The Manipulative Potential of Unscrupulous Persuasive Communication... Again!

It's just like Déjà Vu, all over again! - to paraphrase the great baseball philosopher, Lawrence "Yogi" Berra. In a similar vein, and on the same theme, you may also be familiar with the supposed "quotation" often lazily mis-attributed to Mark Twain (as happens to so many useful epigrams): ‘History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme’.

That's a pithy #Metaphor but, sadly, there's no evidence that he ever actually said (or wrote) it. What Twain verifiably did say, however, was the rather less pithy, but equally true and wise,

'History never repeats itself, but...

the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.' *

While a more recent pragmatic persuader, the renowned US advertiser and copywriter John Caples, once succinctly summarised all of humankind's history, to a Wall Street Journal interviewer:

"Times change. People don't."

The latter is an idea that's been successfully grasped by many of history's most manipulative communicators, through the ages.

Friends here will already know that I've (almost) unintentionally slipped through a time warp wormhole, to spend much of my leisure time over the last few weeks in 1930s Weimar Berlin - and the disastrous, deadly decades that (almost) inevitably and unavoidably followed it. As a result, I've been taking some lessons from History which I thought might be helpful and/or engaging, for those interested in the power of #PersuasiveCommunication.

My recent reading, for instance, has included the first six novels (so far, that is, but I don't expect to stop any time soon) in

Philip Kerr's extensive Bernie Gunther series of historically-set 'Noir' detective thrillers.

These are set in pre-war (and, later, in post-war) Berlin - and elsewhere. I'm reading them, rather appropriately, in the long, dark shadow cast by having recently also finished

Antony Beevor's grisly 1999 historical epic, 'Stalingrad'.

A multi-award-winning non-fiction exploration of the fatefully decisive WW2 battle, and the wider social and political events and context which led up to it. And, if that wasn't quite enough retro stimulus, I've also followed in the footsteps of many others by enjoying the Cabaret floorshow (and the warming schnapps) at

the Weimar Republic's Kit Kat Club, in Berlin.

Or, at least, at the current recreation of it, in London's Playhouse Theatre. This sadly prescient revival (it's been running since 2021!) of John Kander and Fred Ebb's stage musical 'Cabaret', arrived via the source material of Joe Masteroff, John Van Druten and Christopher Isherwood. The show is recommended viewing, by the way - even from the cheap seats!

Almost inevitably and unavoidably, I also ended up re-reading its source:

Isherwood's 1937 novella, 'Sally Bowles’.

That very name alone will, surely, conjure up for many (almost inevitably and unavoidably) memories of Liza Minnelli's Oscar-winning, 1972 bravura big screen performance - see image above.

I'd quite forgotten that Sally Bowles is supposed to be just 19 years old at the time of those Earth-shattering events depicted. As, rather shockingly, was her real-life inspiration: Isherwood's brazen, Berlin acquaintance - the youthful, itinerant, Egypt-born English woman, Jean Ross. At that time, Ross was a cabaret singer and aspiring film actress, far from home and wildly out of her depth. Although she would later reinvent herself as a respected thinker, journalist and political activist. Given her reported experiences and exposures in the turbulence of 1930s Berlin, It should come as little surprise that her later outlook was left-leaning.

Although Ross felt the movie adaptation had 'deleteriously glamorized the harsh realities of the 1930s Weimar era', she nevertheless conceded that the depiction of their social circle of British expatriates as pleasure-seeking libertines was accurate: "We were all utterly against the bourgeois standards of our parents' generation." While Isherwood's companion, the poet Stephen Spender, lamented how the film glossed over Weimar Berlin's crushing poverty. He claimed what they had mostly known was

"the Berlin of poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between forces of the extreme left and the extreme right."

Any single one of those cultural inputs would likely make one's ears prick up at the sight and/or sound of any rather more current and unwelcome Right-Wing rhetoric. But all four of them? In quick succession? That's left me suffering from Fascist overload, in a fearful historical context. Some of which, alas, appears to have somehow mysteriously leaked from the 1930s directly into our 2020s, without so much as a by your leave. Causing me to prick up my ears on an almost daily basis, at present. Those 1930s Nazi's would have dearly LOVED having unfettered access to our many under-policed and under-verified Social Media outlets. Just as much as their 2020s extremist counterparts seem to.

