Nazi Newspaper Propaganda and Stephen Miller's Twitter Feed

Judging from Stephen Miller’s Twitter feed, a ton of immigrants living in the United States are dangerous criminals who need to be incarcerated, exterminated or, at the very least, deported. His is a spigot of malice that drops toilet bowls full of racist hatred over the heads of “foreigners;” Miller’s tweets are pulling the same carts that Nazi-owned newspapers did years ago in Germany, during the 20s and 30s, spreading the manure of anti-Semitism. This comparison came to me a month ago or so when I was in Dresden perusing the local flea market scene. In reality, of course, the vast majority of immigrants in the U.S. are exemplary, law-abiding, citizens (more so than the general population) who contribute a great deal to the country’s well-being. Misrepresenting them as enemies of the state -dehumanizing them, smearing them - is exactly what the Nazis did with the Jews, leading up to the gas chambers. In fact it comes straight from the National Socialist playbook. Where’s proof of this demonizing and scapegoating? In Nazi newspapers, which is exactly what, given my electric fascination for print culture, I figured I should go after while I was in Dresden. Nothing at the flea markets unfortunately (I did however score this: a week or two later in Vienna. Not Nazi propaganda obviously. The opposite in fact. The year is 1933. The paper was shut down in 1934) but I did get lucky at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies, spending a good morning there in the basement scouringthe library. As it happens, researchers at the Institute, notably Christoph Hanzig, have been digitizing and analysing Der Freiheitskampf, a Dresden-based Nazi daily, for the better part of a decade. Christoph is a ‘font’ of knowledge when it comes to Nazis manipulating the news.I spoke with him about Miller, and Nazi print propaganda techniques, a couple of weeks ago via Zoom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebibliofile.substack.com/subscribe