Dear Friends,
It seems to me, lest anyone believe too much what the media or government claims, all one needs to do is open an encyclopedia from the 1930’s, and read what it says about the Soviet Union under Stalin. People have far too much faith in what we are told by the unbiased media and government. We accept the stories as gospel, and are told to disbelieve gospel, thinking and acting wrongly as a result. We should read all that is available on a subject… especially that which we don’t agree with, else our perception becomes narrower and we ourselves become more and more ignorant, regardless of how enlightened we consider ourselves. The times in which we live are too perilous to be willfully ignorant.
Any encyclopedia you open, from the 1930’s, will have a glowing account of the wonders of communism under Stalin. I have a copy from 1940. It goes on and on about the rights of the people living under communism. It claims poverty is eliminated in the USSR. While history shows us, at the same time, the people of the Ukraine were being systematically starved to death. Untold human suffering was brought about by Stalin. In addition to the millions who had food stolen from them, food they had grown, there were purges that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths by firing squad, hanging, and torture. History shows how very very wrong those encyclopedias were.
Despite the fact that many knew about the atrocities of the communists at the time, these fictions were written in encyclopedias and distributed to the American people as reality. Any librarian will tell you that an encyclopedia is the best of reference material. That they are subject to political ideology is not tragic, it is a statement on the veracity of those, who are the gatekeepers of information. Not a pretty statement either. That such atrocities were glossed over, by the media elite and even the writers of encyclopedias, is damming of those who promoted such fables as truth.
Truth is not subject to perspective. Truth must be objective else it is opinion. Today we are inundated with opinion that masquerades as truth. The tragic part is that real truth is more often than not, derided as opinion or conspiracy. We can see in the example of the encyclopedia that even the most reliable sources of information are subject to political calculation. Opinions that are portrayed as truth, are a fallacy that we must realize as such, or we will be subject to acting on lies… to our own and our children’s detriment.
When we have only lies, opinion and falsification to base our decisions on, we are not really making informed decisions… we are being manipulated. People who manipulate, never do it for the benefit of those who are manipulated, but for their own egoistic self aggrandizement, to garner wealth or to seize power. Not one of those reasons are human hearted. The thoughtful individual has to be very careful of what we believe, and what we disbelieve, but to be a rational maximizer we must not discount information, we are told by the elite media, is conspiracy. They have been caught so many times fabricating lies and portraying them as truth they cannot be believed at all. Look at CBS, creating from whole cloth lies about George Bush’s military record, reporting it days before an election and claiming them as reality, when nothing could be further from the truth.
The wise man and woman believes everything and nothing. It is critical to understand the nature of men and mankind to know truth. When a news story claims that people are behaving in a way that is not consistent with history, human nature or logic, the rational human being has to weigh that information carefully, else he or she is subject to manipulation. We must understand that truth is not perspective dependent it is objective, perspective is subject to personal bias, bigotry and self interest. Our media is never unbiased and those who claim that mantel are lying to our faces… and they know it. To believe a liar is to be willfully ignorant and therefore makes us subject to acting against our self interest. That there is even one example of reference material that promotes a false narrative, shows us that even the most reliable sources must be evaluated and checked against historic norms, the teller’s biases and our own rational self interest. To understand is to be catholic in our reading and critical in our acceptance. To do otherwise makes us a tool of the elite, and human beings are NOT tools, we are ends in and of ourselves.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
