From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 21:57:07 MDT
The point I thought I was making is that almost NOONE
in Hitler's Germany believed in Nazism. It was an
absurd mismash of ideas that were convenient to the
actual goals of the Nazi leaders. Unlike Marxism in
Russia - which people did seriously believe for a LONG
time (and they were also famous for the jokes, all the
way back to Stalinist days.) - Nazism was a meme that
succeeded spectacularly even though nobody even
thought it was true.
(Hitler himself was quite a humorist. At one of the
huge rallies of which I saw a film in my college
German class, he is announcing Chamberlin's response
to his demands, in which Chamberlin demands that
Germany guarantee that they will not invade or attack
the following countries - and then Hitler pauses for
effect - and starts reading a list of virtually every
nation on the globe, each time smiling and pausing for
effect, and each time the laughter is growing from the
enormous audience - a sea of faces - until there is
this ongoing ROAR of laughter.)
I think that it is possible to use humor - especially
really nasty sarcasm - to bring people around to some
point. In the above case, it was to substitute humor
for rational fear. The German people did not want
war. Hitler wanted war. Once the war had started, it
was an effective fait acompli as far as the typical
German was concerned. It was too late to back out -
they remembered Versailles all too well - the Nazis
made the stupid Versailles Treaty one of their key
arguments - so they hoped that Germany would win.
Hitler's humor made the enemy appear contemptible -
and Chamberlin's Appeasement was contemptible.
>Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
wrote on Sat Jun 15 2002 - 16:16:21 MDT:
On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 02:11:52PM -0700, Phil Osborn
wrote:
>
>> The NAZI's tolerated the jokes, knowing that they
did
>> nothing, except perhaps relieve tension. I
understand
>> that a similar attitude prevails in China. You can
>> say virtually anything, but try to DO anything....
>Which in the long run may be the undoing of many
regimes. When the jokes
and cleverly hidden satire start to form a coherent
counter-narrative
ideologically driven regimes are in trouble: when
people no longer
believe in the ideology the only thing holding
together the system is
the coercive or institutional force - otherwise it
would be
self-reinforcing by people seeing the dominant
ideology as "good" and
practical. While coercion and institutions are still
powerful, they are
not immune to the corrosive effects of disdain and
that people feel they
have a moral lease to cheat the system if they can.>
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