“…leaflets to help you feign illness and defect from the front, were also designed for people to take control and be more active. He encouraged people to invent roles for themselves rather than play the ones forced on them by Nazi propaganda.”

“How people think and act can be just as important as what they think when undermining the most malign propaganda. People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories, for example, when they don’t feel they have any agency or influence over their lives and rely on conspiracies to explain the world. Many are drawn to “strongmen” when they feel they can’t take back control over their lives. The real antidote to this is not plying them with facts. It’s helping to fix the underlying lack of agency.”

“Delmer wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by pushing Nazi propaganda ‘one step further into the ridiculous’”

“…all social roles are exactly that: roles that are there to be performed. Propaganda is successful when it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate. It also left him with an awareness of how deeply we all need to belong to a group…

It was the performative aspect of propaganda, and the simultaneous need to belong, that struck him when he observed Hitler’s success…

He also gave people roles to play when the old ones had vanished: in the confusing cabaret of Weimar Germany, where identities were in flux, you knew who you were when you became a Nazi party member or an SS man. These roles were emotionally satisfying: they allowed people to submit to a strong leader, and feel strong and superior through him; they also allowed them to feel the victim, which in turn legitimised anger and cruelty to others.”