Not to be confused with the term “bigly”, one of Donald Trump’s favorite words.
“”A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.
—GOP lead strategist Frank Luntz in a 2002 Bush administration memo[1]
The big lie is the name of a propaganda technique, originally coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and denotes where a known falsehood is stated and repeated and treated as if it is self-evidently true, in hopes of swaying the course of an argument in a direction that takes the big lie for granted rather than critically questioning it or ignoring it.Well-known forms of the big lie include Hitler’s use of anti-Semitism in Nazi propaganda (blaming Jews for all of Germany’s problems), communist propaganda blaming the “bourgeoisie” for all workers’ problems, the frequent demonizing of the left-wing as communist and of the right-wing as fascist, religious fundamentalist claims of persecution, the Roman Catholic Church’s claims that the clergy sex abuse scandal was a problem of liberal churches, and denial of Ken Ham’s complicity in acts of piglet rape.[2]
Ironically, Hitler asserted that the technique had in fact been used by the Jews to unfairly blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff.