Moral Authority of Lies (Olavo de Carvalho)

Moral Authority of Lies
For decades, communist and Islamic regimes practiced mass torture of political prisoners, using methods ranging from straitjackets and electric shocks to mutilation and death. The vast majority of leftist intellectuals and the fashionable media (starting, among us, with Folha de São Paulo, in the U.S. with The New York Times, in England with the BBC) not only omitted denunciations of these crimes, at least with some emphasis, but in most cases worked to minimize them and even conceal them entirely.
However, the mere news that American soldiers shouted at captured Iraqi terrorists, forced them to wear panties on their heads as humiliation, or made them listen to heavy metal CDs unleashed a giant wave of protests sweeping the planet, shouting against “torture” and presenting themselves with airs of the noblest appeal to humanity’s highest feelings.
It is precisely the most cynical and brutal who most easily don the mantle of moral authority, impressing with grimaces of remorse and dignity in which only the dull part of the audience fails to recognize the pretense, the histrionic mimicry, the crocodile tears.
It is no surprise that the supreme model of virtues worshiped by these people is Noam Chomsky, a monster of mendacity capable of praising the Pol Pot regime at the height of the systematic slaughter of two million civilians and immediately afterward accusing his own country of Nazi genocide over macabre deeds incomparably more modest carried out, moreover, not even by the U.S. itself, but by a remote ally, Indonesia (he insists on this in a recent article in the English magazine Prospect).
The perverse criteria established by the Chomskys in the international media, where they at least face some opposition, are slavishly copied by Brazilian newspapers, where practically no one challenges them. With exceptions that become all the more honorable because they can be counted on the fingers, journalism in Brazil is leftist militancy and nothing more. Leftist militancy subsidized by cowardly, irresponsible, opportunistic businessmen. Above all uncultured, incapable of informing themselves by their own means and therefore dependent on leftist gurus to whom they surrender total power over their newsrooms, they treat them with servile devotion and pay indecently high salaries.
Under these conditions, no criterion of journalistic honesty survives.
Argemiro Ferreira, the Globonews correspondent in New York, has the immense audacity to deny that there is an organized effort to eradicate Christianity from American culture, attributing the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” on Walmart, Target, and other store signs to innocent marketing considerations, when in fact this substitution responded to growing pressures exerted by the ACLU and other anti-religious organizations for more than five decades. He is so satisfied with his own ignorance that he even writes that evolutionists “do not veto the biblical theory or intelligent design, but think it should be taught in religion class, not science.” Well paid to live in the U.S. and be informed about what happens there, he does not even know that religion classes do not exist in American public schools. And after that, he still feels comfortable calling Fox News commentator John Gibson a “semi-illiterate,” who compared to him is Isaac Newton.
Alberto Dines, as I commented last week, proclaims that the Catholic right dominates the newspapers, but when challenged by Diogo Mainardi to name a Catholic potentate reigning over any newsroom, he cannot find a single one. Mainardi, in response, mentioned dozens of communo-PT members in high media positions. How does Dines react now? Does he confess defeat? Not at all. He accuses his opponent of engaging in “McCarthyist persecution” of the media lords, as if the numerical disproportion between the lone Mainardi and the multitude who hate him were not enough to show who is the persecutor and who is the persecuted.
The surrender of newsrooms to the guidance of these enlightened ones explains why daily newspaper circulation remains roughly the same as in the 1950s, while the country’s population has doubled, illiteracy has been practically eradicated, and the number of business and specialized magazines has nearly multiplied by one hundred. TV, of course, has other attractions, including sexual exploitation, and thrives on them. But newspapers cannot survive the ideologically selective concealment of news.
Wonderful World
Two tips you won’t find in any Brazilian newspaper:
1. Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general who is voluntarily defending Saddam Hussein, was lawyer for the communist government of North Vietnam at the time it was torturing American prisoners en masse. He also later worked for the Ayatollahs’ dictatorship in Iran and organized a campaign in favor of Slobodan Milosevic. Salon magazine published his biography titled “Ramsey Clark, the best friend of war criminals.” The NGO he founded, International Action Center, is composed almost entirely of members of the Workers World Party, Marxist-Leninist.
2. Canada has just become a paradise for pedophiles. The minimum age for a child to be invited, without crime, to participate in any sexual activity, including sadomasochism, was lowered to 14 years. Pay attention: the worldwide legalization of pedophilia is on the program of millionaire NGOs and will become reality within a decade. The movie praising Alfred Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson, is already pure psychological preparation of the masses to accept this without complaint. Kinsey’s research was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which imposed it as scientific truth on the entire university establishment. Today it is known that Kinsey was a practicing pedophile who abused even newborns and subsidized “field research” done by a Nazi war criminal whom he hired to have sexual relations with boys and then describe their reactions. It was also discovered that his descriptions of American sexual behavior were not based on research with ordinary people but with child molesters and rapists, later falsely presented as faithful portraits of the normal average citizen. In short, Kinsey was a monster, a dangerous psychopath. After all these discoveries, never seriously contested, making a movie glorifying him is obviously a desensitization strategy.
