DIVERSIONS

To make a diversion is to lead discussion away from the issues by directing it elsewhere. There are many devices for doing this: resorting to humor, bringing up irrelevant material, interrupting thought with trivial protest!? or questions, appealing to pathetic circumstances. There is no complete defense against diversions. Their function is to make the audience forget the point or become unwilling to consider it. After a successful diversion the audience may find it tedious to get back to business. To be sure, audiences generally do have a sense of fair play which demands that individuals be given a hearing, and people may resent a diversion if they recognize it as such; so sometimes it is effective to expose a diversion and then appeal for orderly discussion. Diversions, like almost all other fallacies, occur also in writings and speeches where no party is responsible to answer and where the alertness of the audience or reader is the only guard.

As an introduction to the general problem of diversion, we will examine Hitler's use of this device in one of his great speeches, that delivered at the Industry Club in Dusseldorf on January 27, 1932. This was a year before the Nazi Revolution, and, though Hitler was facing a rather skeptical audience of industrial leaders of the Ruhr area, the speech is credited with winning substantial support for National Socialism from among these leaders. Hitler began with a feeling that the audience shared with him, dilating on the nationalistic and anticommunistic nature of his movement. Judging from the record of applause, this approach impressed the audience considerably. Then he proceeded to defend his antidemocratic objective as follows:

If anyone today wishes to fling at me as a National Socialist the gravest possible accusation, he says: "You want to force a decision in Germany by violence, and we are bound to protest against this. You want one day to annihilate your political opponents in Germany, But we base our stand on the constitution, and we are bound to guarantee to all parties the right to exist." I have only one answer to this. Translated into practice it means: you have a military company and you have to lead that company against the enemy. But within the company there is complete liberty to form a coalition, [laughter] Fifty per cent of the company have formed a coalition on the basis of love of the Fatherland and of protection of the Fatherland. The other fifty per cent have formed a coalition on the basis of pacifism; they reject war on principle; they demand that freedom of conscience should be inviolate; and they declare that to be the highest, the sole good which we possess today, [laughter]

Let us look carefully at the diversionary technique used. Hitler begins by bringing up what he himself terms "the gravest possible accusation," namely, the Nazi resort to violence in order to establish a dictatorship. He answers this serious charge with ridicule. There is a topical joke in "liberty to form a coalition," a reference to cabinets formed by coalitions of several parties, an unpopular feature of government under the Weimar constitution. Thus, the fanciful notion of a military company directed by a miscellaneous assortment of politicians is advanced to present a ludicrous picture to the German audience. But the problems of leading a small army unit and administering a government are not analogous (see #4), and, in any event, reference to coalition government is obscurantist since dictatorship is not a necessary alternative.

Hitler proceeds to heighten the grotesqueness of the image of a coalition commanding a small military unit by fancying its elements incompatible -- half patriots and half pacifists. This draws a second laugh and opens the way for a further diversion (not quoted) whereby Hitler proceeds with a violent attack on toleration of pacifism, an unpopular minority idea and hence a convenient straw-man. Thereafter the speech continues without ever taking up the charge of overthrowing democracy. Indeed, if this crucial accusation had been treated in a thoughtful way, it might well have raised doubts and made this particular audience ponder.