Adolf Hitler was a German politician, demagogue, and Pan-German revolutionary, who was the leader of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and Führer of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945.
Author: Henry A. Murray, M. D.
Print Source:Nuremberg, Germany: International Military Tribunal, 1943-10-00
Publication Info: Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Law Library
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The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who is becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people…. If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion…
(Adolf Hitler, from Mein Kampf)
Hitler on “social Darwinism”:
Hitler had
gotten into the habit of throwing pieces of bread or hard crusts to the little mice which spent their time in the small room, and then of watching these droll little animals romp and scuffle for these few delicacies.” (Mein Kampf)
ExplicationIn classical Greek mythology (i.e., Homer’s Iliad) myrmidónes were commanded by Achilles during the Trojan War. According to the legend Zeus created them from a colony of ants (myrmex). Cf. Sir Francis Bacon's metaphor on ants, spiders, and bees (Novum Organum Scientiarum, 1620). Per analogiam, ants are scientists who are rule conformist followers who lack the capacity to reflect (i.e., metacognitively/epistemologically) on what they actually do. They work myopically within a given Kuhnian paradigm without asking quintessential overarching questions and, ergo, without any awareness of the bigger picture.Quotation:Even entertainment can be politically of special value, because the moment a person is conscious of propaganda, propaganda becomes ineffective. However, as soon as propaganda as a tendency, as a characteristic, as an attitude, remains in the background and becomes apparent through human beings, the propaganda becomes effective in every respect.
Joseph Goebbels, Facism and the Female Form, 1942, p.170-71