Last week, CBC and The New York Times, friendly fora to Justin Trudeau and Anthony Fauci respectively, went far beyond the usual hospitality extended to these two. They enabled their interviewees to make unchallenged lies, pure and simple..Now, no one ever maintained telling the truth is a political virtue and, among religions, only Zoroastrianism considered lying a sin — as distinct from bearing false witness, which is much more widely condemned. Even so, it’s worth raising the question: what’s really going on with these liars? How did these two so easily get away with lying?. And what does it all mean?.At first glance, Trudeau and Fauci simply looked evasive..Fauci, for example, said it was important to keep an “open mind” regarding whether the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In fact, Fauci refused to consider the lab-leak origin from early 2020 on and subsequently did a great deal to discredit it. And yet the evidence is there, overwhelming, and stubborn. To use the criterion appropriate to murder cases, it's far beyond a reasonable doubt the virus came from the WIV. Period.. FauciDr. Anthony Fauci .Nor, according to Fauci, did he shut down factories or close schools: “Never. I never did.” Instead, “I gave a public-health recommendation” and other people decided to close factories and shut schools..Fauci was not just dodging responsibility. The reason is simple: “public health” would have included threats other than COVID-19, such as mental illness, damage to children, or postponement and cancellation of treatment for other diseases such as cancer. All Fauci ever considered was COVID-19, the threat of which he wildly exaggerated. This was not an error or an illusion on his part but a deliberate falsehood — a lie..Trudeau’s lies were, if anything, more egregious. He said he never forced anyone to get vaxxed. He just put “incentives” in place. If people ignored them, “it was their choice and nobody was going to force anyone into doing something they didn’t want to do.” But, he added, “there are consequences when you don’t.”.There are indeed. Refuse the vax and remain under house arrest. In 2021, some 300,000 federal bureaucrats had a real clear choice: get jabbed or get fired. And we know how Trudeau described those who refused: racists and misogynists to a person, especially those damned truckers who, earlier in the so-called pandemic, were hailed as heroes who kept the grocery shelves stocked..Trudeau and Fauci lied because their words referred to contingencies, to facts that did not exist. The curious thing about contingencies is things might always have been different, which is why liars always think their lies are plausible..Consider the following story: During the 1920s, Georges Clemenceau, the French president at the end of the First World War, was asked by a representative of Weimar Germany how he thought historians would answer the question of who was guilty for the outbreak of the war. Unfamiliar with the possibility of re-writing (and not just re-interpreting) history, he said: “This I do not know. But I do know for sure that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” For Clemenceau it was simply a fact on the night of Aug. 4, 1914, German troops crossed the Belgian border. And it's still is a fact..The kind of lies we're dealing with are not like state secrets or misleading diplomatic obfuscations. What is at stake is factual reality itself, which is inherently a political problem. Facts refer to events and to circumstances that always involve other people, what they saw, and what they said about what they saw..The old saying, “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts,” assumes facts can inform opinions, which in turn may differ. But the facts are not in dispute. The problem raised by Fauci and Trudeau is they assume facts can be disputed just like opinions..We've seen before the problem of not just ignoring facts, but of destroying them and replacing them with fictions. In 1938, when Stalin published his History of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union, the name Trotsky, belonging to the man who in fact founded and led the Red Army during the civil war, did not appear. That “omission” told Trotsky he was under a death sentence. Sure enough, a year later, on Stalin’s orders, Frank Jacson buried a pickaxe in his head. Lies always contain an element of violence..Now ask yourself: how much violence would it have taken to destroy the fact Germany invaded Belgium?.We've seen this problem before as well. Stalin also described the wealthy peasants or kulaks as a “dying class.” They were dying because Stalin had ordered their systematic murder. When the last kulak died, the class was dead. His description was both a prediction and a re-writing of history..Again ask yourself: what would it take for the truckers to be turned into misogynists and racists? Or for ordinary Canadians to swallow the notion, in Trudeau’s words, his “job as prime minister was to keep people alive, and keep people safe, and keep democracy going,” whether Canadians “choose to believer that’s what I’m doing or not?” A little coercion should do the trick..We're not dealing with the narcissism of juveniles who cannot admit their errors, though such a characterization applies both to Trudeau and Fauci. Rather it's evidence of a higher mendacity where both put themselves in a place where they cannot distinguish truth and falsehood..Accordingly, they cannot admit error because they never make errors. Neither has a thought about the world as it is; both live their lives as characters in their own fictions where the possibility of comparing their lies with reality never occurs..The significance of the lies of Trudeau and Fauci is not they aspire to the kind of tyranny exercised by Stalin, but Canadians (and Americans, too) may grow indifferent to such lies because they've become indifferent to truth. In other words, the problem is not we might actually believe Trudeau or Fauci, but the distinction between fact and fiction, reality and lies, might no longer matter..That possibility constitutes a major political problem because a refusal to distinguish facts and lies means we lose any means of navigating the real world. In reality, we cannot change the past; pretending we can, will deprive us all of whatever stability exists in human affairs..The proper attitude towards such liars as these is not anger, but contempt.
