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Photo Above<\/em><\/strong>: Young students make their mark in the Earth beside human ash pit, Auschwitz ii -Birkenau, Sept. 27, 2006. Photo by Eric Francis.<\/em><\/p>\n [Editor’s Note<\/strong>: This article was originally published Oct. 11, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link<\/strong><\/a>. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm Eastern Time. Our apologies for the late posting tonight.]<\/p>\n BEFORE we wrap up this photo and essay series on Auschwitz, we need to discuss the Big Lie. Everyone who is literate and concerned about the world needs to understand what this historical reference is. It is about something specific, and relevant today.<\/p>\n The Big Lie was a propaganda technique — more like psychological warfare — used on the German people so they would fall for the crime we now call the Holocaust. This involved their government and military murdering more than 12 million people in death camps, half of them Jews, and nearly all the Sinti and Romany people, along with waging open war on Europe and England for many years. That is to say, bombing great swaths of Europe, people and all, level to the ground.<\/p>\n We can all agree from the ash pit, depicted above, where hundreds of thousands of human lives were thrown, that the Holocaust was a crime. We must not lose sight of that in discussing how that crime was committed. We need to hold two thoughts at once: the ash pit, and the technique.<\/p>\n The basis of the Big Lie is that people are more likely to believe a great deception than a small one. Big, as in so big, it is inconceivable that someone ever possibly could do or say something like that. Hitler and his men understood that people tell small lies all the time. They play on this fact. <\/em>Because people tell small lies as a matter of getting through the day, they expect others to do so. What we do not expect is for someone to be so brazen as to tell a lie so huge it could have absolutely no basis in truth, and yet be used to justify astonishing, outrageous conduct, and to destroy civilization, or some large part of it, at the same time.<\/p>\n Now, if you’re thinking: “This is too outrageous to be true. Who told you this?” then you fell for it. You swallowed the hook and it’s connected to your television. Be careful, you could get a shock.<\/p>\n First let’s check in with the Office of Strategic Services intelligence report which during the war and the peak of Nazi atrocities assessed the psychological tactics of the Nazi government.<\/p>\n 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. – OSS report page 51 [2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hmm. Does this strategy ring a bell? It should. We’ve been living with it for the past five years. Never accept blame. Never admit you’re wrong. Blame one enemy at a time and blame him for everything. Our civil servants at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. are not deviating one iota from the program. I can name a couple who probably have that OSS report in their desk drawer.<\/p>\n But it gets deeper; the OSS report glances over the surface. Here’s how Hitler himself put it. Vocabulary word: Impudence. It means gall. Nerve<\/strong>. Audacity<\/strong>. Watch that word. This is from his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf<\/em> (James Murphy translation, page 134) and the bold type is my addition, as this particular observation is so stunning that somebody ought to posthumously award Hitler the Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to psychology:<\/p>\n 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.<\/strong> 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. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.<\/p>\n http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Big_Lie<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nMuch of how this crime was committed involved the use of fear and violence, but more of it involved the use of deception. The excerpts below explain why deception works so well. You will, I think, probably need to think about them for a while to really grasp the notion. Fraud is a subject I have studied pretty closely, and it’s taken me some time to wrap my mind around this idea.<\/p>\n
![Take a look<\/a> please, first.<\/p>\nIs it too much to visualize their sincere, gentle faces while they are inhaling cyanide gas? Is it too much to imagine what they thought about as they died, naked, on a concrete floor, if indeed the pain allowed them to think of anything at all? Is it too much to visualize their bodies curling up, in agony, for a lie? Is it too much to imagine them being put into an incinerator semi-conscious, if the gas did not work? I have spent much of the past week thinking about them going through this, and making the connection between all the evidence I’ve photographed at Auschwitz, all the stories that have been told to me, all I have learned, and these two women, Hlawica and Holan. Women I have grown to love this week, looking at their faces every day, wondering what they felt and what they witnessed.