The following is an excerpt on Nazis and the “Big Lie”.
It is excerpted from Gun crime: the Metropolitan police Big lie by Winston Smith http://www.blaqfair.com/blaqfair/biglie/metbiglie.htm
As a propaganda technique, the Nazis developed the Big-lie. In essence it consists of four elements. The first element is obvious enough: it is the deliberate telling of untruths, lies. No puny lies will do, they must be real whoppers, Big-lies.
Hitler’s advice to his propagandists was when they lie, tell big lies; ‘in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility” (Hitler, 1925:159). He reckoned because the “broad mass of a nation … tell small lies in small matters”, people would not suspect others of telling “large-scale falsehood” in important matters (Hitler, 1925: 160-1 and 383). For that reason, people are more likely to fall victim to a Big-lie on important matters rather than a small lie on unimportant matters.
An important matter about which the Nazi told deliberate lies was cause of the economic crisis that crippled German in the early 1930s. They blamed the Jews, who Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, accused of controlling international finance (Goebbels, 1941).
In reality, the primary cause of the economic crisis was the spectacular collapse in the value of investment trust shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which began on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929 (Galbraith, 1961:121).
Europe was not to be spared the fallout from collapses in share prices. Carr argues: “Europe was so heavily dependent on American investment by this time she could not escape the consequences of the Wall Street Crash” (1989:292).
American banks and firms that had provided German financial institutions and companies with credits and short-term loans demanded immediate re-payment of them (Carr 1989:296). Such demands were being made at a time when export markets for German product were dwindling (Bullock 1971:152).
As a result of the credit squeeze, loan repayments and declining export markets, German companies began to shed workers. Unemployment mushroomed from 900,000 in the summer of 1929 to over six millions in 1932 (Carr 1989:296, Bullock 1971:152).
Poverty, homelessness and social strife grew as a result of mass unemployment. They provided the human condition, despair, in which people became susceptible to the Big-lie and Nazi propagandists doled it out in bucketfuls: Jews were to blame for unemployment.
Simplicity is the second element of the Big Lie. The lie must be confined to simple one-loners [liners]: sound-bites. Hitler argued: “all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then expressed in a few stereotyped formulas” (Mein Kampf 1925:159).
Examples of such stereotyped formulas were: “All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are a part of an international comspiracy [conspiracy]” (Goebbels, 1941); Jewish goal was total world domination (Goebbels, 1941); they used culture and “any form of foulness” to cause moral and social decay (Gilbert 2000:20); they stabbed Germany in the back in 1918 (Carr 1989:323); “The Jews are criminals too. Their hair is usually dark and often curly like a Negro’s” (Streicher, 1936)
Consistency is the third element of the Big Lie. It is the “very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda: a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with” (Hitler, 1925: 160-1 and 383). In other words, define every problem as “a homogeneous problem”. Never waver from the lie even when it has become apparent the stereotype is a “large-scale falsehood” or its contradiction blindingly obvious.
All Jews, for example, were simultaneously “the moving spirit behind Marxism and monopoly capitalism” (Carr 1989:32). They were all atheists yet they kidnapped Christian children, killed them and used their blood to make matzos at Passover: the blood libel.
Repetition is the final element of the Big-lie. Lies must be retold continuously in order for them to be at the forefront of people’s consciousness. People must never be allowed to forget the message contained within the lie (Carr 989:301). Hitler said: “Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting a idea on the memory of a crowd” (Mein Kampf 1925:163).
Ultimately the idea Nazis wanted to imprint on people’s memory was “Jews are guilty” of whatever they were accused of: Jews were guilty because they were Jews (Goebbels, 1941).
The Big lie consists of “large-scale falsehood” about important matters. It is a simple lie without elaboration or explanation: a stereotype. It is a lie to which the propagandist sticks even when the lie is exposed. Repetition keeps the lie alive in people’s memory, which is the ultimate success of the Big lie as a propaganda technique.
The aim of Big-lie propaganda was not simply to libel Jews, stereotype them. Goebbels argued that, “Propaganda is not a end in itself, but a means to an end” (Noakes and Pridham 1987:381). As a “means” the Big lie was used to mobile [mobilize]Germans, to organize them and to win them over to Nazism: an ideology based racial conflict and supremacy. The “end” was persecution of Jews.
Nazi persecution of Jews manifested itself in various ways. In terms of their right to be in Germany, the mobilization of hatred towards Jews was a means of desensitising non-Jewish Germans to what would happen to Jews: depriving them of citizenship; deporting them to eastern Europe; and murdering them (Gilbert 200:30-92).
Are there any similarities between the Nazi use of Big-lie propaganda to mobile hatred towards the Jews from the 1920s until 1945 and the Metropolitan Police stereotype of Jamaicans as responsible for gun- crimes?
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[At this point writer Winston Smith exits his historical review of the big lie and turns to his central topic.]
Bibliography [still includes references extraneous to the above excerpt - FNC]
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“Drug gang warning by police”
(3) The Guardian (25/06/2002)
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more cities with violence”
(4) The Telegraph (4/01/2002)
“One in 10 fliers from
Jamaica ‘is drug mule’ ”
(5) The Telegraph (25/06/02)
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out or control’”
(6) The Guardian (23/06/02)
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arrests risen by 200 pc”
(7) The Guardian (25/06/02)
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cities with violence”
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Jamaicans”
(14) The Telegraph (6/09/02)
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rioters”
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