The Sovereign Voice Issue 5 | Page 98

Image Source Image Source THE FOURTH REICH IS HERE: A COMPARISON OF By Nico Cannone “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” – joseph goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister For thousands of years, controlling a population has been the bane of governments all over the world. Many used extreme violence, others used secret police, and some even used starvation as methods of forcing their own people into submission. Unsurprisingly, these methods had consequences, because people have a tendency to unite against their oppressors and eventually overthrow them. It wasn’t until the start of the 20th century that a revolutionary method was conceived to counter the power of the people. Instead of forcing them into submission with abuse, governments learned how to convince the people to submit with words and ideas. When it came to implementing this new method, no regime was as thorough and efficient as Nazi Germany. The Nazis were pioneers in the art of shaping public opinion in order to achieve their goals. The Catholic Church even coined a term for this new form of control: they called it propaganda. Propaganda is defined as “information, especially if misleading in nature, used to promote a specific political view or cause.” Germany was not the first nor the last nation to use propaganda to control their people. Around the world, politicians used newspapers and radio to influence the masses, but their methods were sloppy, and their agendas were much smaller in scale. The Nazis however, learned to perfect the use and distribution of propaganda, convincing an entire nation to endorse the mass murder of Jews, and to fight a TheSovereignVoice.Org