Hilter Would Be Proud

The right wing campaign against food stamps (which are no longer stamps but more like debit cards) is a good example of how right wing opinion makers use lies and distortions to affect policy. The big lie the right is promoting that "lazy, no good" aid recepients are eating on crab meat while the "good white working" (by implication White) people have to get by on hamburger. It's all a pack of lies but it workds for the right wing. The right has a vast apparatus starting with bloogers and talk radio blowhards who can infiltrate the right wing message into the mainstream media. The right used these tactics to destroy welfate and affirmative action. If they do the same to food aid, will be left with people starving to death in the streets. What good would that do?

Adolf Hitler himself pioneered the use of big lies to achieve political ends. In his book Mein Kampf he wrote "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."

The US Office of Strategic Services summed up Hitler's use of political lying: "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

The american right has adopted a similar policy of spreading political lies in order to achieve their ends. Does conservatism lead to fascism? That's a question for another time.