🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug18.165542.26574@bmerh85.bnr.ca> robinc@bnr.ca (Robin Collins) writes:
>In article <1992Aug17.204231.27166@news.unomaha.edu> trajan@cwis.unomaha.edu (Stephen McIntyre) writes:
>>     
>>Citizens become more susceptable to propaganda precisely because they
>>     lack a good education.  With T.V. and commercial magazines doing 
>>     the thinking for them, people are killing off their minds, 
>>     strangling the very thing that could protect them from irrational
>>     pinheads with a presuasive voice and power on the mind.  So, what
>>     can we do then?  Keep T.V. from the people?  Regulate the hours
>>     a station can run programming?  I don't know.  Any suggestions?
>
>
>How do you explain the fact that one of the most educated and sophisticated
>populations in the world at the time, was victim to propaganda despite
>its education (Germany, 1930s).
>In this context, how would you suggest that such a decline into barbarism
>might be prevented?

	This argument is a bit of a red herring. It was the least educated
segment of the German population that embraced Nazism. True, people like
Goebbels and some of Himmler's SS types (well, let's throw in Heidegger in
for good measure) were college educated, upper class/upper middle class
men. But these people were largely pseudo-intellectuals. At bottom, the
Nazi Movement turned out to nothing more than a ticket for them to get
ahead in life, not a serious intellectual commitment. When Germany lost 
the war, it became pathetically easy to turn these people into "liberal
democrats". (Reminds me an AWEFUL LOT of some Reagan-era wimp conservatives
and libertarians I know - just look at the polls and I think you'll
catch my drift)

	Anyway, the bottom line is that the "intellectuals" failed in
Germany not because they were fooled, but because they had no guts. The
ones who could not live a lie fled Grossdeutschland, and populated American
academia for a decade - until the Sixties generation came along and bullied
them for a second time.

	Bill R.

	"My opinions do not represent those of my employer or any
government agency."


-- 
Bill R.