Introduction

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Did you know that it’s possible to convince someone to think just like you, all without telling them what you think in the first place?

Well, it is! And today I’m going to show you how.

The other day a friend and collaborator of mine who goes by “G0utBack” sent me a video he thought I’d find interesting, it’s called “The National Socialist Book Burnings 1933 - The Truth”, a video exploring what books the Nazi movement had banned and burned during their rise to power and their motivations for doing so, he said that he found the creator of the video to be cowardly, as he seemed to be raising interpretations on the topic and then immediately distancing himself from them.

Before I carry on, I’m going to just link the video here:

I encourage you to watch it in full first, so you can judge for yourself if what I have to say about is cherry picking or a fair judgement.

Almost straight away I could tell the direction the video was going to go, which I summed up as “the books the Nazis burned were really nasty”, the top comments I found on the video also gave a hint, with the top comments I found reading “he tried to save us, our ancestors didn’t listen” and “they will always tell you about the book burnings, but never mention what kind of books they burned”.

Taking a quick look through the channel of the uploader, “Zoomer Historian”, I saw his content was filled with videos about World War 2 and Nazism dedicated to attacking various “myths” like “We’d All Be Speaking German”, “The Blitz”, “The Good War”, “Hitler Wanted to Conquer The World”, “Nazi Blue Eyes and Blonde Hair” and “Lebensraum”,

as well as “Complete Histories” of Hitler, the SS, Anschluss and the Sudeten Crisis.

The channel’s about page started with the quote:

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

So I got the impression very quickly that this is someone who wants to relitigate World War 2 and the stigma around Nazism, but anyway let’s not focus on topics, let’s focus on what was said and why.

Describing the Video

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The video starts by asking if book burnings are inherently bad, and why the book burnings are put on a pedestal as one of the key examples of Nazi evil, we’re then asked why, if book burning or censorship is so wrong, the Allies banned 30,000 books during Denazification after the war when the Nazis banned 4000? Following that, the narrator states that while the burnings themselves get a lot of mention in the history books, what was actually burned is glossed over, and that’s what he wants to explore, promising to present the books and their contents “without opinion”.

But first he wants to go into the background of the Weimar Republic, just before the Nazis took over, era and the social changes it brought to Germany, we need to know the context of the Weimar to explain the Nazis cultural actions, as their plans were a “reaction” or “revolution” against Weimar era culture. Again the narrator promises not to take sides, saying this era can be viewed in different ways, by conservatives with disgust but as a big step forward by gay people.

Although the narrator promises this summary will be brief, it actually takes up most of the video, the video is 11 minutes, a minute of that is the introduction, 6 minutes is this historical recap (2 minutes for the Weimar era and 4 minutes for recounting the burnings themselves) and 4 minutes is about the actual content of the books.

The historical summary goes over the rivalry between Communists and Nationalists in Germany, the country’s debts to the Allies, collapsing currency, the costs of the First World War and the cultural changes of the Weimar era, an era where drugs, prostitutes, transgenderism entered the light, a more free era untied to the moral rules of old.

This seems to start out as a not very opinionated segment, but then comes a certain line 3 and a half minutes into the video “an important aspect to note is that many, or even most of the leading figures of this new liberal culture and the liberal government at large at this time, were Jewish, I say this without opinion or further comment”, he then states that many Jews talk openly and proudly of this period and if you’re a liberal it’s your prerogative if this kind of world is what you might strive for, saying whether this type of society is right or wrong depends on your worldview.

It then goes into how, for the Nazis, it was definitely wrong, discussing how the German Student Union spontaneously carried out the burnings and published a cultural manifesto justifying them, which he reads, then reads a speech by Goebbels justifying the Nazi view on culture. 

Of course, explaining why the Nazis did what they did seems fine, it’s important to understand what their ideology and motives were, but then after this explanation comes a line which I would call a mask off moment:

As the ever growing Nazi movement saw it the years following the disaster of the World War had been a mistake, Germany had gone down the wrong path, they felt their culture had been hijacked by jews, liberals and defeatists, they felt family values had given way to rampant individualism, moral values given way to sexual deviancy, homosexuality and worse. The comparisons to our current time are obvious and barely worth mentioning, then as of now it was a battle between the sacred principles of our society in the past and the new, liberal and unknown.

