‘Die Grosse Lüge’ – the Big Lie. That’s what Adolf Hitler called it. It’s even worth quoting his wretched book Mein Kampf to describe what it is – an untruth so colossal that the masses “would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
How much has changed since this formulation? A cursory look back over the Bush years and the current hysteria surrounding Iran’s nuclear ambitions – or what I call the ‘Iranium Syndrome’ – shows that the Big Lie still determines major world events. That’s why Bishop Williamson’s comments denying the Holocaust are so horrifying. That is also why Pope Benedict’s attempt to re-instate him proves how central the Big Lie has been and still is in the institution he represents.
But the damage is done and now we will have to face the consequences. As for President Bush, he showed himself to be adept in Hitlerian mendacity. The surreal aspect of his reign was not so much the magnitude of his lies, but the fact that, like the German dictator, he didn’t even try to disguise it.
On 24 May 2005 he stated: “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” And again on 6 September 2006, in a CBS News interview with Katie Couric he said: “You know the hardest part of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” The candour of his comments is the essence of the Big Lie.
Through incessant repetition of the words ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in connection with America’s bogeyman Saddam Hussein, and the nonsense about his connection with Al-Qaeda, the US government managed to create an effective hysteria to mask the real reasons for their war on Iraq, the simple truth known to millions of Americans and their friends around the world – oil.
The genius of the Bush regime was the way in which his solecisms and Freudian slips turned the Big Lie into the Big Joke. We could have a good laugh about his stupidity but the joke was ultimately on us – and in a much deeper sense, on the victims of the state terrorism he unleashed after 9/11.
The Bush administration was so sure of victory in Iraq that Bush advisor Karl Rove stated peremptorily: “The rules have changed. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
But what about Obama’s promise of ‘change’? Would this mean an end to dollar and gunship diplomacy? US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments on 4 March last accusing the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of ‘interference’ in Palestinian affairs (by urging Muslims to support Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression) suggests that the ‘change’ promised by President Obama smacks of old-school propaganda.
Neither the nomenclature employed in US foreign policy nor the frames of reference have changed in these crucial first months of his presidency; the Palestinians are still the ‘terrorists’, Iran is still a ‘threat’ and Israel is still a loyal ‘friend’.
The problem with the Big Lie, and the mainstream media’s refusal to confront it, is that the public becomes passive and collective amnesia ensues. This means that when the next Big Lie is disseminated, it is already too late to resist. The lie has already become a nightmare reality.
metrogael.blogspot.com / gaelmetro@yahoo.ie
