Dear citizens:

Some of you, mostly my enemies, wonder how I’ve become such a great and adored leader. The ones who hate me puzzle over how I am able to do and say outrageous things, and still maintain the love and support of an adoring public. My approach is really quite simple and based upon the following:

The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. Therefore, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention: It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.

You may be thinking, to whom should this propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? The answer is, it must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.

And why does my approach work? Again, it’s really quite simple. People in the overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing. The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and then to the heart of the broad masses.

Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad masses, the following rule results: It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance. The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

This is why I am not afraid to be strong in my words and deeds. The more radical and exciting my propaganda is, the more it frightens weak and wavering characters away. Perhaps they remain followers, but they do not raise their voices. On the contrary, they maintain a discreet silence.

Finally, remember that a real leader mustn’t always tell the truth. In fact, in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, or think their leaders would do so, or have the impudence to distort truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

Intrigued? Then please read my entire book, from which I’ve quoted extensively here. I’m sure it’s still available on Amazon. It’s called Mein Kampf.

Sincerely,

Adolph Hitler

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash