I think the connection between the Big Lie of Nazism and the Big Lie of our former president is pretty clear: it’s a well-understood historical term, with relevant parallels.
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].
> the connection between the Big Lie of Nazism and the Big Lie of our former president is pretty clear
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.
I think you're confusing yourself: Hitler's Big Lie was the lie that the Jews promoted a falsehood. Trump's Big Lie was the lie that he actually won the US election.
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?
"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.
