Hitler on the Campaign Trail
Republican and Democratic politicians are reviving a favorite Nazi debating point this election season
This is the debut installment of the Righteous Gentile, a monthly column by Michael Moynihan.
Voters are routinely told by politicians that they should be wary of other politicians, those preternatural liars who want to abscond with your money and freedoms. It’s the electoral version of the Epimenides paradox: If all politicians are liars, and the person saying so is also a politician, then he too must be a liar. But there are different degrees of lying, or supposed lying. There are white lies, half-truths, and apparently—at least according to a significant number of pundits and politicians this presidential election—campaigns of out-and-out fascist deception.
If you are unfamiliar with this last category, recall the many recent claims that one politician or another is mimicking the tactics and techniques of Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, by employing the “Big Lie theory”: the more grand the lie, the more likely the credulous voters are to believe it. It’s a common charge these days—and one that unwittingly resuscitates one of the Nazis’ favorite anti-Semitic debating points. But more on that in a moment.
On Monday, the gruff and charmless chairman of the California Democratic Party, John Burton, made headlines when he became the latest party hack to invoke the “big lie,” when describing the allegedly fascist methods of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and his speechwriters: “They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie. [Like] Joseph Goebbels. It’s the ‘Big Lie,’ you keep repeating it.” A convention speech that many commentators thought deserved a rigorous fact check, apparently needed de-Nazification, according to Burton.
The following day, Pat Lehman, identified by the Wichita Eagle as the “dean of Kansas Democratic delegates,” spoke to a reporter from the floor of the Democratic National Convention and described Republicans in similar terms, while shifting attribution to a slightly more recognizable monster: “It’s like Hitler said, if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you.”
Back in January, Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen decried Republican attacks on President Obama’s health-care legislation, saying his critics were advancing the “‘big lie’ just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it.” (Glenn Beck, annoyed that Cohen was competing in the illiterate historical comparison business, blasted the congressman—while invoking Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, and adding that “Nazi tactics are progressive tactics first.”)
The modest backlash against such rhetoric framed the debate as yet another example of the triumph of crudity in American political discourse. But while the squadron of fact-checkers parse the claims of the Obama and Romney campaigns, no one bothered to explore the origins of the “Big Lie” theory, which is regularly conjured on Twitter, blogs, talk radio, and cable news.
A little detective work reveals the Big Lie to be a rather big lie.
In fact, there is only a single reference to the “big lie” in Hitler’s collected writings and speeches—most contemporaneous usage capitalizes the phrase in order to underscore its Nazi ancestry—and it is this slight and unremarkable passage from Mein Kampf:
By branding [General Erich] Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland. In this [the Jews] proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.
Like most of the ponderous anti-Semitism found in Mein Kampf, this isn’t a terribly sophisticated or original point. It was a sinister cabal of Jews—those who controlled the German press and manipulated public opinion—that propagated a “big lie” about Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I. In other words, it isn’t a recommended method of propaganda, but an accusation by the Nazis against German Jewry.
What the pro-Palestinian activist—whose death was just ruled an accident—shared with Lawrence of Arabia