Gupta-owned and controlled TV channel ANN7 has artfully mastered Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda techniques to hurt its “enemies”, writes China Dodovu.
During the height of the World
War II genocide in the 1940s, Joseph Goebbels, who was Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda, employed various methods of deception to justify the Holocaust and to sustain the war.
With his virulent anti-Semitism, Goebbels’s focus was to ensure that Hitler was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader, building a cult personality. As the war went on, he fed Germans with distortions, exaggerations, inaccuracies and even fabrications in order to receive support and a sense of legitimacy.
Goebbels planned his speeches, using choreographed inflection and gestures. All his meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party colours. His arrival at meetings (almost always late) was timed to achieve maximum emotional impact.
In order to consolidate power, Goebbels helped Hitler to foster distrust, competition and infighting among his subordinates, including issuing them with contradictory orders and overlapping responsibilities.
To pursue his deceptive infamy, he asserted: “Argument must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, and not intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”
Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators in a state-sponsored persecution. Germans who defied the brutalities were accused of treason, their reputations were smeared and they were labelled as traitors.
In South Africa, the Gupta-owned and controlled TV channel ANN7 has artfully mastered Goebbels’s bigotry. It uses his propaganda techniques to hurt its “enemies”, and with its opinions and prejudices it devotes time to smearing and admonishing others while portraying its favourites positively.
In pursuit of Goebbelism, ANN7 is enveloped in politics of parochial sectarianism to advance the fortunes of the notorious Premier League, which is an interprovincial clique with a national footprint to capture the soul of the ANC, using shrewd underhand tactics.
The Premier League has become a manifestation and the tip of the iceberg of factionalism in the ANC. It is using ANN7 as a conduit to popularise its preferred presidential candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
In 2015, two years before its national conference to elect its president, ANN7 conferred Dlamini Zuma with the South African of the Year award as a prelude to her presidential candidacy.
Under the pretext of political analysts led by Professor Sipho Seepe, ANN7 uses well-skilled artisans of hypocrisy who employ various propaganda techniques to wreak havoc, including entering the ANC succession debate where it openly and covertly punts for Dlamini Zuma and admonishes Cyril Ramaphosa.
Only Premier League sycophants and crazy political analysts are given ample time to sway public opinion. Its participants are bogus political analysts, and anyone whose views are contrary is excluded, sidelined or criticised.
For its survival, its owners rely on capturing the state’s highest echelons, our president.
In the early days of the Nkandla scandal, ANN7 unsuccessfully tried every trick in the book to spin it. Its propaganda hit its apex during the latest
cabinet reshuffle when it directed vitriolic attacks and carried a comedic banter to the much-respected Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas.
In the worst gutter levels of journalism, three weeks ago ANN7 indulged in the leak of a story from “highly placed sources” that Ramaphosa, Gwede Mantashe and Zweli Mkhize pushed Zuma to attend the May Day rally in Bloemfontein, where he was booed by Cosatu members.
ANN7 is not a channel to be venerated or applauded, but rather abhorred and despised for what it represents. It is a morally destitute channel which has turned itself a modern-day Goebbels.
We don’t have to tolerate this sort of mindless cheerleading. We must refuse to succumb to its whims and dictates.
Most importantly, we must show ANN7 that in South Africa we will not brew a culture that blindly worships the cult of personality like Goebbels did with Germans, but instead we will encourage open and robust debates. We must blaze our own path towards genuine press freedom for all.
* China Dodovu is executive director of the AIM27 Foundation.
** The views expressed here are nt necessarily those of Independent Media.