THE BIG LIE | Anti-Communist Film (1951)

THE BIG LIE | Anti-Communist Film (1951) - The Big Lie was a 1951 anti-Communist film produced by the US Army. It details how the brutal socialist regimes of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China & North Korea were rapidly becoming as dangerous as the defeated Nazi regime. It begins with the quote by Adolf Hitler: "The great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one". It then exposes the creation of Kremlin-controlled puppet regimes in those countries, describing how the people were "sold out". Communist China is described as a Soviet puppet state. Footage of marching is shown for each of the satellite states.

Imagery alternates between Nazi and Communist themes in an attempt to link the two ideologies and inform the public that Communism was as dangerous to human liberty as Nazism.

The final part of the film identifies "peace movements" linked to the Communists, contrasting their rhetoric with the realities of Communist warmongering in Greece, Indochina, Korea and China. The concluding slogan is "Beware the big lie. Beware the dove that goes BOOM." It shows a cartoon of a dove metamorphosing into a Soviet tank -- its wings have become tank treads, and its head is a tank turret. This cartoon was first used by the French anti-communist group Paix et Liberté.