“We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience.”
White Rose and the role of mockery in the age of Donald Trump
On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels gave perhaps his most infamous speech, after the Russian Army had retaken Stalingrad after one of the bloodiest battles in world history. Despite the devastating losses on the Eastern Front and in North Africa, Goebbels gathered the masses in Berlin Sportsblast and called for “total war.”
The response of the crowd, despite the dire circumstances of the Reich and its degenerating leader, is a case study on mass psychosis and cult behavior. It’s a terrifying example of the power of demagoguery and propaganda to turn normal people into monsters.
On the same day as Goebbels’s speech, Sophie Scholl, 21, and her brother Hans, 24, went to the University of Munich with a pile of leaflets mocking the Führer for his failure in Stalingrad and calling for a mass resistance to National Socialism. The year before, they had started White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance movement inside Germany with their professor Kurt Huber, which had distributed five other leaflets. After they dropped Leaflet VI down a stairwell they were spotted by an informant and arrested.
Four days after their arrest and a show trial, the Nazis executed Hans and Sophie, three of their comrades, and Huber, by guillotine—a technique which had been revived by the Gestapo.
Here is the leaflet that they dropped.
Fellow Students!
Shaken and broken, our nation is confronted with the downfall of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!
The German people is in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never!
The day of reckoning has come – the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people has ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the meanest possible way.
We have grown up in a state in which all free expression of opinion has been unscrupulously suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have tried to regiment us, to revolutionize us, to drug us in the most promising young years of our lives. “Philosophical training” was the name given to the despicable method by which our budding individual reflection and evaluation have been suffocated in a fog of empty phrases. A system of selection of leaders, at once unimaginably devilish and narrow-minded, rears its future party bigwigs in the “Castles of the Knightly Order” as godless, shameless, and ruthless exploiters and assassins – blind, stupid hangers-on of the Führer…
For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party organizations, which want to keep our mouths sealed! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! What we seek is genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can frighten us, not even the shutting down of our institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and every one of us for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime conscious of its moral responsibility.
Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his accomplices have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, feeding the highest values of a nation to the pigs. They have sufficiently demonstrated, in ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German – it is a slaughter they have carried out in the name of “freedom and honor of the German nation” throughout Europe, and which they continue to perpetrate every day. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise up, take revenge, and atone, smashing its tormentors, and setting up a new Europe of the spirit.
Students! The German nation is looking to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they are looking to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit.
Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action!
“Rise up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”
Our people stands ready to rebel against the National Socialist enslavement of Europe in a devout new breakthrough of freedom and honor! [emphasis added]
I came across this and the other White Rose leaflets, which are all worth reading, studying the role of mockery in resistance movements. At the end of Leaflet IV read the following:
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!
Mockery is a crucial rhetorical and psychological tool in fighting tyranny because it robs the target of their power. It is very hard to be scared of someone that you’re making fun of, or that someone else is. And, crucially, mockery is contagious.
“The moment you laugh at a tyrant, you strip him of his mystique.”
— Václav Havel, Czech dissident and playwright
The brave German students, and the professor who helped guide them to resist the Nazis, all understood that what they were doing risked death. They knew the ramifications, and they did it anyway.
They called a man who was slaughtering countless dissidents “World War I Private First Class” and mocked his military losses: “Fuhrer, we thank you!” They said Hitler was a “dilettante” and that his followers were “blind, stupid hangers-on.” And they paid with their lives for it.
America is not yet WWII Nazi Germany. It is not yet a crime to insult the leader. But that is coming as sure as night follows day, unless we take the lessons of the people who paid the price to warn us, to heart. The only way to keep your rights is to use them, fearlessly. The minute you become afraid of exercising your rights, it’s too late.
On that note, I will be doing a livestream with my co-hosts and today at 4PM PT / 7PM ET. Mockery is sure to follow. Hope to see you!
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Jim, exactly what I've been waiting for. After the horror of the 2016 election and the reality of a Turmp administration set in, I started screaming that ridicule was the only way to deal with Trump. If you recall, although many of us ridiculed him ever since, all media outlets, both print and broadcast, gave him the deference we always gave to just about any public officer, no matter how repugnant and incompetent the officer. Ridicule seems to be taking its proper place as the most important tactic in bringing down a moronic, malignant dictator. Thank you, Jim.
We do what we can according to personality. People will also hear things differently. From what I see today, the resistance is working. Keep the pressure on. Thanks for the info on White Rose. It all feels like an echo, well sometimes.