A bone to pick with memes and one line slogans. Eventually they fail. Been there, seen it.

I have a bone to pick with memes and one line slogans. Eventually they fail. Been there, seen it.

In 1958 and 1959, I spent my junior year abroad in Berlin. It was 13 years after the end of WWII; I had a front-row seat to observe how the communists were attempting to consolidate their hold on Berlin's Russian-controlled East Sector before the wall was built. One could easily cross zones in those days, and I was in a student dorm in the British sector. I could even walk into the East Sector; I was so close. It was an amazing place for this political science student to be. There were no memes on the internet, no TV commercials to control minds then, but red banners strewn everywhere carried slogans reminding people of the glories that would be given to workers, and similar posters adorned buildings everywhere. Even the poorest, least educated, and unquestioning minds got the message. It didn't work. Reality set in as the East German puppet government became more and more of a police state. Scientists, university students, artists, and skilled workers picked up their backpacks, took the elevated train or walked to the West sectors, and eventually kept on going West. My roommate was one of those. My future husband from another communist country used Berlin for his exit.The brain drain became a gusher, and in August 1961, two years after I returned to Northwestern in Illinois for my senior year, the Berlin Wall went up.

The use of short, choppy sentences with no explanation and plenty of one-line slogans for all to believe and repeat were the memes and repeated mantras and commercials of that era in Berlin. In 2026, like in my Berlin days, these modern memes and slogans, often repeated in commercials or by candidates, will convince only those who want to be convinced and who do not ask impertinent questions.