“The Master ring will bind you in darkness” serves as an apt analogy for gaining power through conspiracy theories and other wandering stories. If you rely on lies to secure power, those lies will, in turn, bind you. You will always have to fear the truth, and suppress any pursuit of it.
One important parallel is that both are based on the same means of propaganda, especially conspiracy theories and other urban legends and wandering stories. But using these tactics ultimately traps them in authoritarianism. it is imperative to maintain strict information control to stay in power, because they will become easy prey for criticism
The Guardian reports that Donald Trump has threatened to imprison his adversaries if he wins the election in a post on his social media site. The threats refer to the falsified claims of the “stop the steal” conspiracy theory:
“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,”
“Please beware,” the Republican nominee went on, “that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
In the post Trump reffered to the “Stop the steal” Conspiracy theory. This conspiracy theory was first reported launched in 2016 by Trump aide Roger Stone. Trump accuses of “Cheating and skulduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 election”.
The “Stop the steal” conspiracy theory was motive for the Capitol Siege 6. January 2020 where Trunp-supporters by violence and terror tried to overthrow the legal election that was won by Biden. This was incited by a speech by Trump reffering to the “stop the steal” conspiracy theory.
The “stop the steal” conspiracy theory has been proved false by thorough investigations. But still 57 % of Republicans believed that BIdens win was illegitimate in august 2023.
The Guardian have also described how Trump said to a rally of supporters that if they vote for him, they will not have to vote again in the future: “You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more,” Get out – you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
Trump has repeatedly refered to his opponents as “vermin” and as “enemies from within” that should be handeled by the National Guard or the military. CNN cites Trump from a Fox News interview saying that “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump said told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,”
Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf Volume 1, Chapter 10 that the broad masses fall more easily for a big lie than a small one. A reason for this could be that sensational stories are more likely to be shared. Hitler further wrote that war propaganda should create images of the enemy and create fear, not ridicule the enemy. This type of propaganda plays more on arousing emotions of the masses than on logic.
Many tools once used in old fascist propaganda appear to be shared by the Trump campaign and other modern right-wing populists. American psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, who prepared a report for the American intelligence agency OSS during World War II, stated Hitler’s primary rules were: “Never allow the public to cool off, never admit a mistake, never admit that there might be something good in your enemy, never leave room for alternatives, never accept blame, focus on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong, people will believe a big lie rather than a small one and if you repeat it often enough, sooner or later people will believe it.” See chapter 10 about why repetition is important in propaganda.
Trump and authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a consequence of propaganda aimed at achieving social and political dominance. If a political party wants to dominate the political arena with conspiracy theories and other bogus stories over a long time, it has to seek to achieve total information control; it has actively to exclude or discredit critical voices. Political parties that base their propaganda on disinformation, therefore, tend towards abolition of such democratic rights as freedom of speech.
Hitler’s Nazis understood the importance of excluding critical voices. The United States Holocaust Museum describes how the Nazi regime did this: “During the first weeks of 1933, the Nazi regime deployed the radio, press, and newsreels to stoke fears of a pending ‘Communist uprising,’ SA (Storm Troopers) and members of the Nazi elite paramilitary formation, the SS, took to the streets to brutalise or arrest political opponents and incarcerate them in hastily established detention centres and concentration camps. Nazi thugs broke into opposing political party offices, destroying printing presses and newspapers.”
The United States Holocaust Museum states further: “Under the new Editors’ Law of October 4, 1933, the association kept registries of “racially pure” editors and journalists and excluded Jews and those married to Jews from the profession.
Propaganda Ministry officials expected editors and journalists, who had to register with the Reich Press Chamber to work in the field, to follow the mandates and instructions handed down by the ministry. In paragraph 14 of the law, the regime required editors to omit anything ‘calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home’.
Journalists or editors who failed to follow these instructions could be fired or, if believed to be acting with intent to harm Germany, sent to a concentration camp.”
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that: “It is the duty of the national state to completely free the leadership from the principle of majority or mass decisions” Despite this, he was installed as Reichskanzler.
In Nazi-occupied Norway, the German Nazi Reichskommissar, Joseph Terboven, introduced a law that proclaimed the death penalty for publishing illegal newspapers or listening to radio stations that the Nazis defined as “illegal”.
The parallels with Donald Trump in building social echo chambers are striking. CNN published on 7 December 2023 the headline “Trump and his allies are threatening retribution against the press. Their menacing words should not be ignored”.
“The four-time indicted, twice-impeached disgraced former president, Donald Trump, who admitted Tuesday that he will govern as a “dictator” on “day one” should he win office again, is overtly vowing to weaponise government and seek retribution against the news media, showing no regard for the First Amendment protections afforded to the Fourth Estate.“
“The alarming rhetoric against the nation’s journalists, whom Trump has consistently and insidiously referred to as the ‘enemy of the people’ has also been echoed by his top allies, indicating the promises of revenge are not the rantings of a madman, but the actual intended course of action should the Republican presidential frontrunner manage to seize power again,” wrote CNN.
According to CNN and the Washington Post, Trump in a speech at an election rally in New Hampshire on 11 November 2023 speech referred to his opponents as “vermin” and threatened to “root them out”.
The conservative Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang on 7 January 2024 showed a video of Trump referring to those who stormed Congress in an attempt to overthrow the presidential elections not as perpetrators of a violent attempt to overthrow the legal election, but as “hostages”, and claimed they should be released.
It is shown in section 7 “Stop the steal” how Donald Trump tried to overthrow the legal election result in 2020 after he lost.