
A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is yet to Come - mooreds
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/?single_page=true
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nkurz
_By contrast, the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand
much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown
ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t
force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms
have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t
deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them
depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once
told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-
Size Lies._

This is an interesting theory. The author says that for Poland, the "medium
size lie" is that "a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in
April 2010". And for Hungary, "It is the belief, shared by the Russian
government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George
Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring
down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no
such migrants exist in Hungary."

What is the equivalent "medium size lie" for other countries? As an American,
I'm particularly interested in what people think the lie currently is for
America. Are there just two main lies, that each major political party
believes about the other? Or are there combinatorially many, what each
subfaction believes about each other subfaction? Can opposite answers to the
same question be the same lie? I'm not interested in debating whether any
particular lie is actually true, and more interesting to hear what people
believe, and to try to understand why they believe it.

~~~
TomMckenny
Candidates for the lies in the US would be:

That Obama was secretly a foreign born Muslim.

That Hilary Clinton ran a child abuse ring out of a pizza joint.

That school massacres aren't real but are staged by actors and the "lying"
media.

That Hillary Clinton murdered Seth Rich.

That a deep state, also run by Clinton, is lying about Russian interference
and fabricating evidence against Manafort, Cohen et al.

That the Puerto Rican death toll is just a fabrication to make the
administration look bad

That Climate change is a Chinese plot to destroy American business.

~~~
gwbas1c
Both sides on the gun debate lie.

~~~
adamzochowski
) ) That school massacres aren't real

) ) but are staged by actors and the "lying" media.

) Both sides on the gun debate lie.

How can both sides lie at the quoted example? Either there were people killed
or not? How can both sides lie at the same time about it? Can a person be half
killed? Even if there was a Schrödinger person, wouldn't fact checking
collapse the state to either one?

~~~
gwbas1c
Because one side perpetuates the good guy with the guy myth, and the other
side drastically inflates the numbers of school shootings.

Hense, both sides lie. The mistruths end up being the biggest obstacle to
proper gun reform.

We can't compromise when both sides aren't truthful or realistic. If you think
your side is "right" then I suggest educating yourself about guns from someone
without a political agenda.

~~~
adamzochowski
I am curious about inflating school shooting numbers. Do you have links for
that? Are you saying that there were fake deaths and there are crisis paid
actors?

~~~
gwbas1c
[https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect-
betw...](https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect-between-
perceived-danger-in-u-s-schools-and-reality)

That's NPR!

Seriously, gun control reform is very important. We just need the activists on
both sides to start acting like reasonable adults.

(Begin rant)

On the right, there's the "good guy with the gun" myth; and the belief that
responsible homeowners need to have a gun "for safety." Both are absurd.

On the left, there's this belief that bad guns can be banned, and good guns
allowed. That's also absurd, because all guns are designed to kill! A hunter
sitting in a tree waiting for a deer uses the same equipment as a man looking
through a window waiting for his victim.

That's what I mean by acting like adults. The right and left are so
unrealistic that they're going to get nowhere with real reform.

~~~
actsasbuffoon
I'm not aware of a widespread belief that school shootings are more common now
than they were in the 90s. That said, just because the rate isn't increasing,
is that a compelling argument for not addressing school shootings? If your
house burned down once this year, but it burned down 3 times in 1998, I think
you're still having too many house fires. How is that an argument that there's
no need to buy a smoke alarm, and maybe re-examine your lifestyle to
understand why you're experiencing such an unusually high number of fires?

------
piotrkaminski
Dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995934),
not sure how it got through the filters.

~~~
grzm
AIUI, the dupe detector takes into account whether or not the submission has
gained traction. If a submission only has a few comments, a subsequent re-
submission may not be considered a dupe.

~~~
piotrkaminski
Interesting, I didn't know that -- thanks for clarifying.

------
bruceb
USA isn't Poland. Trump says dumb things, some BS, and is boorish but isn't
Hitler nor anywhere close to it.

"The press and journalists" should realize when you push click bait then you
give room for Trump and others like him to call you fake news, because
sometimes you are

Enough of these scare mongering articles.

~~~
forapurpose
I encourage you to read a book on the lead-up to WWII. The similarities are
amazing. When Hitler was in power in the 1930s, his propaganda was that he was
a man of peace, he only wanted to help Germans (they needed "breathing room"
at one point), etc. To the wonder of many contemporaries, much of Europe and
the U.S. took him at his word and did nothing - the alternative apparently was
too terrible to contemplate. Neville Chamberlain famously negotiated "peace in
our time" with Hitler. I recently read a story of someone at the time who
talked about everyone acting as if nothing abnormal was happening, a story
I've heard many times.

In real life, the bad guy doesn't wear a black hat and doesn't stand up and
say "I'm evil". You are never going to see stronger signals than what you see
now. If what you see isn't enough, nothing ever will be.

~~~
mercer
Got any good recommendations for such a book?

~~~
forapurpose
Any serious history of the subject (WWII, Hitler, etc) that covers that time
period would include it. It was integral to Hitler's foreign policy.

Remember that the purpose of propaganda is not to persuade people as much as
to create enough uncertainty and confusion that there is inaction - like FUD
in the computer industry.