While our narrator doesn’t outright say he agrees with the Nazi view on culture, he describes it as having clear and “obvious” parallels to today and characterises it as a battle between the “sacred” and the “unknown”, with the “sacred” being the side the Nazis were on, very telling.

Then in the final segment he describes the banned books, starting with Communist works he states that as Communism and Nazism were enemies from the start it’s obvious they would be banned first, listing Marx’s Das Kapital, the works of Lenin and Trotsky and German Communists like Rosa Luxembourg.

The next topic is pacifism, the narrator says that although the Nazis didn’t see war as inherently good, they saw pacifism as a disease and banned the book that recently inspired All Quiet on the Western Front.

He then makes another revealing point, arguing that “while this might seem extreme, consider that a few years later Oswald Mosley, Britain’s biggest peace advocate would be thrown in a tiny cold cell without trial for opposing the Second World War and only released when he was seriously ill”.

What’s so revealing about this? Well, Mosley wasn’t just a peace advocate, he was the leader of the British Union of Fascists, he had in fact been allowed to speak and organise in the UK for many years, in fact infamously during the 1936 Battle of Cable Street police attempted to escort his Fascist political rally, but they were stopped by a mass of counter demonstrators and were forced to redirect the march, at the time the government had actually rejected a petition to ban the march.

Mosley also wasn’t arrested until months after the war had started, he was arrested after the Battle of France in 1940, when the Nazis had swallowed up one of Britain’s greatest allies in the war effort. And (as our presenter even admits) he was later released, something else worth mentioning is that after the war he was able to go back into politics, where he ran for election again, he didn’t get back into power though, not because of any sinister conspiracy but instead for a more boring reason, barely anybody wanted to vote for him.

So the British state had actually abetted Mosley’s activism in the past and only cracked down when the war intensified, later they oversaw his release and he freely returned to politics, compare this to the Nazis who cracked down on pacifists several years before they even started the war, and while we’ll never know what a world where the Nazis won the war would’ve looked like, it’s safe to say they probably wouldn’t have suddenly liberalised on speech and allowed the pacifists back onto the soap box¹.

Without outright saying it, only inviting the viewer to “consider”, the narrator is arguing that the British were more extreme with their censorship than the Nazis were, and he does this by filing off a large amount of the context.

The next topic mentioned is books on Transgender theory and Homosexuality, explaining that this should “hardly be surprising” and that “Transgenderism was viewed in all countries, not just National-Socialist Germany at the time, as something absurd and deranged.”, the writer Magnus Hiershfeld was singled out and is described by the narrator as “the perfect example for the Germans of what they didn’t want in society, a jewish homosexual scientist who turns men into women”, listing off several titles of his books: “The Objective Diagnosis of Homosexuality”, “Transvestites, The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress” and “The Sexual History of the World War”.

On homosexuality the narrator argues “the liberalisation of society and the availability for those fighting their homosexual desires, no matter how strong, to act on them was everywhere, even in the early Nazi Party”, pointing to the example of the leader of the Nazi Stormtroopers (the SA), Ernst Rohm, and how he was purged in the Night of the Long Knives, with one of the justifications for this being that the SS found SA leaders in bed with young boys, with the Nazis wanting this problem to be stamped out of the party and German society, leaving it in the past.

This conveniently ignores the actual reason the SA was purged, which was that Rohm had his own ideas about the direction Nazism would take, wanting a further revolution against Germany’s elite, and that the SA wanted to take control of the German Army, Hitler sided with the army and the elite instead, co-opting them. A power struggle in the Nazi Party is presented instead as part of a cleansing by Hitler of German society from liberal decadence.

Next is the banning of pornography, which is explained simply as “much as today, there was a huge opposition to porn, and why the nazis would oppose such a thing needs no explanation”.

