Jan Marijnissen van de SP 41

In Mein Kampf stelde Hitler het zo: 'De intelligentie van de massa is beperkt, hun begripsvermogen is zwak.'

Welk fundamenteel verschil kunt u ontdekken tussen de opvattingen van Hitler over de moderne mens en die van de Amerikaanse adviseur van de angelsaksische elite, Walter Lippmann? Laatstgenoemde stelde aan het begin van de vorige eeuw dat 'public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press... Without some form of censorschip, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks is wise or desirable... Though it is itself an irrational force the power of public opinion might be placed at the disposal of those who stood for workable law against brute assertion...' Een van de wetenschappers die het werk van de invloedrijke Lippmann bestudeerde, schreef: 'Throughout the pages of Public Opinion, Lippmann had asserted that human beings were, for the most part, inherently incapable of responding rationally to their world... For Lippmann, it was not so much people's incapacity to deliberate on issues rationally that was the problem; it was that the time necessary to pursue rational deliberations would only interfere with the smooth exercise of executive power... For Lippmann, the appeal of symbols was that they provided a device for short-circuiting the inconvenience posed by critical reason and public discussion. To Lippmann, symbols were powerful instruments for forging mental agreement among people who -- if engaged in crtitical dialogue -- would probably disagree. "When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism, Progressivism, Law and Order, Justice, Humanity, " he explained, they expect to merge "conflicting factions which would surely divide if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a specific program... Lippmann added that serious public discussion of issues would only yield a "vague and confusing medley," a discord that would make executive decision making difficult. "Action cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform''... The symbol, he wrote, is "like a strategic railroad center where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their ultimate destination." Because of this, "when a coalition around the symbol has been effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than toward critical scrutiny of the measures under consideration. In its adamant argument that human beings are essentially irrational, social psychology had provided Lippmann -- and many others -- with a handy rationale for a small, intellectual elite to rule over society. Yet a close reading of Lippmann's argument suggests that he was concerned less with the irrational core of human behavior than he was with the problem of making rule by elites, in a democratic age, less difficult. Educated by the lessons of the image culture taking shape around him, Lippmann saw the strategic employment of media images as the secret to modern power; the means by which leaders and special interests might cloack themselves in the "fiction" that they stand as delegates of the common good. The most compelling attribute of symbols, he asserted, was the capacity to magnify emotion while undermining critical thought, to emphasize sensations while subverting ideas. "In the symbol," he rhapsodized, "emotion is discharged at a common target and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas is blotted out"... This general understanding infused Lippmann's formula for leadership... "The process, therefore, by which general opinions are brought to cooperation consists of an intensification of feeling and a degredation of significance.' Before a mass of general opinions can eventuate in executive action, the choice is narrowed down to a few alternatives. The victorious alternative is executed not by a mass but by individuals in control of its energy".'

Stuart Ewen PR! A Social History of Spin.

Nu Hitler in Mein Kampf:

'Propaganda
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands . . . [Propaganda] must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect . . . The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses . . . [Propaganda] does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way . . . But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. . . . The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince . . . the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.'

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Nogmaals, welk wezenlijk verschil bestaat er tussen het mensbeeld van de invloedrijke 'liberale democraat' als Lippmann en een totalitaire nazi als Hitler? Zou Jan Marijnissen een antwoord hierop hebben?