seemingly difficult questions as, Why did Britain fight on in 1940 rather than negotiate? Why was it likely that the Soviet regime would collapse like a house of cards following the German invasion of June 1941? Why did Franklin Roosevelt oppose Hitler? Why did the anti-Hitler coalition remain intact as the Red Army continued to push toward Central Europe after spring 1943? In the idea of a vastly powerful international Jewish conspiracy operating behind the scenes Nazi leaders believed they had found the answer to these and many other riddles of modern history.
When the Nazi leaders, in private conversations, office memos, or public statements, drew a connection between the Jews and World War II, they were referring to World War II and the Holocaust taken together as one apocalyptic battle. They did not limit the meaning of their war against what they called international Jewry to the Final Solution. Instead, they viewed the Final Solution, the details of which they never discussed in public, as a necessary campaign of retaliation in the context of a broader war of defense waged by Nazi Germany against international Jewry, world Jewry, and less frequently “the Jews.” In the minds and public assertions of the Nazi leaders, they were fighting a single war that pitted Germany and its allies against a colossal international conspiracy of nonequals driven by Jewish figures working behind the scenes, while their non-Jewish accomplices, primarily the Allies, were the enemy’s public facade. The Nazi narrative attributed enormous autonomy and power to the Jews, while denying those attributes to the nominal leaders of the most powerful nations in the world, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, whom it identified as the Jews’ puppets, accomplices, stooges, and servants.
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During the Weimar years, Nazi propagandists learned how to translate fundamental ideological postulates into a continuous narrative of events, a heavily slanted story of good and evil, easily accessible to mass audiences.
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Jews had made economic and social advances for which there were plausible commonsense explanations that had nothing to do with con-spiracy. The Nazis rejected the plausible in favor of the paranoid. As conspiracy theorists had done in blaming the Jews during the Weimar Republic, Nazis propagandists convinced themselves and their followers that commonsense explanations for developments were deceptive and illusory. The Jews’ small numbers, economic vulnerability, and lack of political influence were mere surface phenomena. The truth was that a small number of unseen conspirators controlled the course of national and international events from the shadows of the wings. The speed and ease with which the Nazis’ blizzard of anti-Semitic legislation destroyed the economic and social position of Jews in Germany did not change the Nazis’ view of Jewish power.75 By the end of 1933, 37,000 of the 525,000 Jews in Germany had already left the country.76 To anyone not imbued with Nazi ideology, it was obvious that the Nazi regime had launched a campaign of persecution against a small minority that had no access to the instruments necessary to wage “war” against Nazi Germany or any other nation-state.
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