Big lie

A big lie (; often "the" big lie) is a propaganda technique used for political purposes, defined as "a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body." The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book "Mein Kampf," to describe the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Hitler claimed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and bring about the Holocaust.
Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie propaganda technique that they describedand that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at an "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting . Nazi propaganda repeated over and over the claim that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It spread claims that the Jews had begun a "war of extermination" against Germany, and it used these claims to assert that Germany had a right to "annihilate" the Jews as self-defense.
In 1943, "The New York Times" contributor Edwin James asserted that Hitler's biggest lie was his revisionist claim that Germany was not defeated in war in 1918, but rather was betrayed by internal groups. This stab-in-the-back myth was spread by extreme right-wing groups, including the Nazis.
In the 21st century, the term was applied to Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. "The big lie" in this instance was the false claim that the election was stolen from him through massive fraud, and the scale of the claim's proponents eventually culminated with Trump supporters storming the US Capitol.
Hitler's description.
The source of the big lie technique is this passage, taken from Chapter 10 of James Murphy's translation of "Mein Kampf" (the quote is one paragraph in Murphy's translation and in the German original):
The Cold War historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson describes its use:
U.S. psychological profile of Hitler.
The phrase "big lie" was also used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile:
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. (CIA)
The above quote appears in the report, "A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend", by Walter C. Langer, which is available from the US National Archives. A somewhat similar quote appears in "Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behaviour and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender", by Henry A. Murray, October 1943:
Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.
Goebbels's description.
Joseph Goebbels put forth a theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression "big lie". Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, sixteen years after Hitler first used the phrase. The article, titled "Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik" (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in "Die Zeit ohne Beispiel".
The following supposed quotation of Joseph Goebbels has been repeated in numerous books and articles and on thousands of web pages, yet none of them has cited a primary source. According to the research and reasoning of Randall Bytwerk, it is an unlikely thing for Goebbels to have said:
Trump's false claim of a stolen election.
To support his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had really won the election. U.S. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz subsequently contested the election results in the Senate. Their effort was characterized as "the big lie" by then President-elect Joe Biden: "I think the American public has a real good, clear look at who they are", Biden said two days after the Capitol was attacked. "They're part of the big lie, the big lie." Republican senators Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey, scholars of fascism Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Russian affairs expert Fiona Hill, and others also used the term big lie to refer to Donald Trump's false claims about massive election fraud. By May 2021, the Republican party had come to embrace the false narrative and use it as justification to impose new voting restrictions in its favor.
Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines to many jurisdictions in the 2020 election, is seeking in damages from Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani. In the lawsuit, Dominion alleges that "he and his allies manufactured and disseminated the 'Big Lie', which foreseeably went viral and deceived millions of people into believing that Dominion had stolen their votes and fixed the election."
In winter 2021, "The New York Times" concluded that Trump promoted "the big lie" for political purposes to subvert the 2020 election, and concluded the lie encouraged the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol.
During the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the house managers Jamie Raskin, Joe Neguse, Joaquin Castro, Stacey Plaskett and Madeleine Dean all used the phrase "the big lie" repeatedly to refer to the notion that the election was stolen, with a total of 16 mentions in the initial presentation alone. "The Big Lie", leading up to and including the election period, formed the first section of the "provocation" part of the argument.
In early 2021, several prominent Republicans tried to appropriate the term "the big lie", claiming that it refers to other issues. Trump stated that the term refers to the "Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020". Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich said that "the big lie" is opposition to restrictive new voter ID requirements.