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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

I cannot take the style of that article seriously. It seems to be about the magazine Signal, a Nazi magazine. E.g.:

> Signal was an insidious tool of Nazi ideology, meant to counteract an image of fanaticism and indiscriminate violence: by late autumn 1943, as many Jews as Signal readers had been murdered in Poland’s extermination camps.

There is absolutely no relation between the magazine and the Holocaust. The date is arbitrarily chosen. And reading literally, it says that millions of Signal readers had been murdered. It's writing at its worst.

For those of you who haven't opened the article yet, a question: can you guess which person is named first, in the article's opening sentence, two words in?

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I think the opening of the article is unfortunate. It doesn't relate that strongly, or support the bulk of the article, which is a skim through different Signal (which as you say was a Nazi magazine).

The rest of the article is better, but still kind of surface level I feel. There are two broad strands of thought in the rest of the article: a) Signal critiques of America could be "surprisingly" nuanced and/or still resonating today and b) the tone of signal critiques show a surprising acceptance of some level of greatness of America.

I say surface level, because a) seems kind of obvious. The best propaganda is to selectively choose (and perhaps mildly exaggerate) your opponents true weaknesses/downsides, while emphasizing (or perhaps fully fabricating) your own strengths. Especially when your target is notionally the land of freedom.

For b) that's also not completely surprising. It was simply NOT feasible not acknowledge America's material strength and wealth. You could not have plausible propaganda claiming that America did not have admirable resources or industry.

Fundamentally this boils down to, Nazis were not cartoon caricatures of humans. They were humans like us, spanning the entire spectrum of temperaments, "high browness", education, and tendencies. Even more, they were humans raised in the western tradition - there were Nazis who were ever bit as informed by enlightenment thinking and greek rhetoric as we are here today. And therefore they could choose to write propaganda that would appeal or at least resonate with us to this day.

The final line however is probably the most interesting bit: "What if our enemies know us better than we know ourselves?". This line of thinking invites us to ask all sorts of interesting questions such as:

* What are the means by which we "know ourselves" - who teaches us about ourselves? * Is our failures to change really a failure of knowledge? Amongst which group of people?

I think the sentence is meant to be read: "As many Jews as [the number of] Signal readers" i.e. equating the size of the groups, not saying that they were the same group.

I understand that. It's probably also the reason the date (late autumn 1943) was picked. But in the haste of claiming guilt-by-association and showing a razor-sharp anti-fascist mind to the reader, the author wrote a meaningless sentence, and then fucked it up. That's bad writing.

"There is absolutely no relation between the magazine and the Holocaust"

There is no relation between a nazi propaganda magazine and the holocaust?

Erm. Sorry, but I don't see that logic.

To reply myself:

I actually do see a strong connection between a state magazine activly promoting the awesomeness of that state - while that same state is activly doing the holocaust more or less in secret.

Because people believing propaganda leads to less resistance to the Nazi forces military and diplomatically, effectivly meaning more jews could be gassed.

But .. there is likely no point here, debating this any further.

If you'd had written that wrt to something like the Völkische Beobachter, fine, but this was a rather dumb glossy, which doesn't appear to have aimed at inciting antisemitism. When it was first published, gassing hadn't been considered yet. And there has never been enough resistance from the population to overthrow the Nazis. The only thing that could overthrow them, was a war at enormous scale on two fronts, and I don't see how a Finnish or Flemish publication could have affected that in any significant way. It's just too far fetched, too "wings of a butterfly". You could just as well argue that the Chicken Dance is responsible for us letting our guards down, which led to 9/11, which led to the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Signal was intentionally not using aggressive antisemitism the same way, whole nazi germany got very soft before the olympics 1936 in germany - to spread a false image. Propaganda. So people not yet occupied get a wrong image like "maybe the Nazis are not so bad after all and we can still do buisness". German resistance groups struggled hard to get evidence out. And then it was not believed, because of propaganda like this.

Signal on its own might have been not that big factor, but it was no random butterfly, but willingly part of the bigger propaganda machine, which main purpose was to support nazi domination, which includes the holocaust.

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