The Goebbels in Aso Rock
BY GODWIN TSA
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a master propagandist of the Nazi regime and dictator of its cultural life. A small man with a large head, a crippled foot and a fragile body, he masterminded the Nazi propaganda machine under his master, Adolf Hitler, and effectively executed its murderous agenda.
As Hitler’s Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and closest associate, Goebbels was known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent anti-Semitism. He advocated progressively, harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
His propaganda ministry gained and exerted control over the news media and information in Germany for propaganda purposes on such topics such as anti-Semitism and attacks on the Christian churches.
Although he was born in 1897 into a strict Catholic, working-class family in Ryeydt, Germany, Goebbels later abandoned his Christian faith. He grew up as a child he had polio, which left him with a deformed foot and one leg two inches shorter than the other. This caused him to be rejected for military service during World War I. Instead he earned a Ph.D in History and Literature from the University of Heidelberg, and began working as a journalist.
Goebbels subjected artists and journalists to state control and eliminated all Jews and political opponents from positions of influence. On May 10, 1933, he staged a massive book burning in Berlin, where university students destroyed the works of Jewish and other blacklisted authors in huge bonfires. Goebbels promoted the Nazis’ anti-Semitic message through black and white films such as The Eternal Jew (1940) and reinforced an ideology of Nazi supremacy with Leni Riefenstahl’s state-funded documentaries ‘Triumph of the Will’, about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympia, about the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
The “Big Lie” theory which was attributed to him gained currency and was applied by his master Hitler during his reign of terror.
According to the theory; “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and this by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”
But the original description of the “Big Lie” appeared in Mein Kampt. Adolf Hitler applied it to the behavior of the Jews, rather than a tactic he advocated. Specifically, he accused Viennese Jews of trying to discredit the Germans’ activities during World War I. Hitler wrote of the Jews’ “unqualified capacity for falsehood” and “that in the big lie there is always a certain form of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and this in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in the little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
Goebbels did describe the big lie in different language in an article he wrote in 1941, “Churchill’s Lie Factory,” but he was accusing the British of the ploy: The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Randall Bytwerk argues that neither Hitler nor Goebbels would admit to lying. Goebbels, “always maintained that propaganda had to be truthful. That doesn’t mean he didn’t lie, but it would be a pretty poor propagandist who publicly proclaimed that he was going to lie.”
After creating an atmosphere of fear and hatred, Goebbels began to authorize violence himself. On November 9, 1938, after the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish student in Paris, Goebbels called for “spontaneous demonstrations” against the Jews. When the pogrom, known as Kristallnacht, was over, rampaging mobs had killed 91 Jews, burned more than 900 synagogues, destroyed nearly 7,000 Jewish businesses, and caused 30,000 Jewish men to be deported to concentration camps. Goebbels later helped execute Hitler’s “Final Solution,” issuing public warnings that “the Jews will pay with extermination of their race…” and supervising the deportations of Jews and other people considered undesirable by the Nazis from Berlin to extermination camps.
During World War II, Goebbels wrote innumerable articles and speeches rousing the German people to arms. On February 18, 1943, Goebbels delivered his most famous speech, the Sportpalast, or Total War, speech, in which he motivated the German people to continue their struggle even though the German war effort was failing. Although the Allies were by then winning the war, and insisting on unconditional surrender, Goebbels whipped the crowd into a frenzy and mobilized them for a near-suicidal “total war.” Inventing secret weapons and mountain fortresses where the Nazis would make their last stand, Goebbels never lost his faith in his cause.
On May 1, 1945, with Berlin under siege and Hitler dead, Goebbels and his wife Magda poisoned their six children and then killed themselves with the help of bodyguards from the German SS. Their bodies were burned, left unburied, and quickly found by Soviet troops. Before his death, Goebbels had declared, “We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.”
Today in Nigeria, there is a Joseph Goebbels in the seat of power, Aso Rock. A certain Presidential aide is callously playing the role of Joseph Goebbels in the satanic agenda of ethnic expansionist.
In projecting himself as the most faithful shield-bearer to the President and orchestrating a pseudo-religious cult, our home made Goebbels has no less cynically gave open voice to his contempt for practitioners of other religions.
His recent outings in the controversy surrounding the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami, and his response to Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state on the killings of harmless displaced persons in the state, clearly put him in same footings with the actions and activities of late Nazi propagandist- a heartless religious bigotry discriminating against Christians who are being hacked down on daily basis by marauding Fulani herdsmen in their ancestral lands unprovoked.
Speaking in defence of Pantami jihadist views, the presidency through the aide said Pantami made those statements when he was young. Secondly, Shehu says, since he has apologized, he should be forgiven.
“The views were absolutely unacceptable then and would be equally unacceptable today were he to repeat them, for he has publicly and permanently condemned his earlier statements as wrong. In the 2000s the Minister was a man in his 20s; next year he will be 50. Time has passed and people and their opinions often rightly change.”
Would this aide take this position if these jihadist views were expressed by a practitioner of the Christian faith?
Responding to Governor Ortom, this media aide wrote: “Benue under the Ortom administration ought to cooperate with the Federal Government in the implementation of a number of national strategies Programmes in addressing underlying issues militating against peace, progress and development. This can still get done when the interest of the people is placed above all other interests. A government voted into office by the people, should treat the people as its masters and not as its servants.”
So innocent lives of Benue state citizens should be wasted because Governor Ortom has refused to cooperate with the federal government?
Assuming victims of the Benue attacks were his brothers and sisters of same faith, would it have attracted this response. May God deliver Nigerians from the hands of this Goebbels in Aso Rock.
Tsa, a media practitioner, wrote this piece from Abuja