Last week, CBC and The New York Times, friendly fora to Justin Trudeau and Anthony Fauci respectively, went far beyond the usual hospitality extended to these two. They enabled their interviewees to make unchallenged lies, pure and simple..Now, no one ever maintained telling the truth is a political virtue and, among religions, only Zoroastrianism considered lying a sin — as distinct from bearing false witness, which is much more widely condemned. Even so, it’s worth raising the question: what’s really going on with these liars? How did these two so easily get away with lying?. And what does it all mean?.At first glance, Trudeau and Fauci simply looked evasive..Fauci, for example, said it was important to keep an “open mind” regarding whether the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In fact, Fauci refused to consider the lab-leak origin from early 2020 on and subsequently did a great deal to discredit it. And yet the evidence is there, overwhelming, and stubborn. To use the criterion appropriate to murder cases, it's far beyond a reasonable doubt the virus came from the WIV. Period.. FauciDr. Anthony Fauci .Nor, according to Fauci, did he shut down factories or close schools: “Never. I never did.” Instead, “I gave a public-health recommendation” and other people decided to close factories and shut schools..Fauci was not just dodging responsibility. The reason is simple: “public health” would have included threats other than COVID-19, such as mental illness, damage to children, or postponement and cancellation of treatment for other diseases such as cancer. All Fauci ever considered was COVID-19, the threat of which he wildly exaggerated. This was not an error or an illusion on his part but a deliberate falsehood — a lie..Trudeau’s lies were, if anything, more egregious. He said he never forced anyone to get vaxxed. He just put “incentives” in place. If people ignored them, “it was their choice and nobody was going to force anyone into doing something they didn’t want to do.” But, he added, “there are consequences when you don’t.”.There are indeed. Refuse the vax and remain under house arrest. In 2021, some 300,000 federal bureaucrats had a real clear choice: get jabbed or get fired. And we know how Trudeau described those who refused: racists and misogynists to a person, especially those damned truckers who, earlier in the so-called pandemic, were hailed as heroes who kept the grocery shelves stocked..Trudeau and Fauci lied because their words referred to contingencies, to facts that did not exist. The curious thing about contingencies is things might always have been different, which is why liars always think their lies are plausible..Consider the following story: During the 1920s, Georges Clemenceau, the French president at the end of the First World War, was asked by a representative of Weimar Germany how he thought historians would answer the question of who was guilty for the outbreak of the war. Unfamiliar with the possibility of re-writing (and not just re-interpreting) history, he said: “This I do not know. But I do know for sure that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” For Clemenceau it was simply a fact on the night of Aug. 4, 1914, German troops crossed the Belgian border. And it's still is a fact..The kind of lies we're dealing with are not like state secrets or misleading diplomatic obfuscations. What is at stake is factual reality itself, which is inherently a political problem. Facts refer to events and to circumstances that always involve other people, what they saw, and what they said about what they saw..The old saying, “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts,” assumes facts can inform opinions, which in turn may differ. But the facts are not in dispute. The problem raised by Fauci and Trudeau is they assume facts can be disputed just like opinions..We've seen before the problem of not just ignoring facts, but of destroying them and replacing them with fictions. In 1938, when Stalin published his History of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union, the name Trotsky, belonging to the man who in fact founded and led the Red Army during the civil war, did not appear. That “omission” told Trotsky he was under a death sentence. Sure enough, a year later, on Stalin’s orders, Frank Jacson buried a pickaxe in his head. Lies always contain an element of violence..Now ask yourself: how much violence would it have taken to destroy the fact Germany invaded Belgium?.We've seen this problem before as well. Stalin also described the wealthy peasants or kulaks as a “dying class.” They were dying because Stalin had ordered their systematic murder. When the last kulak died, the class was dead. His description was both a prediction and a re-writing of history..Again ask yourself: what would it take for the truckers to be turned into misogynists and racists? Or for ordinary Canadians to swallow the notion, in Trudeau’s words, his “job as prime minister was to keep people alive, and keep people safe, and keep democracy going,” whether Canadians “choose to believer that’s what I’m doing or not?” A little coercion should do the trick..We're not dealing with the narcissism of juveniles who cannot admit their errors, though such a characterization applies both to Trudeau and Fauci. Rather it's evidence of a higher mendacity where both put themselves in a place where they cannot distinguish truth and falsehood..Accordingly, they cannot admit error because they never make errors. Neither has a thought about the world as it is; both live their lives as characters in their own fictions where the possibility of comparing their lies with reality never occurs..The significance of the lies of Trudeau and Fauci is not they aspire to the kind of tyranny exercised by Stalin, but Canadians (and Americans, too) may grow indifferent to such lies because they've become indifferent to truth. In other words, the problem is not we might actually believe Trudeau or Fauci, but the distinction between fact and fiction, reality and lies, might no longer matter..That possibility constitutes a major political problem because a refusal to distinguish facts and lies means we lose any means of navigating the real world. In reality, we cannot change the past; pretending we can, will deprive us all of whatever stability exists in human affairs..The proper attitude towards such liars as these is not anger, but contempt.
