Category Archives: Death of Truth

The Monsters of Unreason

Critical thinking, Death of Truth, Vaccines

 

The Spanish painter Goya labelled one of his paintings with this caption: “The Sleep of Reason brings forth monsters.” I think that is a profound statement that is deeply true. That has become extremely important during the pandemic. It is my belief that in the United States in particular, but including many other countries, it has become painfully obvious that reason has gone to sleep and we have had to suffer the consequences.  We don’t have to look any further than the refusal to use vaccines by millions of people even after the scientific evidence and real-world evidence made it overwhelming clear, that the best chance we had to combat Covid-19 was to take the vaccines. There were no good reasons not to take vaccines in almost all cases. Yet people resisted.  Why was that?

 

I have been talking about the sleep of reason since my second post in this blog. That was long before the pandemic. I was concerned that many people, particularly in the United States, have forsaken evidence-based decisions making, critical reasoning, and thinking obsolete in favor of faith, hunches, feelings, instincts, and ultimately conspiracy theories. It seemed people prefer living in FantasyLand to the real boring world of truth and facts.  Some call this a “post truth world” as it seemed people no longer cared about truth. I believed this was a dangerous development.

 

I have been amazed that it could happen in the United States home to the finest universities and scientists in the world. How could this have happened? In previous posts I have tried to explain why I think this happened. This was a pandemic of unreason long before anyone heard of Covid-19.  Since then, this disease has been delivered to us in high-def and there are no vaccines to save us or mitigate the harms. We just have to suffer. And we are suffering from the monsters of unreason.

Those monsters of unreason are still lurking and are more dangerous than ever

The best Defense is our Mind

Authoritarianism, Books, Critical thinking, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Fascism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

When the capacity to think is destroyed, as it seems to have done in the United States, we must realize we have entered very dangerous waters filled with dangerous predators and we have no defenses. For example, in the wars of Yugoslavia people were driven by demagogues to attack their former friends and neighbours for the vital goal of ethnic cleansing. Sort of what Trump has done by claiming that illegal immigrants have poisoned the blood of the country.  We must always remember, as Carol Off makes clear in her book At a Loss for Words, that

 

“words are freighted with ideas. They carry meaning but also hide it. They inspire great acts of kindness and incite people to kill. We live in a moment…where we need to pay very close attention to the language around us—and the language we use—because it holds the secrets of what might be coming.”

 

 

We must always remember as Voltaire told us, “If someone can make you believe an absurdity, he can make you commit an atrocity.” If Trump can make you believe that the 2020 election was stolen against all the amazing amount of evidence to the contrary, he probably would be able to persuade you to attack immigrants with your bare hands. That is what might be coming.

 

Similarly, when Trump persuaded his followers that the rioters on January 6th were engaged in a love in, we must understand that his oratory was important. His words were important. As Carol Off explained,

 

“The January 6 insurrection provoked by the oratory of Donald Trump demonstrated the connection between words and actions and revealed the darkest qualities of this threat: that the language that Trump and his supporters shared is coded. Everyone in the crowd knew what the outgoing president meant when he told the mob that they needed to “save America” and “fight like hell,” just like …that Serbian politician meant when he said that Christians and Muslims could no longer share the same space. What we saw in Bosnia during the war, in the UK during Brexit, and in the United States during Trump’s speeches is the power of demagogues to speak to people in the language of fear, uncertainty, and anger using rhetoric to break down our trust in our governments, our societies, and each other. Our only defence is language that’s clear, rational and unambiguous.”[2]

 

I would summarize these thoughts as follows: our only defence is our ability to think critically. If we lose that we are sunk.

 

+2 + 2 = 5

American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Death of Truth, Fascism, Populism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

I had a surreal experience yesterday. First, I went for a walk in our new Events Centre in Steinbach. While I walked on the track, I listened to a podcast  on the topic of George Orwell and a film made about him by Raol Peck. who was interviewed on the podcast.

The podcast was very interesting, because George Orwell was very interesting. Orwell was a brilliant thinker and critic of totalitarianisms of both the left and the right. Peck had recently made a film about George Orwell and he called it 2 + 2 = 5. The title of the podcast is based on a scene where Winston was asked questions by his interrogator.  He was asked ‘what is 2 + 2 equal to?”  Winston replied, ‘4.”  The interrogator then asked what if the Big Boss says 2 + 2 =5? What would say? I would say ‘2 +2=4.’ Then he was promptly zapped with an electric shock. He was zapped often enough that he begged to say, 2 + 2 = 5.  That is how totalitarianism works. You believe what you are told to believe. At least, you profess to believe. The more absurd the belief you are persuaded to believe, the better. The Bigger the lie the better, as Adolf Hitler pointed out.

