The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle through the lens of The Third Wave

Kenneth Burke said that the majority of Hitler's war was won not through weaponry, but through the control of the mind. ("...the efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy(Burke, 193)") It seems like a pedantic thing to do, but Hitler had recognized that his war needed an enemy and a cult mindset, so he would have to create one. Similarly, California schoolteacher Ron Jones found it difficult to teach to his class how Hitler was so easily able to bring people together, so he began a program for them to follow called "The Third Wave". 

The program had a symbol (a blue wave on a button), involved teamwork through rigorous drills and group projects, and isolating non members. By the fourth day of the project, the group had grown from the original 20 students to 200 students, and Ron Jones said that they began to commit to the group in a scary way. Students were cutting class to join The Wave, and The Wave's underground police force (yes, really!) was acting aggresive towards non-Wave students. Eventually, Jones had to call an assembly that showed the students how similarly they were acting to the Nazi Party and how easily they were manipulated into acting in a certain way.

Burke also went into the mentality of the group mentality ("Instead, it deals with the Nazis gradual absorption of the many disrelated "folkish" groups. And it is managed throughout by the means of a spontaneous identification between leader and people "(Burke 210). Burke identifies the relevancy of making the leader relevant. People need someone that they identify with and someone who they feel will support them. Both of Burke's ideas that are discussed in this post can be seen in the Milgram Experiment, where people delivered shocks that they believed would possibly kill a person to someone that they were led to believe was a prisoner who deserved it because someone else in power had okayed it. They were given an acceptable scapegoat (Burke 195) and that someone in power said that it was okay to hurt this person because of their background.

It wasn't a radical doctrine or a hatred for a race that had brought the students together, it was the group mentality that united them. We can see similar mentalities in cults such as Jim Jones and his People's Town, who he encouraged to drink Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide rather than have him be caught and arrested for his crimes, and in organized crime such as the International House of Prayer Murders, where the congregation felt the pull of group mentality so strongly that they accepted leader Tyler Deaton's dinner seating requests, gender separated housing, and ultimately, the command to rape and murder his wife for straying from his path. Burke's ideas follow throughout these awful marks on human history: that the worst acts were not committed out of a hatred, but because of a group mentality.


Works Cited:

Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, Third Edition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. 293-304.