Live not by lies

We are all culpable

One of the salient features of The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s insistence that societal failures are the fault of everyone who buys the lies that undergird that society.  The power of truth and lies are a dominant theme of all his books.  When I read his books in the early 1980s, I didn’t fully understand what he was saying.  I sort of understood the Christian theme of “the line between good and evil running through every human heart” – all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and all that – but I didn’t understand the universal significance of Solzhenitsyn’s words until about March 2020.  My red pilling started in the 1990s but understanding the implications of what I was seeing took rather longer to manifest.  I should have understood much earlier.

Towards the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), I noted that all the news reports in Canada regarding that war were more than similar. They were precisely the same.  I supposed at the time that the talking heads were reading what Reuters or Associate Press were writing and this explained the lockstep nature of the reporting.  Now I am not so sure.

Whatever caused the reporting to be identical, the veracity of the reporting was entirely disputable.  A friend of mine, well steeped in history, was offering me explanations of the war that were more nuanced than,

“This is all the fault of Slobodan Milosevic.”

He wouldn’t tell me his views, but he challenged me to read some history and come to my own conclusions.  And so started my 30 years walk through history.  I have concluded that it is not that history repeats itself, but that when people refuse to learn history, they can be convinced of anything.  I think Mr. Solzhenitsyn had a lot to say about this as well.

When the Bosnian Serbs were accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing, I was skeptical.  But there were the pictures of the concentration camps for the Bosniak and Croatian civilians.  When the photographer of the “concentration camp” subsequently reported that the photo was staged (he has since recanted and said it wasn’t staged), I concluded that the lockstep reporting was being done for propagandistic purposes.

Two other reports about the war sealed my conclusion that the legacy press was dedicated to propaganda and not to reporting.  I had started reading Esprit de Corps, a magazine dedicated to the Canadian military (https://www.espritdecorps.ca/home).  The magazine publisher, Scott Tailor, was a veteran and he reported by imbedding himself in the military wherever it was deployed.  When it was deployed as part of the UN peacekeeping force in the Balkans, Scott Taylor was there.  Canadian soldiers were with Bosnian Serbian forces when the market in Srebrenica was bombed.  The bombing was not coming from the Serbs according to Mr. Taylor, but the Serbs were blamed for the civilian loss of life.  The eyewitness account did not conform to what the talking heads were telling me.

In 2003, Diana Johnstone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Johnstone), wrote a book on the Balkan’s wars (Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions) that was both vilified and given high praise.  I tend toward the latter appraisal because Ms. Johnstone is not a Serbophile and she reported both after the fact and based on ground truthing rather than reading old copies of the New York Times.  Her version of events was completely different from what had been reported during both the Bosnian conflict and the subsequent bombing of Belgrade and removal of Kosovo from Serbia. 

Her reporting was substantially verified for me when Slobodan Milosevic was exonerated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2016.  Milosovic was indicted on 66 charges of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.  From 2002 until his death in jail in 2006, Milosovic defended himself and, according to some reports, through his legal arguments, made a mockery of the criminal tribunal.  In 2016 the ICTY quietly concluded that Milosovic was innocent (not guilty of crimes. They could not bring themselves to pronounce innocence.) and that the bad guy was actually Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. 

My point in relating all this is not to determine the truth of what went on in the Balkans from 1991 – 1999.  Rather it is to point out that, from the very beginning, there were strong reasons to doubt what was being passed along as “truth” by the Western media.  The Bosnian and Kosovo Wars were not “one offs”.  The Balkans had been the center of attention 80 years earlier and the reporting at that time was similarly suspect.  All this to say that news reporting slides very easily and quickly into the spread of propaganda for reasons that rarely enhance the lives of those who are not paying attention.  If you were like me and didn’t know the history of the lead-up to World War One, then reporting of the Bosnia-Kosovo wars in the Balkans was opaque and propaganda was easily accepted as news. 

Solzhenitsyn famously instructed,

“Live not by lies.” 

When I read this, I thought he meant that I should not lie.  The probability of people dying unnecessarily decreases if I do not lie and you do not lie.  Now I think his meaning was much broader.  Rod Dreher hinted at this broader meaning in his book “Live not by lies”.  What is this broader meaning?

I now conclude that it is immoral to put oneself in such a weak intellectual position that one’s behaviour becomes conditioned by the lies of others. 

“But surely no one puts themselves in that position,” you say. 

