The unwonted hysteria over Chinese pandemic permitting, I shall be talking at the Percy French Summer School in Castlecoote later this month. This year’s subject is Truth, and to judge from previous years, the only way you’ll have of learning about what’s being said there is by your presence. Even though last year it was the only summer-school in the entire island, the mainstream media – which usually rejoice at the easy copy that results from summer schools, since these begin just as most news-making events in society go into summer recess – boycotted it. Quite simply, RTE and The Irish Times – both bound by charter to tell the truth, while being inveterate and unashamed opponents of it – will not want to give publicity to anything involving Declan Ganley or me.
I told a friend – a good, intelligent and usually open-minded woman – about Declan Ganley’s superb talk last year, and she let out a little shriek: “Isn’t he connected with the Russian mafia?”
And there you have the power of an Official, RTE-Endorsed Untruth, which, though costing RTE a small fortune in a settlement with Declan for an utterly vile and baseless defamation, nonetheless has lodged in that curiously selective organ, the Dublin 4 memory. Once RTE has defamed you, you stay defamed, no matter what the station says later in terms of apologies and retractions. No RTE careers were ended or damaged within that licence-subsidised, broadcasting-sewer for proclaiming the lies that Declan was a gangster involved in murder. Nor did any careers suffer for the deliberate falsehood uttered on Morning Ireland four years ago that I was a Holocaust denier, or a parallel falsehood published that same week in The Irish Times that I had ‘denigrated women as dull, mediocre, workshy wasters and shriekers and men as the pitiful victims of feminazi justice’.
These are just some examples of the culture of studied-falsehood that now dominates Irish public life, which has its apotheosis in the entire Sinn Fein-IRA programme. When politics is about lies, who else is going to win but the political party with the biggest and most plausible lies? Sfira is run by the IRA army council. It takes orders from that council, which in turn has undeclared but loyal agents at decision-making level throughout Irish life.
The organisation that wins a lying contest doesn’t learn to become a liar: lies are in its conception, its birth, its infancy and its DNA.
But this is not just an Irish phenomenon but simply an Irish dialect of a global lingua franca of deceit and falsehood. We live in a world dominated by social media, where big lies stick because the systemic falsehoods issued under the banner of political correctness go undiagnosed, unchecked and unstopped.
Moreover, the EU is a Rhenish confection based on lies. The first and foundational lie is that it is morally serious. It is not, and never has been. It is an undefended marketplace, of the kind that all conquering tyrants love. We saw this in Bosnia nearly thirty years ago, when the EU dithered and dallied until the lead was taken by Bill Clinton, perhaps the most cowardly and unprincipled occupant of the White House at that point in its history. We saw this again with the downing by the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade of the Russian Federation of the Air Malaysia MH 117 and the murder of 211 EU citizens (along with 87 others).
This was not merely a war-crime; it was a casus belli, which not merely the EU shirked, so too did a man who managed to outdo Clinton for cowardice, Barak Obama.
We saw this with Merkel’s admission of some two million migrants from North Africa without consulting any of her EU neighbours and her attempt to negotiate a separate energy deal for Germany with Russia (which simply shouldn’t be possible under EU law, but since her stooge is EU President, the utterly impossible is now entirely probable).
These lies are in part made possible by the bribes that are the EU’s bloodstream: the tax-free boodle that cascades down all its operational sluices, enriching all its participants – politicians, bureaucrats and most of all journalists, the most gullible, most compliant, most corruptible of all human species. I learned this decades ago in the journalists’ “canteen” in Brussels, where a superb lunch was literally half the price of that in a good restaurant. This is before the untaxed EU “allowances” kick-in, which can transform even the most improbable of species, an honest hack, into an unprincipled servile serpent: a eurotoad.
The wash of lies in which the EU subsists means that truth is impossible to ascertain: thus an unprincipled anti-EU liar like Boris Johnson twenty years was able to prosper on the journalistic confections he was peddled out of Brussels. His falsehoods were probably no more egregious and outrageous than those other lies being peddled insidiously and invisibly by his colleagues. So what was a newspaper-reader to do when he or she had no way of knowing what or was not EU or anti-EU propaganda lies? How does a poor soul know the difference?
In this culture of strategic deception, Johnson’s fellow sleaze-merchant Clinton got away with his lies his adultery with Monica Lewinsky just feet away from his wife, who, having tolerated this public humiliation, thought she should therefore become the President of the USA. If she could endure that deeply personal degradation without walking out of the marriage, what would Putin have to do to irritate her? Nuke New Hampshire?
Before her much-deserved electoral defeat in 2016, we had eight years of Obama, whose lies about illegal immigration and whose conciliation of the Silicon Valley Complex alienated half of America and prepared the way for yet another pathological liar named Trump. I don’t know if the words attributed to Putin are true, but they sound right: “Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon. It knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game.”
I’m sure Trump did sometimes tell the truth, but whenever he did it was invisible within his braggadocio, his inability to complete a sentence unless it was already scripted for him, and his irresistible compulsion to lie both badly and provably.
Meanwhile, Europe managed to find the most incompetent German Defence Minister since the Defenestration of Prague and turned her into its unelected President. In as much as I understand these things – true, not much at all – she is virtually as now unsackable as she was originally unelectable. She is now the voice of the EU opposing the twin tyrannies of Putin and Xi: and who has she for an ally but that presidential embodiment of senile dementia, Joe what’s-his-name. He promised to solve the Mexican border problems with lies (though he’s probably forgotten what they were) and his term in the White House (that’s the name of the place you live, Joe) is now mired in a calamity, wrapped in a catastrophe inside a disaster, with a Harris Presidency a mere heartbeat, a straitjacket or a padded cell away.
That’s it. That’s what now defends the western, Christian Caucasian value system: the Biden-von der Leyen-Merkel-Johnson axis. Is there even one of them to whom you would entrust the management of an unruly kindergarten? We expect the enemies of democracy – the PuXis of this world – to be ruthless, focussed and psychopathic; but we do not expect our defenders to have the morality of a shoplifter and the world-view of Connemara turf-cutter.
One might argue that this is a long way from a summer-school in Roscommon; but it is not. Truth, as an ascertainable, scientifically verifiable, empirically measurable and psychologically reassuring entity, is seldom present in our lives, and whenever we find it – difficult enough at the best of times – we should cherish it. Far more common, indeed a ubiquitous presence and a medium through we must daily swim, is untruth. This has been the case since the serpent lied to Eve, and Peter lied to Jesus, Bonaparte lied to the Assembly and Lenin lied to the world.
But today, it is different: we are drowning in a Sargasso of untruth. It is a universal norm, from the IRA’s plans for Ireland to the Irish media coverage of Chinese pandemic, from the Russian confrontation with Ukraine to Biden’s policies towards Latin America, from China’s strategies towards Hong Kong and Japan to Turkey’s imperial project across Asia. Truth is not now hidden in the general discourse like a golden lode deep within an otherwise tawdry ore. It is simply not there. It has been abolished, not least within social media, which cherish untruth, revere malicious mendacity, celebrate malevolent falsehood and rejoice in lies.
You may no longer confidently hear or read the truth in the mainstream media: but you will be able to enjoy it in full if uncomfortable measure at the Percy French Summer school at Castlecoote, Roscommon on July 21-23. Join us please.
See info@percyfrench.ie