And lastly, he mentions the Jews, saying that Jewish works are the culmination of all the others and that the Jews were massively over represented in art, culture and politics, a major part of the history of liberalism and at the spearhead of every movement challenging the European status quo, which he again says he is pointing out “without opinion”, even saying “maybe this is something to be proud of, maybe it isn’t” and “your interpretation of this phenomena depends on your worldview”.

Jews, he summarises, were at the head of all the other categories, and when you combine that with the other gripes the Nazis had with the Jews, like banking, it’s not hard to imagine why Jewish books were an easy target for them.

After this summary of all the topics, he ends by saying it would be silly and hypocritical of Westerners to be horrified by Nazi book burning, as most of our countries have books on the banned list and media censorship, and how if a country doesn’t have banned books, buying certain books can get you on a watchlist, arguing that very few censorship free societies have existed throughout history and Nazi Germany was no exception.

So, put simply, my initial expectations were absolutely right. The video mentions the Nazi’s cultural divide with the Weimar era in a positive light for the Nazis, calling the values they apparently wanted to return to “sacred” while liberalism is an “unknown” and totally endorses the Nazi blame of Jews for this liberalism, presenting Jews as the peak of the pyramid, it presents all of their censorship policies as either positive or with a shrug, something normal, nothing to be surprised about.

The video doesn’t actually explore the substance of any of the banned books, only mentioning a few titles and topics, despite supposedly being neutral or non-political it only provides the Nazi interpretation of the culture, with no words offered from any of the authors who had their work banned.

The only olive branch to other views are the references to how if you have another worldview, you might view things differently, but we’re not given any of the reasons why you would, it’s a case of tunnel vision whitewashed with the argument that you could imagine a different tunnel if you liked, without going into any detail.

The Technique - Guiding the Reader

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In short, the narrator argues that the Nazis were right about there being a Jewish liberal clique pushing Germany in the wrong direction, that their opposition to porn, homosexuality, transgenderism and pacifism was normal and that their methods, censorship and book burning, were nothing extreme. In other words, he says that what the Nazis did was at worst neutral and at best positive.

And he does this all without openly stating he sympathises with the Nazis or agrees with a lot of what they did, repeating several times that it’s up to your own interpretation, this is something I call “guiding the reader”.

Now, guiding the viewer isn’t always something sinister or wrong, we’ve done it before, here are some examples from the first episode of MEGA, MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea:

On top of this, statistics indicate that out of all the nuclear armed states, the DPRK actually has the least warheads, with around 30 bombs. Of course, 30 bombs capable of wiping entire cities or regions off the map sounds like a big problem, but to put that into perspective China has around 300 warheads, while the US and Russia have over 6000 each! Somehow superpower countries arming themselves with world ending arsenals is not an issue, but this one small country arming itself with a supply of weapons eclipsed by everyone else is so unacceptable that it needs to be starved into capitulation. The US does missile tests of its own, it has a huge arsenal of its own, do you think it would compromise and remove these weapons if demanded to by the international community? Would any other nuclear country? You can imagine the answer.

Some would say that the reason the DPRK having nukes is an issue while others having them is not comes down to how untrustworthy the country is with such a destructive weapon, because Kim Jong-Un is a madman constantly hovering his finger over the red button, but let’s ask ourselves, how many wars has the DPRK fought in? What about the US? How many nuclear bombs has the DPRK used against actual people, as opposed to the US? Which country seems more war -or, uh, “police action”- crazy when you put things into perspective?

These are leading questions with clear answers we want the viewer to reach, when we ask if the US would dismantle their nuclear weapons if demanded to by the international community, the answer is obviously no, the point being that the US government is massively hypocritical for demanding the North Korean government do something they would never do themselves.

When we ask how many wars North Korea has fought in as opposed to the US, the answer is clear, the US has fought in more, when we ask how many nuclear bombs North Korea has dropped on actual people, not just nuclear tests, compared to the US, everyone watching this knows the North Koreans have never done this while the US is the only country in history to have actually used nuclear weapons in this way, with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the point is that it’s crazy to present North Korea as a sinister, aggressive country when the countries often making these accusations, like the US, have fought more wars with more aggressive methods.

