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John Oliver, perceptive late-night talker, has recently described function of political lie in Rolling Stone: “Trump presents thousands of bizarre claims, but each one relativized madness of ors. The principle Trump works like a nail board: If you step on a nail, it is painful; If you step on a thousand nails, you do not perceive m as individual nails. “
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The credibility of political liar grows with quantity and size of lies he is giving up. A knowledge that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were well acquainted with. The Nailboard lie is a language policy strategy that is characteristic of totalitarian intentions – in conquest of sovereignty of interpretation. Therefore, function of lies of this type is especially important in transition of systems.
If, for example, this type of lie is used in democracy, credibility of political utterances is declining altoger. It is becoming increasingly unclear what can be regarded as true and what is considered wrong, which also decreases reliability of judgments that are confided in face of messages that have previously been thought to be naked nonsense.
This is chance of political liar. This is because confidence in resilience of statements generally decreases, and this is tantamount to sinking of system confidence. Which is a problem, in particular, when in a part of political spectrum obvious lies are used without hesitation, while anor part feels compelled to have verifiable facts. It would be enlightening to trace frequency of political lies of type “stab”, “November Criminal” and “Jewish-plutocratic conspiracy” Towards end of Weimar Republic: a significant increase is likely to be recorded.
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Nailboard lies, for ir part, prepare ground for a phenomenon that Sebastian Haffner, very precise chronicler of rapid interpretation and hiring change since 1933 in Germany, mentioned in his history of a German. It is a remarkable mechanism of public debate: namely that, despite anti-Jewish actions of Nazis, re has been no “Antisemitenfrage” in Germany of those years, but on contrary a “Jewish question”.
This text comes from magazine Time History No. 3/17. You can purchase current booklet at kiosk or here.
By Nazis, Haffner writes, “Anyone – a country, a people, a group of people – publicly threatened with death, y brought about fact that ir right to life was generally discussed and questioned. Everyone felt at once behaved and entitled to make an opinion about Jews and to give m to best. One made subtle distinctions between ‘ decent ‘ Jews and ors; If one, as in justification of Jews – justification for what? Whereas? – to cite ir scientific, artistic, medical achievements, ors reproached m just that: y had science, art, Medicine, ‘ strangers ‘. “
Psychologically, this would be described as an object shift: not attackers of democracy and justice are being made a problem, but attacked.
This is accompanied by a shift in Sagbarkeits rules and – since terms are always also interpretations for perceived realities – a changed reality view. No one has worked this out more clearly in historical case than Victor Klemperer in his lti, lingua Tertii imperii, “language of Third Reich”. He, literary scholar persecuted as a Jew, was able to interpret entry of anti-democratic and racist concepts into social discourse as a sign of a rapidly changing moral climate.
