If you follow politics, you’ve probably heard plenty of politicians complaining about the lies of their opponents.
It’s a staple diet of democratic political discourse. Does a day go by when Parliament (or Congress) is in session in which copious accusations of lying aren’t hurled across the chamber? If so, I must have missed them.
Arlen Specter: these days, he a Senatorial liar; Adolf would not have been surprised
But how many politicians do you know who admit to telling lies? Telling lies themselves, that is – and not just lies but really big lies. Politicians like that are certainly unusual.
I’ll thicken the plot. How many politicians do you know who brag about telling really big lies in a best selling book published before their political career gets underway? Such a politician would be rare indeed.
Yet that’s what a lot of people seem to believe about Adolf Hitler. If they don’t actually believe this, they certainly like to make out they do.
Take this quotation, which has become famous thanks to its frequent repetition on the Internet:
“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.
Yuk! What a nasty mind! (In case don’t know already, those are the words of Adolf Hitler, written in his semi-autobiographical book ‘Mein Kampf’, published in the mid 1920s).
Adolf Hitler: according to legend, the politician who bragged about lying
It’s astonishing, when you think about it, that Hitler got away with boasting about all the Big Lies he was about to tell. How did he still get so many votes? Did Germans 70 years ago admire politicians who brazenly admitted they were huge liars? Amazing!
Actually, it is amazing – too amazing by half. In fact, it’s nonsense.
The quoted words of Hitler are authentic enough (it’s a translation into English from the original German). But some rather significant context is missing…
Here’s the paragraph that follows… in the same translation of Mein Kampf, as provided by Wikipedia:
“From time immemorial. however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies.” Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.”
Ah – now the famous quotation makes more sense! Hitler wasn’t talking about his own lies at all. Like most politicians, he was complaining about other peoples’ lies. That’s a lot more plausible!
As of today, a Google search for the first paragraph alone (in red) – inside inverted commas so the search is for the exact text – returns 384 results. By contrast, a search for the second paragraph alone returns 4 results. Clearly, a lot of people are quoting Hitler’s words about ‘the Big Lie’ out of context. About 100 to 1 on that count!
World War Two: it ended in 1945, as anyone left in Hiroshima can explain
It’s hardly surprising when this kind of thing happens in wartime. Propaganda against Hitler was to be expected during World War Two. But why propagandize against a man who died over 60 years ago? Rather odd, don’t you think?
It’s clear when searching for instances of this notorious quotation that many of the folk who repeat it are Jewish. That strikes me as even odder. Surely they’d do well to stop quoting from that particular page of Mein Kampf? Hitler was, after all, being very rude about them – as the smallest amount of research makes apparent.
Now, for pointing out such elementary and easily verifiable facts in today’s ‘western world’, it’s customary to be branded a ‘Fascist’ or ‘neo-Nazi’’. That really just demonstrates how far rational discourse has been debased by slavish conformism to one particular, absurdly biased, historical narrative.
Just in case I’d latched onto a statistical artifact, I found another version of the same quotation, this time in the Jewish Virtual Library. The words are essentially the same, but the punctuation is different and in this instance the two paragraphs are collapsed into one.
All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.
The Warren Commission's absurd 'magic bullet' lie
Once again, I did a Google search for the first part of the text (shown in red above) – then the second half (in blue). On this occasion, Google returned 385 and 16 results respectively.
I rest my case – or to coin a phrase from Gerald Posner, ‘Case Closed‘
Posner, for those who haven’t heard of him before, is a truly epic liar of our own era.
He’s the man who still promotes the risible ‘magic bullet’ theory – a recycled lie originated by fellow-liar Arlen Specter, formerly adviser to the 1964 Warren Commission. In the early 1990s, he wrote Case Closed – a book that supposedly vindicates the Warren Commission’s verdict on the Kennedy assassination.
These days, Specter is a US Senator who lies often and unremittingly, mainly for the benefit of the military industrial complex and the Israel Lobby…
An Ethiopian Jew: does his genome have more in common with Simon Peres' than mine?
Incidentally, Zionists are very well-represented among those people on earth who still believe what I suggest might appropriately be called Hitler’s mistake (not all lies are deliberate – sometimes misinformation is spread by people who don’t know better).
By what conceivable stretch of the imagination are Jews a ‘race’? (whatever ‘race’ actually means). Compare and contrast Jewish folk from Ethiopia or India with Jews from Sweden or Lithuania? Can you spot the difference? Me too.
Apparently, Hitler couldn’t. But many folk believed strange things three quarters of a century ago.*
In modern civilized society, we expect ideas to evolve and become more factually-based over time. It’s a natural process… but of course, it’s a process impeded by the incessant repetition of one-sided untruths.
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Footnote *
In fairness to Hitler (a rare trait in the 21st Century), I suspect the word he used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews was ‘Volk‘.
Should this really be translated into English as ‘race’?
This is what today’s Wikipedia has to say on the translation into English of the word ‘Volk’ – and its changing usage over time (emphasis added):
Background
In German the word Volk can have several different meanings, such as folkpeople in the ethnic sense, and nation. (simple people), people in the ethnic sense, and nation.
German Volk is commonly used as the first, determing part (head) of compound nouns such as Volksentscheid (plebiscite, lit. “decision of/by the people”) or Völkerbund (League of Nations), or the car manufacturer Volkswagen (literally, “people’s car”).
19th century and early 20th century
A number of völkisch movements existed prior to World War I. Combining interest in folklore, ecology, occultism and romanticism with ethnic nationalism, their ideologies were a strong influence on the Nazi party, which itself was inspired by Adolf Hitler’s membership of the Deutsche ArbeiterparteiMein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use. Today, the term völkisch is largely restricted to historical contexts describing the closing 19th century and early 20th century up to Hitler’s seize of power in 1933, especially during the years of the Weimar Republic. (German Workers’ Party), even though Hitler in even though Hitler in Mein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use. Today, the term völkisch is largely restricted to historical contexts describing the closing 19th century and early 20th century up to Hitler’s seize of power in 1933, especially during the years of the Weimar Republic. himself denounced usage of the word
Nazi era
During the years of the Third Reich, the term Volk became heavily used in nationalistic political slogans, particularly in slogans such as Volk ohne RaumVölkischer Beobachter (“popular observer”), an NSDAP party newspaper. Also the political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One people, one country/empire, one leader”); and the compound word Herrenvolk, translated as “master race”. — “(a) people without space” or
Even though Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf often erroneously applied specific biological and zoological terms such as race, species, and others, the Nazi-era use of Volk could not, depending on context, be interpreted as “race”, “Germanic”, or “European.” In Nazi propaganda, several peoples made up a race, so these two terms did not denote the same thing during the Nazi years. The German people was considered part of the Germanic race which latter officially included the Scandinavians, the English, and the Dutch as well (while Hitler himself also included the Celts), so Volk did not equal Germanic either. Nazi-era publications on pre-history only differed whether their Germanic race equalled the Indo-European race or the Germanic race itself was part of a family of Indo-European races, since indogermanisch is the common German term for Indo-European.
Today
Because Volk is the generic German word for “people” in the ethnic sense today as well as for “people entitled to vote” (Wahlvolk), its use does not necessarily denote any particular political views in post-1945 Germany. However, because of its past, the word is rarely used with Bevölkerung (“population”) serving as a substitute.
