Grasping Reality
Joseph Goebbels (1932): Those Damned Nazis!: Weekend Reading
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Brad DeLong — Joseph Goebbels (1932): Those Damned Nazis!: Weekend Reading
Grasping Reality
Joseph Goebbels (1932): Those Damned Nazis!: Weekend Reading
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley
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4 comments:
What a hideous mess, and it's kind of childish too. A horrible mix of pretend socialism and real fascism. It's a weird socialism because it's virulent anti Marxism, but it also says it's anti the capitalist hierarchy but has an hierarchy based on merit with service to Germany instead. No doubt Hitler and his generals were at the top, i.e, the same old ruling class in power.
What a hideous mess, and it's kind of childish too. A horrible mix of pretend socialism and real fascism.
Copy that. -- 1930's U.S. State Department
https://youtu.be/WpJjuotD534
I hadn't read these short Goebbels pieces before, and in the light of the times, I was struck by how contemporary they are in some respects.
I think there are two separate but related issues that get conflated.
The first issue is nationalism and populism as the basis for a conservative political theory that will appeal to workers. Goebbels does a pretty decent job of presenting that in a form that is more or less acceptable in liberal democracies.
The second issue is the extremism. While Goebbels sets for a reasonable basis for a modern political theory that could be acceptable in a liberal democracy, he veers off into extremism in its application in a highly authoritarian way.
Related to this is the creation of "international Jewry" as the boogeyman. While that may seem ridiculously over the top in today's liberal world, it had a lot of support then and it still does in Europe, especially Eastern Europe.
It is also reflected in other forms of scapegoating such as racism and ethnic cleaning as nationalism viewed as national purity and national exceptionalism. This too is very much alive and operative today in various places around the world.
Rather than dismiss this Nazi stuff as offensive nonsense, we need to understand it and ask why it had appeal then, and variations on the theme still do, not limited to neo-Nazism.
I had thought it was pretty much a thing of the past, but it is raising it ugly head again. At the same time, a moderate nationalist and populist political theory favored by some conservatives should not be lumped together with it and compared with Nazism, and even equated with it, as some "liberals" are now to do.
So I think that these works of Goebbels need to be examined with a critical eye and awareness of nuance. Goebbels was a master of starring off with reasonable presentation and only subsequently veering to the extreme. This is commonly used persuasion technique — first hook them, and then reel them in. It didn't and still doesn't work on everyone but only those with confirmation bias, and there seems to be enough of them to catch to make it a worthwhile political strategy.
Probably offensive nonsense because of the idea of ‘breeding of a super race’. Upper classes always wanting to breed among themselves to ‘preserve the blood line’. No genetic diversity there. In Egypt the pharaoh bred with his sister. It took the universe billions of years to produce a human being – think of the arrogance believing they could improve on that. If architects could design the sky it would be full of billboards. Concepts – no feeling for being alive.
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