“Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and people will believe it.”
Adolph Hitler
“With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.”
Adolph Hitler, whose purges and concentration camp slaughter claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.
“Cigarette smoking is no more ‘addictive’ than coffee, tea, or Twinkies.”
In 1994, what James W. Johnston, CEO of R.J. Reynolds, told a congressional committee, after millions of American had perished from cigarette-caused heart disease and lung cancer.
“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
President Lyndon Johnson, in the fall of 1964, less than 6 months before he began sending US troops to Vietnam. Aside from the damage to America’s reputation and the untold numbers of civilian casualties, 58 thousand American lives were lost.
“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
W’s VP, Dick Cheney, before thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands, if not more, of Iraqis have died in a war that lasted eight years and cost $2.4 trillion.
“In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules.”
Fund manager Bernie Madoff addressing potential investors in 2007. After bilking 4,800 clients of billions of dollars over decades, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
"These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long… Go home with love & peace."
Donald Trump in the late afternoon of the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. The death toll and damage are continuing, and he has publicly decried a “stolen election” well over a hundred times.
These are just a few of the most damaging lies in the last century. There are thousands more, a proclivity that seems to afflict autocrats more than those favoring democracy… but lies have become the most widely disseminated political currency in the modern world. On all sides. Not that the ancient world was bereft of mendacity. As Mark Kurlansky, writing for the September 11th Los Angeles Times, notes: “Lying is as old as the human race. And every advancement in communications has facilitated it.” His piece, A history of the ‘Big Lie,’ from Plato to TikTok, goes on to say:
“The year was 375 BCE, the critic was Plato and the still relatively new medium was the written word, which, despite his many reservations, he used to circulate his oral dialogues with Socrates… Plato, though he was concerned about the written word, wasn’t actually opposed to lying under all circumstances. In fact, he believed societies needed what he called ‘a grand lie,’ a deception intentionally spun to serve a civic purpose, a great national myth that would help forge a nation’s identity.” Except it did not work out that way.
“The printing press, invented in the 15th century, helped spread lies too, just as the written word had. After the English Civil War in the 17th century, lies defaming Oliver Cromwell kept the presses busy. In 1665, a fake cookbook, supposedly by Cromwell’s wife but full of fraudulent attacks on her husband, was published. The lying cookbook was invented.
“One of the most successful examples of lying in print was a pamphlet first circulated in Russia in 1905. It was so clumsily written and so obviously untrue that it should have died quickly. Instead ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ has been translated into many languages, is still being published and is widely available on social media today… The ‘Protocols’ claimed to be the stolen notes of a meeting of a secret organization of Jewish leaders conspiring to take over the world. There never was such a meeting because there never was such an organization. That the ‘Protocols’ still survives proves the durability of unconvincing lies and the utter unoriginality of today’s liars.
“With the growth of newspapers, new opportunities for lying emerged. Now a liar needed only to convince a reporter in order to spread a lie to a mass audience. At the beginning of World War One in August 1914, the French spread false reports of atrocities in German-occupied Belgium to motivate allied soldiers. A London Times correspondent reported that a German soldier had ‘chopped off the arms of a baby which clung to his mother’s skirts.’…
“[Next,] Radio was a big step forward for lying. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Michigan whose antisemitic radio broadcasts were extremely popular in 1930s America, referred to the ‘Protocols’ as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. Coughlin was a pioneer in talk radio, spewing out lies on the radio with no one to contradict him.” Kurlansky. Then, with lots of visuals, television, particularly television news, became less news and more opinion as multiple channels telecasting 24/7 became the norm.
There was a time in the United States when outlandish conspiracy theories were relegated to small pockets of extremists, often scattered across the land. But once these pockets of mendacious perception became linked via the Internet, actually social media, their power and numbers exploded, accelerated by the post-2004 lifting of the assault weapons ban followed by the introduction of upwards of 20 million semiautomatic assault rifles into civilian hands, disproportionately, extremists. Mass shootings and armed intimidation has followed. You have to wonder what Adolph Hitler would have been able to perpetrate if he had had access to the Internet. All he had was radio, newsprint and propaganda films that did not travel well.
“[T]he great master of radio lying was Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. ‘It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio,’ he once said. He distributed radios to the public. Having one of these official radios was a sign of being a good Nazi, not only because they were decorated with swastikas, but because they were capable of picking up only Nazi Party frequencies… But all sides were using the radio to get their stories out. In 1945, as World War II ended, Alexandre Koyré, a French philosopher and science historian, commented, ‘Never has there been so much lying as in our day. Never has lying been so shameless, so systematic, so unceasing.’
“The exact same thing is being said today about the rise of social media. But there are differences now… Social media celebrates amateurism. Any idiot can weigh in… And it’s easy to use effectively. Donald Trump can put out an immense volume of lies on his own and dispatch them to tens of millions of people in a moment. Goebbels, however, required a staff of nearly 1,000 professional liars.
“And there is something else: Only a small portion of listeners believe a lie when they hear it. If you lie to 100 people you might get two or three believers, and if you lie to thousands, you might get hundreds. So what happens when you lie to millions on the internet?” Kurlansky. Do lies cause wars? Do they support brutality to install autocrats? The answers litter history.
Many have posited that we are highly unlikely to have an American civil war over this polarizing force. But then, they define a civil war as two opposing armies living in distinctly separate geographical areas shooting at each other. Such an old-world view. Perhaps outbursts of regional violence, refusals of large pockets of citizens to follow the law (except as they “interpret it”), plus rolling protests and counter protests are the modern face of civil war. Stuff like trying to kidnap Michigan’s governor or storming the Capitol to reverse the outcome of an election.
I’m Peter Dekom, given the combination of a rogue Supreme Court, a corrupt ex-president unconcerned for the integrity of a nation, uncontrolled proliferation of arms and the unbridled power of social media… we just might be in a civil war already.
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