It is called the Big Lie: A falsehood, a half-truth, or most dangerous, a simplification, repeated so often that it becomes conventional wisdom and for most people, the truth. Hitler did it, and McCarthy, but they were just two of the more over-the-top offenders. It still happens all the time, just on a smaller scale. Little fictions are repeated so often that they appear to be common knowledge. Here are some examples:
Little Fiction No. 1
“Racism in The South.” This phrase, repeated ad nauseam, not-so-subtly implies that there is no racism in the North. I first noticed that there was a problem with this phrase when Time magazine had a cover story on the subject in the early 80s entitled, coincidentally, “Racism in the South.” The cover photograph was of a lynching in the 1940s. It showed a bunch of rednecks smiling and pointing to the dead man hanging from a tree. It was a horrible, poignant photo. On the inside cover there was fine print which identified the site of the event as a town in Indiana.
Recently, a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece described Brown vs. Board of Education as the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case that ended “segregation in the South.” The writer may have forgotten that the full name of that case is Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kan.
Correct me if I am wrong, but at no time in history has “the South” included Indiana or Kansas, nor to my knowledge have these states ever applied for membership. Kansas, as I recall, even fought its own little civil war in order to stay out of the South.