“Go ahead,” said the skeleton of my father, “I don’t really care how little this has to do with my life, or my story. You seem intent on telling it, so go ahead.”
Well, you read the NY Times cover to cover every day, along with several other periodicals. You followed the news religiously, read a dozen or more papers on-line every day once you had a computer. You were an avid student of history. Is history not an ongoing horror show we can’t look away from?
“Fine, go ahead, I said,” said the skeleton, with a yawn, or a silent scream, “Tell them all about The Poisonous Dwarf and his pioneering efforts in mass political marketing. Luckily for me, I’m dead.”
This belongs in the book, dad, somehow.
“If you say so, you’re the poor fuck whose got to try to sell it.”
In November 1923, when my grandmother was pregnant with the fetus that would grow up to be Irv Widaen, a little known rising star of the militant German Right, Adolf Hitler, jumped the gun and tried, with two thousand armed followers and a popular right wing general, to violently take over Munich, and subsequently Germany. When my father was a newborn, Hitler was sitting in comfortable Landsberg Prison, a kind of white collar lock-up, dictating a few hundred pages of rabid slavering to his obsequious, dim follower Rudolf Hess and his future driver and founder of the SS, fucking one eighth-Jew Emil Maurice.
Placed on trial after the failed putsch by the world’s model democracy in post-World War One Germany (“described after the fact as one marked by ‘supine passivity'”, added the skeleton of my father) Mr. Hitler had performed brilliantly in court, in front of a sympathetic reactionary judge, and increased his Twitter following a thousand-fold. He was world famous overnight. He did so well at the trial, performing as a passionately outraged patriot, that he ended up serving less than nine months of his five year sentence for high treason, during which hideous gestation period his ill-hatched best seller Mein Kampf was completed. [1]
“Oh, this is really darling, Elie, you’re doing this like a creative writing story,” said the skeleton, turning away.
By the time my father was nine Mr. Hitler had maneuvered his way into absolute power, seizing on a fully constitutional measure, under the admirably democratic Weimar Constitution, to pass an Enabling Act and make himself Fuhrer under the Emergency Powers provision triggered by the burning of the Reichstag, the German Parliament, a politically expedient fire the Nazis almost definitely set, and beheaded a Communist dupe for, shortly after the Nazis rose to prominence in the government, with that famous 39% mandate.
“Convoluted, moreso, I daresay I think not you could have woven, if woven we can say, that long run-on sentence,” said the skeleton absently. “Hitler, coyly exploiting the AUMF of his day to do his damnedest.”
The point, the point, then, the accursed fucking point. Hitler, a pretentious autodidact and the smartest moron in every room he dominated, gathered around him a band of fiercely loyal men. Among them was the club-footed Doctor Joseph Goebbels, whose doctorate, I believe, was in German literature, the equivalent of my Masters in Creative Writing. The fanatically devoted Dr. Goebbels was not the ideal Aryan, being small, dark and crippled, but he was the ideal wing man for Mr. Hitler, and reportedly the shrill little bastard, referred to on the street as “The Poisonous Dwarf”, had sex with many women, in addition to his devoted wife who bore him a brood of little Goebbelses. He was Hitler’s Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and in this capacity, and as head of German arts, cinema, radio, news and all mass media, he wielded tremendous power in the Third Reich.
“The Thousand Year Reich,” said the skeleton.
You can see movie clips of his speeches to the German public. As despicable and clearly psychotic as Hitler is in similar clips, you can see, if you look hard enough and catch certain moments, a bit of Hitler’s charisma. Goebbels, on the other hand, was only the confirmation of war criminal, ladies man Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about power being the ultimate aphrodisiac. It is an indictment of artistic ambition of all kinds to imagine anyone willingly submitting to The Poisonous Dwarf’s, eh, charms, but there you have it.
“The point, the point, Elie, the point,” said the skeleton.
Yah-vold, mein herr. Hitler recognized the necessity of political propaganda in selling ‘ideology’. He admired the Allies skillful and heartless use of outright and inflammatory lies to enflame their armies and their populations to vicious hatred of their enemies. He described and applauded it in the only lucid passages of Mein Kampf and consciously set about doing it in his own cause after his failed Beerhall Putsch in November 1923. He had a certain artistic flair for propaganda and branding– he came up with the Nazi flag, the dramatic red flag with the swastika in a white circle. Can’t beat that for a symbol.
