hermod wrote:Hektor wrote:That's why demonization can be such a powerful tool. Once you successfully demonized an enemy, you appear more holy (since you are fighting him) and those persuaded by the demonization disbelieve anything the enemy says or anything that is said and could defend the enemy against accusations. That effect must have been heavily at work with Allied prosecution teams and investigators during the early stage of the occupation of Germany.
In an old book about propaganda I read some time ago, the author explained that very well and he said that false atrocities (propaganda lies) generate real atrocities (brutalized enemies) and that those brutalities generate false confessions making those real atrocities seem legitimate and fully deserved in a vicious circle of lies, outrage, violence and more lies.
I'd love to have a look at that book.
The thing with false atrocities is that they won't necessary work, when they are over the top and recognizable, when they are outlandish. People expect to be fooled with propaganda, even if it comes from their side. So what propagandists do is to muddle this with as much as possible real information. That has been done with a lot of the 'Nazi atrocities'. E.g. pass on reprisals against partisans as atrocities against innocent civilians and the like. Pick up info on disease that and turn it into an extermination program, etc.
An once the vicious cycle is rolling, the propagandists can actually lean back, since now people unaware of deception will deliver info to you.
hermod wrote:Hektor wrote:The "Ueberleitungsvertrag": https://www.hackemesser.de/ueberleitungsvertrag.html
stipulates that the Allied court decisions can not be challenged, which anyway would be a laborsome process.
That way historiographers can always point to courts having proven German 'war crimes'. The audience will be ignorant of the problems with those trials of course. So the 'there are court verdicts'-argumentoid will continue to work. And most folks neither have the time nor the skills to work through court verdicts spotting what they problems with them are. It's apathy, laziness and ignorance that keep the Holocaust Ball rolling.
For fun, I like asking the people who refer to the court verdicts of post-WWII show trials as a definite proof of the Holocaust if they believe in witchcraft because there exist many court verdicts 'proving' the alleged guilt of so-called witches.
They have a repellant for this. They simply will claim that the witchcraft confessions were created using torture and that the people in the Middle Ages were irrational brutes, while today we use refined interrogation and are rational and enlightened people. This is of course false in more than one way:
- Losts of the confessions during witchcraft trials was obtained without the use of torture. People came forward and implicated themselves in witchcraft.
- The witch trials were mostly during the early enlightenment era, not the Middle Ages.
- People during the Middle ages were neither brutes nor irrational. In fact lots of the literature from that time is highly rational. This can even be seen, when they deal with the witchcraft issue. Many of the educated people did actually dismiss the wild witchcraft allegations.
But then most people don't actually realize this. It's the dimwittedness that assists Holocausting in so many ways, since with foolishness, you always can quickly design a copout.
