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The Olson File
 April 29, 2021
 

The Big Lie
   by Douglas Olson
 

E veryone has heard of the “Big Lie” — the assertion that if a falsehood is sufficiently outrageous and is repeated often enough, a considerable proportion of the populace will believe that it is true.

The most recent confirmation of this maxim is the almost unchallenged idea that American police departments are “systemically racist,” and that police deliberately kill massive numbers of unarmed and unoffending black people every year.

The results of a poll of 980 adults conducted by the Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study (CUPES) last September and October are instructive:

Asked how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019, 53.58 percent of self-identified “Very Liberal” respondents said 1,000 or more. And an even more astonishing 7.86 percent within that group thought more than 10,000 blacks were killed that year. Among plain “Liberals,” 38.79 percent said police killed 1,000 or more, with 5.45 percent opting for 10,000-plus.

To demonstrate how this Big Lie has affected even those who are not inclined to unquestioningly believe leftist propaganda, 25.8 percent of “Moderates” said 1,000 or more were killed, and 3.49 percent guessed more than 10,000. Some 13.25 percent of “Conservatives” said 1,000 or more, and 1.20 percent said more than 10,000.

Among “Very Conservative” respondents — usually thought to be more fond of conspiracy theories than their less-rightist brethren — a shocking 20.44 percent said 1,000 or more were killed, and 4.38 percent claimed more than 10,000.

In fact, according to the generally accepted Washington Post database of police killings since 2015, only twelve unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Only twelve out of a total of more than 375 million interactions between police and the public, two-thirds of which were caused when citizens called 911, thereby forcing one or more lawmen into potentially deadly situations. The Big Lie is indisputably alive and well in America today.

The name of Adolf Hitler is invoked nearly every time that the Big Lie is mentioned, with the almost inevitable assertion that Hitler either “invented the Big Lie,” “boasted of” using it successfully, “advocated its use,” or a similar — and always undocumented — accusation.

Such claims are false, and — in accordance with Hitler’s very vivid and accurate description of the Big Lie — continue to be repeated only because their perpetrators know that virtually no one will bother to read Hitler’s actual words to discover just how badly he is being deceived.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler cites the Big Lie in connection with contemporary assertions that Gen. Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) was to blame for Germany’s loss of the First World War. In his defense of the general, Hitler outlines the components of the Big Lie and illustrates how it works. Far from advocating that strategy, he vigorously condemns it, while admitting that it can achieve its aim when the lie is big enough, and effectively told, and repeated often enough:
 

By branding Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War, they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland. In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick — a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.

Mein Kampf, volume 1, chapter 10,
“Causes of the Collapse” pages 231–32 (Mannheim translation, emphasis added).
 

Watch any news program, read any newspaper, and you will see that the Big Lie remains alive and well today, and is being used for precisely the same purpose that Hitler noted — to take away the “weapon of moral right” from the enemies of leftism and anti-white racism. It is perpetrated and promoted on every vital issue of national and international importance, exactly as Hitler analyzed and explained — and condemned — nearly a century ago. Ω

 April 29, 2021
 

Earlier entries in The Olson File and Douglas Olson’s occasional anthologies, Freak Show and Flashback, are all available in the Olson archive.

 


 

Published by Thornwalker at thornwalker.com, 2021

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