The term Lugenpresse re-emerges yet again as Trump supporters try to justify Gianforte’s physical assault on a Guardian journalist. When the term was heard at a Trump rally last October several US media outlets discussed its history. It means “lying press” and while its roots go back to the 1840’s, it became part of the whole scale physical and verbal attack on free press under the Nazis. It’s full meaning extends beyond attacking unflattering, critical coverage and reaches towards tearing down Democratic institutions. It also has anti-Semitic overtones.
This diary is to shed light again on this word as the fascists and trolls step out from under rocks to inject it into our public discourse yet again. While I let many things slide by on FB, Twitter and Real Life, this word makes me confront the person using it. There may be some moderates out there who live an insular world removed from much contact with minorities and multiculturalism who are ignorant, insensitive and befuddled by FOX. But they need to understand that this word is absolutely a mark of Racism and NeoNazis. There is no middle ground.
The ugly history of ‘Lügenpresse,’ a Nazi slur shouted at a Trump rally
BERLIN — When a video of two Donald Trump supporters shouting “Lügenpresse” (lying press) started to circulate Sunday, viewers from Germany soon noted its explosive nature. The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the “ugly Germany”: members of xenophobic, right-wing groups.
Its use across the Atlantic Ocean at a Trump rally has worried Germans who know about its origins all too well. Both the Nazi regime and the East German government made use of it, turning it into an anti-democracy slogan.
The verbal attacks against journalists soon turned into physical violence in Germany. At times, media members were unable to cover the Pegida-organized protest marches without private security personnel. Some reporters who risked going in without bodyguards were beaten up. It is without doubt that the word “Lügenpresse” has an extremely ugly meaning in modern-day Germany.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
For a more in depth of the word’s history:
Lügenpresse has a long and ugly history in Germany. It was first used after the failed revolutions of 1848, mainly in Catholic polemics against the liberal press. From the start it implied that the media were controlled by Freemasons or Jews. After the Franco-Prussian war, the term was directed at the French press for its alleged lies. During the first world war, after Germany got a thrashing in foreign newspapers for what they called the “rape of Belgium”, Allied (and especially British) newspapers earned the moniker. That set a usage pattern that holds till today: Lügenpresse refers to any medium that does not reflect the user’s own worldview, and must therefore be propagated by a hated “Other”.
In the interwar years the term was used both by communists against the “bourgeois Lügenpresse” and by the Nazis against—no surprise—the allegedly Jewish and Bolshevik media. Once the Nazis seized power and took control of the domestic press, they naturally stopped calling it a Lügenpresse. Instead Hitler and Goebbels once again applied it to the foreign press—for instance, for reporting the 1938 Kristallnacht.
www.economist.com/...