When I was a child, my playmates bickered a lot. One of the most common rejoinders I remember from those days was bounces off me and sticks to you, an annoying reversal that my verbal adversaries would use when valid accusations were leveled against them. Another similar one was I know you are but what am I?

If you’re of a certain age you’ll probably remember that sort of thing – a way a person could hurl insults right back in the opponents’ face. Truth didn’t matter in this verbal jujitsu. What mattered was to deflect and annoy.

When my son was a child I don’t recall hearing either of these phrases. Perhaps they’d grown out of style. But they came to mind today when I saw this article dealing with a far more serious problem. It’s entitled, “Holocaust inversion is going mainstream – it’s deeply disturbing: Holocaust inversion transposes the guilt of the abusers, the Nazis, onto the abused, the Jews, and leaves no room for any other possibility. The point, of course, is to legitimize violence against Jews.”

Well, yes. It’s been going on for quite some time, and not just about Jews as the new Nazis. Take a look at the number of times I’ve used the word “inversion” on this blog, nearly always to describe the lies of the left. Inverting the truth, rather than merely lying, is a favorite ploy of leftist propagandists and it has an especially infuriating and pernicious effect on its targets.

Here is a quote from the Holocaust inversion article:

Lesley Klaff explained this particular phenomenon in 2014. “What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion,'” she wrote in Fathom, “involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the ‘new’ Nazis and the Palestinians as the ‘new’ Jews), and an inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of ‘the Jews’). … The Holocaust … is now being used, instrumentally, as a means to express animosity towards the homeland of the Jews.”

Indeed.

People studying this phenomenon often use the term Big Lie to describe it. It’s not just that it’s an egregiously large lie, however; it’s this inversion of the truth – this act of turning something upside down so that it becomes the opposite of the truth – that is especially evil.

But although most people are aware that the term Big Lie has Nazi origins, it’s my impression that most are also unaware of the fact that when Hitler wrote about the Big Lie it was in the act of telling a big lie – against the Jews, naturally – and not just lying but inverting the truth.

From a previous post of mine on the subject:

Hitler did talk about the Big Lie … [and his words] were couched in an accusation towards others, this time not against the English but against – you guessed it – the Jews:

“But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall [of the Germans in WWI] precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff [see ADDENDUM below] they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

“All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true within itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they 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. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

Hitler displays his knowledge of the workings of the technique, one he had mastered, but he certainly never owned up to his own use of it.

Those who use the Big Lie against Israel and Jews fall into two groups: those who are aware that their own accusations against Jews are themselves a Big Lie, and those who are not aware of it. The relative size of each group is unknown.

Speaking of which, this is as good a time as any to mention once again that the current anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations – some of which threaten to interrupt the Democrats’ convention in Chicago – are a fusion of leftists and Islamists, as Professor Jacobson writes here. These days it’s called the Red-Green Alliance – red for the left, and green for the pro-Hamas wing:

Israel is something around which groups who have absolutely nothing in common can come together in hate. And that would be what’s frequently referred to as the Red-Green Alliance. So the Marxists and the anarchists and the Islamists, who in many ways are the exact opposite ideologically all come together to hate the Jews and hate Israel.

And so that has developed over 30 years. So it didn’t start on October 7th …

It’s been building in this country for at least thirty years. But that same alliance between leftists and Islamists was a main feature of the Iranian Revolution that ended up installing the theocracy that’s been in charge of Iran since 1979. That’s about forty-five years ago. In Iran, the left thought it would be the last group standing. But as we know, the Islamists won the day in the battle of who was more ruthless.

[ADDENDUM: The Hitler quote from Mein Kampf was, of course, written many years before Hitler came to power. Hitler ended up changing his mind on Ludendorff – who was an early supporter of Hitler – and Ludendorff also ended up changing his mind on Hitler. Ludendorff was a fascinating character. Some excerpts:

Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff … was a German military officer and politician who contributed significantly to the Nazis’ rise to power. He achieved fame during World War I for his central role in the German victories at Liège and Tannenberg in 1914. After his appointment as First Quartermaster General of the Army General Staff in 1916, he became the chief policymaker in a de facto military dictatorship until Germany’s defeat. During the Weimar Republic, he took part in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch and Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. …

After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader and a promoter of the stab-in-the-back myth, which posited that Germany’s defeat and the settlement reached at Versailles were the result of a treasonous conspiracy by Marxists, Freemasons and Jews. …

Tipton notes that Ludendorff was a social Darwinist who believed that war was the “foundation of human society”, and that military dictatorship was the normal form of government in a society in which every resource must be mobilized. The historian Margaret L. Anderson notes that after the war, Ludendorff wanted Germany to go to war against all of Europe, and that he became a pagan worshipper of the Nordic god Wotan (Odin); he detested not only Judaism, but also Christianity, which he regarded as a weakening force. …

Nice guy. And not altogether dissimilar to some of today’s leftists who want to destroy Western Civilization and its Judeo-Christian underpinnings.

When Ludendorff turned against Hitler, he apparently turned hard – if in fact it’s true that he sent the following telegram to Hindenburg when Hitler first became chancellor (it may have been a forgery):

I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.

Ludendorff’s Wiki entry is very long.]