Kander and Ebb's decadent Kit Kat club setting and EmCee character are both, of course, "#Mega-phors". i.e. Long-running or over-arching #Metaphors. They represent the evolving state of the German state - and its doomed liberal government. While Sally and Brian / Cliff stand for, amongst other things, the beguiled and disinformed foreign governments of the UK and USA. The EmCee's roster of songs were recently described, by The Independent 's Alexandra Pollard, as

'a metaphor for the darkening soul of Germany as it descends in[to] Nazism'.

Worryingly, it feels there are 'darkening souls' for us to contend with currently, too. And rather too close to home for comfort. Though none have been quite foolish, narcissistic or self-referencing enough as to publish their own re-imagined versions of 'Mein Kampf'. Yet!

First performed in 1966, Pollard asserts that the stage musical 'Cabaret' was meant to shock its audience(s). Its original director, Hal Prince, called the show “a parable of contemporary morality”. Yet it's telling that our capacity and threshold for such shock seems to have risen inexorably, over the intervening c. 60 years.

After the success of his 1967 Oscar-winning satirical black comedy movie, 'The Producers', which features a shocking song and dance spoof spectacular (so tastelessly bad, they thought it was good!) Mel Brooks famously joked:

"I'm the only Jew who ever made a buck off Hitler".

In Real Life, however, the Far Right is no joke. For all of Brook's efforts to assert the contrary, in parody. Benito Mussolini, for instance, once asserted (in a 1914 speech)

"It is blood which moves the wheels of history."

Which may have helped to inform Anthony Eden's later vivid explanation / description of him (in July 1937), once the counter-intuitive slippery slope of appeasement had been embarked upon, in earnest:

"Mussolini has the mentality of a gangster."

An observation which echoes some coverage of and commentary on the background to the recent #Rhetoric of current extremist leaders. Mussolini has not been the only gangster in town, it seems. But where is our good-guy sheriff hero, Gary Cooper, to round them all up and despatch them? Or our latter-day Mel Brooks, to ridicule them into submission once again?

There are plenty of contemporary commentators lining up to tell us that the current flood of extreme(ist) rhetoric we're witnessing is nothing more than a distracting smokescreen of other, more dangerously insidious objectives. That's another #Metaphor; although, for sure, there's no smoke without a metaphorical fire burning somewhere, one might reasonably suppose and suggest. Interestingly, few such commentators are calling the device/diversion a "clever" smokescreen, though - just a brazen one. Extremists themselves and their apologists, of course, claim there's nothing even remotely extreme or insidious about such content, or the philosophy it espouses.

One popular narrative asserts that the masses are deliberately being overwhelmed with such a wide variety and massive quantity of ever-changing and unpredictable, destabilising subjects and messages, that we couldn't possibly take it all in and analyse it effectively. Along with an almost total absence (a vacuum?) of verifiable facts.

For the most part, these extremist messages are accompanied only by unverified "Alternative Facts" (you've probably noticed their modern-day re-appearance). This distracting and constantly shifting background landscape prevents us from grasping what's really happening. We simply do not have the facility and capacity to handle so much simultaneous, deliberate distortion and disruption.

If all of that IS true, then it would probably be wise for us all to take a step back, to more carefully study the bigger picture. And maybe to reflect on it through the lens of those events that unfolded so very disastrously for the whole world, c. 90 years ago. They heavily featured Isolationism, Inward Focus, Subsidy, Subterfuge, Reconstruction, Big (or Bad?) Boy politics, Demands for (highly visible) Gratitude plus Territorial and Mineral Rights, "Roman" salutes, etc. You know the drill.

Although it's "only" (award-winning) fiction - initially written c. 35 years ago, about events from c. 55 years earlier still - there's a deeply, distressingly familiar, resonant, warning undercurrent to the tone of much of Kerr's carefully crafted, Berlin-themed writing. By way of illustration, I've shared a few examples below, having recently come across them in the early chapters of book six in his 14-novel series, by way of a warning illustration. There are many more examples, throughout his work - but so little time and space to share them all.

"Enjoy!" If that's the right word...

Chapter 1 - Narrator (Bernie Gunther): Dictatorships always look good until someone starts giving you dictation.

Chapter 2 - Narrator: These days the weather's the only really safe thing to talk about in Germany…

The Excelsior Hotel's in-house detective, Rolf Kuhnast, talking to Bernie about Avery Brundage, visiting head of the US Olympic movement: 'The Ami is here on a fact-finding mission to see for himself if Germany discriminates against Jews.'

'For a blindingly obvious fact-finding mission like that, I'm surprised he [even] bothered checking into a hotel.'

'... Right now he's up in one of our function rooms getting a list of facts put together for him by the Ministry of Propaganda.'

