Deja Vu, the Big Lie and How History Repeats Itself...

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it often, people will come to believe it.” –frequently attributed to Hitler's favorite propagandist, Joseph Goebbels

It’s an old maxim that if you are ignorant of history you may find yourself repeating many of the more disastrous errors of the past.   Next June will mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when nearly 130,000 US and Allied troops charged onto the beaches in Normandy in a desperate gamble to end what was arguably the first truly global war.  By the time it was over, World War II had cost the lives of 15 million soldiers on both sides as well as another 38 million civilians who died as collateral damage.  Anyone who was there and still survives is most likely approaching his or her hundredth birthday around now.  Yet it is hard to imagine, even today, the dimensions of the horrendous violence that took place during those few years.

What we like to refer to as the “Greatest Generation” definitely deserves our respect and gratitude, but the history we really need to remember concerns the decades that preceded 1944 and finally made World War II an inevitability. It was a period, which Irish poet William Butler Yeats described in his poem, The Second Coming, as sliding into chaos, or as Yeats put it in which‚ “The center cannot hold.” In a sense, it was a case of extreme political polarization on a global scale and a reminder of what happens when civil discourse finally has nowhere to go and gives way to violence.

Today, much of the world is again asking itself whether democracy is really the best system of government.  The original notion that America should have a “Government by the people and for the people,” is under attack, even in the United States. A significant number of people would prefer‚ “Government for some of the people, to be decided by the right kind of people.”  America’s traditional role as a de facto experiment in the ideas of the Enlightenment is under attack. These days, America is beginning to look pretty much like everywhere else. 

Before we slide down this slippery slope, it might be worth taking a second look at how similar disputes in the 1920s and 1930s took the entire planet to the brink of total destruction.

Adolph Hitler is generally blamed for the madness of World War II, but the “Fuehrer,” (the Leader), as he liked to call himself, merely nudged society in a direction that it was already predisposed to follow.  In the process, Hitler perfected two rhetorical tricks.  The first came to be known as the “Big Lie,” a series of falsehoods repeated so often that the public came to believe them.  The second, more banal tactic, consisted of using incendiary rhetoric to incite prejudices that were already lurking below the surface of the public subconscious.  Hitler used these enflamed prejudices to create an alien presence in the public mind. The aliens, Hitler suggested, wanted nothing less than to rape your women, corrupt your children and spread general mayhem throughout society.

Hitler crafted his Big Lie in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), his list of personal complaints against established German society.  His argument in the book contends that Germany could not have been defeated in World War I.  Its surrender had to have been a betrayal by a conspiracy of Marxist Jewish traitors and liberal intellectuals. 

Hitler called his imagined conspiracy the “Big Lie.”   Today most historians agree that the real lie was Hitler’s false interpretation of what had really happened.  Germany’s World War I defeat had really resulted from miscalculations, disastrous risk-taking, and general indecision on the part of the last German emperor and king of Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany found itself stalemated in endless trench warfare, running out of both men and ammunition and facing exhaustion.  The end came after an influx of fresh American troops finally tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. There had never been a conspiracy. Germany had simply lacked the manpower and resources to overcome the combined Allied forces.

Hitler’s denial of Germany’s world War I defeat looks absurd to anyone with even the slightest notion of what really happened, but instead of facing reality, Hitler doubled down on his false analysis. It didn’t matter whether any of it made sense; it was what he wanted to believe. In the end, he came to realize that if the lie is big enough and repeated often enough, the truth doesn’t really matter; a public that is only half paying attention will believe almost anything as long as you keep repeating it over and over. Given the choice between admitting the shame of defeat or blaming that defeat on someone else, most Germans preferred Hitler’s version. There was no longer any need to express shame over Germany’s decline; the real responsibility belonged to someone else. As Hitler presented it, that someone else was a conspiracy of Marxists, Jews, and liberal intellectuals.    

It’s a well-known principle in psychology that the easiest way to unify and mobilize a group is to threaten them with an outside enemy. The tactic works almost every time, even when, as in most cases, the threat is only imagined.

For Hitler, if you were Jewish, you were an ideal target for cathartic vengeance from society’s losers. That vengeance promised to be even more virulent because it was fueled by jealousy and anger in an economy that seemed to some to be in free fall.  Although Germany still had some of the brightest minds in Europe, the average German, the common man in the street, was not overly educated and found himself trying to cope with a dismal economy that promised an even more dismal future.  Most were more than ready to buy into Hitler’s fantasy.  To mobilize the public behind his vision, Hitler needed to find a minority that was visibly different from the masses. In the end, he might just as easily have struck out against Gypsies—the Roma people—or Germany’s gay population.  The problem was that those minorities were too small to attract serious public attention.  In contrast, Germany’s Jews were an important presence in German society. For the most part, they were highly civilized, educated, intellectually gifted, and in some cases lucky enough to be wealthy. These were all qualities that could be used to inspire jealousy in the heart of almost any dissatisfied German who felt abandoned by the state and society as a whole.  The fact that many Jews were German aristocrats and held important roles in the German establishment, was even better. Hitler was determined to destroy the entire German establishment as it existed, the aristocracy included. They were his “Deep State.”  But Germany’s Jewish population, simply by being different, made a smaller, more accessible target to isolate and attack, at least in the beginning.

It soon became apparent that quite a few ordinary Germans in the limping Weimar Republic were more than ready to go along with Hitler’s fiction.  Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary film, “Triumph of Will,” dotes on the impressive size of Hitler’s mass rally at Nuremberg. It is testimony to the fact that much of the German public was clearly ready to drink Hitler’s Kool-Aide. The rest had either fled or had been terrorized into silence. Neither Riefenstahl nor the German public at the time could know the depths of destruction to which Hitler’s misdirection would ultimately lead them.

