The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘A Society of Emasculated Liars’

Posted on | March 30, 2020 | 1 Comment

In his 2001 book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, the British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple observed:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

One must actively resist the propaganda of political correctness or else you become complicit in it and compromised by it. This morning, I decided to turn the TV to MSNBC and watch Morning Joe, which offers an example, in the person of Joe Scarborough, of what happens to people who become part of such propaganda machines. There was a time — and it wasn’t really that long ago — when Morning Joe was not a Democratic Party propaganda operation, but the Obama years took their toll on Scarborough and he became just another operative. Something similar can be observed in the cases of Jennifer Rubin and Robert Costa at the Washington Post. There are some organizations with which no honest person would ever wish to be associated, and the Washington Post is such an organization. But I digress . . .

What called my attention to the above quote from Theodore Dalrymple was that it was quoted in the comments on my latest column:

As late as March 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio was still telling New York City residents to carry on life as normal: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.” Two days earlier, Italy had announced a national lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, and cases were already beginning to appear in New York, but de Blasio did not close the city’s schools until March 15.
Now that New York City has become the epicenter of this pandemic — more than 32,000 cases as of Sunday, with nearly 700 deaths — Mayor de Blasio’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak appears astonishingly irresponsible. Jim Geraghty of National Review has compiled a timeline of how New York City officials dealt with the crisis, and their recklessness seems mind-boggling in hindsight. Early on, their main concern was that the virus might discourage city residents from attending Chinese New Year celebrations. “I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about #coronavirus,” the city’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a Feb. 9 tweet, promoting festivities in Chinatown. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

Comments

One Response to “‘A Society of Emasculated Liars’”

  1. COVID-19 and de Blasio’s NYC | 357 Magnum
    March 30th, 2020 @ 12:31 pm

    […] tip to Robert Stacy McCain at both The Other McCain and American Spectator, who […]