The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
Goebbels went on to practise the technique in his poisonous narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at “international Jewry”.
The phrase was also used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler’s psychological profile: “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.”
Propaganda
The above description articulates precisely the propaganda techniques used by today’s anti-alcohol health lobby campaigners.
The constant litany of scare stories and the remorseless anti-alcohol propaganda — “never allow the public to cool off”; demonising the alcohol industry, and denying that its attempts to promote responsible drinking are anything other than self-serving — “never concede that there might be some good in your enemy”; targeting high-strength alcohol and problem drinkers in order to leverage stricter controls on all drinks and all drinkers — “concentrate on one enemy at a time”; exclude the drinks’ industry from public policy formation — “never leave room for alternatives”; creating folk devils — ‘Big Alcohol’ — and rhetorical typologies — the binge drinker, the chronic drinker, the lager lout, the delinquent pre-loader.
But above all, the deliberate misuse of statistics to inflate the problem.
There are many examples of lying-by-statistics that can be cited in relation to how the health lobby seeks to create a false consciousness about alcohol use in the UK.
But the Big Lie used to bolster exaggerated claims about the harms of alcohol is the use of something many might regard as somewhat obscure: ‘alcohol-attributable fractions’ as a counting methodology for alcohol-related hospital admissions.
The NHS does not actually count the number of people admitted to hospital for alcohol-related reasons. Instead it relies on a counting methodology that uses clinical coding practices that attribute pre-determined alcohol-attributable fractions to all hospital admissions in England.
Health fascism?
I have likened the propaganda techniques of anti-alcohol health lobby campaigners to the techniques employed by Hitler and Goebbels. But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying these campaigners are fascists; merely that their propaganda techniques are strikingly similar to those historically used by fascists.
I think these people are sincere, even well-meaning, which is not at all the same thing as saying their conclusions are either honest or accurate.
Those who quote the 1.2m hospital admissions a year figure, and the statistics derived from it, either know this information is false, but are so wrapped-up in their own self-righteous moral certainties they keep repeating it because they feel that the ends justify the means; or they have repeated the Big Lie so often that they have not only convinced others of its truth, they’ve convinced themselves.
I am left with the thought that a man who lies to others is merely hiding the truth; but a man who lies to himself has forgotten where he’s put it.
Culture Wars and Moral Panic — The story of Alcohol and Society is available from Amazon.