Why propaganda and bigotry must be exposed

ARCHIVES 2009

By admin-s On Aug 17, 2009

By Malaysian Heart

In response to my previous post, You can never win with a bigot – my response to “OutSyed the Box: Is The DAP A Chauvinist Party?”, a reader who signed off as Paul Warren left the following comment (at Hartal MSM):

You just wasted a some bytes writing a crtic on this guy SAA. He’s an idiot to have thought that his opnions mattered. Just as he was, I am pretty sure, unable to comment on acts against non-Muslims and places of worship as well as worship right here in Malaysia itself he seems so cncerned about behaviour elsewhere

ITs more important now for decent Malaysians to ignore these kinds of bigotted writings and racist incantations and move on to forge a better Malaysia for Malaysians.

This is the response I posted over at Hartal MSM, which I reproduce here FYI:

Thanks for your comment, Paul. Yes, it is tempting to brush aside SAA and other BN cyber-troopers as idiots. However, I can see some parallels between our situation in Malaysia today and Germany, during the rise of Nazism:

Political leaders who have no qualms about demonising minorities in order to hold on to power (e.g. Nazi anti-semitism)
Promotion (and acceptance) of racist and supremacist ideologies e.g. Aryan Supremacy and Lebensraum) as "OK" or necessary
Media (mainstream and cybertroopers) becoming propagandists for their ideology
The rise of organisations that threaten and intimidate other citizens with violence just to prevent them from exercising their rights (ala the brownshirts and SS)

The BN owned MSM and cybertroopers seem to be applying lessons from Nazi propaganda well; as Hitler wrote in chapter IV of Mein Kampf:

"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (…) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (…) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (…) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."