FROM IVORY TOWER TO PRIVY WALL: ON THE ART OF PROPAGANDA
By: George Lincoln Rockwell (circa 1966)
If
each of the men in the fable about the blind men and the elephant were
required to construct a model of an elephant, there would be three very
different models. The blind man who felt only the tail would build a
model as he described an elephant in the fable -- as "a sort of rope."
The blind man who felt the leg and said an elephant was like a tree
would produce a tree-like "elephant," while the man who felt only the
trunk would construct his "elephant" like a snake.
Most men I have met in politics consider themselves automatically
experts in the field of propaganda. But almost all of them make the
same type of basic error in their propaganda as did the blind men in
describing and reconstructing an elephant; both suffer from
insufficient experience with the subject.
A right-wing businessman, when he gets sick, doesn't try to doctor
himself, nor does he try to practice law himself, nor does he even try
to do his own advertising. He hires professional experts to do these
highly technical jobs for him. But when that same right-wing
businessman wants to move the people of a whole nation to an
understanding of our national peril, he doesn't hesitate to spend
relatively huge sums trying to write and produce his own amateur
propaganda. In almost every case he produces propaganda which he likes,
completely forgetting in his political excitement that the art of
propaganda (and advertising) is not in producing that which one likes
and admires one's self, but that which will produce the effect desired
-- sales in the case of advertising and political conviction in the
case of propaganda.
Because he is able to think, he presumes that his audience is also able
to think þ a completely unwarranted assumption. Because he himself is
repelled by crudeness and exaggeration, he makes his pitch factual,
logical, and usually subtle. In addition to this foolishness, he also
forgets that the average man in the street is emotionally assaulted
during all his waking hours by advertising brilliantly designed by
experts to capture attention through the most powerful kind of
psychological impact. The average right wing piece, crowded onto a
page, verbose, and dull, is not only not able to win the attention of
the average man amid all this competition, but positively repels him.
Even worse propaganda mistakes are made by both those at the top and
those at the bottom of the right-wing intellectual spectrum. Because
they can't read and understand "them big words," the Klan types are
"agin'" anything other than the crudest and most brutal of approaches.
"Hit 'em 'longside the haid with a two-by-four," is the motto of these
boys, and any attempt to produce anything else is likely to get you
called a "Communist-Jew spy," or get you hit "'longside the haid"
yourself. This type loves the American Nazi Party's "Boat Ticket to
Africa" and the Stormtrooper, for instance, but rages that the Rockwell
Report is too "long" and "dull."
At the other extreme is the Ph.D. right-winger who hurriedly claps his
hand over his mouth and gulps in nausea when one shows him something
like our all-time most popular propaganda piece, our "Boat Ticket to
Africa," full of expressions such as "nigger-armpit stench" and the
like. Because this refined gentleman prefers to read Spengler or
Gobineau, he can't imagine that the ideas of these men might be gotten
across to a semi- literate farmer better with a "boat ticket" than with
a volume of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
In the middle group are the Birch-type blind men who produce millions
and millions of dollars worth of wasted propaganda; wasted because it
is not designed to do the job they really want and need done, but is
instead what they like to hear. These people have never yet stopped to
reflect that in order to win they need not just the thinkers -- the
right-wingers, the bourgeois, rich folks, and the rest of the elite
minority þ but the vast masses of the people who support demagogues
like Johnson, FDR, and Kennedy. Goldwater's catastrophe was the result
of producing propaganda and campaigns designed to win thinkers instead
of masses. The result was that twenty-seven million Goldwater thinkers
were swamped at the polls by some forty-three million Johnson wishers
and hopers, who can never, never, never be reached by "conservative"
logic, facts, and boring, sissy tea parties.
The worst waste of money I have ever seen in the whole field of
propaganda was the special Sunday supplement the Birch Society put out
not so long ago in newspapers all over America. It cost as much as a
quarter of a million dollars in some cities. Had it been designed to
appeal to the mass, the "average man," the man who votes with his heart
instead of his head, it could have been worth the millions it took to
publish. But it was foolishly aimed at a relatively tiny minority. On
the front cover, in full color, it showed a typical Birch Society
meeting, in the home of a man obviously wealthy þ in the kind of living
room which would make the average, working-class, overalled American
uncomfortable. The Birchers were sitting around sipping tea with their
pinkies daintily extended, and the whole atmosphere was foreign,
ridiculous, and even painful to the man in overalls -- to America's
millions of "ordinary Joes."
There might have been some sense in printing that piece in Fortune. But
to spend money to put that advertisement (which could reach only the
rich and the sophisticated) in a mass medium, at the cost of a mass
medium, was the kind of thoughtlessness which keeps the right wing
powerless, eternally defeated, and discouraged.
