• @[email protected]
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    1594 months ago

    His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will **believe a big lie **sooner than a little one; and **if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. **

    https://phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/documents/osssection3pt1.htm

    • @something_random_tho
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      1684 months ago

      I never understood how normal, kind Germans in the 1920s could be so brainwashed that they’d turn into monsters just a few years later.

      Now I’ve lived through it and seen the same transformation within my own family. It’s incredibly sad.

      • @[email protected]
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        504 months ago

        “Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.” - Naomi Shulman

      • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)
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        4 months ago

        It’s very much like how people have created cults, slowly pushing the boundaries people will accept, while also claiming to be the authority of everything and accept no blame. And people crave a sense of belonging, and community. By the time people find out they are following a monster they are so far down the wrong path they feel trapped and it’s the path of least resistance to just go with it. Also an example is made of anyone trying to rock the boat.

        Was an episode of The Dollop (podcast) about a teacher that created a cult of his students to show them this exact scenario (how everyday Germans got behind Hitler). I’ll look it up later if nobody beats me to it before then.

        Edit - nevermind found it faster than I thought I would.

        • @[email protected]
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          214 months ago

          It’s not just like how people created cults, it’s the exact same recipe. They are cults. I have a friend who is obsessed with true crime podcasts about cults, like, listened to the final recordings of the Jonestown massacre where you can hear people dying from cyanide poisoning in the background obsessed, and he was recently telling me how both Trump and Hitler’s speeches sound exactly like Jim Jones.

          • @DamienGramatacus
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            154 months ago

            Can confirm. I’m currently listening to Transmissions From Jonestown and had this very same thought the other day. I haven’t heard many Hitler speeches but the rambling cadence of Jones and Trump are eerily similar.

        • @[email protected]
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          64 months ago

          That was a good watch. Wasn’t planning on taking nearly an hour and a half out of my day on a random video, but it was super interesting so I couldn’t stop!

        • @[email protected]
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          -34 months ago

          crave a sense of belonging, and community

          this goes for brand fanbois too-- i’m in another thread full of people frothing at the mouth because i had the gall to point out how some report the company published didn’t make them particularly special within the industry. it’s sad seeing grown ass adults whiteknighting for a corporation, of all things

      • @[email protected]
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        214 months ago

        And i still don’t understand it, even if I’m seeing it happen live with my own two eyes

        There really is something wrong

        • @madcaesar
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          34 months ago

          I never believed Republicans could be this stupid. I mean… Following George W Bush, such an obvious moron… He at least had some charisma, some decency in him…

          But Trump is a pure garbage human being. From inside and out, I couldn’t point to a single admirable trait of the fucker.

          And that is who these morons cheer for.

        • @IchNichtenLichten
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          134 months ago

          I’m not sure it’s accurate to call it patriotism. It’s fine to love your country.

          This is nationalism, in other words “my country is better than yours”, or “I’m better than you because I live in a better country than you do”.

            • @IchNichtenLichten
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              64 months ago

              Care to expand because this seems like a pretty extreme position?

              • @[email protected]
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                14 months ago

                I don’t really see the difference between what you call patriotism and nationalism. It’s both identity politics in favour of the powerful. If I focus on “loving” my country, I might get distracted that both I as well as my siblings from other countries get exploited by the ruling class.

                • @IchNichtenLichten
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                  74 months ago

                  I thought I explained it already. You can love one thing without it automatically meaning you must hate something else.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    54 months ago

                    I get what they mean in that it’s a thin line between the two, especially in the US. I was recently talking to my dad, a Bernie Sanders voter who is about as left-leaning as I’ve ever seen, and he was talking about how after 9/11 happened the country really banded together and there was a real outpouring of patriotism. I told him that what I remembered from the days after 9/11 was that attacks against Jews doubled overnight, attacks on Muslims more than tripled, and increased against pretty much any other kind of minority you can think of.

                    American patriotism and nationalism is basically a “to-may-to, to-mah-to” situation. Patriotism in the US is defined by things like 9 year old kids pledging their undying loyalty to the flag of the country with a hand over their heart every morning at school.

                • @WoahWoah
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                  4 months ago

                  One way to think about it is that it’s similar to the difference between partisanship, a positive belief in the party you vote for that correlates with higher faith in democracy, and negative partisanship, a negative belief in parties that you vote against that correlates with dissatisfaction with democracy.

                  They’re both “forms of partisanship,” but they’re distinct and different. The way patriotism and nationalism are being used in this thread share similar affective features.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    24 months ago

                    Pride in your nation (to me at least) is so intrinsically linked to the modern nation state that I can’t untangle it from nationalism. As such, it is always a tool for the powerful to override international class solidarity.

                    I can get if you’re tied to and have positive feelings towards a culture that you identify with. But the nation tries to replace that connection to a culture by:

                    1. Not making it opt-out (becoming stateless is such a disadvantage, if it’s even possible)
                    2. assimilating different cultures that actually don’t have too much in common. E.g. Danes and Mecklemburgians have way more in common culturally that Mecklemburgians with Bavarians.