 

When I got home after my walk, I sat down and watched CNN news on TV  about a male  nurse being shot and killed in Minneapolis.  I was pooped and thought I was not hearing things right. I was hearing things right.

 

I.C.E. officers in Minneapolis in search presumably of dangerous illegal immigrants,  shot and killed a young man who was an American citizen and not an illegal immigrant. He was not the worst of the worst as Trump said they were after. He was a nurse in a Vet’s hospital.

 

The  male nurse had watched as I.C.E. officers were assaulting a woman and he, unwisely, but bravely, stepped in to help the woman. There were a large number of witnesses watching what happened. Many taped in on their phones. The I.C.E. agents repeatedly pushed the woman  and man back and then down to the ground. Presumably they were interfering with the officers arresting someone. Perhaps they just did not like being taped at work.

When the nurse, by the name of Pretti, stepped in the I.C.E. officers immediately transferred their attention to Pretti. Pretti was repeatedly shoved to the ground. The officers were extremely rough and belligerent. The men piled on top of Pretti. Really there was nothing that he could do. The agents were on top of him and he was pinned down. One of the agents then could be seen leaving the edge of the melee with what was clearly a gun in his hand. They had relieved Pretti of his gun.

 

Later I.C.E. officials claimed he had walked towards the agents with a gun. technically, that was true. He did have a loaded gun in his back pocket or pants but he never pulled it out. The only thing he waved around was his phone/camera.  Later we learned Pretti had a permit for the gun so was carrying it legally, and, as members of the American right-wing constantly remind us it is lawful for citizens to do so, even to protect themselves from government law enforcement official such as the I.C.E agents.

 

There was no sign of belligerence on the part of Pretti; only on the part of the officers.  About  one second later, after the gun was removed by the agent, a shot could be heard. It turned out one of the agents  shot Pretti while he was unarmed and pinned to the ground surrounded by burly masked I.C.E. agents. Pretti was already disarmed of his lawful weapon, when someone shot him.

As if that was not enough, within seconds there was a barrage of more shots by I.C.E. agents. CNN counted 9 further shots. All 10 shots were fired  after I.C.E. agents  had removed Pretti’s gun and there was no risk of harm to them. There was no need to shoot him once. Let alone 10 times. He was already totally disarmed.

 

All of this was highly disconcerting, but what happened next was even more disconcerting. Within hours Kristi Noem, the Secretary of  Homeland Security, the top position in the department, made a rushed statement saying Pretti had walked up to the agents aggressively with a gun.  In no time at all she figured out it was all his fault. Shortly after that, a few other senior members of the department quickly made other statements assuring us that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who intended to harm the I.C.E. agents. No evidence of this was offered. We were told by department officials that he was a terrorist and the I.C.E agents who shot Pretti did so as a “defensive shooting.”

 

In other words, just as George Orwell had predicted 75 years ago, we were being told that “2 + 2 = 5”.

 

Here is what people learn when they are not allowed to believe that 2 + 2 =4: “War is Peace.”  “Freedom is slavery.” “Ignorance is strength.”

 

Orwell taught us about it 75 years ago and we did not listen. We did not think it was possible. Well now we know. It is not just possible. It is here and now.

As Orwell also said,

 

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful. And murder respectable ”

We don’t have to fear it. It is here staring us in the face Right now. From the TV set you and I have been watching. Here and Now. 2 + 2 = 5.

Autocratic Leaders take advantage of our weaknesses

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Critical thinking, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Fascism, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Populist, Machiavellian, and autocratic leaders have learned to take advantage of our natural (evolved) biases against us.  Goodman used the example of Andrew Tate in England to illustrate his point. I would use leaders with autocratic tendencies instead, like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. And of course, it seems to me, that the young people, being even more impressionable than the older people, seem to be most attracted to such strong man leaders.  Perhaps they are more impressionable, or perhaps, even more likely, they are the most unhappy with themselves.  In modern society, young people are starting to realize that their parent’s generation has screwed them by rigging the rules of society against them. It is no accident that this current generation, for the first time in history, is likely to live less well off than financially than their parents.

 

Strongmen, like Trump, are masters at using deceit and manipulation to create absurd trust in their abilities, against all evidence to the contrary, and then use that ability to propel themselves into positions of authority where they can use that authority to improve their own financial position at the expense of those who supported them. It’s a nasty trick if you can get away with it, and none is better at it than Donald Trump. Trump has done it many times and continues to do it as his supporters don’t seem to notice or don’t seem to care.

 

One of the techniques that strongmen in the past have used to gain influence over the populace include attacking science and knowledge. Hitler did it. Stalin did. And now Trump is doing it. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia they quickly attacked the scientific community with claims that they were merely, “bourgeois” scientists who were acting on behalf of their financial supporters and then replaced them with more compliant and ideologically pure scientists. This is precisely what Trump has done by attacking woke scientists.

