Dear Editor,
“If you repeat a lie often enough people will come to believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself” is something Joseph Goebbels apparently never said, but that axiom has certainly been a propaganda staple since, dare I even mention it, the Nazi regime of the 1930s and ’40s.
Currently, its most obvious manifestation is seen in Donald Trump’s hammering of the claim that the 2020 US election was not lost but rigged and stolen from him. A claim so successful that his MAGA followers have now come to believe it.
Having noted Trump’s success with the “big lie” it seems Chris Hipkins has embraced the same concept, telling the party faithful at last Sunday’s rally “Let me be absolutely clear. The financial crisis the current Government claim to have inherited is one they have created themselves”.
Presumably, this is what he’ll be repeating from now on, even though the most casual perusal of the state of the Government books at the end of Labour’s six years of profligacy tells us exactly where our problems originated.
Hipkins’s claim is political sophistry at its most blatant, but give it three years on repeat and who knows how many will come to believe it.
Certainly, he will.
If he’s still around by then.
JD
