Big Lie

[I]n 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.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The Big Lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique usually used for political purposes. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler believed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and anti-Semitic political leader in the Weimar Republic. The claim that Germany was not beaten in 1918 was itself called a big lie.

A Big Lie is often the product of a Propaganda Machine, which can also support and expand on an existing Big Lie. One can be used to establish a Cult of Personality, as well as to direct such a cult to a specific purpose.

Big Lies are insidious, and once one is accepted by a believer it is extremely difficult to convince them of its falsity. At least part of this can be attributed to ego-investment, where the believer refuses to accept any proof to the contrary because of how badly it would reflect on them to have fallen for the lie. Thus, rather than expose themselves to the possibility of being shown wrong and/or feeling stupid, believers will instead double down on the lie and support it even more fervently.

A Big Lie will often employ carefully-crafted Insane Troll Logic to give it a veneer of plausibility. They take advantage of the Appeal to Audacity fallacy, and are in fact a more extreme version wielded exclusively for political purposes. Often depends on an Appeal to Authority to give it weight and momentum. May incorporate (or be) a Conspiracy Theory to give it added appeal. A Big Lie is frequently engineered to take advantage of an existing Confirmation Bias in its target audience, and to use such bias to perpetuate itself.

See also Bavarian Fire Drill and Poe's Law. Big Lies are often the message (or core) of Propaganda Pieces.

A related (indeed, broadly overlapping) concept is the Noble Lie. First described by Plato in The Republic, it is a fictional narrative -- often but not always religious in nature -- presented as a truth by a society's elite in order to maintain harmony among the social classes in their culture, or to promote an agenda that profits them. "Black slavery is supported by the Bible" was a Noble Lie circulated in the American South in the decades leading up to The American Civil War, for example.

Not to be confused with Based on a Great Big Lie, although the two tropes do share a basic premise.

Examples of Big Lie include:

Film

Æon Flux: The current state of the pandemic which started centuries before the start of the film. It is to the benefit of the ruling Goodchild family that the surviving population believe it is still as virulent and prevalent as it once was, and that they continue to employ the cloning technology used to circumvent the sterility caused by the treatment for the pandemic. A researcher's success in restoring fertility in one woman threatens the Big Lie and the Goodchilds' control -- and Oren Goodchild's attempt to suppress knowledge of that success sets off the plot of the film.

Literature

The Party of Nineteen Eighty-Four has turned the Big Lie into both an art form and everyday tool of control, with a population so numb and accepting that anything the Party says is automatically believed, even if it directly contradicts yesterday's "truth".

"We have always been at war with Eastasia."

The Ministry of Magic and the Daily Prophet attempt a Big Lie when they begin their campaign to discredit Dumbledore and paint Harry Potter as a possibly-insane attention-seeking liar in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. They don't entirely succeed, but they do convince enough people to cause problems for both Dumbledore and Harry.
- Later, the Voldemort-controlled Ministry begins pushing the Big Lie that Muggle-born witches and wizards stole their magic from Purebloods, resulting in Squibs, in order to justify the arrest and "disposal" of non-Purebloods.
In Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein, the remaining unconquered army officers and La Résistance use the Big Lie "we are a religion" to be able to operate right under the noses of the invaders. It's so successful that one of the people who came up with the lie ends up believing it.

Real Life

As noted in the main text, "Black slavery is supported by the Bible". Not only was it eagerly embraced as a justification for the use of slavery in the American South, it was responsible in part for the formation of the American Southern Baptist Convention when the worldwide Baptist denomination chose to repudiate slavery. It also contributed in part to the ethos of the original Ku Klux Klan.
Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis used the Big Lie to turn long-standing anti-Semitism into mass murder. The Big Lie here was a narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an "international Jewry", which it said started World War I. The propaganda repeated over and over the claim that a conspiracy of Jews was the real power in Britain, Russia and the United States. It went on to state that the Jews had begun a "war of extermination" against Germany, and so Germany had a duty and a right to "exterminate" and "annihilate" the Jews in self-defense.
Similarly, Holocaust denialism is an attempt at a Big Lie by the members of the far right, Neo-Nazis and apologists for Hitler.
The denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
For nearly three years after the November 2020 election (as of mid-2023), Donald Trump and his allies -- including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz -- claimed without proof that Joe Biden's victory had been the result of a vast program of voter fraud executed by the Democrats. While they repeatedly insisted that they had evidence to prove this assertion, none ever materialized and no court (out of sixty lawsuits) ruled in their favor. One lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court of the United States by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in early December 2020 actually claimed that the complete lack of any evidence of voter fraud was in fact proof of the existence of a massive conspiracy that had perfectly hidden all traces of both its existence and its efforts to "undermine" the "true" results of the election. Regardless of the absence of any proof, the members of Trump's Cult of Personality uncritically accepted these claims, which directly led to the mob assault upon the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
- And Tariq Nasheed.^[who?] Don't forget renowned "Trump's ally" Tariq Nasheed.^[context?]
- Attempts to "prove" that organized voter fraud "stole" the election continued well into the summer of 2022, with recounts and audits in states with sympathetic Republican governors or legislatures. As of this writing all have failed to show anything close to what Trump's increasingly strident supporters demand that they should.
- Former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) specifically called Trump's claim a "big lie" in June 2021 when discussing why Republican politicians were being pressured by their party to accept it.
- Meanwhile, most American news outlets to the left of Fox News -- and sometimes Fox News itself -- have united in calling this The Big Lie, trusting to viewers/readers to know what they're talking about.
The infamous QAnon conspiracy theory -- which contributed strongly to the Trumpist assault on the Capitol mentioned above -- is a Big Lie first executed by the pseudonymous "Q" who first promulgated it and periodically "updated" it. After the Capitol assault, "Q" apparently backed off, vanishing from the internet until Summer 2022, but by then adherents to the pseudo-religious conspiracy theory picked it up and mutated it to keep it relevant, especially when the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 didn't become the prophesied second coming of Donald Trump with accompanying purge of the Satanist cannibal Democrats from the United States government.
"Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction!" Despite confirmed intelligence to the contrary, the administrations of both American president George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair repeatedly and loudly insisted that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had re-established the WMD programs which had been abandoned after the first Gulf War, using these claims to justify the Second Gulf War. After Iraq was conquered and Saddam killed, no evidence of any renewed WMD programs or subsequent stockpiles were found. Only individual munitions and abandoned facilities dating back to the first Gulf War were encountered by coalition troops. And while there were rumors of stockpiles being moved en masse from Iraq to a sympathetic nation, no evidence for these claims was ever found, either.