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| credit: Taylor Jones | |
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BC Idonwanna sez: You get what you pay for!
When a respected commanding general says the United States government is in
"unbelievable turmoil" ,
US Person takes note. Perhaps that is what comes of installing an (un)reality TV star in the room without corners. Trumpit has either digested Dr. Goebbels* or P.T. Barnum. You decide, but the
"freak show" is sure to continue.
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credit: N. Beller, Columbus Dispatch
Wackydoodle sez: Ol' P.T. said there ain't no such thing as bad publicity! |
* Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich, told an audience of Nazi party members: "To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as
being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the
understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find
those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the
important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but
rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or
theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically
elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political
speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently
in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I
say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall [Berlin]. That is a
matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a
few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad
masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is
not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are
found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but
not in the meeting hall. See H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarinism, p.345 for the oft-noted similarities between totalitarian propaganda and business advertising. Hitler stressed this point in Mein Kampf where he used the business example of selling soap.
