Downing Street Memos expose "Big Lie" used to start the war in Iraq.

What do the Downing Street Memos (DSM) tell us about our government and the war in Iraq?

We were "had" by Bush and Cheney. They wanted a war in Iraq, so what did they do? They told the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he had connections to terrorists. They told the set of lies as often as possible, shouting as loudly as they could and ignored any and all statements that would debunk the lie. That is a classic application of the Big Lie Technique.

Here is a definition and description of Big Lie from Wikipedia.

Big Lie refers to a propaganda tool used by the Nazis, which refers to the tactic that a lie, told often enough and shouted loudly enough, ignoring any and all statements that debunk the lie, will eventually be believed by the masses.

The Big Lie technique refers to attempts by propagandists to use the frequent emphatic repetition of a lie as a means to get people to believe it. Though certainly a propaganda technique the Nazis engaged in quite frequently, it is by no means isolated to Nazis or to totalitarian systems, as we can see many employments of this technique even today in modern politics, and on talk radio.

Frequently attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the oft-cited "Big Lie Theory" also may have been Adolf Hitler's explanation for how people came to believe that Germany lost World War I in the field -- a "big lie" which Hitler attributed to Jewish influence on the press.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels

Now we are in the stage in which the Republicans are working to repress dissent. This is from Molly Ivins.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all gone way out of their way to deny that the Downing Street Memos (it's now plural) are news.

The right-wing bloggers are also working hard to denigrate the DSMs. Here are Powerline and The Strata-sphere as examples. They try to throw questions up about the sources, and totally ignore what the DSMs say. People who bought the original lies are going to feel upset if they decide they were fooled, so they will be easily swayed by such weak attempts to destroy the validity of the DSMs.

The question now is how long it will be until the facts stated in the DSMs destroy the lies the Republicans have been telling. My bet is that this will occur before the 2006 elections.