In Nikolai Tolstoy's book Stalin's Secret War there is a story about the vozhd sitting around with his cronies one day
plotting some new and sensationally outrageous piece of mischief when
one of them — it was Litvinov, I think — piped up with: "But boss, think
of the effect this will have on our followers in the West!" Stalin laughed.
"Don't worry, they'll swallow it."
Similarly with Hitler. Here is part of the character sketch given in Gordon
Craig's Germany 1866-1945.
The masses indulge in petty falsehoods every day, he once
said cynically, but it would never come into their heads to
fabricate colossal untruths and they "are not able to believe
in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous
misrepresentation in others." The bigger the lie, therefore,
the more likely it was to be believed.
It is, it seems to me, a very sad and shameful thing that these totalitarian
principles have now been taken up by the politicians of this free republic.
At the root of them, as can be seen from the words of Stalin and Hitler,
is a contempt for the common mass of people and a belief that if the lie is
big enough, and presented with enough conviction, then "they'll swallow
it." It is a trading on the fundamental decency of "the masses," a cynical
calculation that people who do not conduct their personal lives by lying,
betraying, and intimidating their fellow men will find it difficult to grasp
that the affairs of their nation are being carried on by just those means.
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