Totally objectionable: Goebbels as an inspiration for USG public diplomacy

[JB note: As a former practitioner of American public diplomacy (with all its imperfections), I find citing/misciting (see below) a Nazi minister of propaganda, Goebbels, as a guide to improving the USG's efforts to communicate with the world today far more than "distasteful" -- it's totally objectionable.]

Goebbels image from

Excerpt from Curtis Kimbrell, "The Un-Mighty American Pen," Modern War Institute at West Point (June 13, 2017):

How can the problems with information as an instrument of national power be addressed? First and foremost, there are a few key principles that absolutely must define US efforts.

First, messaging must be guided by clear policy objectives. The Commander’s Handbook for Strategic Communication and Communication Strategy gives a starting point for clear policy objectives in its definition of strategic communication: “Focused United States Government efforts to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power.”

The key word is “focused.” What we do in the information environment must be intentional. This leads into the second principle: limited messages. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, exhibited a ruthless mastery of the information environment. “The most brilliant propagandist technique,” he noted, “will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly—it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”  While the source of this lesson is distasteful, the lesson itself is important. The US government must make a concerted effort to limit the number of essential messages it communicates in order to solve the problem of messages coming across as muddled. ....

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From Wikiquote:

Misattributed [edit]

• The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.

• Actually from "War Propaganda", in volume 1, chapter 6 of Mein Kampf (1925), by Adolf Hitler  [JB highlight]

• If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.

• Attributed to Goebbels in Publications Relating to Various Aspects of Communism (1946), by United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Issues 1-15, p. 19, no reliable source has been located, and this is probably simply a further variation of the Big Lie idea
• Variants:
• If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.
• If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
• If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
• If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes truth.
• If you repeat a lie many times, people are bound to start believing it.

• Attributed in The Sack of Rome (2006) by Alexander Stille, p. 14, and also attributed in A World Without Walls: Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance (2003) by Mike Moore, p. 63