I am asking you today to support the World Socialist Web Site.

All over the world, the capitalist ruling class is reviving the vilest forms of political reaction. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the horrors of that historical period—war, fascism and genocide—are once again threatening humanity with a descent into barbarism.

An essential characteristic of all periods of political reaction is the resort by governments and their media accomplices to the method of the Big Lie, which they employ to justify their crimes and disorient the people.

The Big Lie is not the conventional fibbing of one or another politician. It is, rather, a massive falsification of reality, so huge that it defies logical refutation. Its power lies in the monstrous scale of the deceit. The Big Lie does not convince with well-structured arguments. It strives to overwhelm the public with the brazenness of its mendacity. 

The 20th century witnessed the emergence of the Big Lie as a central weapon of political reaction and counterrevolution. The tsarist regime in Russia, frightened by the upsurge of the socialist movement, forged the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In 1917, desperate to discredit the Bolsheviks and stop the rising tide of revolution, the bourgeois Provisional Government concocted the myth that Lenin was the recipient of “German gold.”

After World War I, the German ruling class blamed its military defeat on the “stab in the back” delivered by socialists. Hitler’s Nazi regime, updating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, proclaimed that it was defending Germany against the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.

The Stalinist regime in the USSR sought to justify its betrayal of the socialist October Revolution by staging the Moscow Trials and framing up the leaders of the Bolshevik Party—first and foremost, Leon Trotsky—as treacherous agents of fascism and world imperialism. 

In the aftermath of World War II, the US ruling class launched Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunting crusade against the so-called “world communist conspiracy,” which provided the political and ideological fuel for the Cold War, US military and CIA operations all over the globe, and the suppression of domestic political opposition to imperialism and capitalism.

The 21st century began with the concoction by the Bush administration of the imminent threat of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify its fraudulent “war against terror,” which included not only the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but also the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and an escalation of attacks on democratic rights that prepared the ground for Donald Trump’s present-day dictatorial measures.

The last five years have witnessed a new and politically malignant resurgence of the Big Lie. 

Evading their responsibility for the failure to heed the warning of scientists of the danger of a pandemic and refusal to take essential public health measures to protect the public against the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the government and media have promoted the Wuhan Lab Leak lie—that is, the totally fraudulent claim that the pandemic was caused by a man-made virus that was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. This lie has served not only to incite anti-Chinese hatred and escalate the preparations for war; it has been used to discredit medical science and the use of vaccinations.

The second Big Lie of the 2020s was the claim of an “unprovoked war” in Ukraine—that is, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was solely the product of the evil megalomania of Vladimir Putin, and for which neither Ukraine nor NATO bore the slightest responsibility.

This fabricated narrative has required the suppression of all references to the expansion of NATO more than 800 miles eastward to Russia’s borders since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the central role played by the United States in the 2014 overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government. Another element of this Big Lie has been the presentation of the Ukrainian regime—which celebrates the fascists who collaborated with the Nazis as national heroes and imprisons socialist opponents of the war like Bogdan Syrotiuk—as a thriving democracy.

The third and biggest lie of all is the claim that opposition to Israel’s genocidal war against the population of Gaza is “antisemitic.” This lie is the filthiest libel against the Jewish people since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It asserts, for all intents and purposes, that the defining characteristic of a Jew is support for the killing of Palestinians. The identity of Jews is defined by the policies of the Israeli state and its fascistic Zionist ideologues. Antisemites are all those, including and especially Jews, who oppose genocide.

This is a case of “semantic inversion”—i.e., attributing to a word the opposite of its actual meaning—which is on a scale far greater than anything imagined by George Orwell in 1984’s depiction of “Newspeak.”

The Big Lie is not merely a product of the immorality of politicians. It is an objective manifestation of the interests of the ruling class and of the contradictions between those interests and the needs of society as a whole. The magnitude of the lies is determined by the depth and intensity of the social contradictions and the resulting potential, recognized and feared by the ruling classes, for an eruption of revolutionary class conflict.

In the age of the Big Lie, nothing is more essential than the defense of historical and political truth. That is why the daily publication of the World Socialist Web Site acquires the greatest urgency. Armed with a socialist political perspective, rooted in the scientific foundations of Marxism and the assimilation of the historical experiences of the international class struggle during an entire century, the WSWS is relentless in its exposure of the Big Lies and its defense of the truth.

Trotsky wrote, in response to the Big Lies of his time: “Revolution explodes the social lie. Revolution speaks the truth. Revolution begins by giving things and social relationships their real name.”

These words define the principles that guide the World Socialist Web Site.

The continuation and development of the work of the WSWS requires your support. Join the fight to build the socialist and revolutionary opposition to the regimes of war, fascism, genocide and the Big Lie.

Make today the largest donation that you can to the World Socialist Web Site. To do so, go to wsws.org/donate. Thank you.