So these are rhetorical questions, we’re not actually asking you the viewer/reader for your opinion, there’s only one correct answer. What we’re doing here is giving you the view and allowing you to work your way towards it, rather than outright telling you.

So what makes guiding the viewer like this an okay thing for us to do, but not our “Historian” over here?

Well, the difference is we are still being transparent about what we’re doing, in these examples we guide you to the opinion but we don’t frame it as something we have no opinion on ourselves, the rhetorical questions are designed to guide you towards understanding our idea, they’re not designed to trick you into thinking it was your idea in the first place.

Later in the segment we outright state our opinion on the topic and what it looks like to us and we present it as our own ideas, not something we’re neutral about:

So the deal collapsed and North Korea went back to its WMD development, as we can see twice the supposedly nuke crazy country has signed deals to dismantle its program and both times it has fallen through, not because of the DPRK, but because of the people on the other side of the table who were supposed to be its partners.

Suddenly this whole issue is looking much less like a problem the DPRK has imposed on itself and more like an issue created by outside pressure, nuclear armed countries berating the North for playing them at their own game. The whole story reeks of an old lesson, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

So while we’re using some rhetorical devices here, there’s no trickery going on, we’re totally open about what we want you to think and that we want you to think it.

When making MEGA we are unambiguously being propagandists, and when I mention propaganda I mean it by its original meaning, which is agenda-driven media², in the modern day “propaganda” has taken on a negative meaning, something that’s not just media with a message but media that’s misleading or outright filled with lies, which our work isn’t, we form our views through intense research and we’re confident everything we have to say is the truth.

But as for the original meaning of propaganda, that’s 100% what we are, our documentaries have an obvious agenda behind them, something we want you to hear and ultimately want you to think, we know some people who watch/read won’t agree and won’t accept the ideas and that’s of course totally fine, the world isn’t a hivemind, but we are trying to be persuasive, that’s the goal.

The difference is we are completely open about it, we are not at all neutral and if there’s several interpretations of an event we won’t present them equally, we will give more weight to the interpretations we think are the most accurate, and even if we use some rhetorical tricks to get you thinking and put our point across we’re not hiding what we’re trying to do at all.

There is an exception to this, which is the first 7 minutes of the documentary, where we introduce the topic of North Korean defectors in a sympathetic light. Although we do ask:

But what if the things we think we know about this country and its way of life don’t hold up to scrutiny? Are defector accounts always truthful? Are there any questions we could raise, or doubts we could have? Surely no one would lie about experiencing hell on earth, right?

we initially present Yeonmi Park’s story uncritically and only later do we start showing the inconsistencies and reveal our actual opinions: That she’s an unreliable narrator and that the mainstream narratives about North Korea are false.

But that’s the thing, we do reveal those opinions, and that’s after only 7 minutes in a documentary that’s just over an hour and 20 minutes in runtime, anyone who watches the whole documentary or even a ¼ or ½ of it will be openly presented with what we are trying to do.

Our “Historian” on the other hand, does something very different, his view is quite obvious when you look at what he chooses to mention and the claims he chooses to make, but he tries to hide it in a veil of neutrality, several times after making these points he says things like “I make no comment on this, whether it was right or wrong depends on your worldview.” and “I say this without opinion.”.

By feeding you the convenient details that benefit his arguments and ignoring those that don’t, providing no opposing sides of the coin, and sometimes outright stating the arguments, but then following up with “I have no opinion on this”, he’s giving you all of the tools to come over to his camp while pretending he’s not in it, the goal is to persuade you without you ever realising you were being persuaded, so it feels like you came to these conclusions on your own, this strategy continues throughout the entire video.

There could be several reasons for his choice to do this, one of the most likely ones is that he thinks if he outright says these Nazi sympathetic ideas are his views, he’ll get banned from YouTube, that’s not an unfair assumption, YouTube has lengthy hate speech policies and open sympathy for Nazism is something that could easily be banned under the platform’s rules. In fact, he even directs one of his “I promise I’m not political” comments in the video to YouTube, saying “Now I will simply, again hello YouTube, without opinion, go over some of the genres and some specifics of the books they sent to the flames.”.

