Talk:Big lie

A large section of these quotes are lengthy anti-Ukraine and pro-Putin diatribes, loosely related or entirely unrelated to the topic, and should be edited down or deleted.


 * Hi JohnDziak, Would you care to specify exactly which quotes you don't feel are appropriate for this topic and explain why? And/Or: perhaps you could find some some  quotations about the topic that are more pleasing and acceptable to you & perhaps post them on this page?  Thanks Alphabravo2022 (talk) 21:03, 8 April 2022 (UTC)


 * To clarify: this is an article whose topic is "Big lie," so the quotes in it should directly relate to the topic. Using the article as a COATRACK for a bunch of long-winded accusations that specific government actions were a "big lie" isn't appropriate. Wikiquote is for "notable quotes" and the suggested maximum length is 250 words.
 * This article was created on March 2, 2022, by Special:Contributions/Will-SeymoreIII on March 2, 2022, when feeling about Russia/Ukraine ran very high. Other editors on the page history include Alphabravo2022, WeNotMeC020, GaneshaSis, and LibraryClerk0191, all of them now banned for abuse of multiple accounts, because all those edits were made by a single person, trying to cover up his activity. Maybe that's why the POV is so unbalanced to pro-Kremlin viewpoints. HouseOfChange (talk) 01:46, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Images and text removed on April 14
Here are images and text I removed with this edit. The topic of this article is "Big lie," a propaganda technique. The topic is not propaganda or misinformation in general. I also removed many examples of people accusing the socks' enemies (US and Israel) of a "Big Lie" when the quote's topic was vilification of the target rather than "big lie." The topic is not Russia v Ukraine, nor is criticizing Putin, per se, an example of "big lie" technique. The Malcolm X quote and image appear in Propaganda, but aren't on topic at this particular article. HouseOfChange (talk) 20:58, 26 April 2022 (UTC)


 * 60 Minutes has blown the lid on the administration’s WMD bamboozlement. There can no longer be any doubt: The march to war was a deliberate sham. The CBS report connects the dots: We knew that the CIA had flipped a member of Saddam’s inner circle, and that he told the agency that the Iraqi dictator had no active WMD programs. What we didn’t know was that, in the fall of 2002 — at least 4 months before the invasion —Bush, Cheney, Condi & Co. were personally briefed. They were told that their casus belli didn’t hold water, but they willfully chose to disregard this highest-level intelligence. In the end, regime change was the policy. The WMD argument was just so much window dressing. The fact that the White House had in fact been briefed about the CIA’s top turncoat was not a given. Far too much solid intel —including the testimonials of 30 expat Iraqi moles who were sent to infiltrate their former homeland and report back on their discoveries (their reporting was unanimous: No WMD) —stayed bottled up inside the agency.
 * Tim Dickinson, The Big Lie, Rolling Stone, April 24, 2006


 * Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.
 * Chris Hedges, Israel, the Big Lie Scheerpost, May 14, 2021


 * Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.”  It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
 * Chris Hedges, Israel, the Big Lie Scheerpost, May 14, 2021




 * As the first anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster arrives, the cover-up involving nuclear power is more extensive than ever. The Big Lie was integral to the nuclear push from its start.  Promoters of nuclear power discounted the seriousness of nuclear plant accidents, although government documents acknowledged the vast scale of catastrophe. As the Atomic Energy Commission’s “WASH-740 update,” done at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1960s, repeatedly states about a major nuclear plant accident: “The possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”  They pushed the “peaceful atom” — although knowing that any nation with a nuclear plant would have the materiel from it (the plutonium produced as a byproduct) and trained personnel to make atomic weapons.  They downplayed the effects of radioactivity claiming it needed to reach a “threshold” to cause harm — even as it became clear that any amount of radioactivity can injure and kill. And nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter,” they insisted. And on and on…  The realities of nuclear power have become ever more evident—acutely so because of the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. But the Nuclear Big Lie continues bigger than ever.
 * Nuclear Power and the Big Lie, Karl Grossman, CounterPunch, March 5, 2012