Does this mean that the Birch Society's high-level appeal is a total
waste? Should all their propaganda be like that of the Klan? An
elephant is neither all leg nor all tail nor all trunk. A complete,
whole elephant needs all of these parts to live. The Jews, masters of
the art of propaganda that they are (unlike the right wing), have
understood this fundamental truth and have organized their "pitch" to
appeal to all levels.
For the kids and the primitives -- for the "masses" -- the Jews produce
comic books and comic strips; crude, apparently "obvious" television
programs, movies, and radio presentations; and the sort of printed
material one can find in True Confessions and similar magazines - or on
privy walls.
For the lower-middle classes, they provide pseudo-"objective" and
thoughtful television "documentaries," which flatter the unthinking
bourgeois into imagining that they are participating in a scholarly and
high-level "study" of a controversial subject, while actually the Jews
are pumping into their smug, ego-blinded minds massive doses of raw
lies and hatred. They also provide this kind of "intellectual" pap in
Look, Life, and other mass-circulation periodicals.
For the upper-middle classes -- the college graduates, professionals,
and business executives -- the Jews produce their Harper's Magazine and
Atlantic Monthly "think-pieces," which are genuinely intellectual but
nevertheless so subtly poisoned by false basic assumptions and
misdirections that all the thinking in the world is bound to lead only
to error. This is the sort of thing one finds among the sincere
race-mixers and liberals, who have been taught, as religious dogmata,
that anything other than democracy is unthinkable, that black men are
only white men with dark skins, and that all opponents of liberalism
are "fascists" who seek to murder almost everybody and who have no
ideas other than bloodshed and tyranny. Starting with these as
unquestionable premises, the most sincere and well-intentioned
"thinking" in the world can produce nothing but the race-mixers,
liberals, beatniks, rebels, and lost souls who are swarming like
maggots in every intellectual center of our civilization.
Finally, there is the devilishly clever, ivory-tower propaganda
designed for the truly intellectual and highly sophisticated academic
community, which actually does examine even basic premises. For this
latter, elite class, even though it is tiny, the Jews spare no effort
or money. For were the intellectual leaders of a nation to see through
all the propaganda on the lower levels, it would sooner or later be
disastrous to the Jews, when the elite had warned the masses. For this
minute, top group, the Jews actually produce manufactured "facts" of
the most basic nature.
To give an example of this incredible process, let me cite the method
they have used to make it a dogmatic "fact" that there are no
measurable, scientific differences between races and, therefore, no
races at all! The Jews first got a few of their boys into top
university spots (Columbia University being an outstanding, but by no
means unique, example) with the express purpose of giving academic
respectability to their "there-is-no-such-thing-as-race" lie.
One of the first and most important of these was Franz Boas, a Jew
heavily involved in communist causes, who sent congratulations to
Stalin on his birthdays {Jewish Voice, January, 1942} and whose red
record cannot be doubted by any objective observer. This communistic
Jew began teaching anthropology at Columbia University in 1896 and
dominated the anthropology department there until his death in 1942.
Meanwhile he produced one book after another "proving" that there were
no such things as racial differences among men {Kultur und Rasse
(Leipzig, 1914); Anthropology and Modern Life (New York, 1928); Aryans
and non-Aryans (New York, 1934); General Anthropology (Boston, 1938),
The Question of Race: Aryans and non-Aryans. Are They Distinctive
Types? (New York. 1940); Race, Language, and Culture (New York, 1940):
Race and Democratic Society, a post-mortem collection of his writings
(New York, 1945), to name but a few.}
The whole of Jewry pitched in to boost their boy. Boas was praised in
every Jewish-owned newspaper and periodical and given every academic
prize they could promote. Little by little, Boas gained such "stature"
by this Jewish mutual-admiration society technique that he became an
"acknowledged authority" in social anthropology and ethnology. His
students and colleagues at Columbia -- Herskovits, Klineberg, Ashley
Montagu, Weltfish -- as unsavory a collection of left-wing Jews as one
might hope for -- spread his doctrines far and wide, deliberately
poisoning the minds of two generations of American students at many of
our largest universities {Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason (Washington,
1961), pp. 18, 47}.
Meanwhile, honest race researchers were given the opposite treatment,
full use being made of economic boycott and unlimited intellectual
smear. Honest anthropologists couldn't get their books published or, if
published, distributed {Ibid., pp. 19, 49}.
