The Big Lie (1951)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Big Lie |
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| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1951 |
| length | 19 minutes |
| Rod | |
| production | Warner Pathé News |
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The Big Lie is an anti-communist propaganda film made by the United States Army in 1951 .
action
The film is entirely in English and consists almost exclusively of historical film documents, with some graphic animations. It begins with the spoken reproduction of an alleged quote from Hitler in English, with a stylized lattice mast similar to the Berlin radio tower being shown on a globe. In front of the radio tower, a black swastika and white Japanese characters as symbols of National Socialism and Japanese imperialism and finally the head of Adolf Hitler are displayed one after the other .
The alleged quote from Hitler reads:
"The great masses will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."
"The great masses will more easily fall victim to a large lie than a small one."
The spokesman now points out that the voices of the Nazis have fallen silent, but the Big Lie lives on in Josef Stalin and the Stalin gang. This is followed by alternating head images of Nazi functionaries and communist leaders, starting with Josef Stalin, with hammer and sickle and Chinese characters as symbols of communism being faded in instead of the swastika . Other pictures show mass marches on the occasion of the Nuremberg Rally and Labor Day on Red Square in Moscow, with the note that the parades have become longer and the marching music louder. Further equations in parallel montages show scenes from National Socialist and Soviet forced labor camps, sham elections with predetermined election results in both political systems, show trials before the People's Court under Roland Freisler and in the USSR, and marches by the Hitler Youth , Wehrmacht and SS against marches by the pioneer organization Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Roten Rotengericht Army . The sequence of juxtapositions ends with a stylized iron curtain pushed from above over the image of the marching Soviet soldiers , which now divides Europe into the free world and the world of slaves.
Against the background of tightly packed women workers in a textile factory and some scenes from grocery stores, the spokesman announced that the world of slaves was being shown here. In broken English with a strong Russian accent, in stark contrast to the pictures, it is stated that communism does not mean poverty and want, but the prohibition of poverty and want.
An animated map of Europe shows Soviet annexations such as the states of the Baltic States , Belarus and the Ukraine in black and Soviet satellite states such as Poland, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Mongolia and North Korea in gray, which shows the efforts of the Soviet Union to incorporate sovereign states or to make them totally dependent. Examples are Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, North Korea and Red China , with pictures and quotes from their heads of state, all of whom have come under the influence of the Kremlin and its Big Lie.
This is followed again crowd scenes from different satellites that by pointing each Sold out ( sold ) are introduced and propaganda statements are backed with typical. Poland, Romania, Hungary, China, North Korea and Czechoslovakia are shown like this. Here are pictures of the state funeral for Jan Masaryk in 1948. Masaryk died under mysterious circumstances shortly after the communist February overthrow by a fall from the window of the Prague State Department. Based on the official description of the death as a suicide , the spokesman states that Masaryk could not live with the Big Lie. The freedom of Czechoslovakia followed Masaryk's coffin into his grave.
Only a nation refuses to die. No communist politician has internalized the Big Lie more than Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito . He also followed the example of other communist leaders and made his pilgrimage to Moscow, but then he pushed back the Iron Curtain. With the special path of Yugoslavia , the Big Lie failed, Yugoslav grain now feeds Yugoslavs, and not Russians at the expense of starving Yugoslavs.
Without a transition in content, the last “communist lie” is attacked, the “lie of the dove”. Film recordings of communist armaments factories and military parades are underlaid with Soviet propaganda statements on the will to peace and readiness for disarmament. But these words contrast with other deeds, the (communist) Greek civil war : The dove that goes BOOM . In a similar way, three further series of images of peace conferences and armaments production are added, underlaid with peace propaganda with a strong Russian accent, images of the Indochina War , the Korean War and the Chinese Civil War : The dove that goes BOOM . The film closes with two warnings: fear the big lie, fear the dove that makes "BOOM".
