I was just restricted on Facebook. No surprise, much of Punching Bag content has been shadow-banned over the past several years. I can post a BS political meme and get tens of thousands of views, but an article on the issue with an identical theme might get a couple hundred. It is useless as a platform now.
I recently made a statement on Facebook about Mein Kampf, the book written by Adolf Hitler, the book that justified the Holocaust. The Facebook censors have decided that the contents of that book should never be spoken about, it is hate speech.
I’ve read it.
Before you form a picture of me carrying a copy around in my back pocket along with my little red book from Chairman Mao, you should know I do a lot of research in psychology, propaganda, mass influence, advertising, marketing, political science, social science and much more. In my office, I’m surrounded by more than 600 books in these areas, mine and from friends, and I’ve generated original research in this area. Not many have a better grasp of the subject, and my close circle of intellectual friends easily (and sadly) overwhelm the expertise of most university psychology departments. (You should see my friend George make a University professor wilt, it’s entertaining…)
I was inspired to read Mein Kampf by the watchwords of the Jewish community, one of the most powerful phrases in the world today.
“Never again.”
I believe that everyone should read Mein Kampf, especially those who are of Jewish descent. Not because it is some great philosophical work (it isn’t), but because it lays out the strategy that led to massive inhumanity, millions of people treated most brutally and callously possible. Ultimately 11 million innocent people (Jewish and others) were executed just because they were NOT Nazis.
Want to know the gist? Well, here it is.
Mein Kampf uses the basic techniques of marketing, capitalizing on several principles of influence outlined by Robert Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion, notably “commitment and consistency.”
Talking about the Jews, it provides details about Hitler’s perceptions and why he believes they should be hated, in increasing severity. Many of these criticisms are valid, they are based in fact, like that the Jews are rich (some of them certainly were), they tend to do business within their community (like everyone else, especially then), and they are doing relatively well in a down economy while many others suffered. He hated them for that. He proceeds to talk about the comparative suffering of other people and how it bitterly affected his life, playing on some of the anti-Jewish sentiments in society at the time. Again, these are the facts and conditions in 1925 post-WWI Germany.
So you have statements A, B, C, and D, that are based in fact and undeniable in the context of the day. The book created a “commitment” in the people who read it, for those who accepted the statements up to that point. “Consistency” demands that you continue to follow the reasoning and gives you the desire to accept the conclusion (basic marketing doctrine).
If you keep an eye out, you can see this same technique in today’s advertising world. How many times have you watched a commercial and the conclusion was that the product would change your life, or something else outlandish that was not supported by the previous reasoning? If you happen to be following the disinformation about Trump, then you will easily see why the left hates him so much, the techniques are similar. It works, especially on the feeble-minded.
In the case of Mein Kampf (taking some liberties in the paraphrasing) he made a giant, sinister, disjointed jump: “Therefore… Jews are animals, they don’t deserve your sympathy, they must be removed from our society, kill them now.“
Now is the time to say “holy crap” or “WTF.”
This is the giant fraud, the massive leap into dislogic, the statement that cannot be justified by any of the previous statements. But remember, you and I are in 2022 America. If you are in 1925 Germany, perhaps you are experiencing suffering similar to his, looking for a scapegoat and you have spent time “committing” to the previous statements. The “consistency” part of the method forces you to suspend your normal ethics and common sense long enough to accept this logic as possible, to believe the conclusion because you have accepted all of the premises and have experienced a sequence of trusted steps – a moment of suspended reason, a tiny crack in a stressed ethical norm that allowed a dismissal of this insane connection.
Make no mistake, the people of Germany at the time were not monsters, and would never overtly accept this logic. There was an anti-Jewish sentiment, but mass murder was not in their character, not an inkling.
But neither were they strong enough or motivated enough to stop Hitler’s rise. Hitler was able to play on the reality of life in Germany and was accepted despite his psychopathic hate, known from Mein Kampf. That tiny crack allowed them to move the insanity to the back burner – not because they believed it, but because they were able to accept it, if only for a moment, despite its insane nature.
The totality of factors allowing Hitler to rise in Germany is beyond the scope of this article. But if you don’t study the history and ask the questions of how the Holocaust happened, how men who should have been strongly moral carried out the orders of Hitler to kill millions of human beings, then you will never see it developing.
And it will happen again.
The stupidity and ignorance of the Facebook censors have been well-documented by others. But this case may allow you to see the magnitude of the crime that is committed when foolish but powerful people attempt to control speech in the interest of tempering the conversation so that others will not be offended.
So what is the greater crime? Discussing an offensive topic, but one that might educate people as to how a horrific historic event happened? Or suppressing discussion of offensive but historically important material, with the excuse that some people might be offended?
My answer is simple, I only need to accept the logic, the mandate and the implied assignment of the following phrase.
Never again.
How can you prevent something from happening again, if you don’t know how it happened the first time?