Thursday, January 25, 2024

Would the Holocaust have happened if Twitter existed in the 1940s? Yes, of course it would have, and the proof is from now

On his first visit to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said that free speech would have prevented the murders that were perpetrated there.

“If there had been social media, I think it would have been impossible to hide,” Musk said of the murders committed at Auschwitz. “If there’d been freedom of speech as well,” Musk told Shapiro about his visit. Musk also said it was “deeply sad and tragic [that] humans could do this to other humans.”

Social media is not much different from the news sources available in the world in the 1940s. Polish fighters and Jews in Europe managed to get messages out about the Holocaust and other Nazi policies.

And that is the point. The details of the gassing and crematoria might have been obscured, but the general outlines were known not too long after the Wannsee Conference. It was spoken about, warned about, and Jews were distressed over their relatives.

It wasn't a secret. At all.

Jewish Press (Omaha), November 6, 1942

Philadelphia Inquirer, March 21, 1943

Indianapolis News,
bottom of page 2, August 27 1943

But the news media didn't make it a front page story.

Social media wouldn't have changed that. On the contrary: The Nazis (and their worldwide sympathizers) would have used social media the way antisemites do today.

In the 1940s, there were social media equivalents: self-published pamphlets and flyers, shortwave radio broadcasts, speeches, dinner party conversations, ethnic newspapers. Not exactly the same as Facebook but they served the same purpose, and they could either spread propaganda or the truth.

We've seen ourselves in recent months how social media has been used to deny atrocities against Jews as much as it is used to publicize them.

This is what Nazi Germany did as well.

Despite the public broadcast and publication of general statements about the goal of eliminating “the Jews,” the regime practiced a propaganda of deception by hiding specific details about the “Final Solution,” and press controls prevented Germans from reading statements by Allied and Soviet leaders condemning German crimes.

At the same time, positive stories were fabricated as part of the planned deception. One booklet printed in 1941 glowingly reported that, in occupied Poland, German authorities had put Jews to work, built clean hospitals, set up soup kitchens for Jews, and provided them with newspapers and vocational training. Posters and articles continually reminded the German population not to forget the atrocity stories that Allied propaganda spread about Germans during World War I, such as the false charge that Germans had cut off the hands of Belgian children.

We are seeing the same dynamic, from Hamas sympathizers and Iranian allies. The October 7 atrocities are denied, obviously faked videos are pushed as truth, and hostage videos taken at gunpoint are produced as "evidence" that Hamas treats them well.

It is the jihadist version of Theresienstadt. And the Red Cross did then what it is doing today in not protecting the Jews.

Then, as now, the atrocity deniers rely on a simple fact: there are a lot of Jew-haters in the world. They will believe anything anyone says bad about Jews and disbelieve anything the Jews say. Social media doesn't dilute their influence - it multiplies it.

Imagine what would have happened if social media existed in the 1940s and politicians in the UK or US accused Germany of war crimes. Nazi sympathizers would have shrilly denied it, publicized videos of happy Jewish children, and accused the Jews of murdering each other. Many people who don't spend the time on their own research would be convinced by the pro-Nazi messages. Nazi defenders would dig up dirt on these politicians - or make things up - and accuse them of being the real genocidaires. Daily protests would have formed instantly outside the homes of any of these politicians, which would inevitably prompt others to mute their own criticism of the Nazi death machine for fear of their families' lives.

We know this would happen because we see it happen today in response to the Nazi-style mass extermination event in October.

The more you research the propaganda techniques of the Nazis and their acolytes in the West, the more you feel a sense of deja vu with what people are saying today.