After Germany’s “first” public television network, ARD, compared Elon Musk reducing Twitter censorship to “letting rats out of their holes”, Germany’s “second” public television network, ZDF, has now compared Musk to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels! (The network’s name Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen literally means “Second German Television”.)
Thus, last Friday, ZDF’s would-be comedy program, the Heute Show, posted this tweet and photoshop.
The Tweet reads: “Thanks to Elon Musk, you’re allowed to say anything again on Twitter! Total freedom of speech! #heuteshow.” The caption, whose color scheme and font invoke Nazi-era propaganda, reads “Do you want total tweet?” It is an allusion to Goebbels’s 1943 speech at the Berlin Sportspalast, in which the Nazi Minister of Propaganda famously shouted, “Do you want total war?” – in response to which audience members leapt to their feet shouting “Yes!” and raising their arms in the Hitler-salute.
The background image appears to show a Nazi Party rally with the swastikas replaced by the Twitter bird logo. Two smaller swastikas are still visible in the lower left-hand corner of the full-size image.
Leaving aside the extreme mental contortionism required to associate freedom of speech with Nazi Germany, if ever there was a don’t-throw-stones-in-glass-houses moment, this was it. For, as so happens, during the Second World War, the founding director of ZDF, Karl Holzamer, himself served in one of the propaganda units that none other than Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda embedded with the different divisions of the Germany military.
Holzamer served in a propaganda unit of the Luftwaffe. As noted in a 2012 article titled “Goebbels’s Soldiers” in the German daily Die Frankfurter Rundschau, Holzamer was embedded with the Luftwaffe during its April 1941 bombing of Belgrade and was “the first” to report on the German subjugation of the Yugoslav capital.
The online Lexikon der Wehrmacht, which also notes Holzamer’s service in the propaganda troops, cites Goebbels himself, who explained that “the Wehrmacht’s propaganda troops ensure the coordination between propaganda warfare and armed warfare in the theater of operations”.
As touched upon in my previous post here, Germany has been leading the global push for online censorship in recent years: notably, in the name of “combatting misinformation”. It is thus ironic that one of the explicit tasks of the propaganda troops in which Holzamer served was precisely to spread misinformation. According to the Lexikon der Wehrmacht, these tasks included: “war reporting… combat propaganda (influencing the enemy)… combatting enemy propaganda, camouflaging [German forces’] own operations by using targeted misinformation”.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Follow him at Twitter here and read his Substack here. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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We can’t underestimate how important and disruptive Musk’s takeover of Twitter is, in the genuine sense of the word. Even if you despise Twitter and see it as a pit of egotism and idiocy, the plan of the small number of elites in cahoots with the CCP, ineptly and shambolically attempting the largest power grab in the history of the planet, is to shut down discourse and any attempts to scrutinise the foundation of lies and manipulative propaganda on which their coup is built.
Twitter could end up the last means of mass citizen-to-citizen broadcasting left open, until those running the show are able to take care of it. It presents a very thin opportunity to wake up those currently unwilling to face the reality of the current disintegration of democracy and the rise of governmental gangsterism.
This is why it terrifies those pushing the globalist narrative, including in the media, who seem to have a lot of skin the game. The takeover isn’t just to establish a fairyland utopia, but to save the hides of those who have already caused untold damage in their pursuit of it.
Well I suppose if anyone knows about the Nazis and their propaganda it has to be, err the Germans.
The trouble is, somewhere along the Line, they’ve mixed the sides up.
What interesting times.
It is almost a privilege to be alive.
I will await these bastards at the Gates of Hell
The gates of Heil?
The Hates of Geil?
If Twitter is in the process of being destroyed or transformed into an ‘X’ app, could the Free Speech Union create its own version of Twitter?
I get the point, but Musk is no fan of free speech.
The German press shoulda chosen a different person to attack. Like someone who is actually standing up for free speech. Like this, they just look double stupid.
Oh what a tangled web we weave.
They’re just copying their American (left) idols/ masters. Frequently, they don’t even bother translate this into proper German, they’re just misspelling the English terms they’re familiar with. Eg, recently, German gained the adjective divers suppoeed to mean what the English diverse means. The German word for that is mannigfaltig, though. But that’s beyond the knowledge of German someone working for a German public broadcaster can be expected to have (or would want to have).
This is a genuine question – what evidence is there to support the assertion that Musk is ‘no fan of free speech’? Maybe it’s there and I just haven’t seen it.
That’s a seriously poor article about something which could have provided a great opportunity for one. The ZDF was launched in 1963. By that time – 18 years after 1945 – it’s a safe assumption that every male German of 34 years or older had served in some capacity in the armed forces of the third reich. This was also 59 years ago and thus, is hardly relevant today. The Germany of today is a US client state and the German (in name only) political and social elites are firmly associated, to a degree which makes them actually seem rather remote-controlled, with the US democrats and everything they’re pushing for in the USA. Hence, they obviously also copy the habit of the latter of calling everyone who politically disagrees with them far right, far right extremist or nazi.
