The Big Lie: Fascism’s Destruction of Truth

© Richard Bolstad

Fascism Requires Irrationality

From Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from Putin’s Russia to Trump’s USA, fascism is rising (Mason, 2021, p. 3-77). As in the 1930s, it does not so much declare itself as aiming for a totalitarian government based on terror, as merely aiming to create a male dominated ethno-state, where people can be “free” of the uncomfortable sensitivities of “modern values” such as gender equality and ethnic diversity. Once again, as in the 1930s, it claims to “tell it like it is”, while simultaneously reassuring us that the truth cannot be found in science, in reasoned arguments, or in researched “traditional news media” (what Vladimir Putin calls the “empire of lies” – Putin, 2022, and what Hitler called  “Lügenpresse” and Trump called “fake news” – Snyder, p. 73).

Instead, fascism urges us to a primal trust of certain “pure” individuals who “fight for us” in an eternal battle of light against dark. Controlling the stories available in the mainstream media is an essential Fascist task, as Steve Bannon (Trump’s fascist ally) said: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” (Illing, 2020). Sean Illing points out “Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. In our time, it was pioneered by Vladimir Putin in post-Soviet Russia. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative. In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”” Worldwide, Russian propaganda is coordinated through the “troll farm” of the Internet Research Agency (Агентство интернет-исследований) run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a more explicit fascist who also runs the Wagner Group army (named after Hitler’s favorite composer). (Zemlianichenko, 2022; Volchek, 2021).

Historian Timothy Snyder wrote one of the many recent warnings about the 21st century rise of fascism, “On Tyranny”. He examines the flood of pro-fascist memes and videos on social media, and explains the importance of deliberate confusion of facts in the rise of all fascist movements, in the 1930s and now. The aim of fascism is not merely to substitute one set of facts for another, but to get people to give up on ever knowing the truth: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle…. Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism.” (Snyder, 2017, p. 65, 71)

Snyder was far from the first writer to recognize the centrality of “post-truth” to fascism. In the 1930s, Marxists tried desperately to integrate the new phenomenon into their model of classes as the only base of ideology, claiming that democracies and fascism were identical because they both served the bourgeoisie. The Communist International held that liberal or left wing democratic governments were “Social Fascism” and worse than actual Fascism (Mason, p. 136). Fascism, meanwhile, had support that was spread across all classes, and it especially presented itself as a movement of working people. The Nazi party was originally called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in order to appeal to left-wing proletarians, for example. Those who saw fascism more clearly, realized that it could not be explained easily by reference to classes. It plugged into a far more universal human desire to escape rationality, and to embrace a mythological pre-scientific fantasy world. Fascism promised a world that was mythically simple, with good races and evil races, with two clear gender roles, with one religious faith, one people, one nation and one leader (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer). The same urge that generated the medieval witch hunts generated 20th century fascism.

This appeal depends on a specific type of mythology, which we now call “conspiracy theory”. “‘Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,’ wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, ‘totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’. Arendt understood that the purpose of conspiracy theories is to make people knowingly complicit in irrationalism: to shut them off from facts, analysis and reason, and to create a closed world in which everything makes sense. In the ‘lying world’ created by Nazi propaganda, she wrote, ‘through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations’.” (Mason, 2021, p. 41). Discussing the rise of fascism in the 2020s, Mason warns “What the fascists were doing, from Brasilia to New Delhi, is mythmaking. … Here it is important to understand that, for fascists, a myth is not a fantasy or superstition, it is a story you can make come true by believing in it hard enough, and centering your life around it.” (Mason, 2021, p.20)

The last time fascism rose, in the 1930s, psychology was in its infancy, and Freudian psychotherapy offered the most popular way of understanding human non-rational impulses. “In the 1920s, key figures from the Freudian movement gravitated towards Marxism. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s star pupils, joined the KPD in 1930 and convinced the party to launch an association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (abbreviated to Sex-Pol), which at its height had 40,000 members. Erich Fromm, another Freudian psychiatrist, joined the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (commonly known as the Frankfurt School) to head up a research program into working-class attitudes to fascism. Reich and Fromm made real-time attempts both to theorize fascism and to fight it. Both asked questions that begin at the point where Gramsci ends: exactly how does pro-capitalist ideology seep into the minds of individual people?” (Mason, 2021, p 179).

The Freudians proposed that it was the fear of freedom, especially the fear of sexual freedom, that engaged popular support for fascism. This explains why modern fascists are obsessed with stopping gender diversity and rolling back women’s rights. Announcing his “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin said the West “sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes that they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” (Putin, 2022) This statement reveals, in its very avoidance of direct language about issues such as women’s right not to be beaten by men, and about legalization of homosexuality, that the Freudian critique was on track. Putin’s speech reveals, in what it cannot say, a fear of even mentioning the freedoms that must be stopped.

