The Devices

Six mechanisms of Nazi propaganda, each shown working — and none of them retired.

A course on the thought of Nazi Propaganda.

Rhetoric

What you will learn

State why a movement needs one enemy rather than several, in the terms Burke gives.
Identify a composite enemy from the structure of a claim rather than from its subject matter.
Explain why an essentialised enemy makes contradictory evidence into confirming evidence.
State the double requirement — contemptible and omnipotent — and why a conspiracy theory needs both.
Explain why a movement labels an action with its opposite rather than defending the action.
Distinguish the contrary label from ordinary hypocrisy, using the test in this module.
State Klemperer's claim about where propaganda's power actually sat, and the evidence he offers.
Trace one word's inversion and explain why the word had to escalate to keep working.

The Composite Enemy — The first device is not hatred. It is arithmetic — the collapsing of many unrelated opponents into a single category, because attention that divides cannot be mobilised. Burke found the rule stated…
The Claim No Evidence Can Touch — Once the enemy is defined as an essence rather than as people who do things, evidence stops being able to touch the claim. Burke watched this happen sentence by sentence, and named the moment it…
The Contrary Label — The most durable device in the set is the cheapest — conduct war in the name of peace, cruelty in the name of love, the irrational under the slogan of Reason. Burke's warning is that this is not…
A Diary of Single Words — Klemperer, a philologist forbidden to work, kept a diary of single words instead. His finding is the least intuitive in this course — the speeches were not the instrument. The vocabulary was.
The Columns Outside the Window — The sound layer, and the one device that operates below argument entirely. Klemperer, watching columns cross the bridge outside his window, works out why a chanted text does something a sung one does…
Where Argument Ends — Where argument ends. Klemperer's evidence is a colleague he knew well — an educated, sensible woman with broad horizons — and Burke's is a trap that catches whoever names the division. The module…

The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle — Kenneth Burke's 1939 analysis of Mein Kampf as a piece of technique, and the founding text of this kind of reading.
LTI - The Language of the Third Reich — Klemperer's 1947 study of what the regime did to single words, assembled after the war from the diary he kept throughout it from inside Germany.
The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses — Adorno's device-by-device dissection of an American radio agitator of the 1930s.
Prophets of Deceit — Löwenthal and Guterman's catalogue of the themes the American agitator works, from the same research programme.

the composite enemy, essentialisation, unfalsifiability, the contrary label, saturation, ritual chanting, the credo

Part of the Simposeum course library.