What Would Machiavelli Do? The Big Lie Lives On ...Thom Hartmann

[ElsewheresDaughter]

i'm in the process of reading his book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight"The fate of the World and What We can do before its Too Late! (This book will CHANGE you forever) it's about the planets dwindling resources and the hell that will befall mankind starting in about 15/20 years :scared: God help us and our children? ...this book has solutions and must be read by every human on the planet if we are to survive

now onto this article ......
There is nothing new about the Swift Boat ads.

German filmmaker Fritz Kippler, one of Goebbels' most effective propagandists, once said that two steps were necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it. The first was to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that "even the most feebleminded could understand." The second was to repeat the oversimplification over and over. If these two steps were followed, people would always come to believe the Big Lie.

In Kippler's day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie "Campaign in Poland," which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny - a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany - and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively "liberate" Poland. Hitler took the "strong and decisive" path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler's way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what's most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. In order for somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli's premise (in "The Prince," 1532) that the end justifies the means.

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe - and then the world - in a thousand-year era of peace, foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it's a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will ultimately kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it.

In fiction, it's the story of Mary Shelley's good Doctor Frankenstein's attempt to conquer mortality, of Darth Vader's misuse of the Force, and of the tragic consequence of the inquisitive Dr. Jeckyll's attempt to understand good and evil going tragically wrong when, as Robert Louis Stevenson notes, he wrote, "I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde."

In real life, it's the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote Jefferson while enforcing a brutal rule, of power industry executives pushing for lax mercury rules to "help the American economy," of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the good name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about it, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemmingway, and Kafka.


Be it "small sins" like Nader getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or "big sins" like George W. Bush repeatedly asserting that he had to invade Iraq because of WMDs and because Saddam "threw out the weapons inspectors" (something Saddam never did - inspectors were removed by Clinton in 1998 and by Bush in 2003), trying to accomplish a "good" by using the means of an "evil" like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Bush campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lie techniques to assail John Kerry's Vietnam War record. With a smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, George W. Bush refused to address specifically the misrepresentations in the ads, and called for "the end of all 527s," a goal he cynically knows unachievable in this election cycle.

more...http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0826-02.htm

[Kagemusha]

1. Just so you know.. Poland's government was not nice in that time

I mean, they weren't saints or angels here...

In other words, good Big Lies usually have an element of half-truth in it.

And why is that? So that it has traction beyond "your people". If you're just preaching to the choir, it's not really propaganda.

That's why there's still hope re: modern Republicans. They're not good enough at it to transcend the polarization of American politics. That's what Rove wanted, and he is not getting it, win or lose the next election.

[Inland]

2. The false choice is Bush's favorite

Invade Iraq or do nothing, for example. Those weren't the only two choices, but Bush likes to pretend that one choice is his and the ONLY other choice is untenable. So he ignored the inspectors or international coalition or anything else, and guess what? He fucked up.

[shraby]

3. The big or little lie repeated no longer

holds true because of the internet which makes it possible for people to communicate in an unprecedented way. The lie cannot stand because it is a lie and is soon smoked out and discredited. Before the internet, snail mail took at least 3 days to just refute the lie and more time to make it into the news. Now it can be refuted in virtually minutes, and in volume.
The liars are a case of trying to use 20th century ideas in the 21st century. They may be successful for a few days, but not longer than that.

[Eloriel]

4. This is excellent, thanks

I was particularly struck (okay, horrified) with the parallels between Iraq 2004 and Poland 1940. Shudder We've GOT to teach more history.

[A_Possum]

5. One thing is somewhat different this time

The internet.

The underground resistance is alive and well. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.