Another reason is that for the vast majority of people Nazism is far outside the Overton Window³, Nazi sympathetic ideas are a pill audiences won’t swallow so he has to present himself as “neutral” and feed these sympathies in discretely, this way you can try to convert people who normally would be totally turned off from the very start and would never want to engage with you.

And in case there was still any doubt about the views of our “Zoomer Historian”, I scrolled through the list of his videos and noticed his earlier ones are much more blunt with their viewpoints, his earliest content includes titles like “How Winston Churchill started WW2”, “World War 2 Was Not Worth Fighting”, “How The USA Provoked Germany Into War in 1941”, “Great Britain is to blame for starting WW2” and “Why Germany Could NOT Win World War 2”, which has a thumbnail saying “Churchill’s Fault”.

Both the titles and the thumbnails of the videos make no secret of their Nazi sympathetic leanings, as they blame the Allies for the war, present them as the real warmongers, and brand the fight against Nazism wasteful and a wrong choice to make, I decided to watch the first of those videos to get a taste of this early style and the difference was striking.

The video attacks Churchill as a deranged drunkard controlled by shadowy influencers who was willing to kill his own people to go to war with Hitler when he was keen on peace, talking about how Hitler loved the British so much and hated the idea of attacking British cities and civilians, that he was so angry because the British wouldn’t give in, and claims that the Blitz only happened because Churchill massively retaliated by bombing Berlin based on a single missed German bomb that hit London by accident instead of an oil refinery which was the real target.

It also attacks the USA for apparently taking far more from Britain in exchange for funding the war effort than Hitler would’ve taken on the battlefield or the negotiating table, and argues that Stalin was far worse than Hitler, with Hitler only having the blood of his own people from the Night of the Long Knives on his hands while Stalin had “tortured, starved and executed millions”.

The argument is very obvious: Churchill and his shadowy cabal were the real warmongers, Hitler’s demands were reasonable, the Allies shouldn’t have fought and should’ve just left Hitler to get what he wanted from the European continent, Britain picked the wrong friends. 

But none of that really matters, it’s not the viewpoints that are surprising, it’s the presentation, the video has none of the “you can interpret this based on your worldview”, “I have no opinion on this” or “I say this without comment” type lines that were repeated throughout the book burning video, all of the commentary is presented as the narrator’s own clearly held opinions with no punches pulled, it even ends with the line:

There is no possible cope for why the myth of “World War 2 (which has fundamentally shaped our current society) was necessary”.

In the end I guess I just don’t think ethnically German Danzig was worth giving away western civilization for.

He’s completely open about his opinions and willing to own them.

The Book Burnings video is where this trend seems to stop and the titles and thumbnails begin to have less overt statements, it happens to be one of the most popular videos on the channel so maybe this idea paid off after all.

Conclusion

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Whatever the reason, this is a particularly devious tactic, pretending not to have an opinion in a video dedicated to guiding an audience towards your opinion, it’s an example of where propaganda goes from promoting ideas to deliberately manipulating people, a line that’s dangerous to cross.

It’s important to look out for things like this when you’re consuming media, otherwise you might find yourself sleepwalking into dodgy viewpoints. These kinds of subtle, more suggestive methods can be far more influential than direct opinionated commentary, if someone outright states an opinion you have something that straight away you can oppose or support, if they subtly guide you to it instead you can get the impression that you’re instead just getting harmless “food for thought”, it’s much harder to resist a conversion process if you don’t even realise you’re being converted.

Although in the case of Zoomer Historian his claims obviously stick out like a sore thumb as dodgy if you know a decent amount of background about World War 2, which you should do if you went to school, there will inevitably be impressionable people who aren’t as well educated or just don’t know about the need to fact check what they hear.

That’s not something to take lightly, especially when you look at the audience someone like Zoomer has, his most popular videos have viewer counts in the hundreds of thousands and he has enough supporters on Patreon that he can make this content full time, earning hundreds of pounds a month.