“Can’t beat it with the femur of a dead Jew,” said the skeleton. “By the way, I’d appreciate not being used as a semi-comic prop right now.”
Yah-vold, mein herr. Goebbels, for all his many repulsive attributes, was a master of propaganda, he was the man for the crucial job of convincing Germans that Hitler was an infallible leader sent by God for a holy mission they should all be willing to lay down their lives for. In the end he’d do it himself, shooting, or perhaps poisoning, his wife, children and himself in the bunker on the day Hitler shot his dog, and Eva Braun, and himself. Tragic, really, that they didn’t do all that necessary euthanasia decades earlier.
“But you digress,” said the skeleton.
I’ve described this elsewhere on this blahg, I have no idea where and my current drug-induced asthenia prevents me from searching, but Goebbels was the first to grasp the importance of real-time public feedback in determining how to most effectively sell the Nazi version of reality to the public.
“Here you go, courtesy of the WordPress version of Jeeves, you put this up in May,” said the skeleton, “to wit:”
Back in Hitler’s time his party made unprecedented use of social feedback to continually adjust and sell their policies. Every speech Hitler gave was heard over millions of radios. Every listener’s reaction was reported up the chain, each apartment building had a captain, every block had someone who reported these reports to a gauleiter higher up the food chain, to Goebbels himself.
Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, quickly had feedback on how the public was buying a given load of crap from candidate Hitler and later from the Fuhrer. Having, and being able to analyze, such data is crucial in selling anything, marketers run ad campaigns based on these invaluable insights. Political campaigns are about branding and marketing. The side with the most emotionally effective “messaging” wins.
Fast forward through almost a century of politics, commerce and technology to Josef Goebbels’s wet dream. On the internet, an international entity virtually everyone in the world who is not in dire poverty uses many times a day, individual choices are continually collected and analyzed by algorithms to target specific demographics for marketing purposes. It’s done instantly, silently, seamlessly. I am, for example, what emotional right-wingers would instantly recognize as a commie, anyone who reads a bit of this blahg can see at once that I am a man who hates unregulated capitalism. But I am a commie who plays guitar and ukulele, draws and loves well-designed, reasonably priced, one-handed folding knives. My friends may not always recall these things about me at birthday time, but Google and Amazon never forget these enthusiasms of mine. I get colorful reminders on-line all the time.
What Goebbels and Hitler pioneered in the years leading up to, and all through, the Thousand Year Reich, real-time political market research, is now within the affordable grasp of every politician or salesman of any and every stripe. So when you see these cocksuckers from FaceBook and Google dancing in televised senate hearings about why they didn’t recognize that 126 million FaceBook friends would see false and damaging political ads purchased, in rubles, by Russian troll farms, well, what is there to wonder about?
The religion of our great nation is the bottom line, expressed through the indomitable will of the Free Market. These are the winners, the most brilliant and successful businesses in our country, on a par with the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries. Who is some elected cocksucker in the senate to question the practices of user-friendly multibillion dollar corporations that most Americans rely on for access to virtually everything?
“OK, Elie, calm down, you’re not winning anybody over here,” said the skeleton.
There’s nobody to win over, dad, you should know that better than anybody. The big bucks are made confirming the confirmation bias, selling masses of scientifically selected individuals exactly what they themselves most fervently want to believe, based on their constantly expressed preferences.
“You make a not unreasonable point. Now go take a nap, Elie, I have to lie down myself.” And, with a dramatic flop, he did.
[1] Hats off to Wikipedia for this brilliant paragraph:
From Hitler’s perspective, there were three positive benefits from this attempt to seize power unlawfully. First, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the German nation and generated front page headlines in newspapers around the world. His arrest was followed by a 24-day trial, which was widely publicized and gave Hitler a platform to publicize his nationalist sentiment to the nation. Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison.[3] The second benefit to Hitler was that he used his time in prison to produce Mein Kampf, which was dictated to his fellow prisoners Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. On 20 December 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler was released.[4][5] The final benefit that Hitler accrued was the insight that the path to power was through legitimate means rather than revolution or force. Accordingly, the most significant outcome of the putsch was a decision by Hitler to change NSDAP tactics, which would demand an increasing reliance on the development and furthering of Nazi propaganda.[6]
gratuitousblahg 