MC’s latest essay concerns the culture of lies that pervades the 21st-century West, and the political, moral, and spiritual pollution that afflicts us because of it.
Unlearning
by MC
Ignorance is never bliss, and is extremely dangerous to life and limb. But what of propaganda? What of lies believed, and never unlearned?
I have just been reading an article about the BBC, and their treatment of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, where the BBC implied that Florence Nightingale was a racist. History makes no such claim, and what is more, provides no evidence that the two ever exchanged any dialogue. But the story makes for good political copy:
The attitude to Nightingale is a mystery. A woman who spent her whole life after the Crimean war taking on the war office and reactionary men in government in order to improve conditions for the average British soldier, should be a hero of the Left, and of feminists. Instead she has been vilified, because she came from a wealthy background and became a Victorian establishment figure, and because she had a brief meeting with a woman from the Caribbean.
Of course this situation says nothing about the two women or their real worth but everything about the strange ideology of the left in the UK today, skewed with envy and hatred but also sunk in historical ignorance, unable to fathom the ideas and behaviour of our ancestors, imaginatively or through facts.
It is these same lying leftists who have been in charge of our children’s ‘education’ for decades. It struck me how difficult a situation one is in when one is not just ‘ignorant’ but has had one’s mind filled with arrant garbage. Garbage disposal is never easy.
When one reads widely, both non-fiction and good (honest) fiction, one gets a feel for truth, and one can compare what one has been taught against what one reads. But this is a rare skill, no longer encouraged and is thus not generally the case, and a historical textbook is ‘lucky’ if it sells more than 6,000 copies in the UK.
Most graduates do not read textbooks once they have finished their finals. And to get a good degree one must regurgitate only that which is politically educationally correct in order to appease the liars.
So the propaganda sticks, and eventually becomes mainstream as the affected individuals attain positions where their unwitting tendentiousness is uncorrected.
When I was lied to as a child, often by well-intentioned parents, there were usually consequences, mostly embarrassing, but sometimes potentially life-changing.
As one of four boys, I did not know what the physical difference was between girls and boys, so, as one does, I asked my mother, she told me that girls have ‘nothing’ there. At the age of eight I knew she was lying, because the girls at school teased me and dropped hints and allusions that I could not understand.
Eventually, as a young teenager, I persuaded a younger female cousin to assuage my curiosity, but had this gone wrong, I could have been liable for prosecution and lifelong disgrace (she was about 9-10 at the time).
In the fifties and sixties, school in UK was apolitical, and one was encouraged to seek ‘truth’ by looking at a situation from as many angles as possible. So I was taught creation myth and Darwinian myth at the same time, and told that there was no proof for either, and that I could form my own opinions.
Also, we did not study other religions, and history stopped at Corn Laws (1850s). If one wanted to know more, then read the books for one’s self. So I did.
There is an inseparable bond between truth and liberty, and by default, between lies and tyranny. Why would we want to teach lies to all and sundry when it is the truth that sets us free? We tell lies when we need people to do as we want them to, not as they want to do for themselves. Why did Barack Hussein Obama tell us that we could keep our own doctors? Because to him in his personal belief, the lies were justified by the perceived need for Obamacare. The ends justified the means.
Revolutionary change is not difficult to kick off, but is very difficult to steer, and almost impossible to stop until it runs out of steam. It is this indirection that means that the best laid revolutionary plans tend to come off the rails and become uncontrollable. We look at history: the Girondists, the theorists of the French revolution, found themselves mounting the steps of their guillotine when the violence-oriented Montagnards seized power and precipitated the Terror. We find the Mensheviks giving way to the extremist Bolsheviks and then the takeover of the Stalinists.
Continue reading →
A French Muslim leader named Dalil Boubaker has called for the country’s empty Catholic churches to be turned into mosques. France is building new mosques at a record rate, but Mr. Boubaker says they are insufficient to meet the needs of French Muslims.
