We're at war with the invisible enemy, haven't you heard?
This is a placeholder to sit here until I've put together a halfway decent article.
A big lie (German: große Lüge; often the big lie) is a propaganda technique used for political purpose, defined as "a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body".[1] 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 believed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the idea of the original big lie was instrumental in turning sentiment against Jews and bringing about the Holocaust.
Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party have themselves made use of the big lie they theorized about to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.[2] He further argues that the big lie was a narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an "international Jewry", which it said started World War I. The propaganda repeated over and over the claim that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia and the United States. It went on to state that the Jews had begun a "war of extermination" against Germany, and so Germany had a duty and a right to "annihilate" the Jews in self-defense.
The New York Times' Edwin James asserts that the revisionist claim that Germany was not defeated in war in 1918, and rather was betrayed by internal groups, was itself called a big lie. This stab-in-the-back myth was spread by right-wing groups, including the Nazis.
In the 21st century, the term was applied to Donald Trump's effort to discredit the results of 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.
Sourced and lifted from Wikipedia's entry on The Big Lie pioneered by Joseph Goebbels.
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