Announcing the Goebbels
Annual Big Lie Cup

And the first recipient is… Donald Trump

By Byron Toben

August 24, 2022

In this age of instant mass communication, the promulgation of big lies has become a sport unto itself. Just as sports have annual awards of cups and trophies for winners – the Stanley Cup (ice hockey), the Grey Cup (Canadian football), the Davis Cup (tennis) and dozens of less famous names for other sports – it behooves us to inaugurate an Annual Big Lie Cup.

Goebbels giving a speech in Lustgarten, Berlin, August 1934 – Image: Georg Pahl, via Wikimedia Commons

It is named the Goebbels Cup after Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda during WW II, to whom the term is often attributed.

While he did deal in big lies, the term was actually first coined by none other than his Leader, Adolph Hitler, who used it in volume one of his philosophical autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written in 1925 while he was in prison for his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Therein, he specifically accused Viennese Jews of trying to discredit the Germans’ actions in WW I. He wrote that, in their capacity for falsehood, they used the big lie in which “there is always a certain force of credibility because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted… and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…”

Examples throughout history go back to the Greeks claiming that their Trojan Horse gift was a peace offering, and more recently, the forged documents in France’s Dreyfuss scandal, P.T. Barnum’s Circus freaks, the Soviets claiming that their placements of nuclear bombs in Cuba were for defensive purposes only, the USA Vietnam deceptions revealed in the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon Watergate cover-ups, the claims that the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown was not dangerous, the tobacco industry’s hiding the dangers of smoking, and so on.

However, all these lies are dwarfed by Donald Trump’s plethora of big lies. His claims that nobody knows more about (fill in any subject) than him, that government files he took with him upon leaving office are “his”, that the January 6 insurrection was “peaceful” and, trumping them all, that he won the 2020 election, make him the clear winner of the first Goebbels Cup.

… there is always a certain force of credibility because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted… and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…

– Adolf Hitler

Viewers are encouraged to send in designs for that cup. The winning submission will receive $60 Canadian from me. The submission deadline is midnight October 31, 2022.

Caveat – not to be confused with unrelated Goebel porcelain chicken and duck egg cups.

Feature image: mohamed hassan from PxHere

Byron Toben, a past president of The Montreal Press Club, has been WestmountMag.ca’s theatre reviewer since July 2015. Previously, he wrote for since terminated web sites Rover Arts and Charlebois Post, print weekly The Downtowner and print monthly The Senior Times. He also is an expert consultant on U.S. work permits for Canadians.