Hacker News Reader

Comment by smhost | Hacker News Reader

Well, not exactly. The ideological trick is to package pain and hardship and to sell it as something wonderful. It's not really even about promising good things in the future. That only works for part of the population (essentially the marshmallow experiment). What Goebbels did is much more immediate. If you identify with Goebbels, then the hardship itself registers as something that's good, and not merely as a promise of a delayed reward.

View on HN

Not sure I understand what you mean. It's a motivational speech like many others. Goebbels was a brilliant public speaker, no doubt. But he wasn't a social wizard who cast an evil spell on the German population, the way people who like to mysticize Nazism often portray him as. Such speakers still exist today, the same old populism still works great. The dangerous part about fascism is exactly that it wasn't a one off terrible mishap, it's a regular occurrence. The Nazis most certainly made all kinds of positive promises, they were the whole reason they got elected. They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc... Just look at their campaigns and posters.

> They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc.

You're missing one component, which is that the Nazis took all of these (more or less) legitimate grievances and redirected them into the figure of the Jew. You're right in that this wasn't a result of some supernatural ability of Hitler and Goebbels, and that's the whole point. There doesn't need to be. I'm sure individual Nazis had similar thoughts as you do (this is just another motivational speech, these are decent campaign promises, etc). The precondition to repeating Nazi ideology is already present in normal psychology.

You're just rephrasing what I wrote now, so I guess we agree. Will you admit your original point was misinformed then? We can look at actual Nazi election posters if you like, they never told the people it's going to be suffering and hell, obviously. They made tons of grand promises and that's how they got to power. Denying this fact is dangerous, if we don't understand how totalitarian regimes come about, history is bound to repeat itself.

What? No. I specifically referred to the Total War speech, not to election posters. You seem fixated on making your own point unrelated to what I was saying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com