- Whilst deceiving the American population (and much of the rest of the
Western world), President Bush’s approval ratings in the US were at
80% (and peaked at 92%). See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George_W_Bush_approval_ratings.svg/.
This could so easily have been turned on its head if within America
Muslims, journalists, academics, clergy and other politicians had
contradicted Bush with what was common knowledge about Islam among
the educated elite. No-one who looked back to texts on Islam written
before World War II would have much trouble discovering that Bush was
carrying out the most brazen lie. President Bush might as well have taken
lessons in propaganda from Adolf Hitler: “in 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, [trans. James
Murphy, 1939], Jaico Publishing House, 2007 , p.104. Whilst Hitler was
claiming that he had learned this technique from observing Jews and
Marxists, there seems no doubt that he not only believed it to be a true
observation, but that the National Socialists would go on to use this
technique themselves to devastating effect. ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
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