Channelling Goebbels?
Manfred Horst In March 2020, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) was involved in the preparation of a 17-page strategy paper entitled How We Can Get COVID-19 Under Control. The paper can still be retrieved from the ministry’s official website. One essential focus of this paper is the communication strategy to be followed by the government, aimed at encouraging the population to trust and accept the measures which were going to be imposed. This strategy explicitly involved the creation of an emotional “shock effect” and the singling out of children as culpable transmitters of disease. The scenario paper How We Can Get COVID-19 Under Control was prepared by external scientists in March 2020 with the participation of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI). It was completed on Sunday, 22nd March 2020 – the day on which the German state premiers and the Chancellor decided on the initial lockdown measures. How We Can Get COVID-19 Under Control recommends methods of propaganda and mass influence which, up to this day, remain precisely the elements of Government strategy that are unmistakable components of reporting in the round-the-clock news on all official channels and in most of the media, not just in Germany, but almost everywhere in the world. Methods which are terribly reminiscent of the ones used by the most...