While he may be a niche content creator that your average person has never heard of, he still has a voice that thousands of people have heard, and it’s highly likely that many of those thousands are the impressionable type of person that I mentioned, these are people who can fall into the trap of influencers like Zoomer and start believing (and then potentially spreading) ahistorical garbage, having a knock on effect through word of mouth.

Does that mean that 10 years from now everyone will be believing that we defeated the wrong enemy, or that we should turn back the clock on racial politics to the last century? No, but every person who becomes prey to these kinds of tactics, to “being guided”, is a well meaning, decent person who could have their worldview contorted into intolerance or hate, that will impact their own wellbeing and those around them.

This is why media literacy is so important, the best defence against misinformation is not going to be some kind of higher authority correcting the record, it’s simply impossible for any figure to do that, it takes more time to correct bogus claims than it does to churn them out, and I write that as someone who has written several documentaries dedicated to correcting the record, including one that I’ve spent over a year of my life on.

And it’s not going to come from censoring dangerous ideas out of existence either, there are lots of people out there who will go searching for someone’s voice specifically because they were told they shouldn’t be allowed to hear it, although Zoomer Historian was using a cheap whataboutism⁴ to defend Nazi policies when he said it, he was right to point out that most countries do have books on the banned list, and we know that hasn’t stopped people from turning to all sorts of crackpot or toxic ideas.

Instead the best defence is in the grassroots, it will come from everyone who explores media having the tools and the knowledge to spot false or unreliable claims, the internet has democratised the spreading of information by creating mass media on a scale unimagineable to the eras of TV, film, radio, books or word of mouth, what we need now is an informed electorate.

So, what’s step 1? How can we fight back against tactics like these? Well, the starting point is actually very simple, background checks. When you watch one of these kinds of opinionated or educational videos, look up the creator, sometimes a quick scroll of a YouTube channel is enough, in this case of Zoomer Historian that’s really all it was, just a few thumbnails and titles were enough to show that his claims to be “non political” were complete bullshit.

And the same can go for any other format, if you read an article from a certain journalist, scroll through their profile with the list of other articles they’ve written, does a certain viewpoint or bias seem to stick out? Do they seem to make questionable or sensationalistic claims? These things can be a quick tip off that you should take what you’re reading with a grain of salt.

Other times maybe it takes a bit more, a wider web search or two, but usually it doesn’t take too much digging before the cracks start to emerge, for example when we were researching Yeonmi Park for our MEGA documentary, we came across articles like The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park by reporter Mary Ann Jolley, which dissected several examples of contradictory accounts she had given to the media, usually if a personality is spreading nonsense they will get called out eventually and you’ll be able to find instances of that.

Even if that’s not the case, you can focus on the claims being made, pretty much no narrative appears on the internet these days without a counter narrative appearing to go against it, you can find those arguments and the evidence or logic seperating them and make a judgement call.

That doesn’t mean you have to do this for every content creator you consume media from, not everyone needs to be instinctually treated with suspicion, but if you notice things are a bit off about the arguments they’re making, especially if they’re lacking in transparency (for example, showing very few or no sources for their work) its worthwhile to potentially save yourself from being duped.

Starting with these little building blocks, we can go from misinformation and sensationalism being the virus spreading endlessly around the population, to education, clearheadedness and nuance.

This topic of “guiding the viewer” is something that will come up again in the final episode (Episode 4) of our MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide documentary (when it’s out, that will be the last part of the Misinformation chapter, dedicated to the allegations of Biolabs being weaponised), it’s something I’ve already written and recorded but at the time of writing it hasn’t been produced, we still need to finish Episode 2 and then make Episode 3 first, lots of work to do!

That section will be about a case of leading questions being used to “guide the viewer” towards claims that didn’t have evidence, it’s an interesting example but this was something different, a case of fake neutrality, so I wanted to take some time to write this to show how media can manipulate, and what to watch for, hopefully it was a decent and educational case study.

Addendum

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For the fun of it I decided to watch a few more of the Zoomer Historian’s videos to see a bit more of what he was about, if he was a Neo-Nazi that was just hiding his views to avoid a ban or just a Nazi apologist (both are garbage views to have, but there is a difference between being an apologist and an actual full blown supporter), from what I’ve seen he seems to lean more into the apologist direction.

