BROADCAST TRICKS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 July 1940, Page 3

BROADCAST TRICKS

METHODS OF GOEBBELS. CONSTANT REPETITION USED. In a talk on “The Voice of the Nazi,” which lie gave through the 8.8. C., Mr W. A. Sinclair exposed some of the tricks used by Goebbels, the German Minister of Propaganda, in his broadcast technique for creating dissension and depression among listeners in Britain, says "The Times.”

In the Nazi newspaper “Angriff” of February 18, 1929, at a very earl}’ stage of his party’s history, Goebbels exI plained that he considered his job to be "to arouse outbursts of fury, to get masses of men on the march, to organise hatred and suspicion. Aii with ice- > cold calculation." Today, said Mr Sin- [ elair, this uncreative agitator is trying with ice-cold calculation to organise . hatred and suspicion among us. "This is the real purpose behind those Hamburg broadcasts. They look as if they were intended as arguments to influence our opinions, to convince ' or persuade us, but they are really intended to influence our feelings, to make us uneasy, mistrustful and depressed. To do this Nazi broadcasters adopt all sorts of tricks, many quite simple, but all of them different ways of telling lies. The more subtle ones are difficult to detect and may cause a lot of worry to people who do not fully understand them. Three of them are specially noteworthy, as they are constantly used.” The first trick, said Mr Sinclair, is to refer repeatedly to things like bacon and butter scarcity, black-out incon-

veniences and dangers, evacuation difficulties, the separation of families, and the other hardships of wartime, especially those that directly affected women. at whom the propaganda is directed. It is usually done by quoting from our newspapers. The Hamburg broadcasters did not try to work upon angry and indignant people, but upon the tired, overwrought, or worried and they sought to make them irritated and resentful at the restrictions. The second trick, constantly used, was to persist in blaming some one cause for every trouble of every kind. That was a deliberate propagandist dodge, described by Hitler on page 129 in “Mein Kampf,” which the Nazis had long worked in Germany. They had changed their scapegoat from time to time to suit their convenience. For along time it was the Communists, then the Jews, then (when the alliance with Russia was made) "international finance,” and if they had an antiJewish audience. "Jewish international finance.” Their aim was to arouse angry feeling that it could all be put right at once, quite simply. The commonest Nazi trick was to quote complaints and criticisms from British newspapers, by means of which they tried to make out that everything was all wrong here, and that the British people were full of disagreements and dissensions and distrust. The whole thing was a deliberately coldblooded attempt to defeat us by working on ou’.' feelings. Our protection was always to remember this and to use our brains.