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Lies take root fast. It wasn’t just Hitler’s chief town crier, Josef Goebbels, who knew that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. Demagogues have known this from time immemorial. The bigger the lie, the more believable it becomes when dressed as truth. Before we know it, lies spread like a blaze through dry tinder, burning everything in its path. There s no one left to believe - long before we know that there is no one left to believe. The intended audience believes the lie. The liars believe the lie. Before we know it, a whole emporium of lies is established and we dwell in it. This is especially true when lies are expressed in language which elicits a strong fear response. When everyone is under a spell, not only is the lie believable. Not only does it become the truth. It becomes the SUPREME truth. In other words, it becomes religious dogma.
Truth, on the other hand is fragile and slow. It took hundreds of years and hundreds of lives burned at the stake before the truth of our cosmic journey around the sun was accepted. Truth is liberty and liberty is never free. To turn the church from its dogma, the fight has always been fierce.
In 1847, The Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, proposed to his colleagues that a thorough handwashing prior to surgeries would decrease mortality. In Semmelweis’s hospital, as was the custom, physicians would proceed straight from performing an autopsy to the operating theater. By washing his hands in a chlorinated lime solution, the good doctor reduced maternal mortality to 1% from 40% or higher. What was his reward? He was mercilessly mocked by his colleagues who were offended by the suggestion they should wash their hands. Semmelweis suffered a mental breakdown, was confined to an asylum where he was severely beaten by the guards and died two weeks later, most likely as a result of the beating. That is the fate of a “heretic” who offends the orthodoxy.
In 1633, the astronomer Galileo Galilei was hauled in front of a Church tribunal, which declared the following: “We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo, have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine - false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures - that the sun is the center of the world” Galileo promised not to teach his “heresy” but he spent the rest of his life (he died in 1642) under house arrest. It took 300 years (!) for the Church to admit Galileo was right.
I wrote in one of my previous pieces about Czech Church reformer and philosopher, Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake for his opposition to certain Church methods and teachings. It was Hus who said “Truth shall prevail” with his dying breath, as flames consumed his body. And indeed, truth did prevail but - yet again - it took centuries for the Church to admit it was wrong in many of its corrupt practices.
In 2021, we are beset by lies at every turn because certain lies (now truths) have become sacrosanct and by doubting them one reveals one’s heretical thinking. Not yet punishable by burning at the stake; nevertheless, the threat of punishment is real for those who point out the lies. These days, the collection of lies has a name. It’s called “the narrative”. The narrative is a bundle of dogmatic beliefs that can be summarized approximately in the following manner:
“There is a lethal virus circulating among the population. We have the power to reduce or even eliminate this virus if we follow certain rules. The rules are set by government bureaucrats and carry the weight of law. We must wear masks, stay distant from each other, eliminate or reduce family contacts, stay locked in if so ordered and above all, we must submit to a regimen of experimental shots. If we “behave” and follow our leaders’ dictates, we can “get our freedom back”, bit by bit, of course, and always with conditions attached”
That is the narrative. Anything that puts the party line in doubt or anyone who casts aspersions on the apparatchiks who have devised this genius scheme to “defeat” the virus and to “build back better”, can expect the axe to fall swiftly. And since the great majority of the population is in a Continuous Covid Coma (CCC), the punishment is as likely to come from the rulers as from the ruled.
There’s only one teeny little problem. A dogma, a policy, a narrative - those are politicians’ tools. Freedom is innate. Freedom is a natural yearning of every human being. Freedom is what Jews still celebrate every year at Passover, millennia after being freed from Egyptian slavery. We are told it is incumbent upon us to remember our slavery and to celebrate our freedom. It’s not optional. It is our duty. And so we gather every year, sing songs of praise to God and to freedom, curse the evil Pharaoh and eat matzo dipped in chicken soup.
Lies are heavy and the truth is light. But lies are dumb and truth is smart. Therefore truth finds ways to get through the dense miasma of lies, the swamp of bullcrap, the fen of deception. People yearn to be free and to be free they need the truth by their side as their most powerful weapon. Layer by thin layer, the fetid façade of deceit falls away. Pilots stop flying. Police stop policing. Christmas presents go unpurchased, children cry. Vaccine injuries mount. Politicians wobble and stagger and invent new lies, sinking ever deeper into the swamp. And as they sink, the truth becomes evident, very slowly at first, until it explodes through the dam of evasion and mendacity. That will be the point where our collective CCC (see above) will end. And end it will, my friends, end it will. Take it from someone who has lived through a brutal invasion in Europe and a brutal war in the Middle East (a war that was also enveloped in a fog of falsehoods and deception) Somewhere deep inside we all know this to be true. We know lies cannot live forever. Or as the Bard famously said in the Merchant of Venice:
”truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long;
a man's son may, but at the length truth will out”