Waging War on Lies

4. Waging War on Lies

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Maureen Gill

This is my 4th and final article about truth telling. My first article (“Liar, Liar Pants on Fire”) asked if our nation’s leaders have a duty to model honesty and encourage truth telling. I asked whether there is a duty to correct a falsehood, to call someone out for deliberately lying, and I looked at a recent incident wherein John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, failed to do just that. Shame on him.

In “Snips & Snails and Puppy Dog Tales” — note “tales” here instead of “tails” — I took a humorous route around my anger toward Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I decided to give two examples of the many ludicrous things Beck & Limbaugh have been known to say. “Snips & Snails” spun me into another trajectory because the painful reality is that Frick & Frack enjoy millions of fans who enjoy their venomous style and swallow whole their idiotic Frick & Frackisms.

Why is that????

To help understand this question I chose to look at what we know about why people are vulnerable to lies and propaganda and my 3rd article brought us back to the 20th century’s most famous masters of deceit, Hitler and Goebbels. Hitler and Goebbels brilliantly played to the needs, fears, and embedded beliefs of millions — most of whom were seemingly normal people. History suggests and recent psychological studies have proven that outrageous lies and propaganda only work when they appeal to pre-existing prejudices and core beliefs.

This is a very scary reality because it means that lies are less about the liars than the persons who are deceived. If we discredit the Hitlers and Geobbels of our time (and there are so many!) it may matter little because there will always be more liars to take their place.

The only immunity against the extremist propaganda that spews from the far right in American politics today rests in reaching the people who are vulnerable to those lies in the first place.

Before anyone jumps on me to say the “other side” as in “the liberal left” (the Democrats, liberals, progressives) is just as guilty of extremist speech, let me say most clearly: “no, it is not.”

I’ve repeatedly issued public challenges asking for proof that liberal politicians, pundits, elected officials, or journalists have produced anything near the equal of the hateful and dishonest speech routinely spewed from the right. The reality is that the left has no equal to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Anne Coulter, Michelle Bachman, Rand Paul, or dozens more who gleefully identify themselves with the far right wing of conservative politics. The truth is that people on the left respond to the rhetoric of the right; they do not instigate it and they do not create their own propaganda and lies capriciously demonizing and defaming others. Liberals in this country have been under continuous assault for decades and that has put them in a defensive, not an offensive, position. For the most part, the political left has been left stuttering and bemused by the aggressiveness of these many attacks and history may well write yet that the left has been sadly bereft of the leadership necessary to combat these assaults.

We have no Winston Churchill’s ready to pugnaciously call out the Huns among us – and so they have advanced and are now on in our backyards. They have captured the minds and hearts of our families and friends. We are losing the war, left consoling ourselves with the humor of pundits and late night comediennes who use our sad state of affairs as fodder for satire.

How can we send the Huns packing? How do we get the minds and hearts of our families and friends back to center, back to sanity and common decency?

I wish I knew – but I have some suggestions.

First, we need to restore a desire for truth but before we do that we need to get out the word that truth is not elusive or a shape-shifter that morphs into whatever we want it to become. Truth can be absolute; we can know it, absolutely, and our elected officials must honor it and be truthful.

Perhaps we should demand George W. Bush and others in his administration be prosecuted for war crimes and treason. I don’t think that will be successful but it is a start. We can demand men like John Boehner not only speak the truth but work to discredit the lies. We can boycott the sponsors who buy time from propaganda machines like Fox News and Murdoch-owned related entities. We should also boycott Koch Industries and research and release information about their generous support in the humanities and medicine. No one seems to be discussing it but as we excoriate the Koch Brothers on the one hand for their financial backing of the far right’s political agenda we fail to also acknowledge that they are proving to be the most generous philanthropists in American history. They have donated hundreds and hundreds of millions to cancer hospitals, museums, and the arts. I would not want to stymie their generosity to good causes. However, I do find it disturbing and wonder if it isn’t somehow ominous. This one is a hard nut to crack.

Confronting the sloppy mental habits, lazy thinking and prejudices of our friends and family will be a true challenge — and that one has me stumped. I’ll be thinking about it for quite awhile.

Your ideas will be welcome. As always, thanks for reading.

Lessons from Hitler and Goebbels

Reposted from my post at the Pragmatic Progressive; 3 in my series on truth.

3. Taking a Propaganda Lesson from Hitler and Goebbels

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Maureen Gill

At the end of my article “Snip & Snails and Puppy Dog Tales” about Frick & Frack and their absurd lies, I said I wanted to look next at why people believe such s**t.
Social psychologists and behaviorists have produced extensive credible research showing why people believe what they believe but none of their studies resonate with me as much as what we’ve learned from Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Hitler understood why the best lies are the biggest lies and he explained it brilliantly in Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Goebbels expanded on Hitler’s understanding about why people believe the most absurd lies and incorporated Hitler’s theory into his own expanded theories about propaganda.

