The Unbearable Propagandists’ Politics of Terror: Amplification and Contagion
The only terrorist in this ad is the one who approved it.
We need to wise up and stop being taken in by this kind of nonsense. Yes, 9/11/2001 happened. Yes, it was terrifying. But the reaction and overreaction and obvious psychological manipulation of ads and approaches like this one are so far beyond reasonable discourse that they should only be branded the ravings of a mad lunatic.
Obviously Tom Tancredo has studied Hitler’s methods. Don’t be one of his victims. This article explains how Hitler did it — guard your minds against similar tactics.
Amplification and contagion. (Note to self: Go back and read Totem and Taboo. Freud had at least some good ideas.) Contagion is the way feelings transfer from one member to another, the way emotions spread through the whole group. Amplification is how emotions in a group grow and grow bigger than the sum of their parts — the emotion of the group-as-a-whole becomes more than that of the members additively.
Hitler sensed their impact on your average Joe: “When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, he steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him…he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm….” (Ibid. 478-9)
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