Many years ago when I was an Assistant Professor of History at a small college in Connecticut, a colleague shared with me the results of his doctoral dissertation on Communist China. He had been with the American army during the Korean War and had become interested in China to the point of becoming fluent in official Chinese. On returning to the United States he decided to seek an advanced degree and eventually teach at the college level.
His dissertation examined the reading habits of various population segments in Communist China. He discovered that during the revolutionary period the ordinary Chinese read periodicals similar to those read by ordinary Americans at the time, magazines like Life, Look, and Readers Digest. The articles in these Chinese magazines often contained stories about life in America that were matter of fact, informative, and non-political.
However, the magazines and newspapers read by members of the Communist party, a small minority of the total population, were different in both tone and content. Primarily motivated by ideology, these magazines and newspapers contained the most blatant propaganda not only about China but about life in the USA. In other words, the members of the party who ruled every aspect of life in revolutionary China received an almost daily dose of indoctrination and misinformation.
I thought about this the other day while viewing my final DVD sent by Netflix when the company cancelled its DVD service. It was Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, her famous or infamous documentary of the 1934 Nazi party congress held that year in Nuremberg, Germany. Whatever else she was, Riefenstahl was a great filmmaker as her work on this documentary as well as on Olympia, her documentary of the 1936 Olympic games held that year in Berlin, demonstrates. For 1934 the film's camerawork and editing were way ahead of its time.
Because of its obvious propaganda purpose and in light of the tragic consequences of the Nazi regime, it is difficult to watch Triumph of the Will in its entirety. So, I just skipped around from scene to scene, and then fast forwarded to the end to see Hitler’s farewell address to the over 100,000 faithful assembled in seemingly interminable rows. Today, it is difficult to understand how the not very imposing figure of Adolph Hitler could have become an object of such mass adulation.
One thing struck me about Hitler’s speech. He looked back over the previous ten years and noted that the Nazi party had started with only seven members, and made a point of emphasizing that now that it had achieved power, it was still only a small minority in Germany. It was, in effect, an exclusive club made up of only the most devoted believers in the cause, the ones who, like the Communists in China, had been completely indoctrinated.
In fact, leaders of Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Communist China, and Soviet Russia, before they could censor or eliminate opposing views among the masses, had to censor themselves. They had to become true believers and deceive themselves before they could lie to everyone else. It is well-known that these regimes regularly conducted purges of their own members to eliminate those who seemed to be backsliders or weaklings. Only true believers could be capable of the atrocities committed by these regimes.
It seems to me that the members of Hamas who conducted the bloody slaughter in Israel recently must be true believers. What else can explain their brutality, and their exultation in brutality? Sadly, it seems to me that some college students and professors in America who persist in blaming the victims of this brutality have so indoctrinated themselves that they cannot even believe their own eyes.
###
