What's the "Big Lie"?
Agreed, just as the usage referring to denial of the 2020 US presidential election was not inspired by its usage by the Nazis.
My point is only that "Big Lie/Liar" or some variant thereof has been a phrase used rhetorically for millennia.
I find it difficult to believe that American journalists, an otherwise well-read and historically informed community of people, would conjure the concept without intending it as a reference. And certainly in that fashion more than as a prosaic form of “this lie was extra big.”
Edit: For example, here is an NPR article that explicitly makes the connection between the two Big Lies[1].
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2021/12/23/1065277246/trump-big-lie-jan-...
I agree that if the actual location of the truth is disregarded they are similar.
However, in these cases, the truth is on the opposite side of the accusation from each other.
Hitler untruthfully accused Jews of promoting a lie, and hence blaming them for Germany's defeat in WW1 and problems afterwards.
Whereas the former president has truthfully been accused of promoting a lie that he won the previous election.
When the truth is on the opposite side of the accusation in either case, they are really quite different usages of the phrase.
> I find it difficult to believe that American journalists, an otherwise well-read and historically informed community of people, would conjure the concept without intending it as a reference
I don't think there is any intentional journalistic allusion happening by using the term. "Big" and "Lie" are such utterly common words by themselves and together in English that people readily understand them in the immediately relevant context. Calling it a "Great Misrepresentation" or something else would be beating around the bush instead of just calling it what it is.
In both cases, the direction of the lie is the same. Your confusion seems to stem from the fact that the original Big Lie is a lie about a lie. But this doesn't change the actual structural, namely: a Big Lie is a gross distortion of truth, so gross that its believers take its size to be evidence of veracity itself.
Both Hitler's and Trump's Big Lie conform to this exact structure: the lies of International Jewry and a Stolen Election are so great, so inconceivable, that they stagger the listener into consideration.
> I don't think there is any intentional journalistic allusion happening
I gave you a link to an article where the allusion is direct and explicit. Or do you think they came up with the phrase themselves, Googled it, and retconned it into place?
Just going on the wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) page, feel free to rebut it if you think it's incorrect:
"Hitler claimed that the [Big Lie] technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic."
So the term "Big Lie" in that case wasn't Hitlers lie as you claim, but the technique he (untruthfully) claimed that the Jews used in his efforts to scapegoat them.
If the wiki page is correct, the usages we are discussing have the opposite truth structure. If the wiki page is incorrect, then I'd recommend you suggest an edit to correct it.
> Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.
In other words, there are two Big Lies that originate with Hitler: the claimed Big Lie, and the actual Big Lie.
A propaganda technique which fooled the world into a forever war that never should have happened in the first place which Wikipedia won't mention or tell you about.
"Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion that it had long planned to launch."