Tag Archives: Hitler

About Propaganda

Narration of the following article

Did you ever ask yourself how it could have been possible that some 70, 80 years ago a whole people – the Germans – hailed one man who then turned out to be a pretty bad guy?

I am not very surprised since I became someone who yelled “Hail!” myself.

Adolf Hitler Reading

Up to the days I stopped yelling “Hail! – or the equivalent thereof – I, myself, definitely did not understand how a whole people could be so blind and miss what was going on in the 3rd Reich.

It was simple arrogance, through ignorance.

Fortunately, I was able to uproot my arrogance of looking down upon the ‘poor, misled people of Germany’ and gain a more humble understanding.

In order to accomplish this, I first had to stop yelling “Hail!” myself, and then realize that I had indeed been shouting “Hail!”

I’m not old enough to have lived through the Hitler regime – so where the heck did I get a chance to yell “Hail?”

I’m not going to give you any names here because that would take away the fun for you to find out yourself, but I do tell that it was a group that many of you might know. You might have experienced it already, but for all of you who don’t – go out and find it.

It was a group that started out great – several decades ago. This group – not yet religious – offered a lot of information and processes that allowed you to understand life a lot better. I joined thirty years after its inception when this group had already fallen into the trap of considering itself the one and only, becoming dogmatic and eventually considering itself a religion.

I have seen this phenomenon in many areas of life. The very good account of this human behavior was told by Thomas Thouw, who was the assistant at the physics department at the university in charge of me as a graduate student. He had grown up as the heir of his uncle’s karate mastership. Originally from Indonesia, he ended up, after an odyssey, in Heidelberg, Germany. There he started to teach a karate group stressing the real principles of this mainly spiritual art, not the type of karate as seen on TV.

Fortunately, he was strong enough to see that his students had turned from pupils into disciples instead and had started to worship him as a guru. He knew that this violated all the principles of karate he wanted to teach, so he kicked them out, advising them to get a life.

This tendency of a group to find a guru, and make him a god, seems to be very prevalent. I have noticed this in movements from Macrobiotics over Chi Gong to even urine-therapy (yes! Look it up!).

The quality of the technology behind these movements seems to be rather irrelevant. Good technology gives better results for more members but as long as something works really great at least for some professional followers, the danger is there.

The group I had become a disciple of and had learned to yell “Hail!” happened to have really good data and technology, so it was easy for members to ‘believe.’

The next step then was to ‘press the help button’. We all want to help. Especially after we got something really good, something that helped us tremendously, we want to give back. This is the stage of the missionary. Obviously the missionary is ‘better’ than the subjects of his mission, but he definitely wants to lift them all up to his level.

Do you see now where the arrogance is entering the picture?

Unfortunately, there are stubborn people who don’t want to be helped. The situation escalates and so we created the next required element – an external enemy.

That’s all the elements required to form a closed system in which internal propaganda can do whatever it wants. External data to measure the propaganda against are no longer available, so whatever the propaganda says becomes true. Anything that questions the propaganda data is considered infiltration from the enemy and only makes the propaganda data more true.

I was lucky enough to have kept one little anchor out there in the other world. It was not strong enough to directly question the validity of the data that was fed to me and that I asked to be fed. But it was strong enough that I grouched sufficiently to be eventually kicked out of this group. Any tight-knitted group will expel members that are not fully behind the cause as they are a danger to keeping the rest of the group indoctrinated.

This is when I stopped yelling “Hail!”, but it still took me years to face the fact that I had, indeed, yelled “Hail!” During this time I lost my arrogance that expressed itself in a righteous “HOW COULD THEY?”

Now, when I look at my fellow Americans and see what they allow their government to do to them, we can see the reason why I can no longer proclaim… “How could they?”.

All elements are there:

  • the initial good technology – the wealth and way of life in America,
  • the belief in the system
  • the mission
  • the enemy

There is the war on terrorism, the weapons of mass destruction, the Patriot’s Act, and the latest  “Orange Man Bad!”

All pretty hefty subjects to swallow for a reasonable person, but listen… I really believed that it was reasonable that – if I wanted to walk across the bridge to total freedom – I first had to knuckle down to a system that demanded to control every single aspect of my life.

Funny, isn’t it??