I’ve decided not to include this topic in the main article because I wasn’t trying to get too deep into him or his ideology, instead I just wanted to use him as an example of this propaganda technique, to teach people how to recognise and avoid it, really I could’ve used any example of any particular viewpoint, this guy just happened to be the particular bullshit artist that was sent my way, inspiring the article.

I focused on his earlier content, mostly because it’s shorter and I don’t feel like sacrificing too much of my time to endless 2 or 3 hour long videos of Nazi apologia, and because the earlier content seemed to be where he was more direct about his views.

His video about how “World War 2 Was Not Worth Fighting” wasn’t really noteworthy for the content, which was basically just the same crap about how the war was down to the evil Churchill clique and the Nazis were actually reasonable, but what caught my eye were several comments under the video that he showed sympathy with.

One complainted about how the war had destroyed “all that was beautiful”, especially singling out a loss of the “feeling of race”, which he replied with “so real”.

In another comment thread, he asks a supporter what videos he’d like to see and the supporter mentions a video about the concentration camps, where Zoomer admits that going into his views on the topic would be a “minefield”.

But one I found quite interesting was his video asking if Germany’s pre-war conquests were justified, unsurprisingly his answer was mostly yes, as he supported Hitler’s annexation into Germany of dozens of territories with German populations, he also called the occupation of foreign countries that were “in the way” benevolent, but one area where he did finally criticise Hitler was the annexation of the Czech regions of Czechoslovakia, which he described as making Hitler look like a monster and an action that destroyed the trust of the British, who until then had been accepting of Hitler’s territorial demands.

Since this was a rare case where he had actually criticised the Nazis I decided to watch his much later video on the topic as well, called “Why did Germany Invade the Rest of Czechoslovakia?”, but it turns out he fell right back into form.

Since this was a much later video on the channel he goes into the grift of again pretending to be neutral, starting it with a “common sense disclaimer” where he says he will be giving “no opinions of my own” and audiences shouldn’t “overthink it”, the video blames the invasion on Czechoslovakia being an unstable state.

This is despite the fact that he admits the SS and one of Hitler’s top cronies, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering, were behind that instability, agitating for Slovakia to break from the country. He calls Hitler’s support for Slovakia a “logical choice”, arguing that otherwise the country would’ve been invaded by Hungary.

After Slovakian independence left Czechia on its own to be swallowed up by the Germans, he describes the German occupation of Czechia in glowing terms, saying that the Germans gave the Czechs jobs and contracts from the Reich with Czechs loving the occupation and loving Heydrich, the leader of the occupation, with Czechia being given widespread autonomy; According to Zoomer the only reason the British couldn’t see the benevolence of this occupation was because they had been duped by the propaganda of Churchill.

According to him the British government were so angry about the prosperity that Heydrich’s social security plans were bringing to the Czechs, humiliating their propaganda that the Germans were oppressors, that they sent assassins to have him killed, only then did the relations between the Czechs and Germans turn to brutality as the Germans retaliated to the assassination.

I didn’t know the specifics, but I had heard of Heydrich and his track record before and knew this account was being so economical with the truth it would make Zoomer file for bankruptcy, a quick skim of Wikipedia showed me just how clownish this fantasyland version of history is, in the real world things went a little bit like this:

On 27 September 1941, Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich on 15 March 1939) and assumed control of the territory. The Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, remained the territory’s titular head, but was sent on “leave” because Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich felt his “soft approach” to the Czechs had promoted anti-German sentiment and encouraged anti-German resistance via strikes and sabotage. Upon his appointment, Heydrich told his aides: “We will Germanize the Czech vermin.”

Heydrich came to Prague to enforce policy, fight resistance to the Nazi regime, and keep up production quotas of Czech motors and arms that were “extremely important to the German war effort”. He viewed the area as a bulwark of Germandom and condemned the Czech resistance’s “stabs in the back”. To realise his goals, Heydrich demanded racial classification of those who could and could not be Germanized. He explained, “Making this Czech garbage into Germans must give way to methods based on racist thought.”

