TELL THE TRUTH AND SHAME THE DEVIL

A look at honesty

Tell the truth and shame the devil … one of my late mother’s favourite mantras. She held truth to be almost as important as loving her deity was to her, and the God that she loved with such devotion helped her as a widow bringing up two lads (me and my brother) during the difficult post-war years.

And if you stand in a court of law to give evidence you must swear to tell the truth. After all, what use would a pack of lies be if the matter being judged has any importance at all? In fact, whenever we humans interact with each other it is a zillion times more satisfactory if we can believe what the rest of the crowd says because it is the truth.

My problem, though, is not with most of my fellow man/woman. After all, if I tell my wife something it is always the truth unless I come out with a ridiculous lie which she knows has nothing whatsoever to do with the real world because it’s our way of being rather silly, and the same applies the other way round. No, my problem is with those who, for some reason, have power over us and deliberately abuse that power.

When I was a little tacker at Junior school I had a small notebook into which I squeezed as many facts as I could, mostly about fascinating stuff like space and the planets. It was a subject I was addicted to, and if I learned something, even the most trivial of facts, I wrote it down, until a day came when a bomb fell onto my world and I wrote down a lie. It wasn’t my lie, but my teacher’s, and in all fairness it was about the relative sizes of the Earth, the moon and the sun, which must have been a strain on her own awareness of relative sizes. But she got it wrong. It was a bomb and I slavishly copied it down, falsely believing by her misunderstanding that the sun is a hundred times bigger than the Earth. It isn’t. It’s much larger than that, and numbers were important to me back then!

She hadn’t intended to lie, but she hadn’t either checked her facts or explained, for the benefit of at least one embryonic nerd, that the actual quantities she quoted weren’t meant to be taken literally but as an example of big versus small. So she is belatedly forgiven.

But forgiveness isn’t something I’d willingly offer to politicians who lie. In recent years there was the American president Trump, who gained quite a reputation for recreating reality in such a way that it pleased him, and he was widely mocked for it around the world. We in the UK complacently said it couldn’t happen here, and then it did. We managed somehow to promote a masterful liar into the highest position in the land, a man who, without blushing lets falsehood after falsehood spill from his mouth, giving each one of them the sort of emphasis they don’t deserve.

If that’s all he did (and by using the word all I’m not trying to belittle his offences) it would bt tolerable. But it isn’t. Bit by bit he’s created a situation in which just about anything he says might well be a lie spoken with absurd conviction. And this leads to a strange kind of reality.

If we can’t believe one thing that he says then we find that we doubt everything. If his promise to build forty new hospitals, for example, turns out to be a downright lie, then what of his pronouncements, during a pandemic, of other matters pertaining to health?

If he says one thing about a vaccine might it be no more than a Johnsonism, or gross misrepresentation of the truth?

If he says the anti-covid vaccine is a life-saver, then what if it isn’t? What could he be covering up by such a pronouncement?

Is that why he’s had so many press briefings put on prime-time telly?

Maybe that’s why there’s an army of doubters out there. People who think the mass vaccination effort is just another lie put about by a proven liar.

So if a man or woman refuses to have the vaccine because of that, because they’ve been told by a liar that it’s a good thing, and then, still protesting, they sadly die of the wretched disease because they’ve unfortunately caught it, what then?

Do we blame the liar because very few people believe his words even though he has great power in the land? Maybe because we think it’s safer for us to not do as he smirkingly suggests?

But men and women have refused the vaccine, and then died because of their interpretation of his message.

Is he guilty, therefore, of manslaughter? Or is it murder?

© Peter Rogerson 27.07.21

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Reviews

[SweetNutmeg]

Used to be, if a reporter presented something that was not factual, they were FIRED. Now they do all this "fact checking." Do your fact checking before publishing or broadcasting. It's called journalism. But they do this because a million retractions and corrections fade, while the initial lie retains its power. So they pretend to be sorry and correct their "mistakes" knowing it's the lie that will stick with people. When I say "they" I am referring to Fox News and its ilk, Trump, and now apparently your Johnson. You have my condolences. I know what it's like to have a liar in the highest office of the land. Do you know, there are still people who believe Trump will somehow magically be restored to office? And he is still collecting money from his dupes. Ugh. Lying grifter and criminal.

Let's take comfort that in the UK, a trump is a loud fart, and in the US a johnson is slang for penis.

[Peter Rogerson]

I can't agree more with what you say. Over here it's not Fox news but sadly other more respected broadcasters like the BBC are tending to do as the Government says, and we're trapped in a circle of lies, half-truths and very few real truths get reported.