Joseph Goebbels: a Sly, Ambitious and Scheming Little bastard
The definition of a bastard is vague, and a list like this is likely top be informed by the personal antipathies of the author, and this is certainly the case with our penultimate bastard. Yes, there are those who were simply cruel, others spectacularly dishonest, most in one way or another self-serving and egotistical, but Joseph Goebbels was one of the few with all of those traits, and more. He was, in the opinion of this author, the poster child of the arch bastard.
And what did he do to earn this unenviable epitaph? Where do we begin!?
While it is unfair to point to a person’s physical appearance as evidence of their evil nature, and it obviously can have no bearing on it, Goebbels certainly could hardly have been cast by Hollywood more suitably. He was slight, crooked, hawkish, black eyed and impaired by a club foot and a thoroughly clammy and unhealthy complexion. And the role he played was as propaganda minister in the administration of Adolf Hitler.
Now, of course, Hitler surrounded himself with deviants of various colors in order to further his agenda of racial purity and global domination. The business of propaganda, in this regard, was to whitewash the worst of what was going on, and to create an alternative reality to mask the horror. It should never be said that Goebbels was a fool, because he certainly was not that. It was he who put the matter in perspective with this infamous snippet of wisdom:
‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.’
It was Goebbels’ job to manufacture the Hitler myth and organize the big rallies and suchlike. Behind the scenes, however, it was also his job to orchestrate the enforcement campaigns on the street, and to stoke up political tensions to justify much of what Hitler would subsequently do. He led the now iconic book burning that represent part of the Nazi iconography, stating that ‘the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is at an end.’
And, of course, Goebbels led the march of anti-Jewish propaganda, setting the ideological tone for the greatest crime against humanity in the modern age.
The litany of Joseph Goebbels’ malice is long, and in a nutshell, he was the most pernicious little s**t in a rogues gallery of bastards, and although he was only 5′ 5″, he stood head and shoulders above the rest. In the end, knowing what to expect, he and his wife committed suicide, some say the cowards way out, and in his case, who can deny it?