Edward Bernays - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In his 1965 autobiography, Bernays recalls a dinner at his home in 1933 where

Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Wiegand his propaganda library, the best Wiegand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. ... Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.^[30]

`Poison Ivy' Lee and propaganda

The second principal accusation against Ivy Lee is based on the well-documented fact that Lee acted as an unpaid public relations adviser to Nazi Germany in the early 1930s.

Miller and Dinan cite sources that record a meeting between Ivy Lee and both Adolf Hitler and German Foreign Minister Herman Goebbels during a visit to a German business client in 1934. According to the reports Lee was introduced to the Nazi ministers by Dr Max Illgner, the Managing Director of I.G. Farben, whose company he was advising at the time (Hiebert, 1966).

Lee reportedly advised Goebbels to cease propaganda efforts in the United States and urged him to meet personally with foreign diplomats and press in an effort to establish better relations with them. According to the US Ambassador to Berlin at the time, William Dodd, Goebbels followed that advice to the letter in the course of a conciliatory speech

You learn something new every day!

Everybody is the enemy or the ENEMY on the eve of Armageddon, and many here take the Bible literally (at least in public) and are primed for the Second Coming, The Rapture, and Heaven.

Sadly, you don't need Millenarianism. You know what was the biggest shock for me on 9/11? At the time, I frequented an atheist forum that was international but dominated by Americans. And suddenly, a couple of fellow posters, even friends, whom (I thought) I knew well from years of discussions and who seemed rational up until then switched into "nuke Afghanistan" mode, and it became clear they mean it as the forum descended into flame wars. Then after the Cheney-Bush regime and Faux News ratcheted up the propaganda drive, these same people turned into full-on hate-mongers who could discuss nothing else. (IMHO there was a connection to the fundies: in my observation many of the most doctrinaire American atheists are ex-fundies turned libertarians who are seething with anger at the lies they were told as children but don't notice that some of the attitudes remained.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}