Whose-story, not History

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“Half a truth is often a great lie.” – Benjamin Franklin

Photo by Bradley Dunn on Unsplash

It is now half a decade ago when a yet unnamed virus was said to be circulating in some far-flung conurbation called Wuhan.

These events came towards to end of Trump’s first term as president of the most powerful country the world has ever seen.

As we digested the media streaming from Asia, and interpreted at home, it broadly split us in two: those who believed those in authority…and those that questioned.

A great deal has happened in the intervening five years.

Perceptions of those events and their consequences will vary wildly depending on the information sources used, how much trust was accorded them and how those elements were synthesised by each individual.

In danger of over-simplifying that question, broadly the two camps remain:

1) Those that believe their government. Those that trust democratically elected leaders to utilise independent experts’ advice to make uniquely well-informed decisions. “Uniquely well-informed” on the basis of having access to the full pool of available knowledge, aka “The Science”.

2) Those that have greater faith in their own judgment. Those that trust their own intellect and lack of bias (or at least, are sufficiently self-aware to identify their own biases) so as to process that which they understand as being most true. Those that don’t see “science” as protected truths handed down from lab-sealed academics. Rather those that perform science. That understand it is a process, not a destination.

Much of this boils down to the pervasive, time-honoured dichotomy of the collective versus the individual. Public health versus your health (ostensibly). Controlled speech versus free speech. Regulation versus free markets. Safety(ism) versus freedom.

Communism versus capitalism.

Many friends still insist that if you don’t trust your government, you don’t believe in democracy.

As opposed to my position, that you can only make democracy (temporarily) work if you don’t trust your government.

That…is the whole point. Those in power need to be held to account – be constantly monitored.

Has there EVER been a group of people in power that have not in some form conspired against others? For power to exist beyond the individual it must do so in via entity that sets it apart from the less powerful. Like any life-form, that entity will seek to extend its lifespan and to self-perpetuate. Those of us in the latter camp 2) point to the history books for empirical evidence.

But now, we really should not need to.

There will still be those, maybe unable to come to terms with the depths to which they have been deceived, that can play a sufficiently multi-dimensional game of logic-dodgeball to stand by Mr Fauci’s catastrophically anti-scientific science. Those that can find a path to justifying the suspension of the Nuremburg Code. To lockdowns. Mask mandates. Coerced inoculations.

However, surely…SURELY, the plain obvious fact that they DO LIE TO YOU can no longer be ignored.

We have all seen the deranged social justice warriors keen to scale the Everests of cognitive dissonance by arguing that 2 + 2 does not equal 4, that a man is a woman if they say so and, at the same time, a man and a woman are the same thing. That the injection was safe despite zero long-term testing. That it’s racist to be born Caucasian. That we are defending Ukrainian democracy.

But even those shameless virtue-scavengers must admit, THEY LIED! Biden’s administration spent US$ 1bn of taxpayers’ delivering falsehoods during COVID-1984:

https://x.com/drjbhattacharya/status/1849703935235457457?s=48&t=phdvByLmTzyDJndDDqJi3g

They lied to you about the costs of renewable energy*. Biden lied when he said he would not pardon Hunter…or issue pre-emptive pardons.

STOP!, you might say. There is a time for “noble lies”, white lies, not all lies are equal, some are well-meaning.

However, in the face of this recent unequivocal evidence of bare-faced deceit, I implore you to inch further down the rabbit warren of lies we have been told (or half told) over the course of the last hundreds of years.

It has become a glib cliché to pronounce, “history is written by the victors.” So glib that it becomes easy to let that wash past without much of a second thought. However, a moment’s contemplation unveils a profound truth: we don’t know the half of it.

We broadly accept that we might live in echo chambers on X or Facebook. Yet, we don’t imagine the same on the larger scale of the Western-centric, English-speaking history books.

We clock with laser-like vision today’s rabid censorship by the State of counter-narratives. We know Facebook censored true information. We know Twitter/X was commanded to expunge truths. We know YouTube censored non-compliant narratives.

Yet, we believe we are presented with a balanced canon of history.

There is a pervasive assumption throughout our Western founding stories that we have been both the victors and the good guys. The defeated enemies have always been the belligerents, the aggressors. They have not only been the initiators of hostilities but also the ones willing to draw upon the most depraved evils – implementing the most inhuman, diabolical acts – to further their vile cause.

Yet, despite the debilitating handicap of retaining moral rectitude, we came out as the victors and the good guys.

Somehow there is a belief that, probably since WWI and certainly since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have lived under benign leaders, each one striving to outcompete the other with their uncommon understanding of how to make our lives better.

In that respect, we have enjoyed a unique period in the entirety of homo sapiens – of the animal kingdom. Statesmen prioritise the lifting up of the populations which they serve. It is an unfortunate juxtaposition that period coincides with two World Wars, the detonation of atomic bombs on innocent civilians and a plethora of savage evils that retrospectively appear utterly avoidable (if not intentional).

I have been reading a number of books looking at aspects of our popular history that schools, universities and general culture have overlooked.

I don’t think people understand the profundity, the horrific scale of the lies that we have been fed – often through acts of omission. But also, very often, through acts of admission then suppression.

I think most of us would be scandalised to hear a neutral version of those events that form the foundation stone of who we think we are. Here is a compilation of reading that opened my eyes to a world of views, facts and opinions that provide a more complete understanding of what has led to the state of our States today**:

We, the West, also committed dreadful, soul-rottingly unethical war crimes. From the Terror Bombing of civilians (culminating in the incineration of Dresden) to the Soviet-influenced military strategies designed to cede Central and Eastern Europe to communist rule. From ignoring the substantial anti-Nazi German resistance (for the same reason) to the forced repatriation of over 2 million men, women and children to Soviet Russia (Operation Keelhaul condemned those poor individuals to death and/or slavery in the gulags) to the extra-judicial extraction from Nurenburg of key Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip.

As with the churn of a wake behind a motorboat, a lapse of time – a certain distance – is required for these truths to bubble determinedly to the surface.

Recently, vastly improved global communications have sped up this process. The truth is gasping for air ever more quickly.

Which, of course, is why those corrupt states are scrambling to censor us all.

Mis/dis/malinformation.

It’s there. In plain, bright daylight.

So. Here we are. Five years since Event 201…ahem, sorry, I mean CONVID 19. Trump is back in office. Biden has pardoned over 8,000 people. Fauci is one of them (would he have lied so brazenly if he wasn’t sure of his pardon at the time?). Pre-emptive, blanket pardons for the Biden family.

To believe that Biden pre-emptively pardoned non-guilty individuals, you would also have to believe that he presided over a justice system for four years (plus eight years as vice president) that he knew could be weaponised but that he did not himself weaponise.

They lie. They all lie. They all lie all the time.

As a result, most of us have been living a lie.

There is no reason to think Trump will lie less.

My advice? In stark contrast to that of the government…DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629624004882

** Books

The Phoney Victory – Peter Hitchens

Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War – Patrick J Buchanan

The Hidden Causes of the First World War – Gerry Docherty & Jim Macgregor

American Betrayal – Diana West

Tower of Basel – Adam LeBor

Podcast

(prologue to a forthcoming series)