Riffing off Napoleon’s notion of the “press as the seventh great power.” Joseph Goebbels gave a speech at a radio exhibition (18 August 1933) in which he named “Radio as the Eighth Great Power”.
“It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio….It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. …[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio….Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,…to provide a clear worldview.”
Substitute “internet” for “radio” and see how that sounds. The Nazis subsidized the manufacture and distribution of millions of radio sets and by the start of WWII, over 70% of German households had radios. Deliberately short range, radios, mind you because they didn’t want people picking up those ‘other’ countries broadcasts that might contradict what Hitler and company were saying.
The analogy isn’t perfect, we (in the United States, at least) can still visit websites from elsewhere and the Trumpistas don’t control everything here, but with Russian trolls and GOP disinformation propogating like mutant Kudzu, the opposing messages are getting swamped or, at least, muddied. Give them four more years and we may well wind up walled off from the rest of the world and faced only with right-wing propaganda.
Sure, Fox News is a giant propaganda organ, but it’s easy enough to see the Fox logo and disregard the content. One can see Trump’s mouth moving and know that lies are coming out of it. It’s harder when the comments on a website are names unknown to you, or from some friend-of-a-friend on your Facebook feed. Sure, you can spot the obvious lunatics, but too often it’s someone (or something) gaslighting us into doubting ourselves, our neighbors, and what’s happening in this country.
In Nazi Germany, many people reacted, at least in the privacy of their own homes, by turning off the radio, but few of us are inclined to abandon the internet. And, if we do, how isolated do we become? How effective an opposition can we be without the connections we have with those who share our values? And yet, if we cannot trust our primary means of communication, aren’t we already isolated?
All of this is fixable, of course. It starts with putting a leash on the big social media firms, restoring Net Neutrality, and getting serious about tracking down – and shutting down – the bot farms that are the psycho-social tools of voter manipulation. None of this, however, will happen until, and unless, we elect someone ready to fight the corporate entities currently in control of the internet and restore its credibility.
This is just one reason why this election matters. It is not just a matter of defeating Trump (and, preferably, the GOP as a whole) but of electing people who will restore our ability to communciate honestly, without the crippling fog of psychological warfare. A moderate, certainly not some neo-liberal corporate lapdog, will not be up to the task.