 

We must be careful to avoid allowing this to happen. As Jonathan Goodman said in his Guardian article,

 

“Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education.

 

And finally, when reigns of terror end – and eventually, they always do – it is critical to learn and absorb the lessons. That way, we inoculate ourselves afresh against our natural tendency to trust the untrustworthy, carrying that wisdom forward into the future so that we’re better able to stymie the autocrats who seek to close our minds.

 

The best tool we can muster to defend ourselves from such attacks is our ability to think critically. We must cherish and protect that skill, as it is our most powerful weapon of self-defence. This is always our most powerful tool. When we give it up we submit to arbitrary and ruthless authority. That is why autocrats are so quick to attack it because that makes us defenceless to their attacks.

 

Love of Country in Bulgaria, Canada, or the United States

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Abuse of Power, Bulgaria, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Social Justice, Truth Seeking

It was at the University of Toronto that Lilia Topouzova and her colleagues Julian Shehirian and Krasmira Butsova, recreated spaces from a Bulgarian home and turned them into an immersive audio installation where Concentration camp survivors’ voices and their silences could live on. Their installation is called The Neighbors. It was the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale. That showed that Bulgaria was now dealing with this issue, after decades of silence. We heard small snippets from the audio in the CBC Ideas radio show. In the autumn of 2023 it had its North American debut in a small room on the campus of the University of Toronto.

The room is based on 20 years of research that Topouzova and her eventual interviews with survivors. The original project was done in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Julian Chakurian, was a partner in the project. She is a historian in training doing a PhD in the history of science at Princeton university and also is a multimedia artist with an interest in archives and expositions of what she called “wayward histories.” Too many stories have been lost. Gone for good.

This is what she said about her recordings of the survivors:

 “Based on the oral histories that I recorded, there were three categories of Camp Survivor narratives. There were the narratives of the people who had always told their story. There were very few of them, but these are the kind of practiced narrators. That was one way of remembering the Gulag. The second way of remembering the Gulag were people who still had memories of their experiences, but they had never told them before. Some people had never shared their story, because usually nobody asked them, but they remembered everything, and they usually had chronicles of their experiences, little notes that they had taken down.    And the third category, and that is the most painful category, is of those who couldn’t speak. There was no language. There were no words.”

 

This was a very disturbing description of the survivors in this last category.  One can only imagine the suffering that spawned their condition. As a result, this is what the 3 researchers did:

 

“I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. Based on these three categories that emerged from the oral histories from the scholarly research, we decided to recreate three different rooms to illustrate the different ways of remembering trauma.”

 

Again, I want to bring this into the modern political arena even though that might be uncomfortable to some privileged Canadians or Americans or their offspring. Imposed silence is definitely not golden.  Nor should the survivors be maliciously misrepresented as people who are maligning their country, as Donald Trump and the Trumpsters are doing in American with their American descendants of enslaved people, and indigenous people. Or women who experienced sexual assaults or violence or systemic racism in that country. Or Canada. Or members of the LGBTQ community,  who have suffered systemic injustice and discrimination for decades. It is a horrible defamation of their suffering by  a privileged sector of their society who call them haters of their country. And again, we have similar men in our country as well. Men who want to hide the truth. We even have women who want to hide the truth.

 

Try to bring the truth out of darkness into light is not an act of hate against one’s country. Trying to get your country to recognize what happened there and admit that is an act of love. That is not hate. If you want to hide the truth of what happened in your country from its people, or others,  that is an act of hate. If you love your country you would never do that.

 

The Sounds of their Silent Memories: Lilia Topouzova

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Bulgaria, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Truth Seeking

During the Communist era in Bulgaria from 1946 to 1989 there was little room for political dissent. Protesters, anyone who opposed the government, could be arrested, sent to the Gulag, and silenced. Silence was often the point.  The powerful members of the Communist party brooked no public dissent in order to preserve their authority. They wanted silence. They demanded silence. And some of the victims, even after the regime was dismantled, had nothing left to offer other than silence. It was if they had lost the capacity to speak.

 

This really proved the truth of what the  Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera once said:

 

 

The CBC radio show Ideas, described the work of Lilia Topouzova this way:

 

For 20 years, Lilia Topouzova has been collecting the stories of those who survived: some had many stories, some had little to say, some had nothing to say — or just no way of saying it. From these eloquent stories she has recreated a Bulgarian room from the Communist era, where her meetings and conversations with survivors can be heard, a space about the absence of memory and what that does to a people, a space to bear witness to those who were sent to the camps, but who were everyone’s friends, relatives and neighbours. The installation The Neighbours is the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale.|

Bulgaria has at long last come to own the history of Bulgaria. As a filmmaker, Lilia naturally employs sounds to tell her stories, but this was difficult because many of the survivors did not want to be heard or seen, and neither did the new regime in Bulgaria.  How then to tell their story respectfully?  That was the challenge of her and her team.  She concluded that “this story was fundamentally about sound, about whispers, about hesitation, and the sound of a room where someone simply cannot speak. “She has spent more than two decades studying the Bulgarian Gulag, excavating a history that has been deliberately silenced.”

