THE BIG LIE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4562, 20 April 1942, Page 6

THE BIG LIE

“RESPECTFUL BEARING” “Dr. Goebbels, it seems, has discovered a weakness in his policy,” says the “Yorkshire Post.” “To be properly effective, the Big Lie must have a respectful hearing. As if suddenly made conscious of this by a strange display of indifference, he has ordered that in future all Germans in restaurants and cafes shall hear the nightly German and Italian war news in silence. Having always assumed that in Germany the Big Lie had its highest, indeed its only, hopes of credence, we may at first find some oddity in the circumstance that Germans must now be_ordered to lend Goebbels their ears. Dr. Goebbels has realised that even the most spectacular untruth, issued to the most credulous of people, has no value if its broadcast version is drowned by the clatter of crockery and a general babble of talk restrained in substance (the Gestapo being among those present) but not in volume. Going beyond the joke, we may find that Germans who must be ’

compelled to hear the news are Germans who, wearing the last poor tatters of their hereditary free wiP, do not want to listen. They may perhaps be bored by the nightly boasts of this modern Munchausen. What is more likely is that they have glimpsed, under the brave cloak of Axis communiques, the grim figure of unhappy Truth, holding in her hand the long scroll of German casualties on the Russian front.”