Saturday 23 June 2018

don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the nazi party

Writing for Gizmodo’s Paleofuture, blogger and correspondent Matt Novak gives us a crucial reminder that too few realised the nature of the ascendant Third Reich’s National Socialist Workers’ Party (and perhaps of that minority, too many were either complicit or silent) when as early as 1933, they had opened their first concentration camps nor as late as 1939 when a Nazi rally was held in Madison Square Garden.
This trans-Atlantic acceptance (which surely translated to diminishing concerns elsewhere as well) was due at least in part to US media moguls and public-relations agents, including Edward L Bernays (previously) who we see receiving retainers as foreign agents to push spin and propaganda similar to, adjusted for inflation, to the fees we are catching wind of today—as testament to how under-valued democracy and freedom is. Change is gradual and we can too easily become inured to it, especially when boundaries are trampled on and such behaviour is normalised by the media and given enough of a narrative that the safest among us are the most precarious and under threat.