History

The big lie or many small lies

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Here is an interesting question for all our readers? Who burnt down the Reichstag in 1933? Can you recall the name of Marinus van der Lubbe, the somewhat crazed Dutchman, who actually set it on fire? And even if you can, do you not think that there was somebody behind it all? After all, it could not be just a lone lunatic, could it?

It would be interesting to know how many of those who read the above paragraph nodded and said: “Of course, Hitler ordered and manipulated van der Lubbe (assuming you can recall the name) and then used the fire to get rid of the opposition and to blame the Communists.”

I am willing to bet that nobody said: “Oh yes, it was the Communists and they managed to get away with it because Dimitrov’s trial (assuming you can recall that name) was unsuccessful. Hitler merely took advantage of the event.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between good and bad propaganda.

The truth is that van der Lubbe did act on his own. This has been investigated and proved by a number of historians. No evidence has been found of anybody else’s involvement. Further, Hitler did take advantage of the fire to do what he had always planned to do and destroy the remnants of German democratic parliament and ban the Communist Party of which the Nazis were oddly afraid. All of that is true.

Now we come to the battle of the propagandists. Everyone, but everyone, quotes Dr Göbbels’s comment about the big lie and compares every would-be spin doctor with him. But who actually believed Göbbels? A large proportion of the German people for a time and some supporters in other countries who wanted to believe him.

As opposed to that, millions of people across the world repeat certain “truths” for which there is “full agreement” without once realizing that it is propaganda first started by that genius of spin doctoring and promoter of the Comintern, Willi Münzenberg, without even knowing his name or comparing any tuppenny-ha’penny press officer to him. Now that is propaganda. Sheer genius. Achieved by a long list of small and medium-sized lies.

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Alan Macfarlane on the Decline of the Ottoman Empire

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A nice short summary touching on the main points about what does and does not provide a sufficient basis for a modern civilization.

And here he is on Venice and the riddle of modern wealth and liberty.

If you go to this page you will find that Macfarlane has put an enormous number of videos onto You Tube. I have only scratched the surface, but this is clearly a treasure trove of good material.

Those of you who prefer text to video can find an enormous amount of interesting material on his web page.

Prof. Macfarlane writes in convincing fashion about many of the issues which we have been discussing on this blog: the rise of the modern world, the role of technology in social change, the centrality of liberty to the rise of the West, the key role of England and the English-speaking countries in the modern world (though he does not use the word Anglosphere), the critical role of civil society and free association, the cultural and social and legal foundations of modernity.

Robert Conquest Interview

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Thanks to Robert Schwartz for a heads-up about Christopher Hitchens’s report on his recent visit with Robert Conquest. Note the Anglosphere kicker.

UPDATE: Helen has already blogged about Conquest and her post is well worth reading.

Do we really owe it all to the geography of the Norwegian fjords?

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What are the deepest roots of Anglosphere exceptionalism? Some of the most commonly attributed sources are wrong: Protestantism, for example. England was exceptional long before Protestantism. Alan Macfarlane, from an anthropological perspective, has taken the story back into the Middle Ages. His predecessor F.W. Maitland, from a legal perspective, took it back a little farther. The Victorians and Edwardians (Stubbs, Maitland, Acton) agreed that the English retained from their Saxon ancestors something of the “liberty loving” ways of their Teutonic forebears, as depicted by Tacitus almost two thousand years ago. This type of thinking fell into disfavor in the 20th Century. But I think the Victorians were on the money.

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