Telling the “Big Lie” isn’t new. Not at all. It’s a combination of the “Information” and “Communications” skill to affect the “Production” skill and make something happen that is based on false information. It’s effective for those people who are too lazy or are incapable of ferreting out the truth of a matter – and are gullible enough to believe virtually anything they read or hear.
Your “information” is what you start with when you do your thinking – your “critical thinking,” so to speak. It’s important, for those who do understand what “critical thinking” is, to base such thinking on truth – on facts that can be verified. So if you want to manipulate the thinking of those who follow you, just tell them whatever information you want so that they will draw the conclusions that you seek. That the information you feed them is totally wrong, made up, or simply a “big lie” is unimportant to those who don’t think critically.
Think about it!
This is where the “Big Lie” becomes very handy. Just make up the facts (the “alternative facts,” as you remember) that lead your followers to the conclusions you want – even if those conclusions are based on the “Big Lie.” Yep! It Works!!
Many Americans are oblivious of the “Big Lie” – they listen faithfully as their favorite news sources (generally far right-wing) or posters on social media platforms spew forth the stuff that they want their followers to believe.
Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister put what they are doing to you this way:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Adolph Hitler wasn’t so subtle. The OSS psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:
Goebbels did describe the big lie in different language in an article he wrote in 1941, “Churchill’s Lie Factory,” but he was accusing the British of the ploy:
Josef Goebbels on the "Big Lie"
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the “Big Lie”
The big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth, used especially as a propaganda technique. 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 claimed that the technique had been 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.