This guy used the power of narrative control ...

It's a simple concept, really: who tells the story first, and gets that story accepted as truth first, determines what everybody then and later regards as the Truth.

The guy up there, Paul Joseph Goebbels, had the trick down pat. The key, of course, was that, as Nazi Propaganda Minister, he controlled the Reich's media - hence, the first story that got told widely and "officially," which thereafter established what was perceived as Truth.

Except, of course, among his rival Muscular Humanitarians, in London, Washington, and eventually Moscow; they spun their own lies to cocoon Goebbels'. And then they won that often-overlooked prerogative of military victory, the right to write their own history, and have their self-serving lies and omissions regarded ever after as incontrovertible truth.

What everybody knows.

(And if you're wondering, the Allies' lies mostly consisted of covering or explaining away their own follies and outright crimes, such as their genocidal terror-bombing - their term - of civilian populations. Oh, and the fact that Stalin and Mao, Allies in good standing both, were far greater mass murderers even than Hitler. They also, ironically, tend to make Hitler look like less of a blundering incompetent than he was, as well as the likes of Churchill, Montgomery, and MacArthur, in order to magnify their own success.)

And so it goes since: what NBC or the NYT claim in their headlines defines The Truth. Those who question it are occupants of The Fringe, loony "revisionists" and "conspiracy theorists," and not to be taken seriously. Even when they have a preponderance of fact on their side.

Especially then.

Sometimes, of course, the official Guardians of Truth are forced to admit they, well, didn't tell it. Although for instance there are still morons and sociopaths - like Leon Panetta - who claim Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, for instance.

What Goebbels is known for is the technique called the Big Lie. To me that's a subset of narrative control. Obviously, he needed to be able to tell his lies, of whatever size, widely. More to the point, he was able to confer the all-important imprimatur of The Official Story, since he was The Authorities. He even, as you see up there, had a spiffy uniform to prove his Official Status.

In our country many do in fact take the lies of the President or his designated mouthpieces as Revealed Truth. But the usual purveyors of Official Truth are the State/Corporate Complex-run media - what some call MSM or mainstream media.

Over on his Facebook feed, my freedom-movement friend L. Reichard White raised the question, "What's the the most effective way to lie?" He was angling for another principle espoused by old Paul Joseph up there: "Don't tell them, then it will not exist."

True enough - and to my mind, again, an example of narrative control. Indeed, over on his own website, the Nexialist News Network, his masthead logo says, "An unchallenged lie becomes an unquestioned truth." Which I'd call a succinct summation of the principle of the power of narrative - with the added proviso that the story accepted as Official Truth becomes very difficult indeed to challenge.

The key takeaway: if you control the narrative - the initial story that's widely told and accepted - you control what everyone knows is true. For generations if not forever.

And it is exceedingly hard for mere evidence to overturn that righteous certainty.

We'll come back to this; it strikes me as a Big, Important Thing.

I'll leave you with one final sting: the history of History is that it's always been written to serve rich and powerful patrons.