Hitler, unable to accept the bankruptcy of Germany’s war aims, that its leaders were fallible and even foolish, or the possibility that Germany wasn’t the equal of or better than the victors, looked elsewhere to explain Germany’s defeat in The Great World War (WWI). He found his answer in the Jews and Marxists but reserved his greatest vitriol for the Jews whom, he claimed, were responsible for the creation and circulation of a lie that said German Army officer Erich Ludendorff and his General Staff were responsible for Germany’s defeat. Hitler called this alleged lie (which he felt was truly heinous) the Grosse Lüge (Big Lie) and in his infamous work, Mein Kampf, he raged about his belief in the perpetual perfidy of the Jews and then explained why their Big Lie was so effective:

…in the big lie…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.

Reading this now I’m struck by Hitler’s understanding that even if a lie is called out as such that it “always leaves traces behind it.” Hitler understood lies leave damaging residue. Even if you have to recall it and are called out as a liar, the lie has served its purpose.

The Big Lie and its equally infamous twin the “stabbed in the back” theory were thoroughly embraced by soldiers and civilians unable to accept the bitter truths about why Germany lost the war. The Draconian reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Peace Treaties added to Germany’s sense of victimization. Germany’s humiliation was so total, so unexpected and so seemingly sudden that the only way a defeated people who had been led to expect total victory could make sense of what happened was to conceptualize defeat as a vast conspiratorial sell-out. The people extolled their military leaders and the superiority of their Army and the possibility of their legitimate defeat was simply not congruent with those cherished beliefs. Blaming the Jews, the quintessential scapegoats in history, was an emotionally comfortable thought; it played on centuries of social, cultural, and religious prejudices.

Hitler’s brilliant and demonic propagandist, Goebbels, turned the Grosse Lüge into an art form. Goebbels knew how to kick it up a notch and said: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

The Big Lie is one thing and propaganda another, although the two often go hand in hand.

The Big Lie is a brazen fabrication that works exactly because it is so enormously preposterous that no one can believe it could actually have been fabricated. The absurdity of the lie serves as the engine that drives it forward; the more absurd, the more the lie is empowered. The Third Reich orchestrated brilliant and disastrous campaigns against Jews, homosexuals, socialists, intellectuals, gypsies, and others, and never balked at throwing out the most preposterous lies as justifications to attack other countries. Big Lies must fall on fertile ground in order to take root and grow – and this can’t be overstated. The belief that the Jews sold out Germany in WWI was a total fabrication; it had no basis in fact but it was a very successful falsehood because it meshed perfectly with existing core beliefs. Big Lies feed on pre-existing belief systems.

Propaganda is more often anchored to reality; it manipulates and exaggerates the reality but it nonetheless is connected to that reality. An example is the reality of a war. The German people certainly knew they were at war but propaganda distorted that reality. It lied about the reasons Germany was at war and to keep the people committed it demonized the opposition, sanctified the German position, and maintained a distorted level of fear about what would happen if the German people quit fighting.

During World War II Goebbels developed nineteen very sophisticated principals about how to wage a successful wartime propaganda campaign against the enemy as well as how to wage it at home in order to control and manipulate the German people.

Items 14, 16 and 18 speak to the basics about any form of fraudulent manipulation:

14. Propaganda must label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans; (a) they must evoke desired responses which the audience previously possesses; (b) they must be capable of being easily learned; (c) they must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations; and (d) they must be boomerang-proof.
16. Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level.
18. Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.

All countries have used propaganda in wartime and the United States is no exception. Unless you hold that truth telling trumps all other virtues, it would be hard to argue that propaganda is always a very unethical and immoral form of communication or social control. I would want to weigh the reasons for the propaganda against the possible harms and outcomes with or without its use before I condemned outright the merit of its application.

When faced with many of the Big Lies that are so pervasive in American culture it is convenient to blame the Dumbing Down Effect but that is probably the least reason for their tenacious endurance.

My take on why so many Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim or a socialist or not even an American citizen has moved from a cynical belief in an overwhelming and pervasive cultural stupidity to a belief in the underlying human psychology that allows Big Lies to become so enduring. That psychology, as Hitler and Goebbels understood, rests on the fact that all Big Lies and successful propaganda must be compatible with other deep seated beliefs.

I’m fairly certain I understand the character of the people in America who create the Big Lies of our day; their agenda and lack of integrity seem clear. They don’t even bother me anymore (which is not to say I don’t want to expose them and end their war on truth and democracy). What concerns me more is the character of the millions who accept these Big Lies and embrace them as absolute truth.

What these millions of people tell me about the American character in this day and age is very scary indeed.

Next: Is it possible to change deep seated beliefs that are flawed?