Emotional Stuff That Makes Me MAD

This emotional video of a 6-year-old boy with cerebral palsy walking to his homecoming marines-dad the first time made me raving mad…

Am I the only one wondering why this dad was away so long instead of being with his son during all these years?

What is so heart-warming about a mercenary for an imperial outfit to go out and miss his family to support the ‘interest’ of the owners of a country like the US?

Usually, in response to this, we hear that they are heroes defending our freedom and liberty.  Could not possibly be true if we look at the only country I know of that had no war for two centuries – Switzerland – a country smack in the middle of the bloodiest wars.

They have a militia – as suggested the US should have according to the constitution. Being in the militia is a part-time job, so they can be home with the family and they don’t go out to foreign lands to conquer. They are just all armed and ready to shoot any invading troops and are trained snipers to take out the highest officers – not troops – and that caused even Hitler to leave them alone.

No, marine-dad, there is no reason for you to wait years to see your son walk, if you would stop believing all this imperialistic propaganda, evaluate the ethics of what you are asked to do and find out that killing is simply killing, even if you are ordered to do so by a ‘law-maker’ – a glorified lawyer.

Just imagine – they gave a war – and nobody went…

The Fall of Rome and Modern Parallels

Did you enjoy your history classes in school?

I believe there is hardly anybody who will answer ‘yes’ to this question, and I believe this to be by design. People at the helm, the so-called ‘leaders’ are usually not the smart and productive ones. Otherwise they would not have to resort to plunder. So we can not expect them to be very creative in inventing new ways of cheating the productive part of the people out of the fruit of their labor.

They have to look at successful actions in the past. But as these actions are always doomed and not very long lasting it would be very bad for business if others would recognize their actions and see where they lead.

Thus history lessons have to be made so boring that nobody wants to even look at them. Trying to actively hide them would not work because a good mystery will always cause interest and that is definitely something that must be avoided.

Making it boring was therefore a very good move. If a noticeable number of people would be interested in history – even the rather recent one like that of the Hitler empire – they would see the plain parallels in today’s events.

Hitler for example used the word Vaterland (fatherland) and the emotionally charged word to rally the people behind his agenda. ‘Homeland’ feels pretty close to that. Both don’t have any real meaning as a farm in Maryland is as little my home, or fatherland as a farm in China. The current owners of both would kick me off if I were to go there and life there now. If something is not mine it is not mine independent of where it is.

But beside making the real history, one that tried to convey reasons behind events and not only the date, a mock-history is sold and promoted by Hollywood. This fake history causes people to believe that they know what went on and so there really no reason any more to do some actual research into cause and effect.

All these ideas are not new and all over the past the few who could look and see realized this reality. One such evidence is the essay “The Fall of Rome and Modern Parallels” by Lawrence W. Reed, the director of The Foundation for Economic Education. This was a talk given in 1979 and is read by Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio.

Or see it directly on YouTube.

Germania v. Washingtonia

Synchronicities are always surprising and can, at times, be outright scary. Here is one that is somewhat in the middle.

Sometime last week I talked to somebody and the subject of Washington came up. The drives or walks along the impressive buildings oozing history, statesmanship and greatness of this nation. Did not really think much more about it and actually had the thought that I should take my son there and show him the sights that document how great this nation is.

This thought did not fit quite in with my latest subjects of study, my journey into the philosophy and realization of anarchy (*) but then again, I just had a chat with a friend who told me how she took her daughter to DC to show her the sights.

But the universe, or whoever that might have been, could not just let that sit there, no, it had to rub my nose into my glibness regarding this display of of state power, built in a way so that the people who actually build these temples for their masters, were even proud of their accomplishment.

So what did the universe (et al) do? – It threw this video into my general direction , so that I could not look past the facts any more…

Germania would have been bombastic, I’m sure, probably similar to how Washington, DC feels today to all the school children visiting the cradle of this greatest nation of the world, looking at the wonders and temples build to honor our politicians. I guess, as Hitler was not really a politician and lawyer, he was a lot more honest at what he was doing – Heil, Hitler! – for helping me to see a bit better what is going on and confirming the words of my two favorite anarchists (yes, I have two now!) – Larken Rose and Stefan Molyneux.

(*) anarchy: this word has two main meanings, one, that is often used in emotionally charged arguments, is a synonym for chaos and lawlessness, but the other one is the more objective definition of

  1. a state of society without government or law
  2. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.
a state of society without government or law.