The Marketing of Evil, Grooming "Consent"
World War Wednesday: Propaganda in the rise of fascism
Propaganda did not always carry a negative meaning. It began as a phrase used by the Catholic Church to propagate, or spread, the faith. In the early 17th century, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, (the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) was simply a church body tasked with spreading religious doctrine. This was important after the Reformation because someone needed to keep Catholicism clear and on point in the non-Catholic countries were there were still practitioners. Nothing nefarious about it. However, the 20th century flipped the term. During the Great War, governments realized that national morale was as vital as bullets. This including making the people hate the enemy and believe their government was just in fighting on despite the death toll. The Nazi Party took the World War One means of propaganda and transformed it into a sophisticated, state-sponsored marketing of evil. But they did not start this trend, they amplified it.
Madison Avenue was the heart of American advertising. By the early 20th century, it was effectively a business psychological laboratory for modern consumerism. Firms on Madison Avenue shifted toward lifestyle branding, marketing goods as symbols of status, health, or social belonging. These campaigns set the pattern of thinking of “citizens” as mere “consumers” and provided a blueprint for manipulating mass behavior through visual and emotional cues. It proved you could bypass the rational mind to sell a feeling rather than a fact.
Governments took the most sophisticated marketing and psychological manipulation techniques and applied them to their information operations. The Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s head of propaganda, followed the Madison Avenue trends. The Nazi manipulation lay in its mimicry of commercial advertising. Joseph Goebbels did not just spread information; he built a brand, and developed targets. The Nazi propaganda apparatus used bold color palettes, repetitive slogans, and high-production aesthetics to make extremist ideology appear normal and needed. This process abused logic to short-circuit circumspection and drive immediate conclusions.
Nowhere is this exploitation more evident than in the regime’s targeting of the young. The propaganda poster above, featuring a young girl with the caption Auch Du gehörst dem Führer (You too belong to the Führer) is chilling in its apparent innocence—if you did not know better. It does not sell a policy; it sells an identity. By using the image of an innocent child with traditional braids, the National Socialist fascist regime framed its ideology as wholesome, protective and traditional, disguising its revolutionary nature. It hijacked the universal instinct to cherish youth and redirected it toward the state. Not the family, but the state.
The root word gehören (to belong) has a double meaning in this case. In this paradigm, a child is no longer the ward of their parents’ stewardship but the property of the community, the tool of the movement. The insidious nature of the propaganda was to make total submission to the government feel like a heroic form of belonging. This was the second part: not just ownership by the leader, but belonging to something bigger, being part of a new movement with your little friends. A goose-stepping playdate.
Call it what it was: the seduction of the youth is grooming.
In May 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced an unlimited national emergency to prepare the United States for war while still at peace with Germany. Speaking by radio address to the American people, he delivered his remarks in the presence of the Canadian minister—whose government was already at war as part of the British Empire—and ambassadors from the rest of the nations across the Americas. The British Empire was at war, but like the USA the rest of the Western Hemisphere was not. But needed to get ready for the danger. Roosevelt warned what was at stake if an ideology that threatened the fundamental understanding of family and community won the war:
Yes, even our right of worship would be threatened. The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler; for the Nazis are as ruthless as the Communists in the denial of God. What place has religion which preaches the dignity of the human being, the majesty of the human soul, in a world where moral standards are measured by treachery and bribery and fifth columnists? Will our children, too, wander off, goose-stepping in search of new gods?
We do not accept, we will not permit, this Nazi “shape of things to come.” It will never be forced upon us, if we act in this present crisis with the wisdom and the courage which have distinguished our country in all the crises of the past. — F.D.R. Radio Address Announcing an Unlimited National Emergency. May 27, 1941
The Nazi propagandists were grooming the youth of Germany for hate that would lead to the near destruction—and permanent shame—of their civilization.