As just one instance, at the time when Boas was at the height of his
destructive activity, Madison Grant, president of the New York
Zoological Society and a trustee of the American Museum of Natural
History, wrote a study of the racial situation in America, entitled The
Conquest of a Continent, or the Expansion of Races in America (New
York, 1933). The book was flatly contradictory to the Boas-Jewish
racial propaganda and sounded a clear warning of the impending danger
of serious racial degeneration in the United States.
Whereupon the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith issued a circular
letter to publishers, dated December 13, 1933, in which they blatantly
stated that Grant's book was "antagonistic to Jewish interests" and
demanded that it be "stifled" - as it has been! Copies of this book --
and any honest book about race -- are very hard to find. They are
almost nonexistent in the university community -- in such places as
college bookstores and all but a few of the largest university
libraries.
This whole intellectual fraud would never work if our side had sense
enough to understand it and courage enough to stand up to it. But our
side can never understand, let alone fight, this vicious Jewish
perversion of our people and their minds as long as our side, like the
aforementioned blind men, remains utterly mulish in its insistence on
amateur and one-level propaganda efforts. The left wing has its
organizations and its propaganda at all levels. And the whole left aims
the same way -- right at your heart! They have their Dean Achesons,
their Harvard professors, their White House presidential aides. But
they also have their brutal goon squads in the streets of the steel
towns, ready to crack the legs of their opponents over a curbstone, as
is their quaint custom. In between, they have their "soldiers" at all
levels, and they are all part of the same army of hate against the
White man and Western civilization.
Let one of my supercilious, intellectual critics just spend an evening
watching television or reading a teenage magazine -- not for pleasure,
but to analyze the masterful methods of the Jewish brainwashers, and he
will see that they do not use intellectual propaganda exclusively to do
their devilish work, but also the most stupid, obvious, and brutal
anti-intellectual stuff imaginable. At the same time, let him examine
the explosion of scatology on any big newsstand and see just what
primitive, rough propaganda the Jew produces for the mass mind. Even
the pornographic, illegal "comic books" smuggled from kid to kid and
man to man are loaded with propaganda for race-mixing and degeneracy.
And there is nothing subtle about the disgusting magazines openly sold
for queers.
The Jews do not confine their attack on us only to gutter propaganda or
only to goon squads; God knows, they certainly have flooded America
with their filthy and degenerate "literature," "art," and "poetry,"
with their "comedians," their warped stage plays, and their savage,
jungle "music," while there are still plenty of communist muscle squads
to break your head open if they can't pervert it. In short the enemy
has brought about a "black miracle" of subversion of our people with
his multi-level propaganda, while the reply of the leaders of our
people has been almost entirely an attempt to "prove," with facts and
arguments, that all this is "wrong."
Right and wrong in propaganda have no meaning. There are only effective
and ineffective. Jewish propaganda couldn't be more wrong, objectively
speaking, but it is almost always right, psychologically. It is
carefully aimed; it is designed for a specific audience; it is not
concerned with what the producers think and feel, but with what the
audience thinks and feels; and it is uniformly excellent and successful
in doing the job for which it is intended.
Right-wing propaganda, to choose a contrary example, is almost always
wrong. It is invariable, single-level material -- usually aimed at the
upper middle class. It is utterly disdainful of the audience and
endlessly insists that "the truth will make us free," if we just get
out enough "literature" (almost none of which is read by prospective
converts). Almost all right-wing literature is read by other
right-wingers who do not need it. It is basically reactionary,
concerned almost wholly with money, taxes, and protection of wealth and
vested interests (masked, of course, with "deep concern" for the
Constitution, "our American way of life," and the like). It is
incredibly snobbish and contemptuous toward the kind of horny-handed,
working, hard-pressed "ordinary Joe" who, in his millions, makes up the
masses which have kept FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, and now LBJ in office.
Surely we need the truth and facts and arguments -- but only to win
over the officers and noncoms of our counter-revolutionary forces and
then to educate and train them for intellectual combat with the
well-trained forces of the enemy, not to convert the masses. To try to
use the "facts and arguments" method with the masses of the people is
the eternal stumbling block of the right wing. By insisting on only
this method, in its pure (and dull) form, not only the right wing, but
any movement of national regeneration, insures that its material is
read only by itself and the few Jews whose professional job it is to
study and neutralize its material.
Hitler's National Socialist movement not only did not make that stupid
mistake, but brilliantly exploited every field of propaganda with
inspired material, scientifically designed not only to appeal to a few
stuffy professors -- but to move people, to move millions of people in
the direction desired. Hitler had Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer, full
of the wildest and wooliest sensationalism, designed to smash its way
into the consciousness of the masses, as it did. He also had the
regular party press, designed to reach and convince the great middle
class. And, for the university community, he had the esoteric material
of Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, et al.
Again I stress that, whereas the academic scholar is most powerfully
influenced by a logical, heavily footnoted dissertation at the highest
intellectual level, the simple farmer or worker is utterly perplexed
and repelled by "them big words" and is moved most effectively by a
brutal and earthy presentation of a thoroughly subjective, grossly
exaggerated picture of any situation. Only the latter class of
propaganda can yield the sheer weight of numbers of persuaded people
needed to sweep into legal political office. The major propaganda of a
mass movement, therefore, must be of the elementary, direct, and
emotional kind which alone can win honest hearts (and empty heads) --
"boat tickets" and the Stormtrooper.
When I began, I purposely made my propaganda as brutal and shockingly
rough as I could, simply to force attention. And I have kept
everlastingly at the business of building a simple and direct image of
all-out hostility to "Jews and niggers" in the minds of millions of
Americans, regardless of the costs in other respects. (And when I have
the rare opportunity to use some mass medium, as was recently the case
when I gave a long interview to Playboy, I am forced to walk a careful
line between what I should like to say and what the enemy would like to
hear me say. Unless I deliberately sound at least halfway like a raving
illiterate with three loose screws, such an interview would never be
printed.
This is another thing that most people fail to understand about my
"Nazi" technique.) After I had become known to most Americans, I
published the Rockwell Report at a somewhat higher level than my
previous material to begin to recruit some of the brains and funds we
needed to proceed. When this had begun to bear fruit, I used the
talents obtained with the Rockwell Report to get back down to the
people's level and produce a publication designed for the masses, for
the "average" man, the comic book reader, kids: the Stormtrooper. As
planned, this is now our most popular and largest-circulation
publication. And were it not for the Jewish ownership of the news
distribution business, we could sell Stormtroopers literally by the
millions.
My Ph.D. critics regularly berate me for the vulgar and brutal material
in the Stormtrooper. Because these gentlemen don't like to see the word
"nigger" in print, or crude drawings of Jews, they often insist that I
am a damned fool, a hoodlum, or an agent provocateur, trying to ruin
the whole movement by printing such rough stuff. These sincere but
pitifully blind men are going to have to understand that one can't win
elections with Ph.D. votes. As Goldwater proved, one can't win
elections even with all the upper classes. It is the vast masses of the
lower classes, the beer-and-dirty-joke-loving workers, on whom we must
depend finally for survival. The Stormtrooper with its pages full of
cartoons, violence, insults, jokes, and general hell is exciting and
readable to men who would never, in a million years, pick up and read a
right-wing tract.
With a base of operations established and with successful publications
directed at both the lowest and the middle-class levels, the movement
is finally in a position to afford the relative luxury of a publication
directed exclusively at the academic intellectual-professional class.
The National Socialist World, now in your hands, is designed not only
to reach but to move people in that category. Perhaps our material is
not what you, personally, enjoy most. But our aim, and the aim of the
World Union of National Socialists, is not to produce material to
please our friends -- but to win over millions of those who are now our
enemies or who are oblivious to both sides.
The years of success with the Stormtrooper and the Rockwell Report give
me confidence that the new National Socialist World will also do what
it has been carefully designed to do -- that National Socialist World
will beat its way into the highest intellectual circles just as the
Stormtrooper smashed its way into the minds of the juveniles and
working folks.
Finally, if you'll permit me, I'd like to drive my principal point home
with one more analogy. If you own a grocery store, and a man comes in
from a painter's truck in overalls to buy groceries, you don't try to
sell him a one-ounce jar of Russian caviar at two bucks a throw. You
offer him beef, potatoes, and bread. If a French diplomat comes in, you
don't offer him hawg jowl; you might try the caviar. It is the same
with propaganda.
If you wish to win the "trade" of all potential "customers," as we must
do if we are to survive, you must have in stock a complete line of
goods, especially the kind of goods most desired by the majority of
your potential customers -- and that means bread, potatoes, and beef,
not caviar and truffles. If you can open a special store to peddle only
caviar and truffles, do it in the silk-stocking district. Conversely,
if you want to open another branch to sell only chitterlings, hawg
jowls, and the like, then do it in the "nigger" section of town. And if
you want a mass grocery business, in the name of sanity, stock up on
something besides caviar and truffles. We intend to win enough
"customers" to become masters of the grocery business, against the
competition of the greatest and most complete "chain" operation the
world has ever seen: "The Sheeney Supermarket," which stocks something
for everybody.
To do it, we have designed some great products to appeal to specific
customers: the "hawg-jowl" Stormtrooper, the "Delmonico steak" Rockwell
Report -- and now the "Cherries Jubilee" which you hold in your hand,
the National Socialist World.
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