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Unsettling Echoes: Joseph Goebbels (1933), Sean Spicer (2017), Steve Bannon (2017)

http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/un...e-bannon-2017/

Originally Posted by Jane Caplan

An outspoken free press is one of the great obstacles to demagogues, who prefer simplistic propaganda to open public debate. The Trump government exemplifies this maxim. It loathes both honest reportage and critical opinion, it seeks to brand uncomfortable truths as lies, and through making direct contact with its audience it tries to evade the filters of fact-checking and sceptical assessment. Whether or not Trump and his entourage understand this, these moves propel them ineluctably into the realm of history’s past masters of political propaganda and the repression of dissent.

Jane Caplan is Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and Emeritus Marjorie Walter Goodhart Professor of European History at Bryn Mawr College. She is a leading historian of Nazi Germany and the history of the documentation of individual identity. Professor Caplan was involved in establishing one of Britain’s first university courses in women’s studies. She is also an editor of History Workshop Journal.