Screw your feelings

By Jon Cogburn

One of Joseph Goebbels' most impressive propaganda victories involved paradoxically using widespread revulsion at the earlier stages of the Holocaust as a motor for the later stages of the Holocaust.

Here's the problem. You saw a little kid screaming as his mother was being beaten bloody by a brownshirt in the town square, as the Jews were being put in the trains. You voted for Hitler in the plebiscite, but something about the child's abject terror bored into you, and you can't get it out of your mind.

This kind of thing happened a lot, even and especially to the millions of people doing the beating and killing. So what to do? According to Goebbels, the first thing to realize is that of course you're upset. We Germans are a moral people and hate to see the sufferings of others. But this is war and we're fighting for our very survival. Our enemies have no such compunctions! We, on the other hand, must suffer as we do the difficult but necessary things. In this we retain our humanity. Don't stop being upset. Germans are a moral people. If you lose your sorrow then our victory will be empty, and the Jew, the Slav, the Gay, the Gypsy might as well have won.

Goebbel's propaganda worked. It's a kind of twisted version of Nietzsche's dark wisdom that the person who thinks he's a bad person really thinks he's a good person.

If I hear another Trump voter intone in a phony self-pitying way that voting for Trump was one of the hardest things they've ever had to do I'm going to scream. No, you didn't have to do that. You didn't have to work so hard to make yourself stupid enough to believe that the alternative was worse. You don't have to try convince yourself that you are still a good person because you feel bad about it, even though you'd do the same thing again.

I've learned two things after talking to so many Trump voters (mostly students who know I'm Burkean, administrative staff I'm friendly with, and dear relatives of mine): (1) We don't need Goebbels in the United States. People here spontaneously adopt the mindset he and his minions worked so hard to foist upon the Germans. (2) Good people doing nothing is not sufficient for the triumph of evil. You also need bad people convincing themselves they are good.