 * [Hoc says, from this long passage I removed the part in italics but left the rest in the article] Amid a media crackdown in Russia, demonstrators are taking to the streets to protest the country’s war on Ukraine. Encrypted tweets and surreptitiously shot videos posted to Reddit and Telegram show Russian police out in force to silence dissent, even approaching passersby and demanding to check their phones. In Moscow, a woman was reportedly arrested on her 80th birthday. One Telegram clip captures a pensioner in Kaliningrad shouting at an officer: “I am a survivor of the Leningrad Blockade! My father died at the front [in World War II]!” The officer replies “And now you are supporting the Ukrainian fascists?” only to be drowned out by a crowd, crying “They are not fascists, they are our friends!” Anticipating that popular unrest could continue to grow as economic sanctions deepen, the Russian government is clamping down on free speech, independent media, and online opportunities for unsupervised, big-group information exchange. Media establishments inside Russia have been shut down for refusing to report only government-approved, highly deceptive versions of events in Ukraine. Western outlets such as the BBC have left the country. Anyone who passes on information that contradicts official sources now faces up to 15 years in jail; the new law prompted the Chinese-owned platform TikTok to suspend operations. Kremlin authorities have blocked access to Facebook and Twitter. Russians are scrambling to learn more about what is happening and what they can do. Should they obey their country’s laws, or defy them in acts of conscientious objection? Should families remain in their homeland or try to flee? Their decisions will be a test of the power of propaganda in a social media age, and of the ability of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime to shape values and beliefs strong enough to withstand crisis. Many theorists claim that hard times can lead to citizen protest, and sometimes even to political change. But the Kremlin is banking on its ability to control the message and, instead, fuel a sense of outraged unity.
 * Cynthia Hooper, in "Russia’s information war: painful truths vs. comfortable lies" in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (9 March 2022)
 * It is hard for us to see beyond the all-enveloping narrative that surrounds us of Western good intentions with occasional mistakes in implementation, versus our horror comic negative mental images of Russia’s President  Putin. The latter images are far from the truth but very compelling. The people who create and sustain our mental furniture are top professionals at what they do. They  condition  our thinking and emotions, through powerful images and memes as well as words.
 * Highly intelligent people hate to admit they have fallen for such propaganda, and often get angry when it is suggested to them that they have.
 * Ukraine shrinks again, Tony Kevin, John Menadue's Public Policy Journal, Feb 23, 2022


 * [Hoc says, from this passage I removed the part in italics but left the rest in the article] Big lies have established a firm foothold in the United States, and they threaten the stability of our country. The American Psychological Society (APS) defines a "big lie" as “a propaganda device in which a false statement of extreme magnitude is constantly repeated to persuade the public. The assumption is that a Big Lie is less likely to be challenged than a lesser one because people will assume that evidence exists to support a statement of such magnitude.”
 * Big lies threaten the stability of the United States, Jim Jones, The Hill, January 10, 2022


 * Fossil fuel corporations deceived as many people as they could for as long as they could. Their own scientists told them decades ago that their product was cooking the earth. Did that lead them to change course? No, it did not. It led them to suppressing the science, lying about it and seeding that monstrosity called climate denial. So now half the rulers of the U.S., one of the most powerful, violent, extensive and carbon polluting empires in human history, parrot idiotic talking points about burning oil, gas and coal supposedly NOT warming the earth.
 * Big Oil’s Big Lie About Who Caused the Climate Collapse, by Eve Ottenberg, CounterPunch, November 26, 2021


 * Big Corporations promised that they would hire workers after getting a massive tax cut. But so far it looks like they’re pocketing all the money. ...Remember... the talking points, Republicans, oh, this is going to be great. Tax cuts, we’re going to hire more people. We’re going to pay them more. Now, you look... just the opposite has happened... We all knew it was a big lie. We all knew...
 * Mike Papantonio, "As Predicted, Corporations Pocketing Money From Tax Cuts While Laying Off Workers", The Ring of Fire,  (31 May 2019)




 * The U.S. group think still driving the Ukraine crisis began at least eight years ago, as detailed in this article by Robert Parry on Sept. 2, 2014:If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War III much as it did into World War I a century ago all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire U.S. political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats vs. black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason. The original lie behind Official Washington’s latest “group think” was that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis in Ukraine as part of some diabolical scheme to reclaim the territory of the defunct Soviet Union, including Estonia and other Baltic states. Though not a shred of U.S. intelligence supported this scenario, all the “smart people” of Washington just “knew” it to be true.  Yet, the once-acknowledged though soon forgotten reality was that the crisis was provoked last year by the European Union proposing an association agreement with Ukraine while U.S. neocons and other hawkish politicos and pundits envisioned using the Ukraine gambit as a way to undermine Putin inside Russia.
 * Robert Parry: Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine? Consortium News, December 8, 2021


