GERMANS are usually proud of their exports, including their words. What better term than Fahrvergnügen (“driving pleasure”) to sell cars? They are less pleased when foreigners import words that hark back to Germany’s darkest chapter. It was therefore horrifying to see white nationalists at a rally in Washington, shortly after Donald Trump’s victory, saluting with outstretched arms and shouting “Hail victory!”—a conscious echo of the Nazi greeting, Sieg Heil! It has also been disconcerting to hear Mr Trump’s supporters adopt the term Lügenpresse to refer to the mainstream media, or to any journalists who criticise the president-elect. For in America as in Germany, the term, which means “lying press”, is used not only as a cudgel against allegedly out-of-touch media elites but also to validate whatever conspiracy theory the shouter espouses.

Lügenpresse has a long and ugly history in Germany. It was first used after the failed revolutions of 1848, mainly in Catholic polemics against the liberal press. From the start it implied that the media were controlled by Freemasons or Jews. After the Franco-Prussian war, the term was directed at the French press for its alleged lies. During the first world war, after Germany got a thrashing in foreign newspapers for what they called the “rape of Belgium”, Allied (and especially British) newspapers earned the moniker. That set a usage pattern that holds till today: Lügenpresse refers to any medium that does not reflect the user’s own worldview, and must therefore be propagated by a hated “Other”.

In the interwar years the term was used both by communists against the “bourgeois Lügenpresse” and by the Nazis against—no surprise—the allegedly Jewish and Bolshevik media. Once the Nazis seized power and took control of the domestic press, they naturally stopped calling it a Lügenpresse. Instead Hitler and Goebbels once again applied it to the foreign press—for instance, for reporting the 1938 Kristallnacht.

After 1945 West Germans wisely shunned the word. The East Germans were less inhibited: it was now the West German media that became the capitalist and fascist Lügenpresse. In the reunited Germany the term made a comeback among neo-Nazi and right-wing groups. Since 2014 it has been a favourite chant at demonstrations by PEGIDA, a xenophobic movement that is centred on the eastern city of Dresden. Some mobs have become physically aggressive against journalists—39 such attacks were counted last year.

In 2014 a jury that chooses the worst German word of the year picked Lügenpresse, calling it “especially perfidious”. And yet a poll in 2015 found that 39% of Germans, and 44% of eastern Germans, found the word at least partly appropriate. This is dispiriting to critics of the Western media who do not ascribe its failings to malign conspiracies. Lügenpresse is one German export that the world would be better off without.