IN 1933, Hitler’s infamous Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels introduced the Volksempfänger, or…
Tags: Communication, Trumpism, Trump, Twitter, Politics

Hitler’s Radio

David I. Aboulafia

IN 1933, Hitler’s infamous Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels introduced the Volksempfänger, or “people’s radio.” This still-new piece of technology was designed to be produced cheaply, and sold cheaply. It was only sensitive enough to pick up German and Austrian broadcasts. Adorned with two swastikas, one on each side, the Volksempfänger was employed as the principal tool by which Goebbels disseminated Nazi misinformation to the German public.

Eventually, listening to any other radio station would become a crime in Germany, earning the listener banishment to a concentration camp or, sometimes, conviction of a capital crime punishable by death.

At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi henchman Albert Speer testified that the radio was used to deprive the German people of independent thought, making it “possible to subject them to the will of one man.” Writer David Vaughan has aptly described the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich and, in particular, the capitulation of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Hitler that allowed it. Chamberlain desired peace with Germany at any cost, and the price was to allow Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia. Vaughan writes that the fledging BBC’s reporting of events was filtered through Chamberlain, who clandestinely prevented anything controversial about the German occupation to reach the ears of his people.

“Chamberlain had learned a lot from Goebbels, who had been intensely aware of the potential of radio from the moment he became propaganda minister…Czechoslovakia was agonizingly slow to recognize the danger of Nazi radio propaganda.”

Vaughan, quoting John Coatman, a former BBC chief news editor, states that “had the service offered more balanced coverage, ‘it might, probably would, have made all the difference between the surrender to which democracy has submitted and the negotiation of a real peace which would have left Europe secure.’”

There is a lesson to be learned from such history, as there always is. Americans, like the Czechoslovakians, have been excruciatingly slow to realize how they have been manipulated by the propaganda of the Trump administration. That propaganda has been disseminated principally through Twitter.

Twitter has become Donald Trump’s Volksempfänger. Twitter is the radio through which Trump spreads his vile lies, racist mantras, violence-inspiring rhetoric, and self-serving propaganda to this country, changing the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Americans in the process. The difference between Trump’s use of Twitter, and Hitler’s use of the Volksempfänger, is not one of nature, but merely one of degree.

Hitler’s rhetoric encouraged some Germans to loot and vandalize Jewish-owned shops. It conditioned them to blindly salute the false flag of nationalism, to look away from the atrocities their leaders were committing, or to deny they were happening at all. As Jews were being corralled into gas chambers and cremated in ovens not far from their own backyards. Even as the stench of these murders lingered in their noses. Only when their cities were bombed one after the other did reality slowly begin to intrude.

Trump’s rhetoric inspires too many Americans to rip “Black Lives Matter” signs from the facades of historic black churches and burn them in the streets. To view the free press as the “enemy of the people.” As Stalin did. As Mao Zedong did. As Hitler did. To occupy state houses with automatic rifles. To assault nurses as they leave their hospitals. To deny the pandemic and characterize it as a hoax and, only later, like madmen – even as they are being killed by the virus – to refuse to believe it is murdering them.

It is why they stubbornly gather mask-less in crowds, displaying their omissions as some kind of warped, dystopian form of political expression and fealty to the president. It is why some believe that a legitimate democratic election has been tainted by fraud. It is why thousands of Americans will undoubtedly amass on January 6, 2021 - as their Great Leader has urged them to – again, through Twitter – to protest Congress’s final acceptance of the results of America’s Presidential election.

It is why our democracy is now endangered.

Twitter has shuttered itself like a shivering rabbit behind a slender, perforated veil it conveniently denominates as “free speech.” It has knowingly, intentionally permitted the deliberate propagation of misinformation, propaganda and hate speech, and provided the platform by which to disseminate same to 80 million of its followers. The daily Trump Twitter rantings are specifically designed to mislead the public, foment civil unrest - if not outright sedition and revolution – inspire distrust in the free press and in governmental institutions, and blur the difference between fact and fiction. Twitter allows this without taking the slightest responsibility whatever for its acts and omissions. It sits back, and by, as if it were some kind of disinterested spectator, or as if it were Mad magazine’s famous icon, Alfred E. Newman, who blissfully declares “What, me worry?”

Oh, to be sure, Twitter, caving more to public indignation than to any moral grounding its creators and managers may possess, has graced the Trump tweets with “warning” labels and “fact checks,” placing no more than simple asterisks on the propaganda they willingly disseminate with a wink and a nod. Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner has explained that Twitter excepts world leaders from its normal in-house rules and restrictions, reasoning that “people should be able to hear from world leaders even when they share controversial posts because their messages are inherently newsworthy.”

Really? This no more than the statement of a participant-observer acting as apologist, like a cigarette manufacturer who puts a warning label on its deadly product, arguing somehow that such qualification someone gives it a free license to kill without blemish on its conscience.

A servile lack of judgment can never be a beneficial thing. A distortion communicated to millions could never be deemed useful. Irresponsibility is not some slogan to be placed on a billboard to advertise a service.

Twitter is enabler of violence-inspiring rhetoric. Of speech that has harm, confusion and discord as its object. It is Hitler’s radio, the means by which harm is accomplished, without which it might not be perpetrated at all.

Twitter is like the arsonist who blames the match for the fire he sets. It is like a man who knowingly hands the keys to a car to a drunk driver, disingenuously urging him to be careful driving, but knowing that harm is likely to result. It then disclaims any responsibility for the predictable outcome of its capitulation. Perhaps it seeks a Chamberlain-like peace of some kind. More likely, all it does is feed an increasingly dangerous war of words that has real-life consequences.

The right to “free speech” does not bestow upon any of us the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater, as the old legal maxim goes. We have the right to burn our flag. We have the right to march and protest with swastikas on our shoulders. In sum, we have an absolute right to express diverse opinions, even morally offensive and highly controversial opinions.

But no law, nor legal precept, nor the Constitution itself gives anyone the right to intentionally lie and mislead, or propagate such lies and deception and, by doing so, cause actual harm. In some cases, the harm has been existential, dividing Americans into categories of race, standing, party or economic class, erecting an invisible partition between this country’s citizens, one sturdier and more invulnerable to demolition than any physical wall Trump might have wished to erect. But no such harm fails to have real world effects. Advertisers have long been aware of the value of a repetitive message. Any idea, communicated incessantly over an extended period of time, has the power to change hearts and minds, and, ultimately, our actions.

In 1964, pioneering communications professional Marshall Mcluhan famously said that “the medium is the message.” By this he meant that the tools by which we communicate, ultimately become the very message being communicated in the first instance.

Thus, Twitter is not merely acting as the medium, but as the message itself. The law instructs us, at least in my state, that the one who merely communicates a slander, is liable for the slander himself. Twitter, as medium, has become Trump’s message.

Twitter will continue to allow this long after the Trump presidency has faded into the obscurity of dark history. It will continue to allow Trump to sow discord and spread his self-serving, pathologically narcissistic messaging among the American populace. It will continue to allow this only because millions of us are listening, and because they profit by us doing so.

As long as we all tune in.