In 1933, the American Press Was Proud that Hitler Adopted Its Propaganda Methods. Nothing Has Changed

In 1933, the American advertising industry proudly and publicly boasted that Hitler was copying their American propaganda techniques.

After Hitler and Goebbels gave a bad name to propaganda, Freud’s nephew – psychologist Edward Bernays – simply re-branded propaganda as “public relations” and “professional journalism”.

As veteran reporter John Pilger writes:

Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations.” Bernays used Freud’s theories about control of the subconscious to promote a “mass culture” designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”; and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala’s democracy in 1954. More

Know your media

That year reminds me of: