The big lie

When I was studying 'A' level history I read for some strange reason Adolf Hitler's Mein Kamf. This is a turgid, difficult book to read, but one point he made stuck in my head, namely that of the big lie. Essentially, in trying to explain a Jewish consipracy which led, he argued, to Germany losing the Great War, and the economic and political ills of the country in the 1920s he suggested that a big lie had been told. The psychological argument behind his point is that whilst most people might tell small lies in everyday life, telling a big lie was beyond the pale for most people. Thus, they would be unable to conceptually accept that a politician might tell a big lie, because they themselves would be unable to do so. Therefore, the logic of what Hitler was saying, and it became the propaganda approach of Nazi Germany, was tell big not small lies.

I suspect that the political elite in many countries have taken heed of this, and reading media the past week or so this appears to be the case in Zimbabwe. Various Government mouthpieces suggest that economic sanctions are to blame for the countries ills, that most violence in the 2008 elections was caused by the opposition MDC and that it is the MDC who are violating the fragile Global Political Agreement (GPA) which is holding the country together. Such statements have very little basis, but they do just have a certain force of credibility that Hitler required for big lies to suceed. There are sanctions in place, but they are of a small number of named individuals and companies. MDC activists were clearly involved in violence during last year's elections, but nearly always as the victim not the perpretrayor. The MDC is telling anyone who will listen that there are political problems in the country. However, the Zanu-PF big lie of blaming others for the ills of the country is propaganda designed to justify certain actions (or indeed inactions). Given that Zanu-PF still control the state media, the key is how many ordinary Zimbabweans actually believe the big lies they are subject to. My suspicion is that with regional TV and the Internet, enough of a more cogent explanation gets back into the country, in a way that was not really possible in the 1930s.