Big lie

History and effect of Big lie propaganda

The phrase is the English form of die große Lüge. It first appears in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925, vol. 1, ch. 10), where it is an accusation against others. Hitler wrote that "the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood," and their "fighting comrades, the Marxists," had blamed General Erich Ludendorff for Germany's defeat in 1918, and that in the big lie "there is always a certain force of credibility" (James Murphy's English translation). The passage assigns the method to Jews. That is an antisemitic charge, not a finding, and this page quotes it as the source of the term. Hitler's own party then ran a very large falsehood about Jews, described below.

How Big lie propaganda works

Four parts recur. The claim is large and simple: a whole group, a whole election, a whole war has one cause. It is repeated across many channels until it feels familiar. It is protected by an apparatus such as party newspapers, school textbooks, exhibitions, ministries or organised supporters, which supply the repetition. And it comes with an answer to disbelief: those who dispute it are described as part of the plot or as liars themselves.

Why Big lie propaganda works

Repetition raises the sense that a statement is true. Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino (1977) found it for obscure statements, Fazio and colleagues (2015) found it even when people had relevant knowledge, and Pennycook, Cannon and Rand (2018) found it for fake news headlines. That is the repetition half of the technique and it is well replicated. The other half, Hitler's and Langer's claim that larger falsehoods are believed more readily than small ones, is not established by this research and is treated here as a propagandist's belief. People also favour accounts that fit their identity (motivated reasoning), and a retracted claim keeps influencing judgment when no replacement story is offered (Johnson and Seifert, 1994).

Big lie propaganda examples across eras and sides

• Russia and Germany, 1903 to 1945: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The text appeared in the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia in 1903 and as an appendix to Sergei Nilus's book in 1905, presenting itself as the minutes of a Jewish plan for world control. The Times of London showed in August 1921, through Philip Graves's comparison with Maurice Joly's 1864 satire, that it was plagiarised. A Swiss court at Bern in 1935 called it "ridiculous nonsense". The Nazi Party's publishing house issued 22 editions between 1919 and 1938, and Goebbels wrote in his diary, "I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols" (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). A panel at the 1942 Paris exhibition Le Bolchevisme contre l'Europe, under the title "Le judaïsme tend à l'hégémonie mondiale", drew lines from the Soviet party, Labour, Social Democrats and "Haute banque anglaise" to one cartoon figure.
• Germany, 1918 to 1938: the stab in the back. The charge that Jews had avoided service and undermined the front was tested inside Germany. On 11 October 1916 the Prussian war ministry ordered a count of Jewish soldiers, and the results were never published, which let rumours continue (Deutsches Historisches Museum). About 100,000 Jewish soldiers fought for Germany, about 78,000 at the front, and about 12,000 were killed. The 1938 Berlin exhibition panel "Jüdische Drückebergerei und Betriebsamkeit im Weltkrieg" (Jewish shirking and profiteering in the World War) showed strips of Jews idle at the front and profiting at home. The claim was sustained by a state exhibition and a party press.
• United States, 1943. The OSS report is the case where a government turned the phrase from an accusation into a theory of Hitler's method. Its audience was a small wartime circle, not the public, and it described what the author thought the enemy did. The report is a source for the term, not evidence that the method works as described.

How to spot Big lie propaganda

• Is the claim sweeping and simple, with one group, party or conspiracy as the cause of many unrelated events?
• Is there a documentary record (a census, a court ruling, an audit, the claimant's own earlier documents) that contradicts it, and does the record come from sources the claimant would be expected to trust?
• Does the claim survive the contradicting record, and what keeps it alive: new evidence, or the same newspapers, textbooks, exhibitions or supporters repeating it?