In his novel “1984,” George Orwell wrote of a nation called Oceania where objective facts (facts based on provable evidence) and objective reality no longer existed.
Before they could murder 6 million Jews and million of other people in their gas chambers, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew he first had to murder objective facts. It began with burning books and attacks on people who resisted book burning. Goebbels masterfully promoted conspiracy theories and "alternative facts."
Foreshadowing the modern marketing man, he understood that people could believe big lies. The important thing is to aggressively keep repeating the lie over and over and over. In time the lie is perceived as "fact."
In “1984,” Orwell called the government department responsible for this "The Ministry of Truth." Winston Smith, the book's main character, works there. His job is to rewrite history. At the edge of his desk is an opening called the "memory hole" into which he drops documents bearing objective facts to be burned.
Though very imperfectly, America has tried to follow the path of objective facts, both scientifically and socially. When we have been successful at doing so America truly has been great.
We have had our demagogues. Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy rampaged for a few years in the early 1950s, recklessly slandering many patriotic Americans before people stood up to stop him. Notable was CBS newsman and Skagit County product Edward R. Murrow, but also many others.
President Eisenhower eventually stood beside Murrow, his World War II friend from their time in Britain, to stop McCarthy, who within a few years destroyed himself with alcohol and died in disgrace. Dwight Eisenhower would not be welcome in the extremist right-wing Republican Party of 2018 nor would Theodore Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Joe McCarthy would be right at home.
McCarthy's attack dog counsel for his Senate committee was a New York attorney by the name of Roy Cohn. Like Goebbels, the venomous Cohn was an expert at bludgeoning objective facts into an unrecognizable form. After McCarthy's fall from power Cohn returned to New York where he later became the political mentor to a young Donald Trump.
When Trump's assistant Kellyanne Conway attempted to run the phrase "alternative facts" past NBC's Chuck Todd last year, he appropriately cut her off saying, "The alternative to a fact is a falsehood." Ideas like "alternative facts" and Trump's brain barf tweets come straight from the Joseph Goebbels and Roy Cohn disinformation playbook.
Vladimir Putin's job is easy. I'm sure he has a hearty and cynical laugh about it. He plants his seeds of distrust and confusion in ground that has already been well plowed, disced and heavily manured by Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Fox News and all the other post-factual, conspiracy theorist, emotion driven, extreme right wing gasbags inhabiting our modern media.
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
