I go and check on sci-fi writer Sarah Hoyt every now and again. And this time she’s writing about all the lies.
Oh sure, there’s all the COVID lies and the vaccine lies. For what exactly?
Does it sterilize people? We don’t know. Cause heart attacks? The numbers are compelling, but we don’t know. Cause strokes? There are indications, but we don’t know.
There’s the Narrative — such as that FDR saved the nation in the Great Depression — that we all agree on. Unless you do a bit of research and look behind the curtain.
Yeah, as Vox Day recommends: “Read a f-ing book. Then, once you’ve finished it, read another one.”
My trouble is that I’ve read too many books. So I’ve gone way beyond the Narrative.
And first off, because I’ve read and pretended to understand Kant, I don’t believe in logic and reason and the laws of nature and natural rights. I think that all our knowledge is a stitch-up. But some of it works real well. Did you see that “scientists say” it may be time to revise Newton’s law of gravitation? See MOND theory of gravity.
Then there’s history.
My history of the last 100 years starts with the German Bismarck and the Brit Lord Salisbury. Bismarck is famous for the line:
There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
And Lord Salisbury said “never trust experts.”
After Bismarck and Salisbury left the stage they were replaced by idiots. The Brits got into a Triple Entente with France and Russia and made Kaiser Bill really nervous. Hey let’s have a World War!
Then President Wilson decided to get the US involved. And then he allowed a punitive peace after the war that messed up the German economy and prepared the way for Hitler.
Then FDR, after the failure of his New Deal, decided he needed a world war to rescue his reputation. So he meddled in Europe and set up Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. But in the war did he do enough to save the Jews?
I’ve thought, or pretended to think, about why all history is a lie. I think the reason comes out in Shakespeare’s famous speech for King Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt: his St. Crispin’s Day speech. It’s all lies, but what do you do, the leader of your army, on the day before a battle? You rile up the soldiers and get them full of patriotic ardor so they will go out next day and risk their lives fighting for The Cause.
The Brits lost the Hundred Years War, anyway. But Brits don’t really talk about it. They just remember the glorious victories of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt.
You can’t admit mistakes; you can’t humanize the enemy.
That’s the way to understand our current domestic conflicts. Our liberal friends have owned the last century. Their historians got to write the history. Their journalists and their factcheckers get to spin the day’s events. And their partisans get to pummel the opposition with a fusilade of pejoratives.
And ordinary people go along with this. Most of the time. But when there’s a nasty bit of inflation, or when the country is in a stupid war, or when their kids are being groomed at school… that’s when the rulers feel vulnerable. So thet’s when they amp up the lies.
I even push back against the narrative on slavery. I think that slavery ended not because of our glorious virtue but because slavery did not pay — compared to free labor. By which I mean that free labor is real cheap.
And I think that the two worst slave states in history were Stalinist Russia and Maoist China.
And I think that welfare is a form of voluntary slavery, comparable to the “head for food” of a millennium ago.
I think that Social Security is a kind of serfdom. You pays your FICA and your lord promises a pension.
I think that salaried workers at big corporations are working on a semi-feudal estate.
And what do you call living in a community where the ruling class skims 35-50 percent of GDP off the top?
That’s what I think. Your mileage may vary.