The New Neo

Anyone who studies history and humanity knows about the technique of the Big Lie. The summary version of the idea of the Big Lie is that propaganda works, and truth has little to do with its efficacy. In fact, the bigger the lie, the more likely it might be to work, because its very audaciousness makes people doubt that someone would be so bold as to concoct something that preposterous and expect people to believe it.

Most people also know that the Nazis were probably the first to use the phrase. Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kampf. But my guess is that few people know how he used it: to refer to the Jews. It is instructive to look at the full passage on the subject from his book (see also this):

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 Germany 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 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…From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.

So here we have an almost beautiful (in the diabolical sense of the world) symmetry: Hitler describes the technique accurately, and then falsely accuses his supposed enemies of using it, and in that very act he promulgates a Big Lie.

Hitler was probably not the first to do this. But he was one of the first to do it so boldly, so frequently, and so successfully (for a while, at least). Never, however, did he own up to doing it. And in fact, he probably believed at least some of his own Big Lies. He was still actively promulgating one of his most famously destructive ones the day before he killed himself, when he wrote his Political Testament in contemplation of that death:

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests…Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.

To be especially convincing in telling a lie, it helps to believe it’s true.

Why am I talking about all of this? I’ve been contemplating the back and forth allegations of lying in political ads in the 2012 campaign—the latest being Romney and whether Obama has reduced the work requirement for welfare, and Obama’s charge that Romney and Bain helped to kill a woman of cancer. There have been various attempts to assess the veracity of said ads. And so on and so forth—including the question of whether the polls that currently show Obama pulling ahead are valid, or instead feature skewed and misleading sampling in order to rally the Obama troops.

Not all of these things, even if they are lies, would constitute a Big Lie. But some are Bigger than others. Whether or not Romney is completely correct about the effect of the recent Obama memo on welfare and work (see this for the arguments that he’s incorrect), a very convincing case can certainly be made that he’s telling the truth, as Mickey Kaus (not a conservative) pointed out a month ago.* That would make Romney’s ad more of a difference of opinion rather than a lie, or at worst an exaggeration. However, the PAC ad about Bain, Romney, and the woman dying of cancer contains so many actual lies (lies in the conventional sense, that is) that it’s safe to say it’s a pack of lies.

Politicians exaggerating, distorting, and even lying is hardly new. But there is something different about the Obama campaign. To a greater extent than any campaign I can remember in my lifetime, it uses these techniques relentlessly, and its lies are not only more frequent, they are more dramatic, more flagrant, more shameless, and thus more akin to the Big Lie.

What’s more, Obama follows the following rules as well, elucidated in a US intelligence profile of Hitler written during the war:

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

That is the technique in a nutshell—and what’s more it’s Obama’s only technique in his campaign against Romney. Is it working? Maybe; hard to tell—because of that aforementioned difficulty in knowing whether the polls are telling the truth or not. But unless human nature has changed a good deal in the seventy or so years since WWII, it probably has been and will be effective. The only question is whether it will be effective enough to grant Obama a victory.

[*NOTE: Here are some of Kaus’s arguments that favor Romney’s position:

1. The guts of the 1996 welfare reform were a) welfare was ended as an “entitlement” (controlled by the feds) and transferred to the states, as a “block grant” subject to certain requirements; and b) one of those requirements was that a certain percentage of each state’s welfare caseload had to be working or preparing for work. A great deal of effort was put into defining what qualified as work, and making sure that work actually meant work and not the various BS activities (including BS training activities) the welfare bureaucracies often preferred to substitute for work.

2. As of several years ago, the details of these work requirements turned out to matter less than the general signal they sent, that no-strings welfare was over and even low-income single moms were supposed to work. As a result, the welfare rolls shrank so rapidly (roughly by half) that many states never faced the detailed work requirements (since they got credit for everyone who left welfare).

3. But of course the work requirements were part of what sent that general “signal.”

4. To the extent the administration’s action erodes the actual and perceived toughness of the work requirements, which it does, it sends the opposite and wrong signal.

5. The Democrat’s 2009 stimulus bill changed the incentives of the 1996 reform by once again rewarding states that expanded their welfare rolls. If you worry about Obama reestablishing the bad old pre-reform welfare system, though, this is worse.

6. Rector and Bradley of Heritage (among the first to attack Obama’s action) make the case that the law’s work requirements were specifically designed to not be waivable, and that Obama is using HHS’s authority to waive state reporting requirements as a tricky way of voiding the underlying substantive requirements that are to be reported about.

There’s more, much much more, in his article. It would be a good idea to read the whole thing, and then compare it to cursory analyses such as the one at Politifact. As usual, one of the problems is that understanding something like this requires arguments and thinking of some complexity, rather than sound bites. But sound bites are what ads are all about.]

[ADDENDUM: Roger Simon reflects on the role of the MSM in all this.

And Bryan Preston is on the same page as me:

The ad is out there. The uninformed are seeing it in their facebook feeds, twinned up with the latest from MoveOn or whichever smear group is running in parallel today. People will see the ad, and most of them will not see the CNN, PolitiFact or Washington Post fact-checks that declare the ad a total fraud. Out in the wild, the ad is intended do its job of toxifying Romney just enough to peel off a few of his voters and ramp up hate for him among Obama’s voters. That’s the point of the ad, not to tell anything that’s true, but just to stir the pot, sully Romney and depress his potential vote.

As I wrote yesterday, we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?…

The Obama campaign has gone from accusing Romney of boyhood bullying to adulthood felony, to being a murderer in all but name. What accusation is left to throw at him? There aren’t many, but rest assured that the Obama campaign and its allies will find one.]