Trump Tries a Different Approach to Arab Hitlerism – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That was the mantra coined by the American master salesman Elmer Wheeler in the 1930s. What he meant was this — you don’t sell by reasoning. You get people to buy by evoking the great feelings and experiences you can bring them to associate with what you sell. Sell the sizzle, Wheeler taught, and the sizzle will sell the steak.

Successful political propagandists employ that principle. Leni Riefenstahl directed an extraordinarily powerful propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, that sold Hitler as a messianic savior who was restoring power and pride to a nation humiliated by a lost war.

When I taught a unit on the Holocaust to my high schoolers back in the Nineties, I spent a significant chunk of time on her film. I would stop the film at a significant shot —  for instance, one showing a group of young German soldiers enjoying camaraderie at chow time, as the food was served up in steaming ladles-full by a fat and grinning army cook. I hold the image of the cook still on the screen and ask: What feeling is this image aiming to evoke in the person watching it?

The kids got it. The feelings were — the fun of friendship, the pleasure of the pride of serving along with everyone else, of being powerful, since the projection of power is what an army is all about.

I would ask: did the director mean to discuss the issues of war and peace, of the pros and cons of breaking the treaty that held the peace after a ghastly war? Did it mean for its watchers to ask themselves: are we arming ourselves to use power for a worthy end? Was she seeking that precious necessity for those who would govern their own lives — discernment?

The kids got it. The film was not made to provoke discernment, but to bypass it and promote passionate, uncritical support for Hitler’s program of rearmament and conquest.

Cutting out the mind to get to the emotions is the method of the sophist, the one who uses words and the power of the mind not to seek truth but to manipulate others to follow his will. Riefenstahl used positive images in her famous film. Her master, Hitler, excelled at using negative images to create hatred of his enemies, in particular, images meant to evoke deeply sub-rational emotion of disgust.

In film, in print media, in his speeches, Hitler pushed forward the images of his enemies, the races he considered subhuman, as vermin, as capable of every perversion and betrayal, as deserving of sympathy as a colony of rats in a time of plague. He sold himself as the one who would clear out the vermin. He created primordial aversion and sold himself as the deliverer of salvation.

The German culture, down to its religious core, had done much of Hitler’s work for him. He did not have to create these images, only renew them and then to place himself as the new savior. But his work was assisted by being able to quote Martin Luther accurately on placards at Nazi rallies, as well as the even older images of disgust and revulsion summoned by the well-poisoning slander, the undying lie of slaughtering Christian children to use their blood to bake matza for Passover, and the hallucinatory accusation of stealing communion wafers in order to repeat the crucifixion.

In the same way that Hitler sought to evince disgust, so too the accusation of Hitlerism is meant to short-circuit critical thinking and jump to absolute, emotional condemnation. The past few years have provided an object lesson in what used to be derided in intelligent circles as reductio ad Hitlerum. Simply put, by identifying someone as Hitlerian, all discussion is over and there is no need to prove your point. Thinking people rejected that as sophistry.

But for everything which is misused, there is a legitimate use. After all, Hitler was, well, Hitlerian. Accommodation and debate were not appropriate in dealing with him. The appropriate response was finally offered by the Allied powers.

And today, even though Trump’s opponents’ reduction ad Hitlerum has not been a winning strategy in American politics, we make a mistake in not realizing that there are some to whom the comparison to Hitler is apt.

I had a perverse pleasure as a student working in the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati when I used my breaks to read through the literature of American antisemites that they collected. The Archives subscribed to the neo-Nazi papers that came from places like the outskirts of Coeur d’Alene, or from the various political campaigns of  David Duke, the KKK Grand Wizard emeritus. These were groups in the end with little clout and even less ability to stir serious trouble in our culture.

Normalizing Hitlerism

But today, things are different. Since those days in the late Seventies, the hatred of Jews that the Kremlin had found expedient in getting a foothold in the Middle East and that flourished among Marxist intellectuals (as it did in Marx himself, a modern-day Pfefferkorn) has infiltrated and taken a commanding position in the American academy. We have witnessed violence and systemic harassment across the Ivy League schools, in Stanford, Rutgers, UC, etc., etc., ad nauseum. The graduates of these schools take their hate-filled doctrines with them into their positions of power.