The Lie Itself is The Key

In Russian there is a word “враньё” (vranyo) which refers to a lie that both teller and listener know is a lie, but which they pretend is true. In 1873, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote an essay about vranyo, suggesting that it was a core element of Russian culture, enabling the tyrannical Tsarist regime. Vranyo continued in the Soviet Union and re-emerged in Putinism. In 2011, Vladimir Putin was filmed apparently doing some underwater archaeology. As a trained archaeologist, I also immediately realized that his videoed emergence from diving with two perfectly clean 2600 year old amphorae was not actually archaeology but a stunt. Journalist Elena Gorokhova says “When I recently opened The New York Times and saw Vladimir Putin — soon to become, once again, Russia’s president — walking out of the Black Sea with two nearly intact ancient amphorae in his hands, the vranyo alarm went off…. The picture had everything to make our hearts flutter with patriotic pride: a strongman defying time and human limitations.” (Gorokhova, 2011). With the amphorae, the vranyo is cute. When the same man walked out of an election that all international observers and the European Court of Human Rights said was rigged, that same year (Brown, 2017), holding supreme power and control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, the “stunt” is no longer cute.

The point is that Russians know Putin is lying, just as, at some level, Trump’s followers know he is lying about having won the American election in 2020. But they don’t care. The myth is more important. Joseph Stalin had thousands of photos edited to remove his political enemies and install himself at the side of his former comrade Vladimir Lenin, for example. Millions of Russian people initially saw those photos in the original, then saw them edited in later magazines and books, and calmly accepted the lie, the vranyo. One famous photo taken on 29 May, 1918, in St Petersburg, shows Lenin speaking to a crowd, with Lev Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, two men later purged by the secret police, standing at the side of his stage. In later versions of the photo, the two men disappear altogether, as indeed they did in the real world (Barrett, 2021).

The initial invasion of Crimea by the Russian Federation on 23 February, 2014 was another occasion for vranyo. “Overnight ten Russian military aircraft landed in Simferopol carrying paratroopers from the 76th Guards Division based in Pskov. By the following morning, servicemen in Russian uniforms without insignia had seized Crimea’s regional parliament and other key government buildings. They occupied the peninsula’s two airports and fanned out onto the streets of Simferopol and Sevastopol. Putin and Shoigu publicly and repeatedly denied that they were Moscow’s troops. ‘Anyone can buy Russian uniforms in a shop,’ Putin told Russian TV with his trademark smirk. The state-run Russian media, taking the cue, delightedly dubbed the mysterious troops ‘little green men’ and ‘polite people’.” The celebrations in Russia were intense, and within a few days, Putin said that “of course” the little green men were heroic Russian troops, and Crimea was an eternal part of the Russian territory. (Matthews, 2022, p. 100)

At Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the USA in January 2017, the crowd was clearly smaller than that at the previous inauguration of Barack Obama. Trump, however, had his spokesperson Sean Spicer, claim that Trump’s inauguration attracted the biggest crowd in history, and he showed a photo edited at the president’s request, to prove this. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period.” He announced (Swaine, 2018). On January 22, 2017, Senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway explained that this was not a lie, because Spicer had “Alternative facts”. Thus a new term for vranyo was invented. Above are images from Trump’s inauguration (left) and Obama’s inauguration (right).

How do so many people seem (consciously) to buy into such blatant lies? In a classic 1951 Psychology experiment, Solomon Asch had 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participate in a ‘vision test.’ Each student was placed alone in a room with 7 other people, whom they believed to be fellow research subjects but who were actually “stooges”. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the “target line”. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. The stooges gave false answers on 12 of 18 trials. While the actual research subjects correctly answered 99% of the time when the stooges had answered correctly, the research subjects conformed to the stooges’ false answers on average 32% of the time. Fully 75% of research subjects conformed to a fake answer at least once (McLeod, 2018).

Sadly, this experiment suggests that fascist lies (vranyo, alternative facts) do not need to trigger Freudian anxiety to gain traction. Hitler himself understood this, accusing the Jewish people of lies (just as Putin calls the west an “empire of lies” today). It was Hitler himself who invented the concept of “the big lie” (große Lüge) to explain his later almost compulsive lying. In his book “Mein Kampf” Adolf Hitler accused Viennese Jews of trying to discredit the Germans’ activities during World War I. Hitler wrote of the Jews’ “unqualified capacity for falsehood” and added “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying…. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited.” (Hitler, 1939, Volume 1, Chapter X).

