The Big Lie...

This got me thinking once again, not merely in terms of media and terrorism, but rather also how the media is fundamentally also part of the problem, as it has proved time and time again to be incapable of separating facts from narrative. Dominate the narrative and the facts become irrelevant.

From here:

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.

Aiming at emotional manipulation - which is what the warming alarmists aim at - strikes a deeper chord in the human psyche than attempts at intellectual persuasion or moral arguments.

This should sound familiar, from the same source as above:

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.

Never allow the public to forget about humanity's sin of global warming, never admit that something could be wrong with the data or models, never admit that skeptics may have a point or two, insist that there are no alternatives, deny that a climate scientist - whatever that term means today after ClimateGate - could be at blame for anything, point out how the skeptics are horrible people, they must be beholden to oil companies...and repeat these all often enough so that it becomes a cultural meme, so that it becomes part of subculture identity and becomes a cultural given.


See the pattern? Take a look at where those links lead to understand the nature of the beast that apparently, like some sort of Leviathan-like Zombie, cannot apparently be killed. A hint: it's not what you might think.



As a footnote to the source referenced here, I think we can see the Anti-Americanism of the current day as a rebirth of what is called the Black Legend:

...the careful distortion of the history of a nation, perpetrated by its enemies, in order to better fight it. And a distortion as monstrous as possible, with the goal of achieving a specific aim: the moral disqualification of the nation, whose supremacy must be fought in every way possible.

This was used against Spain during the Early Modern Period,

Simply put, the constant harping of the anti-Americanists creates, amongst the non-critical parts of the population, a feedback loop that furthers the stereotype and the cultural demonization that is the legacy of the Soviet and Maoist disinformation campaigns of the Cold War.

There really is little new under the sun.