As Hitler’s movement progressed, his inner clique perfected its communication tactics.  Hitler’s personal dirty trickster and public relations guru, Joseph Goebbels, is often credited with observing that all that is needed to kill a democracy is a lie that is big enough.  There is no proof that Goebbels ever expressed that sentiment in so many words. In fact, he and Hitler pretended that they were expressing the true will of the German people—even though Nazi Stormtroopers beat anyone who disagreed with their vision.  But the Big Lie as a virus capable of destroying democracy captures the essence of the techniques and strategy that Hitler and Goebbels put into practice. 

 A psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the  U.S. Army’s OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the predecessor of today’s CIA, notes that the success of the Big Lie depended on constantly doubling down on the original falsehood, even if at times to do so made the lie’s perpetrator seem absurd.  An equally important tactic was to tell so many lies in rapid succession that the public had no hope of keeping anything straight. The OSS study quotes Hitler’s confidant, Kurt Ludecke, himself a noted scam artist, on the approach: “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off,” Ludecke explained.  “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.”  Other Hitler observers note in the OSS study that Hitler’s greatest gift may have been his ability to sense the mood of the crowd and to play to their emotions.  To do that, Hitler spoke in the language of the crowd, even if that was not necessarily well-educated, high German.  The important thing to Hitler was that the crowd could understand what he was saying and felt that he understood them.  Another extreme politician, Jean-Marie LePen, who founded France’s far-right National Front, put it more simply: “I say out loud what you feel in your gut.” Of course, what you feel in your gut may not be civilized, and, at times, it can even be bestial.

All of that is a lot to take in; still looking at the world situation today, and even at some recent thinking in the United States, it’s hard to keep from having a sensation of déja vu. Haven’t we already been there, and done that? 

It’s hard to think of Hitler’s Big Lie and not think of Donald Trump’s insistence that he did not really lose the 2020 election even though Joseph Biden beat him by a landslide of more than 7 million popular Votes, and no less than 74 electoral votes. Instead of listening to logic, Trump doubles down, refuses to admit that he is wrong, and finds that if he repeats the lie enough there are quite a few people out there who will actually believe him. As for the rest, intimidation works. The intimidation is political at first. If Trump wins re-election it may turn into something else.

The one bright spot is that Trump doesn’t engage in Hitler’s antisemitism.  He doesn’t have to. He has undocumented immigrants, Central American refugees, and liberal intellectuals, not to mention just about anyone with dark skin to get worked up about.  When Republicans were about to agree to a deal in Congress that would curb illegal immigration at the border, Trump sabotaged the negotiations. He doesn’t really hate Hispanics or undocumented aliens. What he really needs is the imaginary threat that they represent. He needs fear to be a tool that he can use to mobilize the public for the next election.  

The real goal, just as it was for Hitler, is naked power.  The objective is to build a cocktail of fear and hatred and then use that fiery mixture to mobilize the masses to vote in Trump’s favor. Just listen to Trump’s speech last Veteran’s Day: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical leftist thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”  

Or in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last October, “These people are very aggressive: They drink, they have drugs, a lot of things happen.” 

And in Waco Texas, “With you at my side, we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.”

It doesn’t matter that there are hardly any communists or Marxists left.  The dog whistles, buzzwords, and labels defining the “enemy” are already deeply implanted in the social consciousness. The target has changed. The rhetoric hasn’t.

 Trump’s language often sounds coarse and uneducated, but he has that gift that is often attributed to Hitler. That is the uncanny ability to resonate and sense the temper of a crowd. It is essentially an ability to adjust to the same wavelength as the mob he is talking to.  Trump may not speak correct English, but neither can many of the people who flock to him at mass rallies.

It is easy to forget that Hitler was legally elected to the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, in 1932. The Nazis won a slim majority over the Communists in that election mainly because Nazi Storm Troopers had already begun terrorizing a sizable percentage of the population and, in many cases, were stationed at polling booths as “observers.” In that, the Nazis were following the lead of Lenin, who managed to win a slim majority in Russia’s parliament, the Duma, and then renamed his party “Bolsheviks,” Russian for “Majority.”  Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Weimar Republic in 1933.  On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was burned to the ground. Hitler blamed Communists for what was more probably an act of arson by the Nazis. It didn’t really matter who had set the fire. After it, both the Weimar Republic and any pretense at democracy ended in Germany. Politics, the press, and meetings in general were forbidden, and Germany was set on the path to a war that would eventually reduce it and much of Europe to ashes.  It took Hitler just ten years to turn Germany from one of the leading intellectual countries in Europe to a pariah. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, which had been among the most advanced countries in Europe, were kicked back to the Dark Ages, from which they are just now beginning to recover.

The situation in the United States today is obviously very different from the one that Weimar Germany faced in the early 1920s and 1930s. The US is still economically powerful. The population is better educated, and American institutions are much stronger than those in Germany were. Nevertheless, America also experienced the January 6 attack against the US Capitol, unquestionably an attempt to use violence to overthrow an election by a fomenting insurrection that was clearly supported by the Commander-in-Chief who had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and defend the country. Unlike the Reichstag fire which was set for much the same motive, the attack on the Capitol and the 2020 election failed. We were lucky this time. That said, history gives us a warning. We have been here before. The next time, luck might not be on our side.