All Mental Illnesses are simply believing in "The Big Lie" - Which Hitler was so delusionally proud of

 Mein Kampf  (My Struggle) 1923

 

When the Nazi Party under Hitler's leadership took over the reins of government in Germany in 1933 after more than a decade of agitation and violence, the world was appalled by its actions. The old regime was cold and ruthless in establishing its control; all the structures of democratic government were abolished, and dissenting views were mercilessly suppressed.

 

Mein Kampf, (My Struggle) rightly has been called the propagandist masterpiece of our age. Hitler formed at an early age his impressions, prejudices, and hatreds that were to govern him for the remainder of his life. According to his own accounts, his early years were full of privation, deprivation, suffering, failure and maladjustment.  His formal schooling stopped at 13 and both parents were lost at about the same time. Hitler claimed he read widely with emphasis on history and his ideas were influenced particularly by a book on the Franco-Persian War, which inspired in him a fervent pride in the German race and convinced him of the God-given right to a particular destiny of the German people.

 

Mein Kampt has been described as 10% autobiography, 90% dogma and 100% propaganda. He described the three methods to objectify his soaring ambitions: Propaganda, Diplomacy, and Force. Propaganda techniques he believed correctly would be one of the Nazis' most effective and formidable weapons in the war. The function of propaganda is not to weigh and ponder the rights of different peoples but to emphasize the rights of only one side of the debate, the side that the propaganda is to benefit. He stated that the receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small but their power of forgetting is enormous. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to very few points and must be handled by slogans until the very last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by the slogan.

 

 His statements illustrate Hitler’s faith in propaganda that, it is possible employing shrewd and unremitting propaganda to make people ‘believe that heaven is hell and hell is heaven’. (A statement that my own oldest brother used to say to me growing up. He was extremely proud of his magical thinking and ability to twist any fact in reality into fiction and a lie – the basic force of evil-doers)  For its greatest potential, propaganda must be adapted to the most limited intelligence, and must always and primarily be directed at their emotions and very little at man's alleged reasoning. Propaganda has little more to do a scientific accuracy than a poster has to do with art.

 

Their complete emotional capitulation is relatively easy to achieve. Hitler's supreme contempt for the masses appears again and again, as he frequently stated “those empty-headed herd of sheep are the incarnation of stupidity”. The ultimate in Hitler's propaganda technique is the principle of the ‘Big Lie’. The doctrine simply puts that the very greatness of the lie is the single most important fact in getting it believed by the primitive simplicity of the masses. The ‘great lies’ are more effective than a small one. Living the lie is perpetuated, for to admit to the knowledge of the lie, that one was fooled by it, would amount to an admission that you were a fool, therefore lies and the perpetuation of lies is self-assuring. Hence it would never occur to the broad masses, to suspect an all-encompassing lie. The masses will be quite unable to believe that anyone could possibly have the infernal imprudence to pervert the truth to such an extent. In brief - the bigger the lie the more likely it will be believed by the masses.

 

Another major propaganda principle is to always find a convenient target to direct your own self-hates onto – The Scapegoat -  ‘the single devil’. Do not confuse the populace by offering too many enemies for it to hate at the same time, instead concentrate on only one adversary and to focus the people's hatred upon this one enemy. For Hitler of course, the Jews served as a universal Scapegoat.

 

Education, Hitler felt is to be limited to the indoctrination of the masses with ‘general ideas, carved by eternal repetition into the heart, mind and memory of the people. His main guiding principle is that ‘the child belongs to the state, and the sole object of education is to train the youth to be tools of the state’.

 

Hitler was ignored by other world leaders because of the general atmosphere of appeasement at the time, their own wishful thinking and attempts at peace at any price that prevailed. Dictators and Evil willed humans around the world will continue to find primary source material for their evil purposes in Mein Kampt in the same manner that for the past four centuries they've been drawing upon Machiavelli in his classic The Prince.

 

June 3 2013