<\/p>\nThe real issue with the Nazis was the lies they told, lies that were a conscious part of their strategy of mass murder. I will say this again: What they did could not have been perpetrated in an atmosphere where truth had any value. Indeed, where truth lacks value, where that lack is<\/em> the primary value, anything at all can happen. This is why we need to breath truth like we breathe oxygen — remembering WHY it is we breathe. Anything else is Zyklon B.<\/p>\nMore than half a century has passed since the Nazi disaster, and the conduct of all those who let it go on without saying boo; without daring to complain. We know the terrible results of the German police state. We have all heard about it. We have all seen the movie. We were there in the shower room with the people in Schindler’s List<\/em>. None of us can claim ignorance. Some of us know the remnants of the Nazi scientific and military establishment found homes in US corporations such as Dow Chemical, and the CIA.<\/p>\nI’ve been hearing from a lot of readers this week about this series, and one letter came from a writer I respect greatly who was concerned that I was not addressing the issue of the “Nazi within.” I would like to address that one now. Yes, I agree we all have an inner Nazi. But contrary to most images of this being, the domestic version of someone who might kick an innocent camp inmate in the ribs, to death, for no reason other than as a<\/em> rite of passage<\/em> (true fact, learned at Buchenwald), I have a different image of the Inner Nazi.<\/p>\nThis is the well-meaning person within us who is willing to believe anything. It’s the person who is unwilling to challenge the lies we are told, unwilling to even see them, unwilling to admit we are wrong or were fooled. It is the person within us for whom the truth is inconvenient. The Inner Nazi watches a lot of TV these days and feels well informed, but doesn’t get angry. Hey, it’s all good, things will work out.<\/p>\nI have read many spiritual philosophies, studied and become acquainted with many therapy philosophies, and read Brad Blanton’s book Radical Honesty<\/em>, which I bought and checked out because I know him. He’s someone who understands lying because he’s studied liars so much (and he works near Washington DC). He is very eloquent and yet there is one thing I have not been able to get him to discuss.<\/p>\nWith the notable exception of A Course in Miracles<\/em>, not in any of these books, or presented, published teachings, have I come across the idea that there’s something seriously wrong if we consistently believe what is not true. This is the one rather unusual thing that A Course in Miracles<\/em> states explicitly: That we believe lies, and this is the cause of all our suffering. But it’s funny, I don’t see that message going too far.<\/p>\nIn the sanctity of our therapy room, not in print and not in a class, my own therapist Joe Trusso most definitely held the value that what was true was what mattered, in terms of what we accept and live for. In essence, that was the theme of our work. My impression of those years was that he was deeply aware of the sham our parents pulled on us, however “well intentioned,” and how important it is to get past that veil. And this is directly related to the Big Lie, because the presumed, unquestioned infallibility of our parents is the first setup for the government doing no wrong, or being excused when it does.<\/p>\nPlease be assured, I know how far people (Monsanto salesmen, and those individuals who produce cigarette ads, for instance) can go to foist their Big Lies on people; how smooth and seductive they are. How friendly. And I know how, if you were paying attention, your common sense would vomit in their faces, on the spot. I know from my environmental coverage, where I came into contact with many, many contamination victims, nearly all of whom told me to fuck off — and I did feel like throwing up. Has nobody mentioned this little notion out loud, in public political discourse? That if you believe lies, you’ve got a problem? And your problem becomes our problem?<\/p>\nIf not, please, allow me to be the first to raise the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The basis of the Big Lie is that people are more likely to believe a great deception than a small one. Big, as in so big, it is inconceivable that someone ever possibly could do or say something like that. Hitler and his men understood that people tell small lies all the time. They play on this fact. Because people tell small lies as a matter of getting through the day, they expect others to do so. What we do not expect is for someone to be so brazen as to tell a lie so huge it could have absolutely no basis in truth, and yet be used to justify astonishing, outrageous conduct, and to destroy civilization, or some large part of it, at the same time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[357],"tags":[1789,361,373,362,360,117,363],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3875"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/home\/homepix\/mug_shots_homepix.jpg\"){kind=link}