In confirmation of the Horseshoe Hypothesis, and in conformance with the cynical workings of a Stalinist dialectic, the power players of the unsheathed left have joined forces with such folks as the clerics of Iran and the fideistic monarch of Qatar to develop the latest and most sophisticated of rationalizations for Hitlerian hate.

Wars have always been won by ideas, whether worthy ones or not. In a time of American military supremacy, Ho Chi Minh showed how to overcome the disparity of power and wealth that America used to win World War II, and successfully cultivated an erosion of American will to extend his totalitarian rule, learning from the failure of Kim Il Sung in Korea.

Today, that way of winning is pursued at an exponentially more sophisticated level by the violent anti-Jewish movements of the Middle East over which Iran has asserted effective leadership, and which Qatar finances and promotes. The Qatari promotion is not just in its long and deep-pocketed financial support of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, but also in its management of information, packaging the violent hatred it has nurtured in a way that has made it not only acceptable but de rigueur in the politics of the what we still call the democratic West, despite behavior that is abhorrent to freedom’s core principles. They have funneled billions into our universities, infiltrating what were bastions of free thought and helping to flip them into credentialed avatars of Iran’s hideous aspirations.

The violent Arab movement against Jews in the Middle East in its birth had a close association with Nazis. Its most effective leader, Amin al-Husseini, directed the avalanche of rape, pillage, and murder that drove all Jews from Hebron in 1929 and initiated a full-fledged war in the Holy Land in the mid-Thirties. Hitler courted and won him. In furthering Hitler’s grand plan to run one pincer through the Middle East to meet the other pincer crossing the Caucasus from Russia, al-Husseini helped overthrow British control in Iraq briefly during World War II.

Churchill daringly organized a rapid response and regained the country, and al-Husseini was evacuated to spend the rest of the war actively helping the Nazi cause, as for instance, recruiting Balkans Muslims to help round up Jews in their countries and to be concentration camp guards.

The affection of the heirs of al-Husseini in Hamas and Hezbollah with the core Nazi program of extermination is concealed only by tatters today. But that is enough cover for those who don’t mind being deceived. For Western consumption, and following the lead devised by Soviet propagandists in the Sixties, Iran and its supporters project onto the Jews what they embrace themselves. October 7 gave evidence of their exterminationist sadistic agenda to those who still test their opinions empirically. But for those raised and indoctrinated in universities awash in Qatari money and willing to prostitute themselves for it endlessly, those projections serve as articles of faith, immune to challenge or the slightest doubt.

Miraculously, the Iran/Qatar project was interrupted during Trump 45 by the Abraham Accords, whose sudden revelation is an astonishing testimony for the ability of truth and common sense to survive and return triumphant. Peace broke out, not at the point of a gun, or as a hudna — a ceasefire only for rearming and regrouping — but a real peace. It was based on the realization that living together peacefully and developing friendly relations can lead to mutual benefit, effective deterrence of truly hateful actors, and shared material and spiritual abundance.

Trump is owed no small debt of thanks for those accords. That alone is enough for me to give him the benefit of the doubt in his dealings today with Qatar and Iran. I don’t look to Trump for dogma or ideology — he doesn’t really have either, just a strange sense of discernment in political affairs, concealed behind bluster which seems sometimes merely tactical, at other times, self-indulgent. He does have a bloodhound’s smell for both real opportunities and for real dangers. Not seeing the world through an intervening cloud of ideology surely helps.

Pray he plays this right too. What true greatness it would be to see through the transformation of these Iranian advocates of Hitlerian evil and their skilled propagandists into real agents of peace. If only!

In the meantime, party politics and ideology have interposed their fog too long. Confine them to their place and let us deepen our discernment as well. It is always in short supply. Our need for it has never been greater.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

How Churchill Defined Christian Civilization

Constitutional Order and Existential Threats