At the joint opening of the annual assemblies of UMNO’s Wanita, Youth and Puteri wings on Tuesday night, the Acting UMNO Deputy President, Datuk Seri Zahid Hamidi sought to draw parallels between the Opposition’s propaganda efforts with the leaders of Nazi Germany.

He recounted how Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a grip on German citizens through carefully crafted propaganda strategies.

Zahid said: “It was based on lies… Hitler once wrote: ‘If you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one and if you tell it often enough, people will begin to believe it’.

“Through creative radio and film propaganda, they succeeded in controlling the minds of more than 80 million people.”

Anyone doing a Wikipedia search will find the following explanation:

“A big lie is a propaganda technique. 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 asserted the technique was used by Jews to unfairly blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff.”

Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels perfected Hitler’s “Big Lie” theory: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it” to the extent that he created the Fuhrer myth and the image of Hitler as the Messiah-redeemer.

Are we seeing a repetition of the “Big Lie” theory in modern-day Malaysia, with the UMNO leadership warning about the “Big Lie” theory but with the UMNO President, Datuk Seri Najib Razak becoming the biggest exponent of the “Big Lie” propaganda? Read the rest of this entry »