Please consider cleaning your domestic Augeam stables before admonishing other people that your muck spilled over to them.
“Augeam”
Pedant that I occasionally can be but the word is:
Augean.
Well, yes. That’s what I meant to write.
Why would anyone downvote a correct correction?
They don’t like it up ’em, Mr Mainwaring.
More smokescreens, more distraction. Musk is not to be trusted. Not one bit. Musk sees Twitter as built on the model WeChat, the Chinese social media system that covers just about everything. It’s a platform of control and surveillance essentially. Musk does not have your best interests at heart, he’s playing us. remember, this is the man behind Neuralink and Starlink, both of which have conflicts of interest with purveyors of mass surveillance systems.
I think you’re missing the point here: This is not about whether or not Musk (former darling of the climate changers and former recipient of massive subsidies from the German state for producing electric cars in Germany) can be trusted. It’s about a completely unhinged propaganda crusade of the empire of woke against someone who threatened its heavy-handed political domination of public communication on the internet and who also disagrees with the woke core tenet that speech is really magic (ie, that words have other direct consequences beyond communication) and hence, that evil magic, ie, unconrolled wrong-speak, must be persecuted and (insofar possible) eliminated.
The latter actually offers a nice inside view into the woke mind: The people are intellectually so feeble and backwards that they literally hunting evil sorcerers because they’re convinced they must exist.
I’m not missing any point at all. I hear what you say but I tell you again, Musk is playing you. He plays his part as the anti-wokeist very well. When all is said and done, they are basically ion the same page.
I have absolutely no sympathy for Elon Musk who is – among other things – (in)famous for climate hysteria profiteering. But this isn’t about Elon Musk, it’s about the woke establishment turning into All good people must surely agree with us! berserkrs because of a challenge to its draconian control over the means ordinary people can use to make themselves heard (sort-of at least) on the internet.
Germanic countries are a joke. Customs and Excise in Austria – another basketcase country, who gave us the world’s favourite semi-eunuch mass-murderer – has impounded a birthday card my Mum sent to my cousin, because it’s got €35 cash in it. It’s apparently illegal to send cash in the post into EU countries from outside.
My aunt blames Brexit, because EU media force-feeds their citizens with endless anti-British propaganda. I blame EU countries for being deliberately obstructive and a**ehole-ish. Austria is one of those countries that is desperate to lead the way to cashless surveillance societies.
15 years ago, when my aunt was sent a bankers draft of her part of her inheritance following my grandfather’s death, she was actually dressed down by the manager at her Austrian bank for presenting it. Electronic transfer had to be organised in the end. So a bank doesn’t just say ‘no’, but will actually chew you out when you try to deposit a couple of hundred thousand euros! Staggering
I’m fine with countries like Germany and Austria leading the way in surveillance societies: feel free to go and live in one. Just give me the opportunity to live in a country that isn’t and has it written into law that it can’t happen. And that’s the biggest problem: there need to be more options for people to choose where to live. We need to be able to move to a country that suits what we want from life. Instead, we have WEF cult zombie politicians running all the major countries and, no matter what party they represent, there’s no one standing up for liberty. I want to live in a free country with very small safety nets. If you want to live in a high-surveillance biosecurity state, please do, but leave me out of it.
Austria is not a country. It’s the part of the remnants of the former empire of Austria-Hungary where Germans settled in such density that deporting them all in favour of some … cough, cough … indigenuous population which should in future rule this area was impractical. Hence, it became a reservation for Germans without the right (or – for that matter – ability) of pursuing any politics of its own.
You should really stop complaining that the Europe you messed up is so dysfunctional. Or maybe, complain to yourself about it.
How exactly did DomH75 mess up Europe?
In German, second person singular and plural pronouns are different (du/ ihr) but not in English, where you is used for both of them. Hence, this is a seriously poor rethorical trick.
Germany and Austria are largely ruled (to which degree this is voluntary — vorauseilender Gehorsam — is a good question) by all these funky international United-something organizations. This is by design of the so-called allied powers of 1945. Hence, both more-or-less nominal governments strictly toeing the the United-something party line on anything is absolutely unsurprising.
Further, a crucial part of the actions of both sort-of nominal governments is constant surveillance and suppression of the people they’re supposed to govern in order to stamp out unclean thoughts so that they cannot again take hold. Eg, so-called glorification of war, is illegal in Germany (and Austria). This is usually interpreted as any positive statement about German military achievements in the 20th century of the kind which are totally common-place in Britain, France and the USA[*]. This is – again – by design. The people who are historically responsible for this design thus have only themselves to complain about.
[*] When I originally moved to England, I was genuinely shocked by the existence of the Royal British Legion because I had – naively – thought the essentially pacifist viewpoint which had been taught to me all of my life would be one shared by our friends and allies abroad. But then, you hang around, you learn.
Can I compare the Times muppets to Goebbels? We know they are not covering big pharma corruption in good faith for a start.
Most sane people compare Jack Dorsey to Joe Stalin so less genocide for a start.