Rep. Steve Cohen has been comparing Republicans spreading misinformation about the Affordable Care Act to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' "big lie" concept:
They say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing. ... The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it -- believed it and you have the Holocaust. We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care.
It's really not the same kind of thing, any more than unjustly accusing Sarah Palin of responsibility for Tucson is comparable to blood libel. Cohen's statement was unjustified, and he's since given a qualified apology. But that apology alone simply doesn't erase the last three years of Obama/Hitler comparisons from high-profile right-wing figures, from Rush Limbaugh to Palin herself. Glenn Beck's show is simply one extended, unending violation of Godwin's law.
Cohen's remarks, aside from being wrong, aren't winning the Democratic Party any friends. But there's also the historical origin of the whole "big lie" concept. Cohen is deploying a common historical misconception about the idea. As Michael Moynihan recently explained, the "big lie" concept was introduced by Adolf Hitler rather than Goebbels, and he wasn't talking about how the Nazis operate; he was talking about how "the Jews" operate:
But the “big lie” theory, mentioned only once in Hitler's rambling manifesto, is part of a larger argument about the supposed Jewish betrayal of Germany in the First World War. It isn't the blueprint for a Nazi media strategy, but a mad exposition on what is considered a “Jewish” way of media deception; i.e. the Jews, via socialist newspapers like Vorwärts, have spread a “big lie” that the First World War was lost militarily when, in fact, said those on the radical right, it was lost in the salons of Berlin and Munich.
I think the "big lie" concept's usefulness as a shorthand for "lies repeated often enough that they are received as true" is diminished by its origin as a "Jews control the media" type conspiracy theory, as conceived by the most infamous anti-Semite in history. On the other hand, Cohen is certainly right that the ACA was not a "government takeover" of health care, and that conservatives have repeated it often enough that like Palin's "death panels," many of them believe it.
At the same time, the accurate historical origin of the term, involving cloistered elites sapping the strength of a once proud nation, sounds a lot like what we hear every day in certain corners of the conservative media (absent the overt, virulent anti-Semitism). But that has to do with the fact that it's an old standard narrative deployed by right-wing nationalists, not because conservatives are Nazis.
