Truth is coherent

Truth is coherent

I’m a hopeless liar. Not to say I do it a lot, but the opposite. I’m so hopeless at the game of lying I have to avoid it. Unless I have a moral reason to lie (‘No commandant, Anne Frank is not hiding in my attic’ or less seriously, ‘Yes, you look fantastic!’) I find it much easier not to. Just in practical terms, lies require a lot more maintenance than truth. If pressed, you can’t rely on actuality to fill in the detail. You have to produce other supporting lies and these may not cohere with other aspects of reality, causing you to generate even more lies of increasing feebleness, with increasing dry-mouth – ugh!

Stick to the truth on the other hand, and you have the whole state of the world to support you. You don’t need to make anything else up because you never made anything up in the first place. When asked, ‘Where were you at six-thirty last night?’ you can reply with confidence, ‘On the bus’. When questioned further, ‘Did anyone else see you on the bus?’ you can reply, ‘Yes, my friend Stan’. You can say this and feel comfortable that they may contact Stan for corroboration. You don’t have to slip-off and phone Stan to prime him because he actually was on the bus with you. Worst thing that you might be in such circumstances is mistaken, but if you have been acting in good faith then at least you can explain how you came to be mistaken, hand on heart.

I can’t be sure whether Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hari actually believe their own writing or if they are card carrying mercenaries like Paul Johnson or Roger Scruton. In an important sense it really doesn’t matter. Their own opinion of what they write has no bearing on its actual truthfulness. Reality is independent of opinion and whatever they might think the world-views they espouse simply don’t tally with reality. They’re grossly incoherent. You can’t oppose terrorism AND support the ‘war on terror’. To any rational and informed mind the two are mutually exclusive.

Take one huge lie, one all serious historians will be cacking themselves laughing-at in years to come: The invasion of Iraq of was not motivated by oil but by moral concern for the people of Iraq.

Given the Bush family’s connections with oil, US support for Saddam during his most violent excesses, subsequent US sanctions specifically targeting the people of Iraq, Rice and Chevron, the PNAC, the breaching of Kyoto, and every previous post-war US president being a war criminal (I would go on, but you’ve heard it all before) it takes a lot of effort to keep this whopper afloat. The bare faced, often self-confessed cynicism of the invasion is just plain obvious, a truth easily grasped by Chomsky’s ‘fairly intelligent adolescent’ should the poor child ever get told about it. Ask any stranger at a bus stop, right-wing or left wing, anywhere in the world outside the USA, ‘Are the Americans in there for the oil?’ Hundred to one, we all know what answer we’ll get.

A lie of such proportions takes some spinning. Every other aspect of reality is screaming, ‘Not so!’ For whatever reasons the above named have decided to take on the job. Of course, given the complexity of history, there’s no need to actually make anything up. Those who wield Occam’s mallet beat-out distraction, evasion and omission. Good start, reduce everything to one loaded question, “So you’d prefer it if Saddam was still in power?”. And of course condescension. Everything is so much more complex than we mere mortals could understand. We need their guidance to see that black really is white.

Growing up in the seventies, watching BBC news, I felt rather dumb for not understanding ‘the situation in the middle-east’ or ‘the situation in Northern Ireland’. At the time I put it all down to my own inability to grasp complex ideas. These events were being explained in detail, night after night, yet I just couldn’t get a handle on them, silly me.

Now of course the problem is clear. You can’t expect to understand a story when you’re only told half of it. At the time only Republican acts of violence counted as news. What was being done to Catholics was all but omitted from the picture. If mentioned at all it was in the (now eerily familiar) reframe of ‘the continuing cycle of violence’.

Aside from the moral implications of such omission it’s no wonder so many say they find the news boring and confusing and unsatisfying. It’s no wonder so many of us don’t ‘get it’ when there’s no consistent ‘it’ being offered for us to get. As long as so many key aspects of reality are ruled out before the explanations even begin there’s no chance of creating a coherent picture, one which you could argue from. All you’re left with is, ‘Bad people have been bad again. They usually are in that part of the world’.

So you give up. The Irish are obsessed with religion and violence and the IRA are the most appalling example. But don’t ask me to explain it.

The first time you encounter Chomsky or Said on Palestine or Tim Pat Coogan on Ireland it’s surprising how easy it is to understand. Aside from occasional bouts of nausea it’s extremely satisfying to have all that missing data finally stream in. The human misery that prompted the miserable act finally has a chance to enter the picture, and a more coherent pattern of cause and effect emerges, one you can use to draw future judgements from.

Call me a victim of left-wing propaganda all you like. All I know is that after several decades of immersion in mainstream news I was quite incapable of discussing either of these subjects, way out of my depth. I’m no expert now, but I’d happily argue the fundamentals with anyone. Armed with truth, as in a balanced picture of events, at least I have a chance of discussing these situations.

And soon after you start to notice how it’s done. You notice how it’s always Palestinians doing the attacking and Israelis doing the retaliating. You notice how individual acts of terror using primitive weapons are far more horrific and barbaric than the perpetual hi-tec hell unleashed by the West and its clients. You notice that violent threats to the lives of Africans are only newsworthy if the threatened Africans are white. This is the real danger that prompts all the vitriol. The real threat of Chomsky and Herman and Zinn is the threat of a thinking public, one that can analyse and participate in politics instead of giving up and blaming it all on evil people. And blaming their own inability to get to grips with the subject on their own intellectual inadequacy.

All of which leads to a rather upbeat conclusion. Although those who promote ‘necessary illusions’ have the mass of media to support them, they haven’t got the coherent qualities of truth to back them up. Their huge, flabby, apologies can’t be defended by reference to reality other than excruciatingly feeble exceptions, ones that beg as many questions as they answer. This is why it’s so easy to argue with Daily Mail readers. Their knowledge of world politics, as mediated, is paper thin. You don’t have to identify many contradictions in their arguments before they either smile embarrassed and agree with you, or more likely run-off screaming with their fingers in their ears.

Dissent is always going to be a hard game but at least it can be approached honestly, and that’s a real asset. If you refuse to tolerate inconsistencies in your own beliefs, even the comforting ones, you may never have to lie again. And you’ll always have reality waiting to back you up.

M.