Lies, and the Lying Commies Who Promote Them

Instapundit today notes an interesting thought.

ERIC SCHEIE ON JAMIL HUSSEIN: "I soon noticed that there's a downside to debunking fraudulent people or claims. The people who make them up -- and most of those who agree with them -- simply don't care. Because the characters and claims are invented to support what they already believe fervently, debunking them does not 'count.' Lies presented in furtherance of a greater 'truth' are not really considered to be lies, at least not in the moral sense. The idea is to persuade people, and if fictional people or incidents have to be used, that's OK, as long as it's in the interest of the greater truth. The problem I have with this approach is that I don't like being lied to."

The problem that Glenn (Instapundit) is really having is that he doesn't understand that the Big Lie is precisely the point and that the left doesn't regard their lies as lies.

The link provided above, which takes you to the Classical Values website, discusses at length the vicious "defense" by leftist Eric Boehlert, of the AP's phony Iraq stories, discussed for weeks, at least, in the conservative blogosphere but rarely if ever in the MSM. Schie further observes:

Boehlert's approach is to minimize the seriousness of the fictional character and reports, and mount ad hominem style ideological attacks against those who debunked them. While the debunkers' primary crime is simply that they are "warbloggers" whose pro-war ideology is wrong, he also misleadingly splices selected fragments from quotes (whether this is "Dowdifying" or Issikoffing I'm not sure) to make JunkYardBlog's SeeDubya and the Anchoress look like heinous opponents of free speech. What they actually said -- along with the context -- are as unimportant to Boehlert as whether or not Jamil Hussein exists. As Boehlert concludes, it is only the larger truth matters...

These are great observations, and true to the mark, and Schie's whole piece in Classical Values is well worth reading. But again, amazingly, neither Instapundit nor Schie note the obvious answer to their puzzlement because they are amazingly unaware of the obvious. Boehlert, AP, and all the other leftists in the MSM who refuse to pull their phony stories or recant their lies are operating right out of the old, unabridged Stalinist propaganda playbook, as updated by Antonio Gramsci, and have been doing so with remarkable effectiveness for years.

The short description of their approach: When caught in a falsehood, lie, get your leftist friends on board to amplify that lie, get the MSM on board to trumpet the lie, and, when the cacophony is at its loudest, get your entire team organized into a massive chorus that continually broadcasts a vicious and neverending stream of ad hominem attacks on the character of your opponent. The end result: that the Stalinists don't have to address theie lies, and another truth-teller is removed from the public conversation by being tarred with convenient epithet, like "racist" (always a favor, but "fascist" will do) whatever the context.

For a Communist, and most particularly a Stalinist—and Uncle Joe appears to be the main influence on writers such as Boehlert—there is no such thing as objective truth. Truth is subjective and is defined only by the Party. If the Party has not stamped its imprimatur on a "truth," it is therefore transformed into a lie.

Thus, evidence, logic, and reason have no standing, and the circular logic of the perpetual dialectic seizes hold. The actual truth is transformed into a lie, while the Party's Big Lie becomes the truth, what "everybody knows." There can be no objective proof, and thus, no objective truth. "Truth" thus becomes a malleable, protean concept, a mere, shapeshifting convenience to be defined at will during what, on the surface, appears to be an intellectual argument. This repackaged lie, which is now the universally accepted truth is used as convenient building block by the Party apparatus as it builds its alternative mythology which somehow becomes the "real world." As defined by them.

It could be argued somewhat convincingly that there isn't much of a Party apparatus left in the U.S. today. However, one must wonder where all the Party discipline we are seeing whenever the left promotes its Lie of the Day—one must wonder where it's coming from. Has the hard left somehow figured out how to create pod people by planting propaganda genes into the bodies of those who inhabit the left, thus rendering the never-ending lying and ad hominem attacks upon perceived enemies an autonomic rather than a reasoned response?

We sometimes wish our friends in the right-wing and libertarian blogosphere would link here a bit more often. The core point they continue to miss is painfully obvious to us: the hard-wiring of the left to their Stalinist heritage. That is very often what we deal with here at HazZzMat. Indeed, it's our mission. And the earlier and more often our conservative friends would point out the left's propaganda techniques, the closer we'd come to winning the culture war: a war that conservatives want to win. But the right remains supremely handicapped. Essentially creatures of logic, they never perceiving the nature of its core or its essence.