Search ICH

America’s massive effort to distort and suppress truth

By Paul Edwards

May 30, 2023: Information Clearing House -- Humans love legends. They’re in thrall to them. It’s universal. Human societies, in all their diversity and distinctions, are ruled, in their deepest fundamental beliefs and convictions, by myths, a term formal and less current than the common word legends, but with the same meaning. The dictionary defines both as “any invented story, idea, or concept”, “any imaginary or fictitious thing or person”, and “any collective belief that is accepted uncritically”, that is, without a factual basis.

This follows naturally, inevitably, from the custom that children everywhere are raised on stories, tales, and fantasies with no grounding in actuality. It is the function of such tales, not to reproduce realities of the world but rather, by stimulating their imaginations, to excite, amuse, and beguile children, and make their moral impact through drama and example. Our minds, so conditioned in youth, respond eagerly to legends in our maturity.

It would be difficult to say, at this stage, whether the myth of Christianity or of Capitalism has the strongest hold on humanity. What is undeniable is that both are myths that have long exerted tremendous influence over the minds of much of mankind.

Christian dogma has been far more historically and damagingly attacked as absurdity and nonsense than Capitalism’s catechism and yet, exposed and exploded as infantile myth repeatedly, over hundreds of years, it continues to hold hundreds of millions of people’s passionate loyalty; nominally, if not in actual practice.

Capitalism, being of far more recent advent, and still in its period of maximum ascendancy, has not taken the thorough shellacking Christianity has absorbed. This, despite the fact that its mythical nature is at least as blatantly, obviously absurd as that based on an imaginary God and putative Savior. It took nearly a thousand years for the egregious foolishness of Christian dogma to begin to be battered by honest intelligence, which explains the eluding by Capitalism of withering criticism that broke Christianity down.

There is a perfect example being exhibited right now of the way Capitalism’s huckster fairy tale has escaped responsible analysis in America. It is the ludicrous clown show known as “funding the government”. We are advised that unless the limit or “ceiling” of the Federal debt is raised, all manner of disastrous things will happen and, no doubt, they will, but they are all a function of the profound idiocy of our method of financing the government.

Capitalism, which has always represented only the topmost tier of the financially affluent and their banks—those premier criminal organs of chicanery and fraud—convinced politicians and courts—like a father lecturing his children—that government, while in theory it exists to benefit The People, in fact owes allegiance only to the money elite that set it up and owns it. Thus, governments under Capitalism have the double burden of being required to borrow the funds that enable them to defend entrenched wealth.

This is the most spectacular fraud in the history of crime, for it makes government directly subordinate to Capitalism. This devastating megascam was instituted long before anyone but extremely wealthy elites had any idea of what government was, or what it did so that The People believed this was the only way it had ever been or ever could be. That is, of course, utter bullshit.

The evil of this system can be better understood by comparing government to a private entity. Say you want to start a business and you need money. You take a loan from a bank. You owe a debt then and interest on the loan to be paid from your profits.

Government’s job is not to make money but, in theory, to care for its people, emphasis on in theory. Furthermore, a government is, by definition, the supreme power of the state. As a sovereign entity—viz., “having supreme rank, power and authority”—it has all the rights of a ruling organ, including inherently that of issuing money for its own maintenance. Under Capitalism, that right has been usurped from government which, though sovereign, must act as a supplicant, required to borrow money from a private entity within its complex apparatus in order to operate. In other words, government is forced to act as an enslaved cash cow for the Capitalist Tyranny that owns and controls it.

We are now being treated to a nauseating Punch and Judy show of our sleazy, money-whoring parties bashing each other over the specifics of a slimy deal to allow this grifting lunacy, rather than denouncing and dismantling the rotten, dishonest system itself.

In the old movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", there is a line, nearly always misquoted, that sums up Capitalism’s shoddy defense of its parasitic, cancerous capture of government. It is spoken by a journalist investigating the truth of the killing. More captivated by the idea of appealing to an ignorant audience than telling the truth, when asked if he is going to tell the real story, he answers, “No, Sir. This is the West. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

In regard to “funding the government”—like so much in American polity, with the craven imbecility of our dirty press, and our vilely corrupt political parties—printing the legend of Capitalism is what is always done, to our great cost as a nation. America’s massive effort to distort and suppress truth is killing even our capacity to distinguish it.

The great Johnathan Swift said, “Falsehood flies; and the Truth comes limping after.” Truth no longer even limps; it is gagged and shackled.

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

           Search Information Clearing House