Big lie

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.^[1][2] The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged nation striking back at "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held outsized and secret power in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It further spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and used these to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews in self-defense.

In the 21st century, the term has been applied to attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election by Donald Trump and his allies, specifically the false claim that the election was stolen through massive voter and electoral fraud. The scale of the claims resulted in Trump supporters attacking the United States Capitol.^[3][4] Later reports indicate that Trump knew he had genuinely lost the election while promoting the narrative.^[5][6][7][8]

Scholars say that constant repetition across many different forms of media is necessary for the success of the big lie technique, as is a psychological motivation for the public to believe the extreme assertions.