Donald Trump's Loudspeaker

I usually reserve my blog posts to show off archival images from my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Other than that, I pretty much just post old archival animal pictures.

They're dead now. Still cute though.
(Courtesy of The Rooms Provincial Archives VA 10-36)

Today's post is a bit different

It's about Donald Trump, who I refuse to call "president". I'm Canadian, so I don't have to. Not my president!

WOOT!

Like most of the world, I've been obsessed with and horrified by Trump's campaign and election "win". As an archivist, I can't help but study the past, specifically the actions of the Nazi Party, searching for parallels that may provide an educated prediction of what's to come. History has a tendency to repeat, mostly because we're stubborn and seem incapable of learning from it.

The unhinged and unbalanced rhetoric of Trump the Populist Narcissist, is dangerous. Much like the Nazis, he's using a relatively new form of media to reach people in a way that hasn't been done before. Nazism courted the masses with new technologies of the 20th century. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, used cinema to create an elaborate system of dazzling lies.

Sound familiar? Sounds a bit like Trump's use of Twitter. Although, I don't think Trump is smart enough to have an elaborate game plan for his Tweeting. He's impulsive and usually regurgitates the last thing he saw on Fox News...

                                          

 ...or maybe heard from his Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor, Steve Bannon, a xenophobe and racist. 

Trump is impulsive but his tweeting does work. It's a way to communicate unchecked and unfiltered. Through Twitter, Trump can transmit all the propaganda *ahem* "alternative facts" he pleases. Really, Trump's relationship with Twitter is more akin to Hitler's with the loudspeaker. The Nazi Party was the first political party to use the loudspeaker in 1928. Like Twitter for Trump, the loudspeaker allowed Hitler a new technology that provided a unique and efficient way to directly address the masses.

And what about these "alternative facts" that Trump and his surrogates love so much? For example, there's Press Secretary Sean Spicer using his first press briefing to outright lie to the American people, or Trump falsely claiming that millions of people voted illegally in the past election. Despite experts repeatedly stating this is nonsense, Trump continually refuses to base what he tweets in truth. It may be his truth, but it isn't ours and this is dangerous.

From: "Opinions, Commentary, Secrets", Lapham, Lewis.H. Baltimore Sun, June 15, 1985. Pulled from the CIA's FOIA Electronic Room

Like Trump and his Tweets, the Nazis didn't so much care about things like truth or facts as much as constantly creating movement through a barrage of propaganda. As Hannah Arendt, the German-born Jewish American political theorist,states,"totalitarian movements do not rely on content-driven decisions and are only able to sustain themselves as long as they stay in motion, putting everything around them in motion also."

My prediction? It doesn't look good. As long as Trump has a platform such as Twitter, a 24/7 avenue through which to reach his supporters, his movement will continue to grow. And the rest of us will scramble around, an army of fact checking ants, searching for truth shelters while becoming saturated in a downpour of lies.

If this is allowed to go unchecked, what will happen next? Hitler loved cinema. Trump loves television. Maybe Trump will appoint Bannon The Minister of Alternative Facts and give him free reign to develop a whole television network to spread racists, populist, misogynistic rhetoric.

And you KNOW he'll call it TrumpTV