When Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked Thomas Sowell for his reaction to the mantra “Hands up, don’t shoot” now being repeated from the protest theater of the streets to the floor of the U.S. House by members of the Black Caucus to negate the evidence weighed and assessed by the Ferguson grand jury, Sowell replied:
“Oh, for political reasons. I thought of Joseph Goebbels’ doctrine – people will believe any lie if it’s repeated often enough and loud enough.”
This exactly describes the mechanism of the Big Lie. People speak of it variously as a tactic of “Alinskyism,” an “information war,” “the 1960s” or, in this case, Nazi Germany. They are all correct. But the Big Lie, which marries political mendacity to mass media, is the brainchild of Karl Marx. Like the concentration camp, it was introduced to the world by the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany. The results of of this strategic assault on the truth as a means to power are all around us.
At its core, my book “American Betrayal” is the history of the Big Lie and how it corrupted the West. Boggled by the post-9/11 experience of living through the creation and enforcement of a newly current Big Lie – “Islam is a religion of peace” – I set out to discover where in our history facts were sundered from conclusions. As I researched the past, tracking backwards from Big Lie to Big Lie, I discovered in the gigantic works of historian Robert Conquest cogent analysis of how, or at it least when, and by what mechanism, it all began.
The first Big Lie, Conquest argues, was the cover-up and negation of the mass atrocity known as the Ukraine Terror Famine, whereby Stalin engendered the death of 5, 6, possibly many more millions by state-engineered famine in the early 1930s, and the West decided not to notice. Indeed, on the heels of the Soviets’ undoubted crime against humanity, FDR would actually “normalize” relations with Stalin, another mechanism, as discussed in “American Betrayal,” of moral decline. In the memoir of ex-socialist Eugene Lyons, I even came across the actual moment of media creation of this first Big Lie – a sordid scene in a Moscow hotel room during which the Western press corps made a late-night deal with the Soviet censor and washed it down with vodka and zakuski, or hors d’oeuvres.
From “American Betrayal,” pp. 100-101:
[Conquest writes:]
“On the face of it, this [deception] might appear to have been an impossible undertaking. A great number of true accounts reached Western Europe and America, some of them from impeccable Western eyewitnesses. …”
But Stalin had a profound understanding of the possibilities of what Hitler approvingly called the Big Lie. He knew that even though the truth may be readily available, the deceiver need not give up. He saw that flat denial on the one hand and the injection into the pool of information of a corpus of positive falsehood on the other were sufficient to confuse the issue for the passively instructed foreign audience, and to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.
Flat denial plus a corpus of positive falsehood: Sounds like another black hole of anti-knowledge, another corroding attack on the basis of the Enlightenment itself. Conquest describes this concerted effort to deceive the world about the truth of the state-engineered famine, Stalin’s brutal war on the peasantry, as “the first major instance of the exercise of this technique of influencing world opinion.”
This instance, then, was a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the 20th century, a moment in which history itself, always subject to lies and coloration, became susceptible to something truly new under the sun: totalitarianism; more specifically, the totalitarian innovation of disinformation, later expanded, bureaucratized and, in effect, weaponized, by KGB-directed armies of dezinformatsiya agents.
What do I mean by “armies”? Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of intelligence in Communist Romania, told me, “During the Cold War, more people in the Soviet bloc worked for the dezinformatsiya machine than for the Soviet army and defense industry put together. The bloc’s intelligence community alone had over 1 million officers (the KGB had over 700,000) and several million informants around the world. All were involved in deceiving the West – and their own country – or in supporting the effort.”
That came later. It had to start somewhere, though, and so it did. By 1936, after civil war broke out in Spain, George Orwell could sense a sea change in the writing of history, of news, of information, of the handling of what he called “neutral fact,” which heretofore all sides had accepted. “What is peculiar to our age,” he wrote, “is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.” Or even that it should be, I would add. For example, he wrote, in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on World War I, not even 20 years past, “a respectable amount of material is drawn from German sources.” This reflected a common understanding – assumption – that “the facts” existed and were ascertainable. As Orwell personally witnessed in Spain, this notion that there existed “a considerable body of fact that would have been agreed to by almost everyone” had disappeared. “I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History ended in 1936,’ at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism generally, but more specifically of the Spanish Civil War.” He continued, “I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. … I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”
Then he hits it precisely: “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.'” Ideology over all.
Ideology over all. Marxism over all. This, as we all can see, charging from Ferguson, is the criminal Left’s battering ram against facts, morality, rule of law – the teetering foundation of Western society itself.
There is no moral to this cataclysmic story but know your enemy.
|