Affirmative Presumption
In O Globo newspaper of the 24th, Letícia Sardas, a judge at the Court of Justice of the State of Rio de Janeiro, attributes to judges the function of “transforming rights” through “affirmative actions” and thus “rewriting the history of the human being, placing new questions according to our experience and sensibility.”
This lady is old enough to know that “transforming rights,” just like instituting and revoking them, is the function of legislators elected by the people and not of any public official who arrogates that function to herself.
Likewise, “placing new questions according to our experience and sensibility,” to the extent that rights may be born, perish, expanded, or restricted through that discussion, is also the responsibility of the elected Parliament. Judges’ task begins precisely when that discussion has ended.
Public servants who promise to eliminate social injustices were Robespierre and Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. Brazil has not gone that far, but it already has Letícia Sardas.
There is no greater inequality than that of the public official who invests themselves with the authority to define at their own whim their own function, their own powers, and their own rights, while all other officials and citizens must adhere to what the law prescribes. For example, if journalists, in a fit of group self-worship similar to that in which certain judges become intoxicated, were to decree that the function of journalism is not to report what happened yesterday but to “rewrite history according to our experience and sensibility” (and I have no doubt many do precisely that), the population would immediately realize they were dealing with ambitious charlatans. Why should the criterion be different for judges who suddenly decide to create and revoke rights as if they were legislators?
Cultural Wars
“The secret is in the very nature of power,” said René Guénon. Whoever ignores this rule today is doomed to serve as a blind and docile instrument for the realization of political plans of enormous scope that remain totally invisible and inaccessible to them. This is particularly true in the case of the so-called “cultural wars,” whose movements, subtle and extremely long-term, escape the perception not only of the masses but of nearly all political, economic, and military elites. Everyone suffers their impact and is profoundly altered during the process, including in their most intimate and personal reactions, but they generally attribute this effect to the spontaneity of the historical process or to a fatality inherent in the nature of things, without the slightest idea that even this reaction was calculated and produced beforehand by strategic planners.
The idea of having been used unconsciously by someone smarter is so humiliating that each instinctively rejects it indignantly, without noticing that the refusal to see the strings that move them makes them even more easily manipulated.
The fear of being ridiculed as gullible is a powerful stimulant of political naivety, and in the cultural war the exploitation of this fear has become one of the most widespread rhetorical procedures, erecting a wall of prejudices and conditioned reflexes against the perception of realities that would otherwise be obvious and patent.
A long tradition of urban legends around “conspiracy theories” has also helped to cement this reaction. The cultural war is obviously not a “conspiracy,” but the subtlety of its operations, bordering on invisibility, causes the confused impression produced by the concept in those who hear about it for the first time to be exactly that, almost inevitably producing the kind of response that could be called naïve suspicion or rustic disbelief.
Another difficulty is that the weapons used in the cultural war are, by definition, an almost monopolistic property of the class of intellectuals and scholars, escaping not only the understanding but also the interests of the common citizen, even of the elite, not involved in complex studies of literary and cultural history, philosophy, linguistics, semiology, rhetorical art, psychology, and even sociology of art. Throughout the National Congress, at the leadership of large companies, and in military commands, one will not find half a dozen bearers of the knowledge required for the understanding of the concept, much less for the concrete perception of the cultural war operations. Especially in Third World countries, the formation of the governing elites is massively concentrated in studies of economics, administration, law, political science, and diplomacy. For these individuals, letters and arts are, at best, an elegant ornament, a playful complement to the “heavyweight” activities of politics, military life, and the economy. Their weekend incursions into theaters and concerts may fuel interesting conversations, but will never give them that comprehensive vision of the cultural universe without which the very idea of an organized and controlled action over the entire culture of a country (or even more, several countries) would be unthinkable. In fact, for these people, it is unthinkable. Culture appears to them as the autonomous and uncontrollable flourishing of “tendencies,” of creative impulses, of multitudinous inspirations that express the “common sense,” the fund of opinions and feelings shared by all, the spontaneous and “natural” view of reality. That, for the cultural war strategist, “common sense” is a social product like any other, subject to being molded and altered by the organized action of a militant elite; that feelings and reactions which for the common citizen constitute the most personal expression of their inner freedom are for the social planner only mechanical copies of collective molds that he himself fabricated; that the overall direction of cultural transformations is not the expression of the spontaneous desires of the community but the calculated effect of plans conceived by an intellectual elite unknown to most of the population — all this seems at the same time an insult to their freedom of conscience and an attack on the order of the world as they conceive it. But this reaction is profoundly out of step with the historical time. The essential characteristic of our era is precisely planned cultural transformation, and whoever is not able to perceive it will be deprived of the possibility of offering a conscious reaction: no matter how much money they have in their pocket or how high a position they occupy in the political, legal, or military hierarchy, they will be reduced to the condition of “manipulable mass” in the most contemptible sense of the term. The dream of the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century — an entire society at the mercy of the plans of the “enlightened” elite — became achievable two centuries later thanks to three factors: the expansion of university education, creating a mass of intellectuals without defined functions in society and ready to be recruited for militant tasks; the progress of communication means, which allows reaching entire populations from a few broadcasting centers; and the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of some oligarchic groups imbued with messianic ambitions. I will explain more about this in the next articles.