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fandomhigh2009-11-03 01:58 pm
chosehumanity) wrote in fandomhigh2009-11-03 01:58 pm
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World Wars in the Media, Tuesday
"We called it the Holocaust," Mitchell started. His mood seemed more solemn today, "The Germans called it the Final Solution. One of the main lessons about the media is how you word it, the phrases you use, the vocabulary you set up. You can spin almost anything to sound like it's a good thing in the end." He was standing, his hands in his pockets. "The Nazis were convinced that Caucasians with blonde hair and blue eyes should inherit the Earth. That the lower races, as I've mentioned, were to be subjugated to make things better. The worst had to be wiped out. That was the problem they needed a Final Solution for."
"Starting at their rise to power in 1933, the Nazis issued laws against the Jewish, gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled. They had to be excluded from public life for the nation to become a better place." Sarcasm: dripping. "By 1939, Jews were forced to wear a mark on their clothes to show that they were Jewish. They were forced to live together in small, dank pieces of the cities called ghettos - until the Nazis got tired of those, too, and shuttled them off elsewhere."
He took a deep breath. "'Arbeit macht frei'," he said, "Work gives you freedom. Those words marked the camps they used to 'store' the unwanted blemishes on the populace. Millions of Jews and other unwanteds were forced to live in inhuman circumstances, forced to do demeaning work; and when the Nazis got tired of those, these people were sent to extermination camps to be killed en masse in gas chambers." He snorted. "Now that's a final solution. They also committed medical experiments, drove people to starvation, treating them like cattle, less than that. Because they were less than human; because they dragged the rest of us down." Sarcasm? Not even the right word for it anymore. "Read Anne Frank, watch The Man Who Played Piano, visit Theresienstadt if you can; there are very few places where you'd be able to find that kind of perfect cruelty, mass-produced and shipped out across the new German empire like a theme park. This was what they were up to while the war was fought on other fronts, like a perfect cover."
He glanced at his computer screen, ready to put in a film clip. "This is the ultimate worst of what propaganda can bring about," he said, "The Nazis were masters of the media, and this is what they left behind." He glanced back up at the class. "I'm going to be showing you all a fragment of a recent reconstruction of the discovery of such a camp. You don't have to talk about it. I just want you all to think about that for a moment - to keep your eyes open when words like 'Final Solution' start getting thrown about."
[[wait for the OCD up ]]
"Starting at their rise to power in 1933, the Nazis issued laws against the Jewish, gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled. They had to be excluded from public life for the nation to become a better place." Sarcasm: dripping. "By 1939, Jews were forced to wear a mark on their clothes to show that they were Jewish. They were forced to live together in small, dank pieces of the cities called ghettos - until the Nazis got tired of those, too, and shuttled them off elsewhere."
He took a deep breath. "'Arbeit macht frei'," he said, "Work gives you freedom. Those words marked the camps they used to 'store' the unwanted blemishes on the populace. Millions of Jews and other unwanteds were forced to live in inhuman circumstances, forced to do demeaning work; and when the Nazis got tired of those, these people were sent to extermination camps to be killed en masse in gas chambers." He snorted. "Now that's a final solution. They also committed medical experiments, drove people to starvation, treating them like cattle, less than that. Because they were less than human; because they dragged the rest of us down." Sarcasm? Not even the right word for it anymore. "Read Anne Frank, watch The Man Who Played Piano, visit Theresienstadt if you can; there are very few places where you'd be able to find that kind of perfect cruelty, mass-produced and shipped out across the new German empire like a theme park. This was what they were up to while the war was fought on other fronts, like a perfect cover."
He glanced at his computer screen, ready to put in a film clip. "This is the ultimate worst of what propaganda can bring about," he said, "The Nazis were masters of the media, and this is what they left behind." He glanced back up at the class. "I'm going to be showing you all a fragment of a recent reconstruction of the discovery of such a camp. You don't have to talk about it. I just want you all to think about that for a moment - to keep your eyes open when words like 'Final Solution' start getting thrown about."
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