Nazi Techniques: Disruption, the Big Lie

The recent attacks on "town hall meetings" by partisans against health care provision reform has as their aim to disrupt and prevent discussion. The basic techniques are those pioneered by the S.A., the Storm Troopers in the early National Socialist movement in 1920s and 1930s Germany.

According to Gordon Craig, Martin Brozat, and other historians, the signal technique of S.A. mobs was to prevent free speech. Shouting down people you disagree with is not, in any fashion, free speech: it is the suppression of free speech. Now, how can the opponents of the free exchange of ideas claim to be exercising their rights to speech? Again, we have to look to the Nazis for the answer: the Big Lie.

Adolph Hitler said that most people can spot a white lie, a fib, a small lie that stays close to the truth. This is because they themselves have told such lies, and understand their function. Hitler's insight was that a huge lie, the exact opposite of an obvious truth, works precisely because most people have no familiarity with such a thing, and cannot imagine that it does not contain some truth. Hence putting a Hitler mustache on Obama, or calling him Hitler, or saying "Obama is the racist, Judge Sotomayor is the racist," or calling Nancy Pelosi a Nazi, or claiming that the Obama campaign insignia resembles the Third Reich's emblem, and that this is somehow significant . . . or, a Rush Limbaugh does, disavowing the larger significance (i.e. "of course" this is not deliberate), but nonetheless saying, "Hey, maybe there is something there . . ." This is again because the Big Lie is so capacious, in its reversal of truth valence, that it has room for affiliation even from people who doubt part of it; in other words, people who mistake it for an ordinary lie, one that stays relatively close to the truth.

So to return to the S.A.'s techniques: let the disruptive meeting-goers tell themselves they are exercising their right to speak freely, as they are told to disrupt and undermine meetings, and some of them will believe it, or believe part of it; they cannot conceive that the reality is the precise opposite: they are the opponents of free speech. It becomes important to call the Democratic leadership Nazis, because this helps immunize yourself against the realization that in fact you are behaving like a Nazi, you are engaged in mob rule, intimidation, and anti-political tactics. Rush can contort himself into claiming that President Obama is a Nazi precisely because President Obama is nothing like a Nazi: that fact alone can then be called up as if it were a camouflage, a clever mask, and the accusation is presented as if it were a revelation. Once the animosity and hatred is tapped, people can believe anything -- or at least, believe part of anything; they can excuse themselves and engage in the worst sort of behavior imaginable.

Now there is a lot of talk about Saul Alinsky and "Radicals' techniques" for getting their voices heard. For the record I believe that whether the Left or the Right does it, acting to stop dialogue, to prevent speech, to disrupt people at the podium and upset them, -- this is not something to be associated with. Anyone today can get a megaphone, literally or figuratively. There is no excuse for stopping speech, if only because free speech is a protected right in our own Bill of Rights. I remember when Lefties shouted down Gen. William Westmoreland at Wesleyan University: that was terrible, humiliating. Lefties need to remember how easy it is for the state to suppress speech in public venues before they pretend they are so righteous that the rules don't apply to them.

That said, when corporations fund gatherings of people to oppose the "socialist agenda" of the government, and claim to be adopting the modalities of an organizer interested in techniques for have-nots to get their voices heard, we are again in the territory of the Big Lie. When at meetings scheduled for transparently PR-related purposes, the disenfranchised speak up, or shout to get attention, they are not suppressing free speech, they are attempting to open the forum to new points of view. This is absolutely not the same thing as corporate-funded lobbying groups organizing people to shout down q-and-a sessions with Representatives. The Right always uses the "techniques" of the Left, but the purposes they put them to are very different. Let's not be fooled. The aim here is: More money in the pockets of the haves, fewer benefits and safeguards for the have-nots.

I am afraid we have not seen the worst of it. We know in this country that the Right falls back on mob rule, on lynchings, as Rep. Todd Akin remarked a few days ago. Lynchings are not a joke. They happened at the hands of enraged white men in the lifetime of many people, and they may happen again.