What is truth?

How narratives swallow the truth

It has been a consequential few weeks. First, and most importantly, I have remodeled the kitchen of our little cabin and once again, it was a trip through memory lane as I peeled the layers of wall cladding off and remembered the “vivid” colour choices of my mother. Or stripped off the flooring and remembered how I hated the early variations of linoleum that we used. But the job is done and is entirely consistent with my “Close enough,” mode of attention to detail. Look. If the patching of one era of wallboard to a new era of wallboard leaves a hump on the wall, then buy a bigger picture. Easy peasy.

As I type this, all manner of military helicopters are flying overhead to provide protection to the leaders of the G7 nations who are meeting at a resort west of Calgary. I would be bothered by the noise, was I not so keen to watch them fly about. Maybe I should have been a helicopter pilot. The highways leading to the event venue are heavily patrolled by police and I watched an older woman protesting something described in a very wordy sandwich board get arrested. That was kind of interesting. I kept thinking, “Lady, if you want to protest, the words have to be big enough to be read at 100 km per hour.” Her efforts seemed a complete waste of time. But she will have stories for her friends I suppose.

And yesterday Israel finally attacked Iran to destroy their ability to enrich uranium and build nuclear war heads. I have no idea whether Iran wanted to build nuclear bombs. I have been reading reports for the past twenty years stating emphatically that Iran is only days away from building a bomb. Then Iranian leaders say that Islam prevents them from building nuclear bombs and they just want to build electrical reactors and enrich enough uranium to provide their own nuclear medicines. In March of this year, the US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard stated that it is the assessment of the Intelligence Community that Iran is not currently building a nuclear weapon. She said there was a lot of enriched uranium but no sign of bombs. But how enriched was the material? Were the Iranians really only days from building a bomb? No answer. No answer because no one is even asking the question and demanding some evidence from the Israelis.

It reminds me of Colin Powell standing before the General Council of the United Nations giving us proof that Sadam Hussein was creating and storing weapons of mass destruction. To me, the pictures just looked like buildings with trucks parked beside them. It turns out that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Maybe they were buried in the sands of eastern Syria as some have claimed but, either way, they haven’t been found. Nevertheless, like Helen’s face, Mr. Powell’s pictures launched a thousand bombs, and the body count is in the hundreds of thousands. One wonders what the body count in Iran and Israel might be when this latest venture in regime and culture change in Iran is over.

My sympathies in these situations are generally with Israel as that nation is easily David to Iran’s Goliath in this recurring Valley of Elah fight. There is credible evidence that Iran has financed and armed several proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) that insist upon lobbing missiles into Israel and that is an untenable situation for any nation. At the same time, we are asked to believe that the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel caught the Israelis by surprise. Mossad was able to destroy Hezbollah by having pagers blow up many of its soldiers. Mossad was working within Iran to launch drones preemptively at Iranian missile launchers in this latest fighting. Mossad is a very capable intelligence agency, and they missed the call on October 7? Maybe. It doesn’t help my doubting spirit that Prime Minister Netanyahu might be in jail were it not for the current hostilities. He has a role similar to that of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Ukraine war. It is in their personal best interests that the wars do not end.

In 1992, I noticed that every news channel that reported on the war in Bosnia Herzegovina used the same talking points. There was no original reporting and the scripts were identical. The Serbs started it, and they needed to be punished. NATO, with nothing to do following the collapse of the Soviet Union, was just the ticket to sort everything out. But consider this. Of the three combatants (Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims), the Serbs were the only ones to have fought with the Allied forces in both world wars. A nation which sacrificed proportionately more of its citizens to fight against the Nazis than any other Allied nation was now the villain. That didn’t make sense to me. Onsite reporting from Scott Taylor (Esprit de Corps magazine), embedded within the Canadian peace keeping mission in Sarajevo, only deepened my suspicions about the truth of legacy news reporting.

In 1999, NATO was called upon to bomb Serbia to stop the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims in Kosovo. Or so all the talking heads repeated in unison. The murderous Serbs were destroying the peaceful Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). They needed to be stopped. Except that the KLA was a known terrorist group that controlled all the heroin traffic into Europe. The KLA was on every terrorist watch list until a year before the bombing when they became the “victims of heinous crimes”. What a transformation!

Belgrade, the capital of Serbia was bombed. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed. Everything was bombed. In the end, by popular vote, the Serbian province of Kosovo was made into the modern, independent state of Kosovo under the control of the KLA. Oh… and the Americans were able to build Camp Bondsteel on the plains of Kosovo – one of the largest US military bases in Europe. When you are tempted to scoff at the legitimacy of the vote by residents of Crimea to become part of Russia remember the legitimacy of the vote of Kosovars to become independent of Serbia. One followed the other as night follows day.

