The Big Lie is a propaganda technique that comes in different sizes. This essay is about the Bush size Big Lie. I’ll get around to The Really Big Lie another time. The Bush Big Lie is just a distraction to keep people’s attention away from The Really Big Lie. But it’s big enough in its own right.
The Bush Big Lie is everything he’s done and said for the last seven plus years. The biggest part of his lie is the war in Iraq. It’s so obvious on the face of it that he lied us into the war, he lied us into escalating it and he’s lying us into staying there forever while he lies about the great progress we’re always making. The amazing thing about this is that over half of the American people actually know he’s been lying. But hey, what can one person do about it? A significant percentage of Uhmericans still believe that Saddam had WMDs; that he was complicit in 9/11; and that he gave shelter to al-Qaeda. We have some of the most unquestioning, incurious, gullible people on the planet. These Uhmericans think we’re doing the right thing and stopping the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here.
Bush is too dumb to have invented the Big Lie. A European guy came up with that concept in 1925:
The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.
Hitler blamed the Jews for being the Big Liars which was a bit of evil genius. He accused his victims of being the crime. Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels attributed the Big Lie to Churchill and the English leadership in 1941:
That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Hmmm. During the war – the Big One – our OSS, precursor to the CIA, came up with a psychological profile of Hitler. They derived yet another example of the Big Lie:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
I don’t know about the rest of the country but if someone handed me a sheet of paper that had the last blockquote written on it and asked me who I thought might have these qualities I’d have a ready answer. Actually, it would be three people: Cheney, Bush and Rove – the father, the son and the evil spirit of the Big Lie, Bush-sized.
And almost all of America is focussed on the Bush Big Lie while the pickpockets work the crowd. More later.
(All quotes from Wiki – Big Lie)
Shanti.
