Sometimes, It Just Can't Be Said Better....Wisdom From Weird Places

I am often stunned at the insightfulness of movie writers and the things they have characters say.  I probably shouldn't be surprised, because they get to set up the situation that requires the perfect thing to be said, then they write the perfect thing and have a character say it.  However, there are things that are said, in of all places the movies, that are applicable to real-life situations and often the real-life situation mirrors what occurs in the movies.  A situation like this occurred in the movie "The American President."  While the overall plot of the movie was a romantic comedy of sorts, there are kernels of wisdom applicable directly to the politics of today.

I address the words of the fictional character, President Andrew Sheppard, to my favorite group, the Right Wing, Neo-conservative, fascists... the so-called "Teabaggers" and the Right Wing of the Republican Party.

“We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you the [Republicans are] not the least bit interested in solving it. [They are] interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character ... and you scream about patriotism. You tell them who's to blame for their lot in life...”

I remember another group that did this.  I learned about it in my high school history class.  I later learned more about it in a course I took in college entitled, “Propaganda.” It was exactly the same technique of propaganda that is being used today, while we watch.  It was called the "big lie." The expression was coined, appropriately enough, by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf (Chapter 10), for a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

History is, in part, repeating itself, and at the risk of being totally politically incorrect, it was the Nazi Party in Germany that did exactly this.  They pointed the finger of blame and guilt at the Jews.  It was the Jews this and the Jews that.  They blamed the Jews for all the woes of the German Public; the loss of World War I, high unemployment, declining standard of living and the German Depression.  This game culminated in the rounding up of over 6 million Jews who were ultimately exterminated, at best under the noses of the German public, at worst, while they watched and allowed it to occur.

I do not in any way suggest that the Republican Party or the Teabaggers would ever exterminate a race of people, but if a propaganda technique is so effective that you can manage to convince an entire people that you have the right to do so, it must be an incredibly effective technique.  The Right-Wing, neo-conservative fascists have certainly learned a lesson from that history and they are using it today. 

I do not trust anyone that can do what they are doing, even if they believe themselves to have a worthy goal.  It really is how you play the game that counts in a lot of things, and politics is one of them and this is an ends-justify-the-means kind of thinking, which is unacceptable.