Subject: Re: Societal differences and rudeness calibration From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/29 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3147630043965732@naggum.no> * Erann Gat | Here is the exchange that started it all: | | Erik: | | > but I gotta give Bill Gates this: not since Joseph Göbbels has | > any one man been able to lead so many people right into such a | > disastrous future. | | Me: | | > Your continued comparison of Microsoft to the Nazis diminishes the | > horror of the Holocaust, and I find it quite offensive. Unethical | > business practices, no matter how egregious, do not deserve to be | > compared to even a single murder, let alone millions upon millions. | | Any sane person competent in English can see that I did not accuse Erik | of anything more serious than making an unwarranted comparison. In all | our subsequent discussions I never accused Erik of anything except being | insensitive, hypocritical, and rude. I stand by those accusations. for some reason, my news server doesn't have this article, anymore, so I'm following up to Lars Lundback's quotes from it. (thanks, Lars.) Erann and I have been exchanging some e-mail privately, and it has suddenly dawned on me why he keeps saying that I introduced the Holocaust into this debate: he believes that Joseph Goebbels' propaganda had the Jews as their _audience_. that is to say, it should be fairly obvious from reading what I wrote that I was talking about the German people, for which Joseph Goebbels produced propaganda films and other materials that subtly and very effectively made them accept the political stance of the Nazis to exterminate Jews and gays and the handicapped. the disastrous future that Joseph Goebbels led the _Germans_ into was prolonging the war at least a year beyond the natural point of defeat, at enormous loss to those who believed the propaganda for many hard years to come, and _that's_ my comparison: the believers in propaganda are made to pay. however, I'm constantly amazed by how some Jews fail to grasp the losses and suffering that were inflicted upon other people during that war. an enormous number of Russian soldiers died under horrible conditions. an incredible wound was inflicted on Germany. the whole German psyche has suffered 50 years of gnawing guilt for the fact that their people could _do_ something like that. people who have been abused and who have been made to believe that they accepted it and is therefore to blame have the kind of individual problems that the whole German culture is oozing with. this happened, not because Germans are despicable, loathsome people, but because Joseph Goebbels was the greatest mass marketing genius the world has probably ever seen. he sold ideas through entertainment! it's so simple, yet so _deviously_ deceptive. he formed people's opinions by giving them _his_ words to express them and _his_ imagery, and he made all the care in the world that he did not _push_ opinions on anyone. you should be _enjoying_ his productions and think as little as possible, it should be _relief_ above all to watch the movies, and they you absorbed the ideas effortlessly because they were only a tad more specific than what you had in mind yourself. you can all imagine how truly effective this is, and how guilty someone who has been tricked by it will feel. a lot of people will do _anything_ to keep from realizing they have been duped, and that's the beauty of good propaganda: if you're smart enough to figure out that you've been had, something goes on within people that makes them work _for_ the propaganda machine, as if to make what it says true. for whatever we ought to hate Goebbels, he really understood what makes the human mind tick when in large masses. meanwhile, in comp.lang.lisp, Erann Gat has consistently written about what I have been saying in the same kind of just-a-little-worse words than I have used, and you'd have to be _unconscious_ not to notice the effect over time, but that's just what people are. that's what search engines are, too. by setting up his own propaganda machine, he proved not only to object only to Goebbels in _name_, because he adopted his theories with a passion. that's what I have been trying to stop: we should learn from Goebbels precisely because we should remember what it led to. instead, we ignore the lessons because they came with a lot of pain, and then we set ourselves up to be hurt again. I've said this before, too. it annoys me to repeat it. obviously, and I mean this is _really_ obvious, Bill Gates doesn't hurt the people who don't believe him much -- it's the fools who do that are going to pay, and pay so much I predict a _very_ significant crash in technology stocks. (now, I'm not Ballmer, so you won't see Dow Jones or NASDAQ take a dip today or tomorrow...) it is also bloody obvious that Bill Gates is not favoring _killing_ any particular group of people, unless you take his pathological competitiveness and predatory behavior to be a dire threat to decent businessmen and smart people everywhere, but I don't see him as favoring such things _literally_. that Erann Gat responded as if the Jews were under attack again may very well be due to his personal cultural background (he mentioned that he's from Israel and few non-Jews are, so I'm guessing here), but I've worked with Jews who have not been on this 50-year-long victim trip, and I have worked with Jews who have been, but the latter appear few, although very vocal, like Erann Gat has been here. only the latter see the Holocaust wherever it might be possible to introduce it. I must say that I have about as much respect for people who conjure up ghosts like that as I have for people who can't get over being defeated at a battlefield 700 years ago, which is apparently what ignited the masses on the Balkans, and I don't even consider people who at least appear to be smart to suffer from such debilitating delusions. therefore, I didn't even cross my mind that anyone could read what I wrote to be about the "disastrous future" of the _Jews_. (but _what_ future? the Jews were robbed of both past and future, damnit! Germany was left with their new legacy.) now that I have been the subject of so much fucking insane abuse from a whole bunch of deranged lunatics, I'm going to ask Erann Gat to speak up and state his assumptions (ever noticed how I keep carping on this? can you _finally_ guess why it's so important?): Joseph Goebbels' audience, which is what I was talking about, just like I wast talking about Bill Gates's