When I was a kid we had a lesson in school about advertising and propaganda. I still remember much of it because I found it so fascinating--the various tactics used by advertisers and propagandists to shape people's perceptions and motivate them to action (such as buying a product or voting a certain way or slaughtering their neighbors). Throughout my life I've informally studied propaganda. And to this day, since that childhood educational experience, when I see an advertisement I can't help but analyze it to see where the motivational hooks are: Is it appealing to a need for prestige or a desire to belong? Is it playing on fear? Is it implicitly promising success with sex/mating? Etc.

One of the things I've learned about the most heinous applications of propaganda--those used to foment things like genocide and fascism and violent revolution--is that they intentionally dehumanize a target group. Nazis referred to Jews as parasites, as plague-ridden rats. European colonialists in 18th-century America referred to the indigenous people as "merciless savages" (it's right there in the U.S. Constitution) and in the 20th-century depicted Japanese people, including Japanese-Americans, as dirty, sneaky, ruthless, murderous, nihilistic and fanatical bucktoothed caricatures (making it much easier to round up one's neighbors and put them in internment camps or explode atomic bombs over a couple of their cities). During the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, radio broadcasts played an important role in inciting ordinary Hutu citizens to take part in the massacres of their Tutsi neighbors. Tutsis were referred to by the radio propagandists as "cockroaches" and "a disease" and "snakes." There are, sadly, a plethora of other examples from history of this dehumanizing rhetoric about "the other" easing the way toward cruelty and atrocity.

Which brings me to something I saw last week that chilled my blood: Speaking at CPAC, the political conservative gathering, U.S. President Donald Trump recited a poem which he prefaced as being about "immigration" (not "illegal immigration" but simply "immigration"--I assume from "shithole countries") Apparently, he has read this poem aloud before at some of his rallies. The poem (actually lyrics to a song based upon one of Aesop's fables), is called "The Snake."

Here is a video of Trump reading The Snake at CPAC:  https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?c4715808/donald-trump-performs-the-snake-cpac

If you don't find it disturbing, you probably need to spend some time studying the historical role and consequences of propaganda.