Anyone watch the American Experience about Goebbels yesterday?

[bleedingheart]

It was frightening.

His blatant use of propoganda as his means of furthing the nazi agenda was just chilling.

What I told my husband was that he really believed in all that rubbish and in the end his own suicide was proof that he believed it until the end.

As for his wife Magda...what woman would kill 6 innocent children...

The entire documentary was eye opening and disturbing but boy do I see parallells in the Bush Administration...

[hippiechick]

1. I did, it WAS creepy.

The parallels ... his 1000% belief in 'Dolph ... "my first loyalty is to my party, then to my wife" ... the whole 'catapaulting the propaganda' aspect ... :scared:

But, on the flip side, it was amazing to see how they sorta pioneered the 'in car camera' and 'action shots' and how they did manage to take a new tool - the media - and shape it
into something they could use (and is unfortunately misused to this day for those same purposes) ...

[bleedingheart]

2. his entire manipulation of the media was the key to nazi success

it was pure evil genius.

did you notice some of his remarks about "taking care of" those people who he detested or didn't like? made my skin crawl.

[hippiechick]

4. Yeah, I was thinking that ...

... when he was talking about the Jews in the media and how they lie and blablah ... could be replaced almost word for word nowadays with 'Liberals' in the media ...

I don't remember exactly but how the people of Czech were so excited to see Hitler and how
he'd 'liberate' them soon enough, when the time came, he had a plan ... and about 'freeing'
people from the 'oppression' of their existing political parties and religions ...

It was so ... prescient. Eeeeeew. :scared: The man was truly deluded.

[bleedingheart]

6. the Czech portion was interesting because he felt that

their architecture was so "german"...and not Czech...

Now I will grant that most of that area had been under the Austro-Hungarian empire...but you can see how Goebbels only saw the "german" parts of things.

Did it creep you out when he talked about how he "owned" Magda...and was so joyful to have her as "his"....ick...

[hippiechick]

17. Magda: more than just a little ...

... He was almost stalker-ish in his obsession to 'have' her; then later on her fucked around with that actress and started dissing Magda as 'cruel' etc ...

Talk about a man with issues .... :silly:

[meegbear]

3. I didn't see it (yet), but I have 2 questions ...

I've done research on him and did they discuss:

1. Towards the end of the war, he was quoted as saying that he hoped that if Berlin fell and he was captured, he hoped it would be by the Russians and not the Americans.

2. He said that if Russia did capture Berlin an iron curtain would fall on Europe, this before Chruchill.

[bleedingheart]

5. I don't remember either being discussed

basically it was excerpts from his diaries being read by Kenneth Branaugh (I think that is who it was)..

and then a radio broadcast of him blathering more pathetic propganda.

[meegbear]

8. I wrote a bio on him in high school ...

and I helped a friend write a paper on him in college.

There's a great bio on him: "Goebbels" by Ralf Georg Reuth. The Amazon reviews are mixed, but I thought it was a great read on him; a lot is based on his personal diaries that were found in the late 80s.

[Spazito]

7. I did and the resemblence to the propaganda arm of the bush

admin is quite frightening, imo.

[Arkansas Granny]

19. Those were my thoughts, too. There were a lot of similarities to

the propaganda campaign of the Bush administration.

[evermind]

9. An interesting thing about Goebbels' propaganda was that

he learned a lot of techniques from US PR gurus that had themselves been schooled in the Creel Committee - A huge US gov. propaganda effort tasked with engineering consent and support for the US involvement in WWI.

(Incidentally, the phrase: "keeping the world safe for democracy" was one of the Creel Committee gems. Bet you didn't know it was that old!)

Methods from Creel Committee veteran Edward L. Bernays' book Crystallizing Public Opinion, for example, were used by Goebbels in his campaign against the Jews.

The same propaganda techniques and their evolutionary descendents, of course, are widely deployed today in the US, but not just in the US, in both the political and commercial spheres.

See http://www.americanidealism.com/articles/karl-rove-and-the-spectre-of-freuds-nephew.html for a nice article on Bernays.

[NoAmericanTaliban]

12. Thanks for that link - it is very informative

lets also not forget how the Bush family support Hitler.

[enid602]

10. Barr

I think that Barbara Bush (for giving birth to the Bush brats) deserves the 'Magda Goebbels Homemaker of the Year' award.

[NoAmericanTaliban]

11. I plan to see it - joked with my wife that pbs is having a show about Rove

I have seen other shows about Magda & Goebbels and you can tell that Rove studied him at one point. At leasst Joseph had the honesty to call himself the Minister of Propaganda - made no bones about that.

[90-percent]

13. Goebbels

Yup, he was Hitler's Karl Rove.

-85% Jimmy

[Oeditpus Rex]

14. One thing that struck me was that he wrote

in his diary about D-Day, "The attack came precisely where we anticipated."

Yeah, that would explain why the vast majority of German defenses were concentrated near Dunkirk and Calais, where the Allies led them to think it would be, and why Hitler was livid when told of the invasion.

Goebbels couldn't, or wouldn't, admit the truth even in his own diary — a strong indication that propaganda works even on the propagandist.

[bleedingheart]

15. you know I told my husband that I thought his assessment was off

and that the Germans were unprepared... I don't know enough details about the war, but you have backed up what I was thinking while watching it..he really did believe his own propaganda.

[bdamomma]

16. it was frightening and true

how Goebbels suckered all those people in, hmmm....just like Rove and the propaganda machine. Bush is no different from Hitler, giving everything to his base, and spying on Americans and invading other countries, what, never can happen again, never say never it is happening in our own backyard. When are we going to stop it????????????

[Blue_In_AK]

18. Magda was a monster

I've seen several documentaries on "Hitler's women." It's hard to imagine how a mother could do such a thing to her children. I saw a German docudrama on Sundance a couple of months ago (which unfortunately I can't think of the name of right now) about Hitler's last days in the bunker with his "friends." It was really an eye-opener, too, and much more effective than other films I've seen on this since it was in German with English subtitles. The man who played Hitler was astoundingly good.

[NoAmericanTaliban]

20. Movie was 'Der Untergang' aka 'The Downfall'

actor was Bruno Ganz - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6019248/

Good movie that protrayed hitler having parkinson & pointing out his dammantion of the German people.

Another good movie is the 'Last 10 Days of Hitler' with Alex Guiness

[Blue_In_AK]

21. Yes, that's the one...

I thought it was a most compelling movie. I stayed up and watched it until about 2:00 in the morning.