Weaponized free speech

CBS's Face the Nation yesterday, host Margaret Brennan makes two points: one is imprecise and the other is very pointed. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ignores the second point and responds only to the imprecision of her first. That is, Rubio does not actually address the fact that the AfD is a German anti-immigration extremist party that has recuperated Nazi slogans. And he does not address that US Vice President J. D. Vance, while in Germany for the Munich Security Council, met with AfD leadership after giving a scolding speech to the current leaders of Europe, include Germany's. In his speech, Vance criticized European leaders for refusing to “participate in dialogue with” with far-right populist parties, like AfD, and for not “being more responsive to the voices of your citizens.”

After Rubio's Face the Nation interview, Vance and others on X focused on the awkwardness of Brennan’s phrasing about free speech and genocide.

Yes, her phrasing is unfortunate and, again, imprecise, but there’s a great deal of truth in what she says. Free speech was weaponized by Nazis to bring them to power and to spread their antisemitic and antidemocratic ideology. Fueled by that ideology and their authoritarian power, Nazis committed genocide.

Propaganda, like its more contemporary twin term disinformation, does get thrown around a lot without a discussion of what it means. Gareth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell (2019) define propaganda quite capaciously as “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions [or thoughts], and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist” (p.6). For Randal Marlin (2013), propaganda is “an organized attempt to affect a given audience’s beliefs and actions through communications that circumvent or suppress an individual’s ability to judge adequately the truth of what is conveyed” (p. 91). I appreciate Marlin's stress on the circumvention of judgment. Propaganda often seeks to short circuit reflection, deliberation, and contemplation. It urges us to pay attention and feel, and feel quickly.

Often, propaganda takes the form of weaponized words and images that hide behind the principle of free speech. Propaganda, after all, is not only created by the state or the ruling power. By the time Nazis came to power, yes, there was no freedom of speech and no free press. Rubio is right about that. But the weaponization of words and images that marked the Third Reich did not begin in January 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor.  

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Nazi propaganda began much earlier. In 1920, Hitler joins the DAP, which would become the Nazi party, as its chief propagandist. The mass rallies throughout the 20’s provided what Nicholas O’Shaughessy (2016) terms both “entertainment” & “organized outrage,” and propaganda speeches, posters, and ceremony were vital features of those rallies (p. 26). By the early 1930s, the nazi uniforms, flags, and the salute were firmly established features of Nazi identity (Fritzsche, 2008, p. 63).

By 1925, the official Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published daily editions on Nazi themes, like “the evil of Jewry and Bolshevism, the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and the weakness of Weimar parliamentarianism” (Welch, 2002, 12). In 1927, Goebbels started the newspaper Der Angriff which, according to David Welch (2002), attacked “political opponents” and stoked “antisemitic feelings by claiming that Jews were responsible for most of the ills of the Weimar ‘system’"(p. 13). In 1929, Alfred Hugenberg gave the Nazis access to his press agencies, newspapers, and Germany’s largest film company, UFA (O’Shaughessy, 2016, p. 29). The “Hitler Over Germany” campaign of 1932 had Hitler flying across the country giving a staggering number of speeches both in person and via radio (O’Shaughessy, 2016, p. 31).

All of this is propaganda, all weaponizing words and images. And the Nazis were not yet in power when they did it. They hid behind the freedom of speech to spread genocidal bigotry, antisemitism, and xenophobia.

The US Holocaust Memorial and Museum’s exceptional exhibition on Nazi propaganda, The State of Deception, makes clear that the weaponized words and images of Nazi propaganda began long before the authoritarian regime came to power.

The fact remains that Vance lectured our allies about free speech and censorship for seeking to shut down ideas they feel stoke hate, mimic Nazi rhetoric, and, in the case of AfD, suggest a “let’s move on already” approach to the remembrance of past genocide – a message not unlike the one delivered by Elon Musk during an AfD rally on January 27, 2025. Then Vance meets with the leaders of the party circulating those very ideas. As the vice president of a far-right administration that has engaged in anti-immigrant rhetoric, this should come as no surprise, perhaps.

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During his recent campaign, President Donald Trump spread false claims that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating dogs and cats. Vance amplified these claims, even posting on X that those same migrants were the cause of a “massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime."

These claims were debunked by Ohio public health officials, the Major of Springfield, and even Ohio’s own Republic Governor, Mike DeWine, who called Haitian migrants a “positive influence on our community in Springfield.”

On September 15, 2024, during an interview with Katrina Welker on Meet the Press, Vance defends his decision to repeat the rumors: “I’m repeating them because my constituents are saying these things are happening. . . The rumors are out there because constituents are seeing it with their own eyes and some of them are talking about it.” That same day on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Dash, Vance justifies his continued amplification of these rumors, now debunked, as giving his constituents a voice. He even describes it as creating stories to get the mainstream media to pay more attention: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

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Near the end of his speech in Munich, Vice President Vance said “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There are no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

By firewall, Vance is likely referring to the pledge, made by mainstream political parties in Germany, to erect a brandmauer or firewall between themselves and AfD.

But if that voice of the supposed people stokes hate and bigotry, if it dehumanizes and demonizing others, is it Democracy’s sacred principle to ignore it, to shrug its collective shoulders, to look the other way? And if that dehumanization has in the past encouraged acts of violence or the tolerance of violence?

Perhaps American and Europe will answer those questions differently.

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Again, the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum’s exceptional exhibit on Nazi propaganda, The State of Deception, makes clear that the weaponized words & images of Nazi propaganda began long before the authoritarian regime came to power.

Bibliography

Fritzsche, Peter. The NSDAP 1919-1934: From Fringe Politics to the Seizure of Power. Nazi Germany, edited by Jane Caplan, Oxford UP, 2008. pp.48-72.

Jowett, Garth and Victoria O’Donnell. Propaganda & Persuasion. 7^th edition. Sage, 2019.

Marlin, Randal. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. 2^nd edition. Broadview Press, 2013.

O'Shaughnessy, Nicholas. Selling Hitler: Propaganda & the Nazi Brand, Hurst & Co, 2016.

Welch, David. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. 2nd edition. Routledge, 2002.