Hitler notes that the tendency to believe the lie is unconscious (it is what we might now call a “cognitive bias”). Sexual repression may indeed feed this unconscious process, adding another layer of cognitive bias. Freudian psychotherapist and Marxist Wilhelm Reich quoted a pamphlet by Joseph Goebbels asking if Jewish men were really “men”: “If someone cracks a whip across your mother’s face, would you say to him, Thank you! Is he a man too? One who does such a thing is not a man – he is a brute! How many worse things has the Jew inflicted upon our mother Germany and still inflicts upon her! He has debauched our race, sapped our energy, undermined our customs and broken our strength.” (Mason, 2021, p. 180). Reich argued that this hints at sexual “perversion”, much as Putin’s invasion speech quoted earlier does.

Another almost universal unconscious trigger, used by fascists from the beginning, is the idea of eating children and drinking their blood. Allenbach (2020) mentions how Hitler’s magazine Der Stürmer (The Stormer) reported the ancient European claim of “blood libel” (the claim that Jews were committing ritual murder of Christian children, whose blood was then used to make Jewish unleavened bread). This claim is made in books as early as the Σοῦδα (Souda – a Byzantine “encyclopaedia” dated to the tenth century CE). Allebach (2020) mentions the ultimate 21st century version of blood libel, often incorporated into the QAnon Conspiracy Theory belief system: “Frazzledrip, [based on] a video (that does not exist) of Hillary Clinton mutilating a child in a satanic ritual for “adrenalchrome,” [was] spread by a fake news website in 2018. Adrenalchrome is the made-up concept of adrenalized children’s blood.” The substance (also named Adrenochrome) is mentioned in the 1998 movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“. A real substance called adrenochrome exists, is made synthetically by oxidising adrenaline, and has some rather irrelevant medical uses such as helping blood clotting, by the way. There is something powerful for human beings in the idea of people eating their own children – a kind of primeval aversion that makes these conspiracy theories spread especially well. 1000 years ago people were willing to accept that cannibals could gain magic power from the blood of their victims itself. Now, they need to propose another magical substance that could be present in the blood.

These are not random “lies”. They are lies that horrify us. And that is how they become central to Fascism. They activate traumatic responses in our brain. As listeners repeatedly imagine the story, “as if it was real”, they have a traumatic response to it. The American Psychiatric Association criteria for PTSD allows for the possibility of repeated exposure to descriptions of a traumatic event triggering the same kind of response as the real event “Indirect exposure can also occur through photos, videos, verbal accounts, or written accounts (e.g., police officers reviewing crime reports or conducting interviews with crime victims, drone operators, members of the news media covering traumatic events, and psychotherapists exposed to details of their patients’ traumatic experiences).” (APA, 2013, p. 823) The aim of these lies is to activate people’s amygdalas so that they make decisions based on fear of the illusory conspiracy (decisions that hand power to a powerful warrior-leader), rather than activating their rational decision-making.

What is going on for the person who lies compulsively? Are they also traumatized? Much has been written about Donald Trump’s compulsive lying, for example. Dr Bandy X. Lee collected 27 concerned Medical commentaries on his psychiatric status. For example, Trump famously lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the US Presidency due to the peculiarities of the USA Presidential Electoral College system. He claimed, however, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” (Twitter, November 27, 2016, quoted in Lee, 2017, p.34). Dr Lance Dodes (in Lee, 2017. P. 87) says “Children must develop ways to manage emotional distress: anxiety, confusion, disappointment, loss, fear, all while they are growing in their capacity to think, and sorting out what is real and what is their imagination. We all develop systems to do this, to tolerate and control our emotions, understand and empathize with the people around us, and tell the difference between reality and wishes or fears. But not people with the early, primitive emotional problems seen in sociopathy. They do not tolerate disappointments; instead, they fly into rages and claim that the upsetting reality isn’t real. They make up an alternative reality and insist that it is true. This is the definition of a delusion. When it is told to others, it is basically a lie.”

If this is the explanation, then with fascism we face a flood of full grown people who have not learned to manage their emotional distress. In positions of power they may feed into a collective problem. Remember that Dostoyevsky considered vranyo to be a collective Russian problem (though he noted that it was not so common in Russian women as in Russian men). Gail Sheehy adds “Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent former professor of psychiatry at Yale University and today at Columbia University, elaborated in a follow-up interview, “Trump creates his own extreme manipulation of reality. He insists that his spokesmen defend his false reality as normal. He then expects the rest of society to accept it—despite the lack of any evidence.” This leads to what Lifton calls “malignant normality”—in other words, the gradual acceptance by a public inundated with toxic untruths of those untruths until they pass for normal.” (Lee, 2017, p. 79). What we see with Russia is that after a century of “malignant normality” this pathological acceptance of lies is indistinguishable from culture.