They do if they refuse to learn and understand history.  The Gulag Archipelago was, in part, an appeal to remember the history of the Bolshevik revolution that resulted in so many deaths.  It was intrinsic to the revolution and not to the personality of Stalin that so many died in the purges of the 1930s.  It was not just Stalin who killed upwards of 7 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor and goodness knows how many Russians in the same famine.  It was the political system of Lenin et al that mandated this industrial-scale death.  But the state perverted the news into propaganda, and everyone played stupid and forgot.

Almost daily it seems another peer reviewed study comes out debunking all the lies that we were told about covid and the mRNA injections.  Now we are getting data connecting the dramatically increased all-cause mortality with the injections.  Now we are told that there was never any testing that demonstrated that the shots would stop transmission of the virus.  Now we are told that the impact of shutting down schools was as terrible as predicted and that the six-foot rule was pulled out of the air.

Could knowing history have changed those awful years of covid lockdowns and behavioural mandates?  To enter a PhD program, I had to take an eight-hour course in research ethics.  I learned about the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis study and about the events leading up to the Nuremburg trials.  I had to read and express my comprehension of the Nuremberg Code and then sign a declaration that my research would comply with that declaration.  Every person who filled out my research questionnaire had to be told in an auditable format that they had been given the information necessary to make an informed decision about their participation in my study and that they understood that they could quit the study at any time.

I was quite peevish about having to take the course, but it might have been the best part of my study program. 

It was clear that the mRNA technology was experimental and, at best, a research program.  The people who administered the shots never offered any information much less the information required to make an informed decision.  In fact, the manufacturers of the mRNA shots and the government regulators who were supposed to monitor their work argued that they needed 55 years before they could release the information upon which to make an informed choice.  Were the mandates coercive?  I was, in effect, told,

“If you want to see your grandchildren again, you must take the shots.”

Others were told to take the shots or lose their jobs.  That is coercive.

For the first two years of the war between Russia and Ukraine, we were assured that the Ukrainians were winning and all they needed were a few more munitions to finish the job.  That was clearly a lie.  Since when does a nation of 40 million people take on an adjacent nation of 150 million and win?  It never happens.  The geriatric support of NATO with its “small war against people in sandals” mentality was never going to give the Ukrainians any edge.  So, we have been supplying war materiel to a people who have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of their young men in a hopeless cause. 

Should we feel individual guilt about our participation in this? 

This is my point about the morality (or immorality) of not knowing history.  The western legacy press has yet to report the truth about Ukraine and is complicit in the devastation of that country and a generation of its young men.  We listened and nodded our heads as the press gave a platform to neoliberal war mongers like Mitt Romney, Justin Trudeau and Lindsay Graham who told us with a straight face that we were getting a good deal.  Should we be urging that Boris Johnson and whatever American was behind him be put in jail for stopping Mr. Zelensky from signing a peace agreement with Russia in March 2022?  We continue to fight Russia with the lives of another nation.  That is immoral.

My point in writing this is not to re-litigate the Balkans wars, the covid fiasco or the war in Ukraine.  It is to offer the idea that, to the extent we are too lazy to learn our history and are willing to accept obvious propaganda as truth, then we are all culpable. 

But what history? How do we know that the history we are reading and studying is true (especially if the source was written after about 1970)? Unfortunately there are no short cuts to understanding history and constant revisions must be made to what understanding we do have. It is a process. But it is a red-pilling process that, at each step, improves our ability to discern the lies.

How can we know the truth about history? The short answer is we can’t. But that just means that we must be guardedly skeptical of everyone who says that they can. People like me who draw lines and inferences across historical events and suggest connections that may or may not exist. People like news readers who, nightly, pronounce with great authority on topics about which they have only passing acquaintance. People like government spokespersons who dictate the current set of lies with impressive authority and not a lick of embarrassment. Stop accepting the “verities” of the talking heads because they are invariably wrong. They are paid to read the propaganda of those who would manipulate us into immoral decision making.

If we know even a little history, we can spot the lies, and we can say,

“That is a lie.”

Governments and news agencies don’t like being caught in lies.  Just ask the people who have been peddling the nonsense that Joe Biden is on top of his game and routinely exhausts the young aides who work in the White House.  The loud squawking the day after the presidential debate was not from people who were proud of their propaganda.

People often die when other people are content to play stupid and accept lies. When an adult plays chess against a 2-year old, we expect the adult to win. Don’t be an infant.

Be skeptical. Start getting to know your history.  Live not by lies.