British WWI propaganda directly schooled Hitler on mass persuasion techniques

Evidence

Erich Ludendorff, a lead German general during the attack on Belgium, reflected that “before the enemy propaganda we were like a rabbit before a snake.” Another German war veteran, while in prison, wrote a tract admiring British propaganda as “marvelous,” praising its simple presentation of “negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,” thereby allowing “no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.” The fan was Adolf Hitler, and given his chance, he thought he could do even better. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Wu’s overall thesis that the attention economy’s techniques were honed in wartime and later exported to peacetime; the Hitler line foreshadows propaganda’s path into commercial advertising. — connects to: Britain pioneered state-controlled broadcast propaganda before Nazi Germany did. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 414; American WWI propaganda anticipated the language of fascist collective will — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 154; Governments manufactured WWI public opinion by controlling information flow — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 167 (+1 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how the losers of WWI studied the winners’ propaganda and became the century’s most effective attention merchants.

Broader Connections

• Hitler’s Big Lie technique was borrowed from Allied trench propaganda #corroborates (0.90) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3062