The Big Lie

The political “big lie” is nothing new. Plato’s Republic, written around 380BC, has Socrates and Glaucon discussing what they call the “Noble Lie”. It’s told to the lower orders by the elite Guardians to promote loyalty and social stability. From then on, the lie has a history that is anything but noble. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written in the early 1920s, accused Jews of spreading the big lie to conceal their responsibility for Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Ironically, Hitler appropriated the big lie to claim the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield, but stabbed in the back by Jews and Communists. For good measure, he railed against international Jewry claiming it had enriched itself from the war. From there it was a straight line to the Holocaust.