 * The plan was even announced by U.S. neocons such as National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman who took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post nearly a year ago to call Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia.  Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress, wrote: “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.  Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”  In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. But even if you choose to ignore Gershman’s clear intent, you would have to concoct a bizarre conspiracy theory to support the conventional wisdom about Putin’s grand plan.   To believe that Putin was indeed the mastermind of the crisis, you would have to think that he somehow arranged to have the EU offer the association agreement last year, then got the International Monetary Fund to attach such draconian “reforms” that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych backed away from the deal.
 * Robert Parry: Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine? Consortium News, December 8, 2021 (reprint of Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine? by the late Robert Parry (1949 – 2018), Sept. 2, 2014


 * This founding false narrative was then embroidered by a consistent pattern of distorted U.S. reporting as the crisis unfolded. Indeed, for the past eight months, we have seen arguably the most one-sided coverage of a major international crisis in memory, although there were other crazed MSM stampedes, such as Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb project for most of the past decade, Libya’s “humanitarian crisis” of 2011, and Syria’s sarin gas attack in 2013. But the hysteria over Ukraine with U.S. officials and editorialists now trying to rally a NATO military response to Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine raises the prospect of a nuclear confrontation that could end all life on the planet.
 * Robert Parry: Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine? Consortium News, December 8, 2021 (reprint of Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine? by the late Robert Parry (1949 – 2018),, Sept. 2, 2014


 * Something those of us who had already seen the U.S./coalition/NATO campaign in Afghanistan up close already knew has now been publicly (and thankfully) revealed by the Washington Post: the American people were systematically misled by their political and military leaders over nearly 20 years about supposed “progress” in the war in Afghanistan.The evidence that the lies mouthed by these leaders were, well, lies, has been obvious to anyone with an interest in the nature of war and the making of strategy. This list of lying civil-military leaders is long — encompassing presidents, their cabinet members, and the senior and mid-rank officer corps. At the top of this list, however, loom the senior generals that paraded through Kabul publicly mouthing their rosy assessments because they knew it was what their political masters wanted to hear. Going along with the narrative meant they could climb the chain of command and, in turn, get their tickets punched to the 0.1 percent club upon retirement, with posts on corporate boards and at Harvard and other hallowed halls of industry and the academy.The Great Big Lie as recounted in the Washington Post calls for the citizens of this nation to take back their role in its defense and to start giving a damn about war and peace and demanding accountability. If we want our forever wars to end, the people will have to demand it. Otherwise, our political and military leaders will just keep on lying to us.
 * How U.S. Military Leaders Perpetuated The Great Big Lie in Afghanistan, James A. Russell, Responsible Statecraft December 12, 2019



If you aren't careful, because I've seen some of you caught in that bag, you run away hating yourself and loving the man — while you're catching hell from the man. You let the man maneuver you into thinking that it's wrong to fight him when he's fighting you. He's fighting you in the morning, fighting you in the noon, fighting you at night and fighting you all in between, and you still think it's wrong to fight him back. Why? The press. The newspapers make you look wrong.
 * The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he's a the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
 * Malcolm X, Speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (13 December 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93

Removed on April 26
I just removed two more offtopic and not-very-quotable passages. I also removed Global warming from the See also section, not clear why it was there. HouseOfChange (talk) 21:03, 26 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Russians are scrambling to learn more about what is happening and what they can do. Should they obey their country’s laws, or defy them in acts of conscientious objection? Should families remain in their homeland or try to flee? Their decisions will be a test of the power of propaganda in a social media age, and of the ability of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime to shape values and beliefs strong enough to withstand crisis. Many theorists claim that hard times can lead to citizen protest, and sometimes even to political change. But the Kremlin is banking on its ability to control the message and, instead, fuel a sense of outraged unity.
 * Cynthia Hooper, in "Russia’s information war: painful truths vs. comfortable lies" in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (9 March 2022)


 * Russians might not believe official media, but might also choose — perhaps subconsciously — not to acknowledge the extent to which they allow themselves to be deceived. (It bears mentioning that social media analysts of the 2016 US presidential election noted a similar phenomenon: Citizens can, and often do, choose to believe comfortable falsehoods, instead of admitting to truths that disrupt their desired way of seeing the world.) Looking at Russian television news after the takeover of Crimea in 2014, journalist Maria Lipman concluded that the more extreme and far-fetched the claims of various programs became, the more their audiences grew. “Russian viewers tuned into shows,” she and two colleagues argued in a 2018 essay, “in search of not truth, but emotional gratification.” Viewers wanted to believe wildly distorted media stories that affirmed “national pride and a sense of vindication.”
 * Cynthia Hooper, in "Russia’s information war: painful truths vs. comfortable lies" by Cynthia Hooper, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (9 March 2022)