The unthinkable origins of the term “Big Lie”
A few months ago, in my Words as Weapons post, I touched on a strange nickname Washington Post media writer Margaret Sullivan assigned to stories about election fraud in 2020. She called the whole theory “the Big Lie.” Back then I found the nickname childish. I still do, but something disturbing happened recently to make me finally want to figure out where it came from.
Last week, the U.S. Senate essentially voted to not discuss a piece of legislation called the “Freedom to Vote Act.” Some news outlets described the Act as a means of increasing access to voting; some described the Act as an attempt at corrupting our current voting system. This article from Vox says it “contains many of the same provisions as the For the People Act, or HR1, which passed the house in March [2021].” (*Rather than listening to anyone else’s interpretation of the bill, though, consider reading the text of the Freedom to Vote Act yourself, here). Either way, Republican Senators are accused of / credited with – again, depending on which outlets you read or watch - blocking debate on the Act, which was originally introduced by Amy Klobuchar in September and is backed by President Biden.
What caught my attention in this news was President Biden’s published response to the Senate’s failure to consider debating the bill. It was released the same day on the official white house “briefing room” page (which I have found to be an invaluable source of information in both the Trump and Biden administrations). Here it is in its entirety (emphasis mine):
The United States Senate needs to act to protect the sacred constitutional right to vote, which is under unrelenting assault by proponents of the Big Lie and Republican Governors, Secretaries of State, Attorneys-General, and state legislatures across the nation.
It is urgent. Democracy – the very soul of America – is at stake.
Today, Senate Democrats would like to start debate on the Freedom to Vote Act. Senate Democrats have worked hard to ensure this bill includes traditionally bipartisan provisions. But Senate Republicans are likely to block even debate on the bill, as they have before on previous voting rights bills. It’s unconscionable.
The right to vote – to vote freely, to vote fairly, and to have your vote counted – is fundamental. It should be simple and straightforward. Let there be a debate and let there be a vote.
As soon as I read the statement, I decided to do an online search for the term “Big Lie.” I was curious if Margaret Sullivan actually coined the term, or if someone else had come up with it before her. The first thing that came up in my search was a Wikipedia definition of “the big lie,” which we’ll get to later . But another search result that came up was a link to something called the “Jewish Virtual Library,” with a description of the term published on its site, titled “Joseph Goebbels: On the “Big Lie.” Here’s what it says:
The original description of the big lie appeared in Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler applied it to the behavior of Jews rather than as a tactic he advocated. Specifically, he accused Viennese Jews of trying to discredit the Germans’ activities during World War I. Hitler wrote of the Jews’ “unqualified capacity for falsehood” and “that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation…. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited.”
Wow.
It takes a minute to digest the sheer contempt in Hitler’s words, and his assumed air of superiority is chilling.
But just take a minute more and think about something else: Both Margaret Sullivan and President Biden are using Adolf Hitler’s own terminology, from his manifesto Mein Kampf no less, to describe the beliefs of a significant number of Americans in 2021.
Whether you believe election fraud happened or not is irrelevant in this case; just take a minute to think about the frightening implications of a move like that. In essence, both the President of the United States and a “journalist” at one of the largest papers in this nation (a “journalist” who is notorious for advocating against telling readers “both sides” of stories and instead just telling them one side: hers) are telling us all, in a subtle-but-not-so-subtle way, that they have about as much compassion for people who think differently from them as Hitler did for the Jews.
Wow, again.
Another thing to consider here is how this propaganda makes its way into the world. It had largely been dormant (or at least unknown in mainstream culture) for decades when Ms. Sullivan resurrected it earlier this year. Thankfully, when Margaret Sullivan writes, only her “journalist” followers and the people who read her column in the Washington Post see it. But when President Biden uses Hitler’s terminology in a published statement, media outlets feel compelled to quote it and it gets pushed out into mainstream news for millions upon millions worldwide to read. The hope, I’m assuming, is that we, “the masses,” adopt the catchy phrase and begin to spread it organically, through conversations and texts and emails and social media. (Just why anyone would want to spread Hitler’s terminology, though, is beyond my scope of comprehension…)
Even more striking is the way this example shows how politicians and “journalists” today appear to be working together. When terminology from the Fourth Estate is adopted by the government, and vice versa, we have left the land of journalism and the free press and moved one step closer to mass dissemination of destructive, cruel and harmful propaganda.
I am a firm believer in freedom of speech and all voices being heard, as well as all sides of stories being told, so I’m not of the opinion that either Sullivan or Biden should be silenced. I do, however, think people who read the Washington Post and / or quote the President need to understand exactly what they both mean when they write about “the Big Lie.” Responsible journalists would call on both Ms. Sullivan and President Biden to explain their choice to use Hitler’s words in describing the beliefs of other Americans. Instead, the media class we have today either doesn’t bother to ask about the origins of the terminology, or repeats / quotes the words blindly.
There’s one more angle to this story that I find fascinating.
Remember how the first thing that came up when I did an online search for “Big Lie” was the Wikipedia page about it?
(**Wikipedia, I’ve also said before in this blog, is a source of information that I have NEVER trusted. Not only did it start out being able to be edited by just about anyone with a keyboard and internet access; even its own founder, Larry Sanger, says it has devolved into a tool for propaganda. Read the transcript or watch the video of American Thought Leaders’ Jan Jekieleck’s interview with Sanger, here).
If you link to the Wikipedia page about “the big lie,” you’ll see it discusses the term in relation to both Hitler… and Donald Trump. In other words, in another not-so-subtle way, the authors of this particular Wikipedia page are attempting to equate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
The odd thing here is that Biden, Sullivan and Wikipedia are the ones who are using Hitler’s own words - “big lie” - to describe the thoughts of people they dislike. And Biden, Sullivan and Wikipedia are the ones who appear to be working in tandem with each other to disseminate Hitler’s terminology, in much the same way Hitler himself did when he and Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda, controlled what information was permitted to be published in all of the news outlets in Germany.
Three years ago, I toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. A friend and I spent hours walking through every floor, reading so many painful and horrific descriptions of the Holocaust as it evolved and seeing things like 4,000 pairs shoes that once belonged to just a fraction of the men, women and children who were brutally murdered at Nazi camps. We were horrified and overwhelmed by the capabilities of mankind (one depraved man, yes, but also tens of thousands of regular people who blindly followed his orders) to succumb to evil.
Another thing I remember quite well is my friend, who kept asking over and over again: How does something like this happen? Because, when you walk through the Holocaust Museum you realize that the whole big, hideous Holocaust that we all know about - the camps and the starvation and the gas chambers - didn’t start out that way at all. It started as a series of small changes. But as those small changes added up, they morphed into massive changes and eventually devolved into the merciless and unjust murder of millions of innocent people.
Surely that wouldn’t happen today, we both had agreed. Surely, someone would stand up for what’s right and the whole awful process would have to stop.
Sadly, neither one of us could have imagined that we’d see the beginnings of similar movements starting right here, in our own nation, in 2021. There is antisemitism to be sure, but the hatred and intolerance is aimed at more groups now, too - religious people of any stripe; Black and White and Brown people; people who believe in biological gender; people who question masks and / or vaccines. The list goes on, but the intent is eerily the same as it was back then: to judge and punish those with differing beliefs, and to silence and shame anyone who dares stand up for them.
I don’t pretend to understand how to fix everything that’s wrong with the world right now, but I do know this: nothing good can ever come from resurrecting Nazi propaganda.