Goebbels, Brand Management, and Genocidal Myth Making | Learner's Digest S3.4

In the modern discourse it seems, any political opponent is immediately a "Nazi", and any historical grievance is a "genocide".

The problem is obvious and three-fold:

Politically, the elites in a less wealthy and/or numerous nation want to use the victimhood status to gain potential reparations from the wealthier/more numerous nation, by any means possible—all's fair in love and war;The impacts on the (wrongfully) accused are also clear: accusing various historical governments of (alleged) genocides smears their modern successors as well as the whole nations, thus dehumanizing them in a way;And in turn, overusing such terms as "Nazi" and "genocide" cheapens these and diminishes the crimes of the actual Nazis, creates possibilities for denial of actual genocides such as the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, and whitewashes the Nazi revival such as various neo-Nazi movements.

I can think of no example more insane than the whitewashing of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators Bandera and Shukhevich, their organizations OUN and UPA, and their modern Ukrainian equivalents such as Azov, S14, and the Right Sector—and at the same time bringing out all the decades of smear campaigns against the USSR and Russia, accusing them of multiple genocides.

Though maybe "Holodomor" myth is at least equally insane.

Russophobia deserves its own post, and so do the Ukrainian Nazis both historical and modern. For now, I'll look at genocide accusations against the historical and modern Russias.

ContentGenocide as a Weapon of Propaganda [00:00]Modern Days: 2022+ "Genocide" of Ukrainians [09:42]Goebbels Propaganda Rules and Brand Management [20:42]Russia's "History of Genocides" [32:17]Circassian "Genocide" [37:09]"Holodomor" as a National Foundation Myth [56:20]Final Thoughts [1:12:11]