I don't follow. The "Big Lie" is a conspiracy theory devised (or at least advocated) by Hitler in order to justify antisemitism. It's not a true phenomenon -- like the Illusory Truth Effect -- but something Hitler falsely asserted the Jews did.
> "It is not a specific big lie, but a class of lies that exploit a certain mass naïveté."
At face value, yes. In practice the term is exclusively tied to Hitler's meaning, who coined the term. I'm not even sure if "Big Lie" has ever been used in another context, possibly because the term is a Nazi invention. To be clear, the "mass naïveté" of "The Big Lie" is (alleged by Hitler to be) the populace's, who "believed the Jews" when they claimed (always according to Hitler) that Germany's loss in WWI was to be blamed on Ludendorff. There is no other real-world usage of the term. And we know this Big Lie was itself a lie coined by Hitler, and this alleged conspiracy to exploit the mass naïveté of the people didn't actually exist.
From Wikipedia:
> "The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated 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 antisemitic political leader in the Weimar Republic."
and
> "Jeffrey Herf maintains that Goebbels and the Nazis used the big lie to turn long-standing anti-semitism into mass murder. Herf argues that the big lie was a narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an "international Jewry", which it said started World War I."
So Big Lie, as a term, is irrevocably linked to the Nazis as its main meaning, is not a "general fallacy", and in fact it could be argued it doesn't describe a fallacy at all, but is itself a fallacy devised by Hitler.
Can you point me to said references? I'm ready to acknowledge them, but I don't see them. The article in Wikipedia (linked to at the start of this thread) is exclusively about the use of the term by the Nazis and how they coined it.
The wikipedia article identified it as the name of a propaganda technique. There's nothing that restricts the use of that technique to anyone in particular. Consider that people other than the inventor of the hammer can use hammers.
Yes, I understand this, and that's something that sometimes happens with words. But the use of "Big Lie" in this context (i.e. capitalized, a concept about lying) is like the use of "Final Solution": sure, it could be used in another context different to what the Nazis meant by it, but how probable is that? All the examples in Wikipedia are Nazi-related.
I'll be happy to stand corrected if you can point me to a single use of this concept of "Big Lie" -- referred to unequivocally as the concept we're debating here, of telling a lie so big people won't accept it's not true -- that does not refer to the alleged "betrayal of Germany" meant by Hitler, or its related Nazi myths and propaganda.
At this point I'm only asking you for an example. To be honest I don't think there is, just as there is no other use of Final Solution, but of course I can be proven wrong.
Thanks for the example. I wasn't aware of the use of the term in US politics/journalism. In my defense, I'm not from the US and while I of course follow some of the drama they have going over there, I'm not always familiar with the details.
The “Big Lie” was the lie itself — it could not be publicly disproven under the Nazi propaganda machine, and therefore provides a cover story. Nobody really believed the cover story, but they were also too afraid to find out the truth because they knew it would get buried (along with them and probably their family). Such is the power of the “big lie”.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say. The "Big Lie" is not a cognitive bias, it's itself a lie. It's a myth Hitler either invented or popularized. So I don't follow how it relates to the topic under discussion.
The cognitive bias is the effect of the big lie. Anti-semitism was already prevalent throughout Western culture at that time, and so the lie was easier to believe because of pre-existing cultural prejudice, and later because the propaganda was simply inescapable.
I'm truly not trying to be dense, but the "Big Lie" (according to Hitler) is something allegedly perpetrated by the Jews against Germany's military, by "blaming" it for the downfall of the nation. "The lie" to what you seem to be referring to doesn't seem to be the the "Big Lie" itself but simply antisemitism ("the Jews are to blame"). These are separate things. It requires antisemitism to believe the Big Lie exists and is perpetrated by "the Jews".
From Wikipedia:
> "Hitler believed the technique [i.e. the Big Lie] was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and antisemitic political leader in the Weimar Republic."
Maybe we're in violent agreement and I simply misunderstood what you're saying :)
edit: to clarify what I'm saying, there are two uses of "Big Lie" at play:
1- The narrative of "The Big Lie", the alleged lie "denounced" by Hitler. This was of course not a real thing, and Hitler made it up while looking for scapegoats and using antisemitism to blame the Jews.
2- The creation of the "Big Lie" itself by Hitler. This is a real thing, but we have a simple word for it: an antisemitic lie.
I don't think this confusion is unintentional. It's a classic fascist tactic to muddy the definition of words, phrases and symbols used by their opponents in order to force the conversation into emotional arguments. You can't have a rational argument when nobody agrees on the definition of the thing you're arguing about.
Judging from your other comments here, we may simply be using the same term in different ways - yours being the historically correct one, mine the colloquial one.
Today's "Big Lie" is simply less overt than that spread by the Nazis, and most people simply don't hear the dog-whistle of anti-semitism behind phrases like "New York liberals" or "cultural Marxism." But the modern day belief in a conspiracy of "globalist, left-wing elites" controlling society, academia and the media is just another, softer iteration on "the Jews" doing the same.
