Tell a lie. Go big with the lie. Repeat it often. Many people will be fooled
In the picture, are these good Nazis in Charlottesville USA that led to the death of Heather Heyer in 2017?
Governments are fragile, especially fledgling democracies. From Athens, to Rome and to Washington D.C., democracies are climbing the steep side of the mountain. It has never an easy day to build a Democracy. Once a Democracy is established under a Republic, Ben Franklin is right, it is tough to keep it free from tyrants.
Here is a simple way lies erode families, communities and civilizations. At a game of bones – dominoes – a brother asked for the permission to speak freely. He says, “Omowale, I heard about the abusive and disgraceful way that you treat your wife. People are talking about you.” Omowale tells the rumor monger, “I am not married, I do not have a wife, I have never had a wife and I have no intentions of ever having a wife.” Does this factual denial help? With an intelligent man, facts help. With a fool, facts empower him to be more reckless. Nevertheless, one fact is worth a shipload of bluster.
The rumor monger then says, “it doesn’t matter, whenever you get a wife, you will treat her in an abusive and disgraceful way.” A lie is in the ether.
It works the same way with governments. During the Third Reich, Hitler and his propaganda minister-flunky Goebbels, pushed the lie that Jews killed babies and devoured their blood (Blood libel). They married the blood libel with the theory that Jews controlled the economy and were the direct cause of the economic tailspin that resulted in unemployment, inflation and hunger. The resulting bloodshed ended in a war with 11 million people dead.
Today, we have a variation. The COVID-19 virus is not a normal virus originating in nature, but a Chinese engineered “China virus,” according to our current president. Now we have hate crimes multiplying against people of Asian descent. We haven’t heard Dr. Anthony Fauci or any of the CDC scientists call the virus, the “China” virus. China has lifted 200 million people out of poverty. We don’t need a war with them.
In Rwanda, envy was directed against an ethnic group, the “Tutsis,” and a hate riptide began that started a holocaust of 800,000 people being butchered. Neighbors who had watched their kids play and grow up together were captured by a Mass hypnosis and began fetching machetes and started killing each other. Rumors were the source of the fever that gripped the country.
President Bill Clinton said that his greatest foreign policy mistake was not intervening to prevent the Hutu-Tutsi genocide.
A “code-switching lie “is loose in the USA. It is designed to convince the suburban white family that the “negroes” are coming. This lie is designed to tap into a primeval fear of those that are different by virtue of skin color, hair texture, language style, etc. It is Hitler’s lie in a different garb.
The good news is that – you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.
In the spirit of that giant of a human being, John Lewis and BIG FLOYD, make good trouble by VOTING. Absentee, Mail, Early Vote, in person on Election Date. VOTE!!!
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