This diary started off as a comment to Morgan Sandlin's post, McCain/Palin. Bigger Liars Than We Knew, but it got so long I decided to create a separate diary. The original diary was about McCain hiring people to write propaganda letters to the editor, then having local people put their names on them to get them published in local papers. They have done the same thing with radio talk shows like NPR's Talk of the Nation.
In blogs, these people are called trolls. During WWII they were called fifth columnists. They were a clandestine group designed to go into enemy territory to soften up the opposition, create dissension and undermine the ability and desire to fight back. Orwell didn't invent the behavior he wrote about in 1984. Instead, he elaborated on the propaganda tactics that were used by Germany and the Soviet Union. Someone in the GOP, perhaps The Heritage Foundation, has taken a page from the fascist playbook to guide their tactics. Hell, they've taken the whole playbook.
The Germans had a term called The Big Lie. The idea was that a little lie would be caught and challenged, but a big lie was too big to be questioned. The GOP has learned that any lie will do, and now simply lie all the time.
Orwell referred to "The Big Lie" a number of times in 1984. He describes it like this.
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed...
We should be very concerned. They have gone down a slippery slope where they no longer know the difference between truth and lies, between fact and fiction, between right and wrong. Over the course of the last eight years they have come to resemble a criminal conspiracy more than a political party.
During WWII, the OSS did a profile of Hitler that will sound eerily familiar to anyone watching this election.
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.
If you click on the link to propaganda tactics you will come to a page hosted by The American Historical Association. They have reprinted WWII pamphlets created by the Army’s Division of Information and Education. These pamphlets were meant to tell GI's what propaganda was, how to recognize it and how to resist the message. If you take a look at them you'll be startled at how accurately they describe the tactics that the GOP has been using for at least the last eight years.