Heydrich started his rule by terrorising the population: he proclaimed martial law, and 142 people were executed within five days of his arrival in Prague. Their names appeared on posters throughout the occupied country. Most of them were the members of the resistance that had previously been captured and were awaiting trial.

According to Heydrich’s estimate, between 4,000 and 5,000 people were arrested and between 400 and 500 were executed by February 1942. Those who were not executed were sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, where only four per cent of Czech prisoners survived the war. Czech prime minister Alois Eliáš was among those arrested the first day. He was put on trial in Berlin and sentenced to death, but was kept alive as a hostage. He was later executed in retaliation for Heydrich’s assassination.

In March 1942, further sweeps against Czech cultural and patriotic organisations, the military, and the intelligentsia resulted in the practical paralysis of the London-based Czech resistance. Almost all avenues by which Czechs could express the Czech culture in public were closed. Although small disorganised cells of Central Leadership of Home Resistance (Ústřední vedení odboje domácího, ÚVOD) survived, only the communist resistance was able to function in a coordinated manner (although it also suffered arrests). The terror also served to paralyse resistance in society, with public and widespread reprisals by the Nazis against any action resisting German rule. Heydrich’s brutal policies during that time quickly earned him the nickname “the Butcher of Prague”. The reprisals are referred to by Czechs as the Heydrichiáda.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich#Acting_Reich_Protector_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia

Although the events described are absolutely horrible, reading this and comparing it with Zoomer’s glowing narrative of poor old Heydrich who was ever so kind was like a black comedy, I couldn’t help laughing about it.

When I told a Czech friend of mine about this, he replied with “I’m imploding inside”, then happily told me the story of how the Czech resistance blew the bastard up.

He then linked me a video of an actual historian who posted a lengthy response to Zoomer’s content, having actually watched all of his videos, which I’ll link below for anyone curious:

The video showcases how Zoomer misleads or removes context to minimise Nazi atrocities and blame them on a few bad apples, often using the same sources Zoomer himself cites, I watched it in full and I highly recommend it if you care enough about this useful idiot and his claims to give up a little under 2 hours of your time to watch his narrative get obliterated.

One of the first things in the video is a screenshot of Zoomer denying that the concentration camps were used for mass murder and calls the use of gas chambers a story, he partly admits to the Holocaust by Bullets, admitting that “a lot of innocent Jews” were shot during the invasion of the USSR, but he brushes that fact away by saying that “these things happen in war” and that they were killed because they had welcomed in the Soviets and that most of the Soviet commissars responsible for deportations and executions were Jewish.

Even where he is willing to criticise the Nazis, he makes sure to insulate that criticism in mountains of apologia, making even the worst atrocities seem like understandable mistakes that are nothing exceptional.

So even though I don’t think he’s a Neo-Nazi, or at least I don’t think he’s said enough to prove it, he is someone who wants to move the Overton Window back to where it was in the 1930s, or earlier, and also a blatant racist and Holocaust denier, that’s more than enough for me to proudly use him as an example of a bullshit artist, I hope you enjoyed reading!

Changelog

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Edit 1 - 06/03/24 - Title change (first to “MEGA: The Study of Propaganda - How Zoomer Historian is Guiding an Audience” then to “MEGA: The Study of Propaganda - How Zoomer Historian guides an audience”) - Original title was “MEGA: The Study of Propaganda - Guiding an Audience”, changed to mention Zoomer Historian directly. Edit 2 - 12/03/24 - Correction on how we initially presented Yeonmi’s story in the MEGA documentary: The article now describes our approach as “we introduce the topic of North Korean defectors in a sympathetic light” and “present Yeonmi Park’s story uncritically” and includes a quote from the doc where we did ask if there were doubts that could be had; The original version didn’t have this quote and described the presentation as “we present Yeonmi Park’s story as if we’re sympathetic”, implying the presentation was more positive than it actually was, also changed the reference to this initial presentation to “the first 7 minutes”, the original said “the first 10 or so minutes”.

Footnotes

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