audience, were the Jews, and that the disastrous future was that of the Jews. then I can say: NO, Erann, the Jews were never the intended audience of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda. Joseph Goebbels manipulated the _German_ people, so that the other Nazi leaders and Hitler in particular, could kill their enemies. I don't expect anyone to believe me after Erann Gat's despicable smear campaign to have his assumptions turned into my intention (propaganda indeed!), but if he expects to set the record straight, let it be straight: Joseph Goebbels were _not_ concerned with propaganda towards the Jews. this is an historical fact. Joseph Goebbels himself kept all explicit references to the Jews out of his material and his films, much unlike Hitler's shots at propaganda, where he explicitly likened Jews to rats, which Joseph Goebbels found utterly disgusting and counter-productive, which it turned out to be, so he was left alone. I have studied the man (the first modern mass marketing and propaganda genius deserves a serious study, if for no other purpose than to avoid the third, now that Bill Gates is the second), and I have been much influenced by Noam Chomsky's works on necessary illusions and manufactured consent during my study. what I found was that (1) a whole bunch of nutcases thought that only neo-Nazis could be interested in Joseph Goebbels' works and movies, and (2) the vast majority of the people who are opposed to what he did, buy the same dirty propaganda from today's politicians and mass marketing people for the simple reason that they don't know what Goebbels _did_: only that he was an evil man that nobody should touch. we're letting history repeat itsel because we shut our eyes to the past, instead of the only possible thing we can do with it: learn from the past through study and eternal vigilance against the warning signs of cultures that are likely to be influenced by the same kind of propaganda machinery that once killed many millions of people (and far from Jews, only). Germans, destitute and starving, flocked to the theaters to see Joseph Goebbels' last movie, an incredibly extravagant movie with so many effects and soldiers and horses that he had to convince Hitler to let him use the equipment and people intended for battle at the front to finish it. on screen, Germany was still a great power (although this, too, was an historic movie, where the great military leader was made analogous to Hitler in very many subtle ways), and if they could make this movie, of course the off-screen suffering was only temporary and was only caused by the enemies and it could be blamed on the Jews. soon they would win and regain their glory. it's a great movie by all standards, but its history is grim indeed: because of the soldiers taken out of active duty to ride and fight before camera, thousands of their comrades died needlessly, and many civilian lives were lost. because of Goebbels' insistence that this movie run everywhere, a huge proportion of the country's last breath went into chearing in a movie theater, only to hold the inevitable off for a few months. his brilliant propaganda led the German people to accept the ongoing atrocities, not the least those sent to the battlegrounds. I'm not exonerating him for anything: he knew what he was doing, and there can be no excuse for it, which he knew, too: he poisoned his children and committed suicide after killing his wife when he knew that Germany could never win this war. such, however, is the end result of successful propaganda: destruction from within, and a very prolonged destruction at that. Bill Gates is setting us up for the same kind of self-destruction: the more people believe his propaganda and the more people continue to buy his products and maintaining the beliefs he wants us all to have, but which he himself doesn't have at all, the longer he stays in power, and the longer it takes to bring that evil man down, the harder society will be hit. and who knows what he'll take down with him. no, Erann Gat, I wasn't talking about the Holocaust. your willingness to ignore the disastrous future of the _German_ people made you obvivious to their fate and suffering. that's what I was talking about, and that's why I vociferously rejected your idiotic claim that I had brought up the Holocaust. you did, Erann Gat, and you're fully responsible for what you did. at this point, I will not concede that a rational man would have thought I had meant the Jews if you had not brought it up. that's why it was important to stop you: because the more you brought this up, the more work I would need to dispell the notion that I was indeed comparing Bill Gates to the Nazi atrocities, when I was comparing Bill Gates' propaganda machinery with Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machinery. yet, let me repeat this: the similarities are so frightening if you care to look at what means these two evil men employ to reach their goals when they stare defeat in the eye (and from what we know of Bill Gates, he has always believed he would be found out and brought down at any time), which is why he's staging his own mythological figure as a visionary (in reality, he's quite dense -- just read his The Road Ahead, if you're not crying, you should be laughing at this nincompoop with so much money), and which worked pretty well for a while when he invited all sorts of disgusting suck-ups and other journalists to make him so great. Bill Gates is his own Joseph Goebbels the way he's doing exactly the same thing Goebbels did for _his_ "great leader". if you still think I'm comparing Bill Gates to Hitler or talk about the Holocaust in any capacity, let me know, because I have compared him to Joseph Goebbels, which I repeat was the first modern mass marketing genius and the father of modern propaganda: he manipulated and duped the German population in ways frighteningly similar to the way Bill Gates dupes and manipulates the American population. this has nothing at all to do with the Holocaust -- I'm frankly much more interested in how the propaganda destroyed the lives of those who were its _audience_, because Gates will lead his devout believers to the brink of disaster, if not beyond, just like Goebbels did with those who believed him. Bill Gates will probably hurt a lot of innocent people, too, in the last stages of _his_ crumbling empire. I'll just say it with a tip of the hat and an apology to Woody Allen: "I'm not afraid of to see Bill Gates die, I just don't want to be there when it happens." #:Erik