Goebbels knew propaganda was a weapon. Do We?

A friend, Leon Kempler, sent me an article this week. Leon has served Australia and the Jewish community in a variety of civic and community pursuits, including through the Board of Questacon and the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. He understands that ideas matter, institutions matter, and the stories a nation tells itself matter.

Leon is a humble man who dislikes any fuss being made about him. He will probably dislike me saying even this much. But his decision to send me the article mattered — and so does my decision to mention him, his achievements, and the service he has given to Australia over many decades.

Non-Jewish Australians, and non-Jewish members of the wider Western world, should understand how much individuals like Leon have contributed, often quietly and without fanfare, at a time when the world’s oldest hatred has emerged once again in our day, and on our watch.

The article was not pleasant reading. Nor was it supposed to be. It was a 1928 speech by Joseph Goebbels titled Knowledge and Propaganda, preserved in a German research archive. Delivered on 9 January 1928 to Nazi Party members in Berlin, it remains chilling because of its clarity. Goebbels did not treat propaganda as a search for truth. He treated it as an instrument of power.

His argument was blunt. Propaganda was not to be judged by whether it was decent, modest, gentle or even truthful. It was to be judged by whether it worked. Propaganda was “good” if it achieved the desired result and “bad” if it failed.

That is the lesson we must confront.

Goebbels knew propaganda was a weapon. Do we?

He understood that propaganda was about organising emotion, simplifying grievance, creating belonging, and moving people from private resentment to public movement. It converted confusion into certainty, certainty into ideology, ideology into organisation, and organisation into power.

Many German intellectuals saw this clearly and fled. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt and others continued to warn from abroad about what had happened to Germany. They saw how propaganda reshaped reality through repetition, fused nationalism with fear and hatred, and manipulated language itself until persecution sounded like necessity.

Victor Klemperer, the German Jewish philologist who survived inside Nazi Germany, later wrote that words could be like “tiny doses of arsenic”: swallowed unnoticed, apparently harmless at first, and then toxic after time had passed. That is one of the most important insights of the twentieth century. Language does not merely describe reality. Under propaganda, language is used to manufacture reality.

Hannah Arendt understood something similar. Totalitarian propaganda does not merely persuade people to believe one lie. It corrodes the distinction between truth and falsehood until many people believe everything and nothing. Once that distinction collapses, the propagandist has done his work.

That is why Goebbels’s speech remains disturbing. Not because every modern propagandist is a Nazi. That would be lazy and unserious. The point is sharper. Goebbels shows us how dangerous movements think before they have power. He reminds us that the manipulation of language is not incidental to extremism. It is central to it.

Propaganda is the battlefield before the battlefield. It prepares the ground, selects the villain, removes complexity, turns human beings into categories, and mobs into movements.

And it rarely ends only with the intended victims.

What people must remember is that Germany itself was destroyed by the ideology Germans had been taught to worship. The Second World War killed millions of Germans, alongside the tens of millions murdered, starved, bombed, displaced and brutalised across Europe and the world. The National WWII Museum estimates German military deaths at about 5.5 million and total German deaths, military and civilian, at roughly 6.6 to 8.8 million.

This does not diminish German guilt. It clarifies the full horror of ideological intoxication. Propaganda consumed its enemies first, and then devoured the nation that had embraced it.

Goebbels himself ended in moral ruin. A fanatical antisemite and Hitler loyalist, he became Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in 1933 and remained in that role until the collapse of the regime. In the end, as Berlin fell, he and his wife Magda murdered their six children and then killed themselves.

That is where the worship of death, grievance and ideological purity can lead.

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes. And when it does, the rhyme is rarely subtle to those prepared to listen.

Winston Churchill understood this. He paid attention not only to what Nazi leaders said, but to how they said it: the repetition, theatricality, grievance, nationalism, demonisation and appeal to wounded pride. Long before many others accepted the scale of the Nazi danger, Churchill saw the gathering storm. His burden was not simply that he saw danger, but that he saw it while many intelligent, respectable and credentialled people explained it away.

Civilised societies can talk themselves into blindness. They can mistake exhaustion for wisdom, appeasement for prudence, and wishful thinking for moral seriousness.

Churchill warned before warning was fashionable. He endured ridicule before his warnings became obvious. He understood that a society unwilling to identify danger early may later be forced to confront it at terrible cost.
My own instinct, formed through service, history and hard experience in the Middle East, is that we are again living through a time when too many people refuse to look up.

That is why I feel compelled to send up the star cluster.

In the military, a star cluster is fired into the sky to illuminate, warn, signal and draw attention. It says: look here. Wake up. Something is happening. Do not drift. Do not sleepwalk. Do not pretend the darkness is normal.

I see, with a level of clarity that still seems to escape many, that the plight of Israel and the plight of the West are now inextricably linked. Israel is not some distant foreign issue to be filed under Middle Eastern complexity.

Israel is the frontier democracy on the bleeding edge of Western civilisation.
Israel is fighting enemies that do not merely hate Israel because of a boundary dispute, a government policy, or a particular prime minister. They hate Israel because of what it represents: Jewish sovereignty, democratic resilience, national confidence, civilisational memory, and the stubborn refusal of a people to disappear.

Israel is fighting and winning an existential war against terror states and their proxies. That war is kinetic, military, ideological and informational. Its enemies fire rockets, dig tunnels, train militias, fund proxies and spread lies. They understand that images can travel faster than facts, that Western guilt can be manipulated, and that a slogan can do what a battalion cannot.
That is propaganda as warfare.

