Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1924, Joseph Goebbles joined the German Nazi party and began to implement effective and sophisticated propaganda for the purpose of bringing Adolf Hitler to power. Goebbles used every means of communication at his disposal, including film and radio, posters and newspapers, to reach a broad spectrum of people who feared for their future and their safety. This media wizard presented Hitler as the stable and secure leader who could make Germany great again. Well, something like that, but in German.
If Goebbles had been born 100 years later he would have gone crazy with the possibilities we have today to provoke and agitate the people: social networks, live broadcasts, trolls, press conferences, algorithms and even personal data traffic. Today Goebbles would have taken advantage of the consumerist crowds and the supposed need for goods and entertainment to achieve, in a few months, what took him years.
A century has passed since Goebbles came to the Nazi party and some politicians have understood the formula: “agitate and entertain the people.” Now it is not necessary to have heavy cameras, movie stars or exorbitant sums of money to guarantee the loyalty of the people. Some tycoons, publicists and economists involved in politics, such as Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele or Rodrigo Chaves, are very clear about this. Let’s review some of their lessons.
Donald Trump: how to take over a Capitol in less than two hours?
On January 6, 2021, at 12:10, Donald Trump had not yet accepted his defeat to Joe Biden and launched the following speech: “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we’re going to go to Capitol Hill and we’re going to go and try to give… our Republicans, the weak… the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country. As he speaks, the crowds move toward the Congress building, just a few miles away.”
At 14:00, the mob broke into the building, doors and windows were broken, and rioters took pictures in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. At 14:20 the session was adjourned. At 15:00 shots rang out as the National Guard was deployed. At 16:20 Donald Trump told his supporters to go home, even though he believed it had been a fraudulent election. At 18:00, a curfew was declared and the situation returned to calm.
Nayib Bukele: how to discredit the legislative branch by taking an empty Legislative Assembly?
On Sunday, February 9, 2020, the National Civil Police and the Armed Forces of El Salvador took over the Legislative Assembly because Bukele had summoned the deputies to a plenary session to approve a $109 million loan to finance his anti-gang plan. With only 20 of the 84 deputies present, the president went to the rostrum and said a prayer before exclaiming to the thousands of people waiting for him outside the parliament:
“If these scoundrels do not approve the Territorial Control Plan this week, we will reconvene here on Sunday, we will again ask God for wisdom and we will say, ‘God, you asked me for patience, but these scoundrels do not want to work for the people’”. From then on, according to the detailed narration of the podcast Bukele: el señor de los sueños, Bukele broke the constitutional order and disrespected the independence of the institutions.
Rodrigo Chaves: how to use a press conference to criticize the Prosecutor’s Office and incite the population to a potential mobilization?
On Wednesday, September 25, 2024, in a weekly press conference and in relation to the Barrenador case, President Rodrigo Chaves indicated that he would not allow the imposition of “the authoritarianism of the prosecutor, the thuggery with which they acted, because today it is Marta Esquivel, but tomorrow it could be any of you, any decent citizen of this country”.
In response to these words, the Universidad de Costa Rica and Congressman Eliécer Feinzaig, who indicated that Chaves’ statements were a call to sedition; that is to say, to a collective and violent uprising against authority and public order. That when Chaves refers to the Prosecutor’s Office with adjectives such as “authoritarianism” and “thuggery” he charges his adversary with his own errors or defects, answering attack with attack.
Our three professional stirrers have a formula, a shared recipe, which we can summarize as follows: “Incite disorder, always use social networks, look cool, be a good macho man and connect with your people. Show yourself as the strongest, the faithful devotee and not as the weakling of the opposition. If these operations don’t work on a first try, repeat again and again.”