A reader writes in response to my post on "The Big Lie":
The history of the phrase Big Lie is actually a little more complicated than Moynihan lets on...
It is true that Hitler coined it as part of the "stab in the back" theory in Mein Kampf, but it is associated with Goebbels for a reason. The reason is Goebbels' attribution of it to Churchill's modus operandi in an essay that is generally thought to reflect Goebbels' own modus operandi. Indeed, the phrase very early on came to be used to describe the way Hitler himself told lies, not the way he thought of Jews as telling lies--though that is indeed, where it comes from. So, for example, an OSS report during the war about Hitler's psychological profile contains the passage:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
In other words, the popular understanding of the phrase as referring to Nazi propaganda is quite old and contains the entirety of the public meaning of the phrase.
All that said, it is outrageous for Americans to be comparing one another to Nazis or their rhetoric to Big Lies. All of the lies we tell about each other are, by Nazi standards, pretty trivial.