This is a three part post about what man believes in when he has abandoned God.
It is about the myths taken as true - about our society, and in particular, about the worship of the world wars.
I think this belief system dangerous, as it replaces the truth with make belief.
These fantasies legitimise the process of dehumanisation and destruction that is “forever war”, which has ruined our nations.
I will use the work of David Irving in this series, as well as that of Peter Hitchens, to show that what is believed about the World Wars is little more than a fairytale.
To explain what replaced it, I again make use of the work of Irving Kristol, whose essays I commend to the reader.
FOREWORD
One surprising aspect of modern life is how much of it is based on myths.
In this post I will examine some of the foundational fantasies which are often invoked but seldom explained in defence of the politics of national suicide.
The present cannot be justified without the myths of the past.
Yet the myths by which men live are dying young.
Their distance from the facts is a dangerous departure.
The world to which they applied has vanished - itself a figment, and no more than a century old.
Why does this matter? Myths have a social and political function.
They not only shape the attitudes of the population, but also indicate what men will believe in when they abandon God.
To many people what I am about to say would be heresy.
In fact, it is far more shocking to most people to question the great myths of the 20th century than it is to commit formal heresy itself.
The loss of God led to a jamboree of new totems - and taboos. Here are a few of them.
CONTENTS
Part One - Dying Young - The Myths of the West
Freedom
Moral Superiority
The Process of Popularising War
Mass Media - Worse than Nothing?
Part Two - “World War Two Was My Religion”
The Myth of World War Two
David Irving’s History as Heresy
Peter Hitchens and the Church of Churchill
Part Three - Propaganda in the Present Day
Forever World War Two
Past Excuses
Masked Historical Grievance
FREEDOM
The idea of freedom is taken to be foundational to the West. What does this mean in practice?
Liberal democracies are in practice ruled by propaganda in the absence of overt force.
The system to direct this was set up a century ago. The first visionaries of advertising or public relations - which they themselves called “propaganda” at the time - were involved not only in persuading the United States to enter the “European War”, but also in founding and supervising the Council on Foreign Relations.
In brief, this body largely decides what is to be said in the Western media.
Recent revelations have shown the remarkable degree to which Western media is controlled by its intelligence agencies.
This includes print journalism, television and the large online search engines and social media platforms.
As scepticism mounts over the desirability of the policies of Liberal governments, efforts to censor and criminalise dissent are accelerating in the West.
What has produced this vertiginous decline is the doctrine of permanent war arising from the policy of regime change.
If you would like to know more about how regime change has driven the decline of the West, corrupted democracy and weaponised the “woke” agenda, see here:
MORAL SUPERIORITY
The distance between the act and the fact-checked “fact” is obvious in many cases. “Safe and effective” is one example. “Russia is losing” is another, and the continued abstention from UN resolutions calling for an end to genocide by Israel is a third.
Liberal democracies are in the business of death. That is, the death of their home nations by policy, and of populations in practice.
The emergence of atrocity propaganda in the First World War is one fount of the foundational myth of Western moral superiority.
A system which promotes the sterilisation of children and the presence of obviously deranged sexual perverts in nurseries has no serious claim to the moral high ground.
The claim rests on the depiction of the enemy at the time as barbaric. What won was the Liberal idea. We inhabit the ruins of its victory.
The power of atrocity propaganda lies in the appetite of the public for a compelling reason to fight foreign wars.
One British Museum historian says that accounts from the time uphold the claim that governments fabricated atrocities to shape public opinion in support of war.
This was most pronounced in the United States, which did not enter the First European War until the summer of 1917.
The Committee on Public Information was created in April 1917 by then President Woodrow Wilson. It employed 75 000 “four minute men” who would deliver brief sensational speeches to tens of millions of Americans nationwide.
Audiences would hear of how Germans mutilated babies and women. This contributed the successful draft of June 1917, which resulted in 10 000 US soldiers arriving per day on the Western Front in the Spring of 1918.
The US mobilised 4.7 million men and lost over 116 000 dead in the war, with over 200 000 wounded1.
The CPI was discredited for its system of total propaganda, with even Walter Lippman amongst its critics. Its methods were developed with the help of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who would go on to write “Propaganda” (1928), “Public Relations” (1945), and “The Engineering of Consent” (1955).
Together with Lippmann, a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, his work would shape the means of managing democracy through the mass production of belief that has governed the West ever since.
For more on Bernays, see part three of my series on 20th Century Propaganda, “Capturing the Western Eye” - here
These techniques have been constantly refined to this day.
A report published in 1940 by the Council on Foreign Relations credits the CPI with creating
"the most efficient engine of war propaganda which the world had ever seen", producing a "revolutionary change" in public attitude toward US participation in WWI
THE PROCESS OF POPULARISING WAR
Germany was demonised, with the most popular account of its barbarism beginning with a historical analysis of the savagery of the Huns.
With talk of Russian “Orcs” commonplace, it is easy to spot the parallels today. Yoav Gallant described his eagerness to kill the “human animals” in Gaza.
This is not to say Germany, Russia or Hamas are innocent.
It is to note the pattern.
The pattern is
The public demand a compelling reason to unleash the hell of war
This reason is supplied by propaganda
This propaganda demonises the new enemy
It supplies “evidence” of the enemy’s barbarism
…and it works every time
Some barbarism is undoubtedly committed. That is normal in war, and killing is part of the business of government generally.
What is of interest here is that actual barbarism is insufficient to the motives of power and to the appetites of men. Something more sensational is needed.
The broader lesson of the hunger for purpose is provided in the efficacy of propaganda, which cannot work without complicity.
Why then do people freely believe in it?
Modern man is so desperate for meaning and for a moral purpose that he will believe in anything to get them.
He knows it is fake. He does not care. He wants to believe.
To believe in the dehumanising propaganda which barbarises the enemy requires an appetite. Where war is necessary there is no need to manufacture hatred. The process is helped along by the absence of meaning at the centre of modern man, who privately suspects his own moral deficiency.
At the root of the belief in this sort of propaganda is self doubt. To support it is to affirm oneself.
This is done because men must believe in something, even if that something turns to out be nothing. Or worse.
WORSE THAN NOTHING
Julian Assange is undergoing a show trial as he enters his twelfth year of miserable incarceration.
He said that our media was so bad it would perhaps be better if it did not exist at all, remarking:
“Practically all the wars of the last 50 years were made possible by media lies”
I would argue he was generous, and that number could be doubled.
Assange will most likely die in prison for his heresies.
In part two I will examine the religion of world war. With a revisionist view of its central figure, Winston Churchill, I will show how this compensation fantasy functions to popularise permanent war.
American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, Congressional Research Service, June 2020.
This is one of the major themes of my book "Our Country Then and Now." The crimes of the mass media are legion. COVID is among the worst. We are looking at a massive death cult.
I think the world that educated them, allowed them to succesful middle class people, was one they trusted and they still think exists. The BBC etc are still referenced in arguements. I have refained from arguing too strongly to date as they are nice bunch and i am still the new boy.