Perpetuating the ‘Big Lie’ by erasing history

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/01/2025 (430 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Late on June 3, 1989, the Chinese government sent in troops and tanks to disperse about 100,000 unarmed pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, many of whom were students. When the demonstrators attempted to confront the soldiers, the troops fired upon them. An estimated 8,000 or so protesters (perhaps less) were killed in what became known as “the Tiananmen Square Massacre”— outside of China, that is.

In a blatant denial of eyewitness testimony and film and photographic evidence, the Chinese government rewrote the story of Tiananmen Square.

In its version, only about 300 demonstrators were killed by soldiers who were defending themselves in what was labelled a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” or “riot.” All broadcasts about the massacre were halted and numerous Chinese and foreign journalists were expelled from the country.

In a May 2014 CBC interview, Rowena He, who has written about the massacre and is now a senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that the “government version of events was promoted through an elaborate ‘Patriotic Education Campaign,’ which included a revision of all school books.”

This is only one of many official efforts to rewrite history and impose what Adolph Hitler in his book Mein Kampf called the “Big Lie.” He pointed out that “a definite factor in getting a lie believed is the size of the lie, for the broad mass of the people in its primitive simplicity of heart more readily falls victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

Or, as George Orwell put it in his 1949 dystopian novel, 1984: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

Psychological studies that go back to the 1970s have proved time and again that the manipulative propaganda techniques used by the Nazis, Soviets, Chinese government and others, indeed, have had the desired effect: the more you repeat a lie, the more likely it is that people will eventually doubt what they thought was the truth and accept the falsehood. Psychologists call this the “illusory truth effect.”

The current master of the Big Lie is, of course, Donald Trump, who is about to serve a second term as U.S. president. Inhabiting an alternative reality of his own bitter design where up is down and black is white, Trump (now bolstered by his sidekick, X CEO Elon Musk) routinely lies and spreads misinformation; most recently about the Los Angeles wildfires for which he falsely claimed that Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom put concerns about environmental policies over public safety.

In the past four years or so, among a litany of lies Trump has continually repeated, two of his biggest and most damaging have been his insistence that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him and that the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president — which he incited and encouraged “violence against his perceived opponents” in the words of special counsel Jack Smith — was a “peaceful” demonstration.

No matter that the mob using pipes, bats and bear spray seriously injured approximately 140 police officers.

In the immediate aftermath, many Republican politicians condemned the riot and Trump’s role in it.

Yet within a short time, a majority of them, accepting Trump’s lies and the wild conspiracy theories spread on social media — that the attack was orchestrated by the FBI or paid “crisis actors” — now maintain that there was no insurrection.

Further, that the more than 1,200 individuals charged with committing federal crimes, and the 500 or so who have been incarcerated, should be considered “political prisoners.”

Expect Trump to pardon a majority of them soon after he becomes president — an act supported by at least 70 per cent of Republicans.

In a classic example of the illusory truth effect and manipulation right out of 1984, several polls taken in the past two years indicate that about 40 per cent of Americans believe “too much has been made of Jan. 6 and believe that it is time to move on.”

This is despite the fact that congressional investigations, police testimony and videos easily accessible on mainstream media websites and YouTube, show Trump’s incendiary actions and the violence perpetuated by the attackers.

It would not be at all surprising if at some point during the next four years the U.S. federal department of education (assuming Trump doesn’t abolish it) or Republican state departments of education try to whitewash the Jan. 6 insurrection much like Chinese government has wiped the Tiananmen Square from the historical record.

Among the bits of wisdom you can find on the internet is a statement wrongly attributed to actor Morgan Freeman.

Nevertheless, it is applicable to the perpetuation of the Big Lie in the U.S. and those who obediently believe whatever Trump tells them: “The definition of stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing evidence of the truth, but still believing the lies.”

That’s where we are now.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.