The Big Lie

By Nicholas von Hoffman, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 23, 2004.

The frightening shark swimming with toothy grin in a giant aquarium does not see the human faces looking in from the other side of the glass. The shark is in a world of its own, with its own reality. Like the shark, Americans don't see the people outside the glass. It is as though America is in a 3,000-mile-wide terrarium, an immense biosphere which has cut it off from the rest of the world and left it to pick its own way down the path of history. By the time the American army stepped into Iraq, the difference in world view between the United States and everybody else had grown to the size of the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole.

A fanciful explanation for the two realities is that the United States is the continent-wide set for a large scale re-enactment of the movie The Truman Show. The plot of that movie has the well-intentioned but naive hero go about his daily life without any suspicion that he is, in fact, in a gigantic soap opera. His hometown is actually the set for the TV show and from earliest childhood he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The enthusiastic acceptance by the American multitudes of the Iraqi stuff-and-nonsense coming out of the White House would be understandable if we were all living on a stage set in a village called Freedom Island threatened by a town called Evil Axis.

Americans believed, as they usually do when their government and their television tell them something, but the rest of the world laughed every time George Bush or Colin Powell or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld thought up yet one more scary reason to invade Iraq. The ill-constructed, clumsy untruths were surprisingly crude for people who have had years to practice the craft of mass deception, and they had only to speak their latest falsehood to be cheered by their countrymen and disbelieved by non-Americans everywhere.

It's not easy to pull off the Big Lie and George Bush failed; though, in mitigation, pulling off a bait-and-switch war demands skillful finagling and this one was complicated. There was the bait (terrorism), then the switch (weapons of mass destruction), then a switch again (kill the dictator), and yet again (regime change). A politician has to be an accomplished teller of tall tales and absurd fabrications to bring off such a demarché. Even the masters of mass prevarication occasionally fail.

In September 1939, Adolf Hitler made the mistake of dressing up some nondescript clowns in Polish uniforms and having them "attack" the territory of the Third Reich. This was done to show an incredulous world that his invasion of Poland, which quickly followed his costume party on the border, was a justified counter thrust to unprovoked aggression. The world didn't believe him, but Hitler didn't care. At Obersalzberg, just before initiating the hell which was World War II, he had announced that, "The . . . destruction of Poland begins Saturday early. I shall let a few companies in Polish uniform attack in Upper Silesia. . . . Whether the world believes it is quite indifferent. The world believes only in success." Hitler, the Biggest of Big Liars, had the brass and the disdain which George Bush, under his Texas cowpuncher veneer, does not have. This may be to his credit, but without them Iraq was guaranteed to be a bloody mess. If you are going to tell a Big Lie badly, you have to pull off the crime, you have to make it a success. George Bush didn't.

The Big Lie must be simple and it must be repeated until it reverberates like a jack hammer digging up the street in front of where you live: inescapable sound. George Bush, either out of a fumbling honesty, inexperience, or incompetence, did not lie well. His labored and embarrassing build-up to the Iraqi invasion broke every rule for effective deception.

Unlike a chef d'état who has the technique down pat, Bush made the amateur's mistake. He, his spokesmen and women, his spinners and weavers of untruth, his propagandists, all fell into the trap of answering back, elaborating, retracting, and adding on. Instead of the Big Lie, simple and pure, the official U. S. government story grew more ornate and complicated as the date Bush had set for the invasion came closer. Instead of one good reason to go to war, swarms of bad reasons were proffered, which gave skeptics in other countries material to pick his little white fables apart.

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