'Oh, those kinds of facts. Well, sure, we wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea about Hitler's Germany, now, would we?...'

'He doesn't even speak German,' said Kuhnast. 'So as long as he doesn't actually meet any English-speaking Jews, things should work out just fine.'

Bernie on Rudolph Hess: With his eager air he reminded me of an Alsatian dog let off the leash by his Austrian master to lick the hand of the man from the American Olympic Committee.

Chapter 3 - Narrator: To be a Jew in the summer of 1934 was like some cautionary tale by the Brothers Grimm in which two abandoned children find themselves lost in a forest full of hungry wolves.

For those now intrigued by and/or dubious about the accuracy of Kerr's detailed historical setting and, more specifically, the contextual vignette outlined above, I share below an extended excerpt from Wikipedia's page about the tin-pot sports martinet and Quisling, referenced above: Avery Brundage - "celebrated as a tyrant, snob, hypocrite, dictator and stuffed shirt, as well as just about the meanest man in the whole world of sports." And THAT glowing testimonial is some legacy!

History has NOT treated his appeasement and rapprochement of / with Hitler's repressive, duplicitous, fatally anti-Semitic, genocidal, White Supremacist regime kindly. Almost inevitably and unavoidably. As you'll read, below.

The following gives a salutary sense of the offensive, Right-leaning, casually racist Establishment views of the time. Be warned: you really could hardly make some of this sh1t up! And it's clear some of the key actors and influencers of that era had no sense that their words would become a matter of public record, for later ridicule. And/or just had no sense...

As the Nazi hatred of the Jews manifested itself in persecution, there were calls to move the Olympics from Germany, or alternatively, to boycott the Games. As head of the US Olympic movement, Brundage received many letters and telegrams urging action. American Olympic champion Lillian Copeland accused Brundage of "deliberately concealing the truth" about Hitler and Nazi Germany, was one of 24 former U.S. Olympic champions who petitioned the IOC in 1933 to move the Games from Germany, to no avail, and herself ultimately boycotted the Games.

IOC President Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour wrote to Brundage in 1933, "I am not personally fond of jews and of the jewish influence, but I will not have them molested in no way whatsoever"... [however] Brundage had learned in 1933 that he was being considered for IOC membership.

In her 1982 journal article on his role in the US participation in the 1936 Summer Games, Carolyn Marvin explained Brundage's political outlook:

The foundation of Brundage's political world view was that communism was an evil before which all other evils were insignificant. A collection of lesser themes basked in the reflected glory of the major one. These included Brundage's admiration for Hitler's apparent restoration of prosperity and order to Germany, his conception that those who did not work for a living in the United States were an anarchic human tide, and a suspicious anti-Semitism which feared the dissolution of Anglo-Protestant culture in a sea of ethnic aspirations.

Nazi pledges of non-discrimination in sports proved inconsistent with their actions, such as the expulsion of Jews from sports clubs, and [DH: here's where Kerr, Gunther et al come in] in September 1934, Brundage sailed for Germany to see for himself. He met with government officials and others, although he was not allowed to meet with Jewish sports leaders alone. When he returned, he reported,

"I was given positive assurance in writing... that there will be no discrimination against Jews. You can't ask for more

than that and I think the guarantee will be fulfilled." Brundage's trip only increased the controversy over the question of US participation, with New York Congressman Emanuel Celler stating that Brundage "had prejudged the situation before he sailed from America."

And my discovery of all the above was initially prompted merely by a chance encounter with a clearly well-loved, battered old used copy of Kerr's opening Berlin trilogy. This was at the excellent book-swap?? of my local train station??. As described in my earlier LinkedIn post. See:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/desharney_persuasivecontent-similes-metaphors-activity-7298769193707995136-WwRE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAEAkeoB9G8EbgXNcT9OBCZZcY5qA0HKLWk

See cover image, below. Again, obviously, I can't tell you the station's exact location. Or else, if I did, I'd have to shoot you.??

Which, in turn, would probably set off an unstoppable further chain reaction of violent, coincidental, conspiracy-fuelled, Noir-ish events. As dark as the back of Satan's deepest, dank and dismal dungeon. Or something!

And we wouldn't want anything like that, would we???

*That actual opening Mark Twain quote is taken from ‘The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day’ (1874) - co-written with his neighbour, Charles Dudley Warner. The mis-attributed and unverified one, meanwhile, you will find used liberally in any number of lazy, unresearched posts, blog pages, etc., across various unverified social media outlets and elsewhere.