Chris Penn, John Wall, Max Hansen: non-Nazis
If a public apology to Christopher Penn and John Wall is necessary, this is it.
Chris Penn has written a good response to my last post. John Wall (in a comment on both Chris’s post and mine—same comment both places), has gotten a little defensive, but then perhaps I was a little offensive.
Look, folks, these guys are not Nazis, or neo-Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, or anything of the kind. They’re marketing gurus of the first rank. And one of them got a little careless in how he worded a recommendation—the same recommendation I would make—that we understand fear-mongering in its worst form.
Most of the impetus for my post was simply how weird it was that Chris Penn mentioned Goebbels the same day I recorded a podcast that talked about both Chris Penn and Nazism. (Not to mention that I listened to his podcast within 24 hours of reading Drucker’s scary book on totalitarianism.)
In addition to Chris’s post, he and John devote a goodly chunk of this week’s Marketing Over Coffee podcast to discussing the importance of understanding Goebbels, not so we can emulate him, but so we can see through those who do. Chris definitely gets it.