Intentionally Nasty
April 13, 2024 Josef Goebbels Culture Wars Propaganda Donald Trump
Coventry Cathedral in ruins. (Warwickshire County Record Office reference PH(N) 600/279/1)
Following the destruction of Coventry by German bombers in 1940, Josef Goebbels reportedly started to use the term coventrieren to refer to bombing campaigns in other places.
Goebbels, of course, was the Reich’s chief propagandist, a die-hard Nazi and pioneer in his use—and abuse—of words for political aims. In equal parts cruel and gloating, coventrieren was precisely how this man played to the worst instincts of his audience, steamrolling any misgivings.
What strikes me about this particular example was the undeniable nastiness: I have a hard time believing that someone who weaponizes a war crime can credibly think of himself as “the good guy”, just like SS troops wearing skulls on their caps couldn’t possibly have believed they were fighting the good fight.
Instead, these examples demonstrate how the nazis didn’t care for anything beyond their immediate aims, let alone for the hundreds or thousands who died in Coventry: Goebbels cared about an effective message, about leveraging one gruesome fact to bring about the next.
To bring this back to the present moment: What most strikes me about the culture war discourse is just how intentionally nasty is it. Culture warriors rile up their audiences by appealing to peoples’ worst instincts; they go where it hurts.
This is a lasting legacy of Donald Trump, no matter if he is re-elected or not. Trump made the unsayable sayable, he normalized a nasty, vindictive discourse that previously only existed in the tabloid headlines. Now we find it everywhere: Any debate is about slamming your political opponent, it’s about “owning” the rival, ridiculing their intelligence, and it’s become entirely commonplace to insult and dehumanize (vulnerable) people for political gain.
It’s a discourse that wouldn’t be allowed on a playground, and yet it’s slowly enveloping us all, one broken taboo at a time.