Unpicking the Coup — The Big Lie

Photo: Lina Marinelli / Jornalistas Livres

by Colin Mansell

The rationale behind the coup underway in Brazil is that Dilma, Lula and the Worker’s Party are corrupt. With no evidence, this has to be manufactured, hence the Mensalão and Lava Jato “investigations”, arriving at false conclusions to rationalize their belief in their own rightness. This is the big lie.

The belief the coup plotters and perpetrators hold is that Dilma, Lula and the Worker’s Party are a threat to the natural order as they see it, which is one of privilege for a few, themselves, the coup plotters and perpetrators.

The psychology of the big lie was explicitly detailed in the extract from Mein Kampf below, but shows how difficult it is to clear up afterwards, once people have taken it on board, in this case that Dilma, Lula and the Worker’s Party must have done something wrong to deserve all this negative attention once it has been repeated enough in the complicit mass media.

“The big lie is a propaganda technique coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf. Hitler asserted the technique was used by Jews to unfairly blame Germany‘s loss in World War I on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff.

It’s usage is where a known falsehood is stated and repeated and treated as if it is self-evidently true in hopes of swaying the course of an argument in a direction that takes the big lie for granted rather than critically questioning it or ignoring it.

As a general rule, the most effective big lies are outrageous enough to be unbelievable, yet appeal strongly to the prejudices of the listeners and are stated in as bland and matter-of-fact terms as possible. It is sometimes even more effective to string several big lies together in a series of talking points.

The source for the expression comes from the passage in Chapter 10 in Mein Kampf:

But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall 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. 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.”