2025.01.25
"He conducted and reviewed more than six hundred interviews with POWs and concluded that * the psychology of Nazis, as disclosed by detailed individual investigation of large numbers of them and sub-sequent statistical validation, fails to show gross mental disorder. It is characterised by an unconscious over-emphasis of paternal authority. evasion of responsibility by blaming scape-goats, over-valuation of masculinity, and depreciation of feminine and tender influences."
"Ukraine is full of advertisers and hackers, activists and journalists who after the start of invasion formed their own improvised civic political warfare executives. They buy ads on Russian porn sites and bootleg movie portals, then target them with videos about Russian war crimes the economic problems their government has caused them, and advice to soldiers on how to surrender. They hack into Russian TV channels and play clips of messages from President Zelensky. They quickly found that "moral" content didn't take off. What was more successful were issues that touched on Russians' immediate self-interests, the Russian pigdog. To give one small example: When Ukrainian activists tried mass telephone calls to Russians, they found that some 80 percent would hang up during the first twenty seconds if the calls were about the devastation caused by the war, but only 30 percent hung up when the call focused on their personal interests, such as a special tax they had to pay to support Russia's newly occupied lands. When the call was about help to Russian veterans, 43 percent hung up, but only 25 percent hung up when the call was about travel limitations caused by the war. As in World War II, such information efforts can be only as effective as the military operation."
"In summer 2023, there is a media scandal in America. News Corp the owner of Fox News, has been forced to pay $784 million for spread ing conspiracy theories stating that the 2020 US election was stoler by the company that ran the vote- counting machines in some states This, the network claimed rigged the results in favor of the candidate conspiracy theory that about third of from the Democratic Party, a Americans, and the majority of Republican voters, believe. During the trial it transpired that the network's presenters and senior management all knew that they were telling lies, but continued telling them because these were the stories their audience desired. Even if Fox stops transmitting this particular lie, the fear is that new networks will pop up to feed similar conspiracies to audiences that want an escape from reality, like those Arendt once described, who desire a remedy for loneliness no less than Ellul's lonely crowds. How does a system that relies on trust in common processes such as elections thrive, or even survive, when so many deny their validity? We need a way to reach these audiences, or at least some of them, for democracy to function. For that we need to understand their motivations. Is claiming the election was "rigged" a case of misinter preting facts, or about showing off your loyalty to a political identity? Is it a badge of belonging I so, how can one start to unpick those bonds?"