At the same time, the West is losing an identity war. It is losing confidence in its own story. Too many Western institutions now produce citizens fluent in accusation but illiterate in gratitude. They know how to condemn their civilisation but not how to defend it. They know the vocabulary of oppression but not the price of liberty.

Israel is fighting an external war against enemies who know who they are.

The West is fighting an internal war against confusion about who we are.

The first war is obvious. The second is more insidious.

In our cities, universities, media ecosystems and cultural institutions, we see a moral inversion that would once have shocked us. We see democratic Israel accused of genocide by people who cannot define genocide with consistency. We see Hamas atrocities minimised, rationalised or buried beneath endless context until responsibility disappears. We see Jews asked to explain themselves, condemn themselves, distance themselves, apologise for themselves, and prove their moral worth again and again.

We see people who claim to oppose racism tolerate Jew hatred when it is wrapped in the language of anti-Zionism. We see people who claim to oppose fascism march beside Islamists who would despise almost everything they profess to value. We see people who claim to speak for human rights ignore hostages, rape, torture, indoctrination and the deliberate embedding of military infrastructure among civilians.

This is not merely disagreement about policy. It is the consequence of corrupted moral language.

In our interactions, Leon pressed me on an important point. If propaganda is to be understood properly, we should not confine our attention to the visible end product: a headline, a television segment, a slogan, or a protest chant. We must also examine the machinery behind it — the institutions, funding streams, academic networks, cultural platforms and media ecosystems through which certain narratives are created, legitimised, laundered and repeated until they begin to appear objective, neutral and self-evident.

Qatar offers an important case study. Through Al Jazeera, education, sport, culture, investment and diplomacy, Qatar has built one of the most sophisticated soft-power networks in the world. The Council on Foreign Relations has described Al Jazeera as a major source of Qatar’s regional and global influence, while scholarship on Qatar’s soft power has identified media, culture, aviation, art and sport as instruments through which a small state has gained outsized influence.

This does not mean every Al Jazeera report is false, or every institution touched by Qatari money is corrupt. Serious analysis requires discipline. But it does mean Australians should ask harder questions about how narratives are formed, who funds them, whose interests they serve, and why institutions so often treated as neutral may in fact sit within strategic information ecosystems.

That is not conspiracy. It is statecraft.

And propaganda works best when people do not recognise it as propaganda.
The West should know better. Australia should know better. But knowledge does not defend itself. Institutions do not protect themselves. Civilisation does not automatically renew itself. It must be taught, loved, defended and handed on.

The stakes are not abstract. They extend to our homes, our children, our grandchildren, and the unborn descendants whose inheritance we are shaping now.

Two large things are happening.

First, Israel is fighting and winning an existential war against terror states and their proxies, at terrible cost and under extraordinary scrutiny.

Second, the West is losing an identity war that may, if not reversed, leave our descendants mortally threatened — Leon’s descendants, mine, and those of every reasonable Australian family. A civilisation that no longer understands itself will eventually fail to defend itself. A society that cannot distinguish between its firefighters and its arsonists will one day find itself consumed.

That may sound stark. It is stark.

But despair is not a strategy. Nor is complaint. Nor is private agreement whispered in safe rooms.

We must snap out of our slumber.

We must relearn the difference between propaganda and truth. We must teach our children that slogans are not arguments. We must demand moral clarity from our leaders. We must support Jewish Australians not as a favour to them, but as an act of national self-respect. Antisemitism is never only a Jewish problem. It is a warning light on the dashboard of civilisation. When it flashes, the whole engine is in trouble.

We must also become better communicators of the truth. Truth badly told can lose to lies well told. Decency without courage can lose to malice with discipline. Good people can be defeated when they assume that being right is enough.

Goebbels understood that ideas must be carried, repeated, organised and made emotionally intelligible. We should learn the technical lesson without absorbing the moral corruption. We should communicate truth with clarity and make the defence of civilisation simple enough to be understood, strong enough to be remembered, and hopeful enough to be shared.

This matters for Australia.

I struggle, as Leon does, to fathom man’s inhumanity to man. In our private conversation, Leon reflected on the moral inheritance given to him by his father, by figures such as Weary Dunlop, by the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and by the best traditions of Australian service. Those traditions teach that human beings possess dignity irrespective of race, colour, sex or religion.

Australia and Australians remain among the finest people in the world. But goodness alone is not enough. We must build the industries, technologies, institutions and civic confidence required for the future. We must invest in STEM, sovereign capability, education, national resilience and moral seriousness. A country that cannot build, defend, explain and renew itself will eventually become dependent on those who can.

That is part of the mission of the 2023 Foundation. We are not trying to shout at the already convinced. We are trying to reach the reasonable, the persuadable, the open-minded and the historically under-informed. We are trying to replace abstraction with lived experience and help people see Israel, Jews, antisemitism and the West’s civilisational crisis through clearer eyes.

That is my optimism.

The propagandists are loud, but they are not all-powerful. The mobs are intimidating, but they are not, I believe, the majority. The lies are spreading, but truth still has force when spoken with courage. There remain millions of decent people who know something is wrong but have not yet found the words, the confidence or the community to say so aloud.

Our task is to help them.

That is what it means to send up the star cluster. Not to panic. Not to despair. Not to surrender to the darkness. But to illuminate the field, identify the danger, gather the decent, and move forward.

Churchill did not stop the storm from gathering. But he helped ensure that when it finally broke, Britain still had enough courage left to stand.

The article Leon sent me was a reminder from history. Goebbels understood propaganda as a weapon. Churchill understood the danger of refusing to see the storm. Our task is to understand both lessons before it is too late.

The storm is gathering again. But so are we.

Those who refuse to understand history are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.