In Russia, for example, it is again illegal to refer to the millions who died in Stalin’s purges (Roth, 2021). Memorial is an organization set up, in Gorbachev’s era of openness, to catalogue the millions murdered by gun, starvation or brutal torture under Stalin’s reign. It is banned and its records confiscated. ““It is obvious that, by cashing in on the subject of political reprisals of the 20th century, Memorial is mendaciously portraying the USSR as a terrorist state and whitewashing and vindicating Nazi criminals having the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands,” said Alexei Zhafyarov, a representative of the Russian prosecutor general’s office, during the hearing. “Why should we, the descendants of the victors, have to see the vindication of traitors to their homeland and Nazi henchmen? … Perhaps because someone pays for that. And this is the true reason why Memorial is so fiercely trying to disown its foreign agent status,”” In her book “The Future is History”, Russian author Masha Gessen says “The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how. The regime aimed to annihilate personal and historical memory and the academic study of society.” (Gessen, 2017, p. 3). She tells the true story of a Psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan who begins to realise that most of her clients are hiding absolutely horrific family secrets – sometimes that one member of the family (a grandmother, say) was a collaborator at one of Stalin’s Gulag camps and betrayed or executed the others. Gessen describes this with another powerful Russian term: Collective Hostage Taking, or Circular Guarantee (круговая порука): we are all responsible for making sure no-one does something wrong, and we will all be punished if they do. In this system, the lies that Russians are now required again to live with are deeply traumatic and “soul-denying”. Read again what the prosecutor said when closing down Memorial: he is saying that the millions of victims of Stalin’s insanity were all actually traitors to their homeland and Nazi henchmen, and to avoid punishment themselves, that is how every Russian must view them (their grandmothers and grandfathers, for example). And this year, all those tortured to death at Bucha and Mariupol in Ukraine, all those dead children … must also be viewed as Nazi henchmen and traitors.

How do we Stop a Fascist Culture of Lies?

Fascism is a traumatized social response that plugs into ancestral fears of cannibalism, incest, and “sexual perversion”. It provides a magical world where we do not need to take responsibility for our own actions because the leader is always right, even when we can see with our own eyes that he is wrong. It has an appeal when the stable basis of culture seems to be unravelling in the face of rapid change and ever-increased lifestyle choices, because it promises an eternal, if mythical, security. After he conquered Crimea, Vladimir Putin explained “Киев – мать городов русских. Мы не сможем друг без друга.” – “Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. We cannot live without them.” (December 24, 2014). This is what Timothy Snyder calls “The Politics of Eternity”. Unfortunately, the eternal values that it promotes include eternal war. Snyder says “Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.” (Snyder, 2018, p. 149). I have taught resilience and trauma recovery skills in many areas where there has been collective disaster. These processes help reduce the activation of the brain’s emergency centre – the amygdala. When the emergency feels less, it is possible for people to remember what really happened in their life and accept it. They no longer need to hide in mythology.

Dr Lissa Rankin, Integrative Medicine specialist, is part of a task force set up by USA President Biden to study the effect of social trauma on acceptance of public health advice, along with many other “big names” in the field of trauma recovery, such as Gabor Mate, Chris Rutger, Jesse Kohler, Jeffrey Rediger, Peter Levine, and Richard Schwartz. Over the time of the pandemic, these practitioners of alternative health options watched in astonishment as many of their colleagues fell for the most absurd conspiracy theories, and joined in rallies with known fascists. The task force argues that in a sense, the traditional health care system is part of the problem, because it is incorporated into the collective trauma that dispossessed groups experience (Kohler, 2021). “While the reasons for vaccine fear are diverse, complex and bipartisan, we believe that individual and collective trauma is an underlying issue responsible for attitudes and beliefs in the vaccine fear-laden population. …Given that preventable medical error was the #3 cause of death in the US until COVID-19, people have good reason to be fearful, ambivalent and mistrustful of the medical system. …While the for-profit pharmaceutical industry gives lip service to patient wellbeing, the public is well aware that, by definition as publicly traded companies, the financial bottom line is the #1 priority. … Given that chronically and intentionally marginalized people have historically been unethically and inhumanely oppressed under systemic racism, not to mention scientifically experimented upon during atrocities like Tuskegee there is a significant historical and active breach of trust that breeds ambivalence and fear.”

What this age calls for, from us as psychotherapists, counsellors and coaches, is a collective trauma recovery program. And for that to happen, we must speak the truth, and challenge Fascist myths wherever we find them. First Fascism sells its lies, its myths, its conspiracy theories. These myths present the problem, for which Fascism claims to have the final solution. Collective Trauma Recovery is my personal focus, this year, 2023. I hope that we have time to succeed. The continuance of modern civilization depends on us getting it right.

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