Prof. Jordan Peterson Analyzes Nazi Propaganda Film “The Eternal Jew” (Der Ewige Jude, 1940)

all right now i want to show you a brief film and you can you can look here at the at the what would you call it artistic and propagandistic transformation of the idea of order into a politicized message and the thing that's so interesting about hitler's particular brand of fascism it wasn't precisely and it see it wasn't precisely a movement that was predicated on ideas like communism communism is predicated on ideas but the nazis went at it with something that wasn't really in the realm of idea it was more in the realm of like embodied disgust and image and so it was also very much more difficult to fight against from the ideational perspective you know it wasn't a well-developed intellectual movement it was an embodied movement and hitler was extraordinarily good at using the metaphors and the images and then his incredible capacity for for propagandistic display to fire people up at a level of analysis that they weren't really even aware of so let's take a look at this film [Music] yeah the campaign in poland gave us the opportunity to really get to know the jewish people nearly four million jews live here in poland but they won't be found among the rural population nor have they suffered from the chaos of war as has the native pole they set it out indifferently in the gloomy streets of the polish schedule [Music] within an hour after the german occupation they were back in business [Music] the germans had a look at the polish ghetto 25 years ago this time our eyes are sharpened by our experience in the last few decades unlike in 1914 we no longer see just the most grotesque and comical of these questionable ghetto figures this time we recognize that there's a plague here a plague that threatens the health of the aryan peoples said the jew is the demon behind the corruption of mankind and these pictures prove it [Music] jewish jewish dwellings are filthy and neglected these jews aren't at all poor after decades of business they've hoarded enough to acquire decent comfortable homes but they live for generations in the same dirty and bug ridden dwellings for reading jewish scriptures [Music] the main part of jewish so-called community life takes place in the street [Music] um [Music] the connection with trade you know you see what's going on in the okay so with the juxtaposition of those two films you see the juxtaposition of order versus chaos and so part of the order versus chaos archetype obviously is is rooted in the dichotomy between disgust and purity it's not the only it's all not the only axis of opposition between order and chaos and then so this is all the invocation of archetypal chaos and it starts with that the the use of the disease imagery and then also the use of music composed in a minor key and threatening and low right so that's all juxtaposed together and then they switched to trade again with the this undertone of threat and there's a hand-to-hand exchange of goods and it seems to me that they're they're using the image to continue the metaphor that in this situation trade is associated with contamination rather than with productivity right and so you and you can see obviously a dichotomy with regards to trade because when you're taking goods from someone else the question is are the goods of high quality and useful or and are they useful are they something that is going to introduce a foreign element or an unexpected element into your house and so this film is obviously taking the that ambivalence that's associated with trade and placing it into the chaos order archetype and then associating it with disgust so it's very very sneaky and it's not done it's done by inference rather than directly which i think is much more powerful way of doing this sort of thing [Music] and one of the things that's interesting too is that you know you can imagine that if you're if you're seeing people who are poor and down trodden that that might evoke two possible sets of responses one might be a compassionate response that would be the desire to help right and the other would be the desire to distance yourself of course you feel the same thing for example if you're walking down bloor and you find somebody who's you know a completely wrecked street person lying there in their sleeping bag in a doorway it's like well what's your response going to be is it compassion or is it is it fear is it disgust well it's going to depend on your mood and all sorts of other things it's going to depend on the particulars of the situation it's going to depend on your temperament but you can see that those two things they're both automatically evocable responses and it isn't self-evident which one is going to come to the fore nor is it always self-evident which one should come to the fore because part of the reason that you're ambivalent about a situation like that is because you have no idea what would happen even if you did choose to interact and so you can't just simply what would you say there's no simple way of solving a problem like that and so that's why there's a war of competing emotions when you're in a when you're in a situation like that but you could imagine as well you could have taken the same images and put them to different music and used a different overlay and it could have been a call to compassion but that's not what it is here it's a call to contempt and extermination because that's also another danger of i suppose insisting upon the fact that a given population is victimized i suppose that might be way of one one way of thinking about because there's two different sets of categorical responses to people who are at the bottom of the dominance harkey and one of them is compassion but the other one is more like this it's not necessarily something that you want to carelessly evoke [Music] one might want to regard these haggling children as a sign of great poverty and it becomes clear that they're proud to act as their grown-ups do these young people don't have the idealism that ours do with them the egoism of the individual is not in the service of higher common goals instead jewish morality in crass contradiction of the aryan concept of ethics proclaims the unrestrained egoism of every jew to be divine in the fifth book of moses for example it is stated that a non-jew thou may loan to upon usury but not thy brother that the lord may bless thee in all thy dealings for the jews then doing business is something holy this is totally incomprehensible to non-jews aryan man attaches a sense of worth to every activity he wants to create something worthwhile food or clothing houses or machines so there's a contrast there they actually use a contrast there between industrious and non-industrious too which is quite interesting works of art or anything else of value to everyone he's ruled by the feeling of being responsible for his achievements [Music] the first trade goods a generally worthless trash of all sorts that's how the little jews start out soon they reach the point where they can sell from a tray and before long they've assembled a complete [Music] and then a bigger [Music] that is the most unscrupulous eventually have warehouses and banks and move into the most splendid mansions in the cities provided that they don't get in each other's way as in the narrow ghettos of the east [Music] that's why they try to escape to rich lands with rich people so in the next part of the film there's another something else that's done implicitly