A few years after the Kosovo war, I read “Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions” by Diana Johnson. In her book, based on independent reporting, she pointed out, among other things, that the famous picture of the starving Bosniaks behind concentration camp wire was actually taken from within a pig stye. What was portrayed as a genocidal concentration camp was actually a transfer camp to protect people from the fighting. The “inmates” were free to come and go as they wished. The English photographer of the famous picture admitted to the deception until blowback caused him to change his story. It is complicated. According to Ms. Johnson, there was no genocide during the Bosnian war. Perhaps that is why Slobodan Milosevic was exonerated by the International War Crimes Tribunal following his death in prison.

As a result of this experience in trying to understand the Bosnian War, I now believe very little of anything reported by the western press. What passes for news today is not actually news. It is someone’s chosen narrative about what they think the news needs to be in order to create a desired public response. It can and often is, diametrically opposed to the truth. The trick to understanding what is really going on is to have a formula for interpreting the narratives.

I mention this only to make the obvious observation that we cannot understand what is going on in the world unless a variety of credible subject experts are referenced. Again there is no point in following the legacy news outlets because, as noted above, they never tell the truth. But there are lots of alternate sources who give varying views on events such as Israeli missile strikes in Iran. And Iranian missile strikes in Israel.

For example, an interesting case study in the modern phenomenon of narrative-based reporting is the story of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. I was first made aware of Dr. Sachs in the early 1990s and considered him to be a pawn of the legacy news. He was constantly on talk show programs and his views and mindless prattle about sustainability struck me as naïve and wrong in a lefty sort of way. What does sustainability mean, anyway? However, he clearly had access to world leaders and so I listened to him from time to time.

During covid, Dr. Sachs was the Chair of the Covid-19 Commission for the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet. During his tenure, he came to believe that covid was probably a created rather than a natural pathogen. I believe this was his “red pill” moment. Dr. Sachs is no longer invited to sit on news panels and offer opinions on legacy news outlets. He strayed from the narrative.

Fortunately, from my perspective, he, like Dr. John Mearsheimer, is straying from the narrative on several topics for which he has particular and specific knowledge. He has joined Mearsheimer as one of my prime sources for understanding world events – particularly as they relate to the Ukraine and Middle East wars. We are far apart on many topics (global warming, China’s geostrategic role in the world, the role of tariffs in economic policy etc.) and I don’t always enjoy their stridency, but they are always thought-provoking and provide a counterbalance to my tendency to embrace conspiracies.

In a world built around the “Big Lie”, it is hard to know what to think of world events. But that is not an argument for ignoring the news. I want to know about, and then protest, for example, when President Zelensky attempts to drag the United States into his war by blowing up Russian nuclear sites. Such recklessness can foreshorten the lives of my grandchildren and must be resisted irrespective of the “anything goes because Russia is bad” narrative of people like US Senator Lindsay Graham. No doubt Russia is bad but that is no excuse for killing my family in a nuclear duel.

Likewise, it is worth the effort to understand why Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to drag the United States into his war by blowing up uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran. To understand this it is necessary to balance the anti-Israel views of a Jeffrey Sachs against the anti-Hamas views of Palestinian Mosab Hassan Yousef. It is worth pondering the unwillingness of other Arab states to provide safe harbour to the beleaguered Palestinians. Perhaps their history of having almost destroyed Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon has worn out their welcome.

My only advice is that you don’t waste time listening to the legacy news but find a variety of “red pilled” (and therefore banned from legacy news sites) experts who offer opposing views. Only in this way will the truth be protected from their narratives.

Even if we had the unadulterated truth it would be almost impossible to understand and resolve complex international issues. Sincere people can be on different sides of such issues and discussing them requires a healthy dose of humility. Remember that Solomon was rewarded by God for his humility and Herod was destroyed by God for his arrogance. Nebuchadnezzar humbled himself and died in his sleep. His son Belshazzar acted out in pride and died on the end of a sword. No one has cornered the market on truth so you have to sort it out for yourself and be humble enough to say, “I could be wrong.” And it has always been thus.

History is the story of competing narratives and truth has always been difficult to find. We are not in new territory in this respect. The Balkans wars of 1914 and 1999 were both started with a list of unobtainable demands designed to ensure war. The unification of Germany was gained at the cost of the lives of thousands of soldiers who fought over a cable that was doctored to start a war. Did any of those soldiers or the citizens who pushed them into war, know the truth? The 1968 coup which brought a Marxist military regime to power in Peru, ushering in twenty years of civil war resulting in 60,000 deaths, was based on a forged contract with a Canadian oil company. Yay Canada!

If we assume we are being lied to and being fed narratives to condition our biases, we will be closer to the truth than we can know.

Sad, but it is what it is.