Letters to Nuremberg
"Everything is chaos, and the situation is excellent"
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/26/02
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/normal.htm
I’ve often thought it would be interesting to compile a collection of letters written by German citizens in the period between Hitler’s election and the start of the war. I would take such a collection and interpose it with front pages from German news papers of the time, and I think that what would happen would be that everything would look startlingly normal. People would get on with their lives, and while you might see the occasional odd story in the paper, it would be mostly the humdrum stuff; so-and-so was elected mayor of Hamburg, this soccer team beat that soccer team, there’s a sale on bicycles, inflation is under control, Czechs continue to harass residents of German lineage in the Suterland. All very normal.
A controlled media is pretty hard to tell from a free one when it’s done competently. And of course, if you don’t know that the truth is, then how can you know if you are being told a lie? If control of the media is absolute, propaganda doesn’t have to be competently done.
But it usually is. The old Soviet Union was noted for heavy handed and lame propaganda that fooled nobody. "The peace loving peoples of Russia wish only for the warmongering imperialists to drop their evil designs on Poland and resume discussions of disarmament"
But I got a frightening example of how effective propaganda could be when done right. I had a neighbor who used to subscribe to a magazine called (I kid you not) "Soviet Life". It looked just like the old Life magazine, and the format was similar. Lots of pictures, and engaging, readable short articles that exposed one facet or another of people getting on with their lives. In the early eighties, the Soviet Union was still largely an "enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a mystery" as Churchill once put it, and we knew next to nothing about the place. Most Americans didn’t know that "Russia" and the "Soviet Union" were two very different things, for example, much the way "England" is different from "The British Isles."
In 1985, the 40th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War rolled around, and Soviet Life pulled out all the stops with a big, double-sized issue commemorating this major event in Soviet history. I borrowed it, and read it with considerable fascination. It was pretty comprehensive, covering events from the signing of the non-aggression pact with Hitler to Operation Barbarossa, and included the siege of Leningrad and the efforts of the allies to assist on the Murmansk run, and told of the privation and destruction wrought by Hitler’s armies.
It was normal. It was startlingly normal. It was interesting, it was informative, it appeared to be carefully researched, it . . .was missing something.
I frowned, and wondered if my imagination was playing tricks on me. I flipped through, didn’t find was I was looking for, and sat down and reread the entire thing, very carefully.
Nowhere in those 80 pages was there a single reference to Stalin. The non-aggression pact was discussed, but not who signed it. The Red Army was discussed at great length, and there was even a reference to the purges of the 1930s, but not who headed that army, or who purged it.
If I didn’t know anything about Soviet history, I would never have noticed what was missing from that amazing issue of Soviet not-quite-Life.
I went back through various American online media outlets today, looking for something that I had realized was missing. I did a cursory search, and then a more thorough one. Something was missing, all right.
On Sunday, the London Observor broke the story that they had a copy of a 4,000 word document from Osama bin Laden, entitled "A Letter to America." (http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html) In it, bin Laden laid out his grievances, real and imagined, that he had with the United States.
Now, if you are expecting to say that it illuminates the man’s mind and points out avenues of approach me might take with him, I’m going to disappoint you. Frankly, he sounds pretty whack, a typical fruitcake religious psychotic. One who happens to be a billionaire, mostly due to America. Just a little something to think about as you fill up your gas tank.
But others might see things I didn’t, and that makes it valuable. I posted the letter on Usenet, expecting the usual shrill cries of "traitor" that I get whenever I suggest that perhaps Bush isn’t the greatest president in American history. To my surprise, I didn’t get any of that this time, just a restrained growl from one user that he expected to see me posting Mein Kampf or the Unabomer’s Manifesto next.
I pointed out that if more Germans had read Mein Kampf in the 1930s, and realized what Hitler’s intentions really were (he wasn’t particularly coy about the Jews), he might not have made it to power. And publication of the Unabomer’s Manifesto was what actually led to Karscinzsky’s capture; his brother recognized the writing style.
In this case, publishing it could do no harm I doubt many Americans would be swayed by his invocations to submit to Islam and wrap up the women in burlap. And it might do good. If nothing else, it will show people what a nutcase the guy really is.
That’s when I got around to wondering how the national media was treating it. NPR had given it pretty good coverage. I went online.
MSNBC mentioned that a "note" (4,000 words!) from bin Laden had been released, and the text was available at the Observer website. PBS had a 2,000 word write up on it with short excerpts.
Searches at the NY Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all drew blanks. They hadn’t covered the story.
Each of them had lots of news, in detail. Some articles were critical of the administration. It sure looked like a free media. The stories all looked normal. Startlingly normal.
But it wasn’t. Like any tightly controlled press, it was only giving you what they wanted you to hear, and were making the rest unhappen.
It isn’t even government control. Corporate types keep newsroom managers who are trained to avoid stories that might alienate consumers. Running the "bad guy’s" point of view in a market raised on Disney and endless "good cop" TV shows would alienate the audience. So with a frightening unanimousity, they buried the story.
Stalin never happened. Osama bin Laden never wrote a letter. The nanny state of corporate America has decided you don’t want to hear about it.
Does life feel normal? Everything’s pretty much the same as it was before the coup, right? Oh, liberals are het up about it, but aren’t we always pretty much het up about some damn thing or another?
OK, there’s a few more cameras here and there, and ok, maybe they’ll start tracking your purchases and what books you borrow from the library. But hey, you’ve got nothing to hide, so why should it bother you? And the media has nothing but bad news anyway. If they leave something out that isn’t going to interest you anyway, what’s it going to hurt?
To give you an idea of how bad it is, reflect on this little news squib that came out once about two weeks ago, and was never repeated in the cyclic news of cable newscasts. Ari Fleischer announced that due to the large number of Americans – over 100,000 – who have applied for asylum in Canada, the White House is going to ask Congress to pass a bill requiring that citizens desiring to leave the country as political refugees get permission from Washington first.
If I decide to flee at some point, I think I’ll pass on notifying the authorities. Somehow, I don’t think that would be healthy.
But you aren’t one of the ones trying to get out, right? So why should you care about some emigration regulation. Everything’s hunky-dory, right?
Everything’s normal.
Startlingly normal.