so you'll see a globe and then there's spread of um of migration and the underlying metaphor there is again the spread of disease people's because they need the whereas with which to do business creative aryan peoples find a value has been reduced by the jew to mere merchandise he buys and sells but produces nothing [Music] production he leaves to the workers and farmers of the host nation it's funny there there's an echo of marxist ideology in there too that's very interesting because what they're the the the insistence is that the the labor that goes into basic production qualifies as labor but the labor that goes into mercantile activity doesn't qualify as labor at all it's not like the nazis were pro-capitalist by any stretch of the imagination so there's this strange distinction drawn between like it's almost like physical production that seems to be something that's valued it's the use of your musculature say but then as soon as it's elevated up into trade which is obviously a value-added process i mean that that's almost self-evident but it's put forward here as something that's only that's only parasitical that's right that and that's commonality with with the marxism of the time [Music] people without farmers or workers a race of parasites wherever the body of a nation shows a wound they anchor themselves and feed on the decaying organism they make business out of the sickness of the nations their faces bear the age-old features of the perpetual sponger the eternal jew who in the course of time and worldwide wanderings has always been the same there's no difference between these jews in poland and those in palestine though the two are geographically [Music] separated [Music] [Music] palestine is the spiritual center of international jewry though the jews are numerically insignificant there here at the wailing wall they gather and mourn the fall of jerusalem their homelessness though is a matter of choice and in keeping with their entire history four thousand years ago their hebrew ancestors were already wandering out of the land of two rivers they wandered along the sea to egypt where they ran a lucrative grain business for a while when the country farmers and other egyptians rose against the foreign users and speculators they wandered once more and plundered their way to the promised land they settled there mercilessly looting the culturally superior rightful inhabitants here in the course of centuries from the oriental far eastern racial mixture with negroid admixture the ultimate mongrelized jews developed foreign from us europeans born of totally different racial elements they differ from us in body and above all in soul we probably would never have been bothered by them had they stayed in their oriental home but the cosmopolitan empire of alexander the great reaching from the near east across half the mediterranean and especially the boundless world empire of the romans brought about the evolution of the trade and migratory traits of the jews who soon spread across the open mediterranean area while some of them settled in the large urban traffic and trade centers of the mediterranean others wandered relentlessly on across spain france southern germany and england everywhere they made themselves unwelcome in spain and france the people rose openly against them in the 13th and 14th centuries and they wandered on mainly to germany [Music] there they followed the path of the aryan culture creative germans colonizing the east until they finally found a gigantic new untapped reservoir in the polish and russian sections of eastern europe so well let's let's tie that together we talked about the use of archetypes archetypes in stories we talked about the relationship between archetypal symbolism and the biological underpinnings of the human psyche and then you can see that manifesting itself in this sort of propaganda and the political positions that come out of it you tap into the arc archetypal dimension that's chaos versus order you can you can place one against the other however you want from a propagandistic perspective because you could make a film decrying excessive order that that's not a difficult thing to do but that is what happens here order is associated with the sun and with what's good and with honest labor and with purity and with health and chaos is associated with decay and disgust and and impurity and also with trade which is extremely interesting and the trade dynamic you could see that in the second part of the film there there was a there was the implication that it was involvement in trade that was associated with this pathological spread right and so trade is that's another reflection of of the ambivalence towards the transgression of borders is trade a good thing or is it a bad thing well that's always a political issue it's a huge political issue right now right you're going to have internationalist trade you're going to close the borders you're going to have internationalist trade and open it are you going to close the borders and so the degree to which the border should be open or closed i think generally speaking is the prime political question and of course we're going through an absolute convulsion of that sort of argumentation again right now part of the reason i i wanted to show you this i mean there's a variety of reasons i wanted to show you um how the how the archetype and the underlying biology are are tightly associated but i also wanted to show you how those associations can be hijacked essentially and used for propagandistic and political purposes because you need to know that because these sorts of things have a very powerful they have the capacity for a very powerful emotional appeal and the only possible way of resisting that i would say and and avoiding the temptation of allowing extraordinarily complex issues to be catastrophically reduced to their to to principles that are far too simple to do them justice is to become at least aware to some degree of what the mechanisms for the production of such propaganda are and why they have such potency then you have at least some ghost of a chance of reducing your own what would you call it proclivity we could even call it a temperamental proclivity to the kind of propagandistic information that happens to suit your temperament best so well we all know the aftermath of this sort of thing right it was absolutely dreadful and we're by no means out of the woods on that yet you know you see in europe and in the united states increasingly calls for the the nationalistic enclosure of borders again you saw that with trump and the building of the wall between mexico and the united states so these things can get very badly out of hand and it's a it's a very bad idea to allow things to swing too far to one way or too far to the other because all hell breaks loose when you do that and well you

Channel: Jordan Peterson Fan Channel

Views: 298,220

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Professor Peterson, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Peterson, Jordan Peterson lecture, Jordan Peterson Clips, Best of Jordan Peterson, Best of Jordan B. Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, lecture, online lectures, university class, history, Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, Nazi propaganda, The Eternal Jew, Der Ewige Jude, propaganda film, Antisemitism, World War 2, Fascism, Jewish ghetto, Fritz Hippler, 3rd reich

Id: xTy1tUi1IlA

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018