The “big lie” in contemporary politics

As a professional historian and longtime teacher of European and world history I must take issue with one aspect of Rabbi Marvin Hier’s welcome June 29 op-ed, “Holocaust: A huge word made small.”

He is quite correct in insisting that the horrendous historical phenomenon known as the “Holocaust” not be distorted and demeaned by its use in trivialized political and nonpolitical analogies. However, he extends his brief too broadly — apparently to encompass within his objection any analogous reference to the Nazi regime. The fact is, there are any number of historical lessons to be learned from the history of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich that are tangential, if not independent, of the horrors of the Holocaust.

For example, Jerry Brown’s reference to the “tactics employed by Joseph Goebbels” undoubtedly was inspired by the Nazi propaganda chief’s use of the “big lie” — charging the enemies of the state with crimes and offenses so outlandish that the people would gratuitously accept them as proven, since no one would dare to make them up out of whole cloth. In the present toxic atmosphere of hyper-partisan political rhetoric, Brown’s historical analogy, though perhaps overstated, is nonetheless pertinent, and even instructive.

Similarly, historical references to the Nazis’ exploitation the people’s fears and anxieties during the Great Depression to demonize and attack subversive “others” within the Third Reich would seem to provide a salutary cautionary tale in the face of present-day alarms over aliens (legal and illegal) in the United States and abroad. If it is indeed true that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, certainly much is to be learned from the history of totalitarianism in the Nazi era, not all of it impinging upon a due respect for the singular “enormity the crimes of the Holocaust.”

Leland J. Bellot is an emeritus professor of history at Cal State Fullerton.