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The slogan The dove that goes BOOM in the last section is the translation of the French title La colombe qui fait BOUM from a caricature that is also shown in the film. A dove of peace has transformed in such a way that its wings have become armored chains and its head represents the tower of a Soviet battle tank marked with a hammer and sickle. This symbol was published as the first poster in a series by the French anti-communist group Paix et Liberté , and 300,000 copies were printed and distributed. It was a caricature of the silhouette of a dove designed and lithographed by Pablo Picasso in 1949, chosen by Louis Aragon to symbolize the Congress of the World Peace Council in Paris in 1949 . For this work Picasso received the International Peace Prize of the World Peace Council in 1955 . Picasso's dove has since become an internationally known symbol for peace and for the peace movement .
background
In 1951, the United States found itself in the midst of what is now known as the McCarthy era of communist persecution from 1947 to about 1956 and the beginning of the Cold War . The Soviet Union was seen as a massive threat to American freedom. The loss of state sovereignty of a number of European and Asian states through annexation or conversion into satellite states owned by Moscow and the Soviet policy of supporting communist movements awakened memories of the violent subjugation of large parts of Europe by National Socialist Germany and Asia by the Japanese Empire. In this climate, served The Big Lie the establishment of an external enemy image as the last year also by the United States Army propaganda film produced The Communist Weapon of Allure : (German Communist weapon of seduction should warn against the enemy at home).
Hitler quote
The alleged quote from Hitler that was spoken at the beginning of the film and was also used for the title of the film is not authentic. It is one of those false quotations that Adolf Hitler or other high-ranking Nazi functionaries like Joseph Goebbels have been putting in the mouth for decades . What they have in common is that the alleged speaker or author apparently recognizes his own lies as such and justifies as a legitimate means that he portrays himself as a liar. In fact, Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders always affirmed their own love of truth, even when they lied, and merely held up alleged lies to others - as in this case the Jews and the Marxists. For the statement in the film, a passage from Adolf Hitler's inflammatory pamphlet Mein Kampf was used as a template, with which in Chapter 10 ( Causes of the Collapse ) the historical falsification of the stab in the back is taken up and Erich Ludendorff's responsibility for the German defeat in the First World War is denied. These claims, according to Hitler, revealed the whole bottomless mendacity of Judaism and its Marxist fighting organization :
“One proceeded from the very correct principle that in the size of the lie there is always a certain factor of being believed, since the broad mass of a people in the deepest depths of their hearts will be more easily corrupted than consciously and deliberately bad, thus with the primitive one The simplicity of her mind is more likely to fall victim to a big lie than to a small one, since she herself sometimes lies in small ways, but would be too ashamed of too big lies. Such an untruth will not even come into her head, and she will not be able to believe in the possibility of such a tremendous impudence of the most infamous perversion in others, yes, even when it is cleared up, she will still doubt and hesitate for a long time and at least some cause will still be true accept; therefore, there will always be something left over from even the cheekiest lie - a fact that all the great lie artists and associations of lies in the world know only too well and therefore use vilely. "
The Hitler quote, which is hardly received in the German-speaking world, has been a synonym for National Socialist propaganda in the United States and Great Britain since the Second World War as Big Lie . So it made sense to include this term in an anti-communist propaganda film and to use it to equate the defeated National Socialism and communism, which from the point of view of propaganda is still to be defeated and no less dangerous.
In his unpublished essay Lie as State Principle , written immediately before and after the beginning of World War II , the German writer Bruno Frank, who went into exile the day after the fire in the Reichstag, also referred to these statements by Hitler. According to Frank, the passage is “the key to all of this person's pursuit and activity. She is the quintessence of all insights he has ever had in life. It is his contribution - his only one - to the development of the human spirit. ”Here, Hitler reveals the lie as the basic principle of his actions.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Adolf Hitler : Mein Kampf , two volumes in one volume. Unabridged edition. Central publishing house of the NSDAP, Franz Eher Successor, Munich 1943, pp. 252-253.
- ^ Bruno Frank: Lie as state principle , 2nd chapter: The state of lies .