Trump press conference on the news

Albert Speer nailed it

Speer was Hitler's Minister for Armaments. When he appeared at The Nuremberg Trials he put forward a pretty shrewd assessment of how it all started….

“Hitler’s dictatorship made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.

The new technology of radio was crucial. Every German household was encouraged to buy a heavily subsidised radio set so they could listen to constant warnings from Joseph Goebbels of the threats to Germany from the Jews, Soviets, Poles and just about anyone else.

Whether you believed Goebbels or not didn’t matter. As he stated. “A lie told once remains a lie. But a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”

Hitler knew, "effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas. These stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated, for only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."

And in summing up, Speer again….

“Earlier dictators needed highly qualified assistants even at the lowest level. Men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with such men; thanks to modern methods of communication, it is possible to mechanize the lower leadership. As a result of this there has arisen the new type of the uncritical recipient of orders."

What if some new technology allowed for something far more invasive than the radio? Where the uncritical would support anything that one man did or said?

Something like X.

 

Honestly I've got no idea what I was on about there. I could fix it, but I'll bask in my shame instead. I typed that message while I was in a meeting and mid sentence and I have no idea where that came from.

I think I was trying to say verbatim... not even close are they.