ELZA: Taking a long look at the Big Lie

Published 6:00 am Friday, June 11, 2021

It is 76 years since we fought World War II. There are still people living who fought in that war. Old war movies emphasize that we were fighting Germany because it wanted to take over the world. We were fighting to survive. Few movies, like “Judgment at Nuremberg,” delved into the basis of Nazism or into its appeal to the Germans. I have often wondered how the German people could believe such a vile ideology.

It began with the Big Lie. 

Hitler claimed that Germany lost WWI through betrayal by elites and Jews. He expanded that Big Lie to assert that all Germany’s pre-WWII problems were caused by the Jews, an inferior race. He believed that inequality was the natural order and that the “Ayran race” was the sole creative element of mankind. 

There is a direct line from refusing to accept the real reason for defeat in WWI to the concentration camps of WWII. Once one false premise is accepted, the rest falls into place. The longer it is accepted, the harder it is to get rid of.

Historians tell us that the Germans were susceptible to the allure of the expanded Big Lie because they were economically divested and that their social order had been disrupted. They wanted someone to blame. 

They were afraid and the Nazis manipulated that fear. The Nazis mastered the use of the radio and mass rallies in ways the other parties in Germany could not. After Hitler goes to jail in 1923 for his failed coup, the Nazis turn more to voter suppression through riots and pogroms and “street justice.”

This does not explain the appeal of the Nazi ideology outside Germany. 

Between 1922-33, several countries adopted Nazi parties – Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Norway, Japan, Hungary, Romania, France. The reason given for the appeal in these places is the Great Depression. They did not lose WWI but their economies were devastated. In fear and uncertainty, they chose the Big Lie. 

When Hitler came to power in 1933, his fascist lies had already begun their journey around the world.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the presidency fair and square. Not willing to accept that fact, Donald Trump’s supporters accepted Trump’s Big Lie that he won the election, that the election was stolen from him. His opponents are not simply opposition but enemies who are directly threatening our democracy. His supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, took his words at face value and attacked the Capitol. Not all of them. 300 of them assaulted the Capitol of the United States.

I have seen any number of interviews with Trump supporters, all of whom firmly believe that Trump won the 2020 election. Some believe that forensic recounts will put Trump back in power in Arizona and Michigan. Our state legislature is authorizing such a recount. Given who has been hired to “forensically” count the votes, something favorable to Trump will be found. What then? What will the believers in the Big Lie do then?

Various experts and talking heads on TV have opined that the true believers in the Big Lie believe because of status uncertainty. Society has changed and they are afraid of those changes. Where will that fear lead them? In Germany, it led to a dictatorship and WWII. Choosing lies over truth never leads to anything good.

Dr. Jane Elza, Ph.D., retired, is a resident of Valdosta.