 

Obviously, that was a very difficult task.  Bringing this story up to our times, it is a stark reminder, that when the forces of darkness try to muzzle the truth, or hide the truth, or even, destroy the truth, as many are doing around the world, even in the United States, much to our current surprise, we must all realize that if those dark forces are allowed to be successful any later job of restoration will be extremely difficult. Whether in Bulgaria, the United States or Canada, for that reason, we must be vigilant to resist those powers of darkness, even if it is challenging.

 

As the CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed said, “Lilia is fascinated by what lives inside silence.”  By that she meant inside both the silence of survivors and the authorities. The victims often came to visit Topouzova, but then did not speak. They kept silent, because it was uncomfortable for them to speak about the horrors they had experienced.  Sometimes they came to see her with their files but could not speak.

 

I was struck by the similarities to what survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools said. They too were often reluctant to speak. Who can blame them? Dredging up painful incidents and practices is never easy. Sometimes silence seems like the only bearable response. We must respect those survivors who are brave enough and strong enough to speak, for only by hearing those words can the rest of us learn about what happened. And we need to learn what happened so that we never let it happen again. We must cherish those who are able to speak, for the benefits they bestow upon us.

 

Topouzova said,

 

“They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence.”

 

It is hardly surprising, under such circumstances, how difficult it is to bring to the light such horrible events. The camps were truly chambers of horror. Consequently, Topouzova said this about the camps,

“Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So, I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

In some cases it took years for victims to speak. That’s how horrible the experience was. We must be grateful to them for sharing.

 

Silence is not Golden

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Modern History, Truth Seeking

 

 

This island in the Danube River was benign. Other islands were not that.

Right in the middle of the Danube River, on an idyllic island the main Bulgarian concentration camp was located. That island was called Belene  and it was the main forced labour camp of  a network of concentration camps in Bulgaria  that now is largely ignored by the current government, even though it is no longer a communist government. That struck me as odd. Why the silence?

 

No one mentioned it to me on our cruise either. No one mentioned it on any of our excursions. It was as if it never happened.

 

According to Lillia Topouzova, “Very clearly the [Bulgarian Interior ] minister said, Belene should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system.”

 

No one wanted to be reminded what happened there. Even the victims were not keen on bringing up painful memories. At least, at first. Topouzova on the other hand, was very interested in the silence of both oppressors and oppressed and everyone else in between. She respected the silence of the victims. And she was very patient. As she said,

 

“There was no language. There were no words. I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. And the silence of those who lived near the camps, but learned to never acknowledge their existence. They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence. Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

It was hardly surprising that I had never heard of the Bulgarian Gulag. It was no accident. It was deliberately kept a secret supposedly to protect the Bulgarian society’s reputation, but really to protect the reputations of the powerful. Now I really want to see them. I knew we would sail very close to the island where one of the main camps was located.

 

But Lilia Topouzova, and her two fellow researchers, were determined to ferret out the truth and bring what really happened into the light of day, but only if that met with the approval of the victims she interviewed. She worked very hard to respect their wishes.

 

It took her 20 years to amass the story. That was the sound of silence. And it was not golden, but it was fruitful.

 

America Can’t be Great if America is Stupid

Death of Truth, reason, The Sleep of Reason, The War on Smart

 

America has been the center of knowledge and thinking and frankly, brains, for a long time. What Americans have done is astonishing and ought to be celebrated.  But what it is now doing is cause for deep concern. America seems bent on destroying what it has built up and has no one to blame but itself.

 

Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times and a professor at an elite University, namely, Duke University. Now in some circles that is about equivalent to saying Bruni is a child molester. What could be worse?

 

That is how the Trumpsters feel about such a person. They don’t like smart. They prefer dumb. Bruni pointed out that,

 

“But Trump doesn’t seem to get that. Doesn’t want to get that. Gets only that the wonky and effete denizens of the world of ideas aren’t his people, aren’t guaranteed supporters, don’t lavishly praise him and sometimes dare to disparage him. They need their comeuppance, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else.”

 

 

Bruni justifiably criticizes Trump for that, but he seems to think this is all Trump’s fault. The sad fact is the happy Trumpsters by and large feel the same about such smarts as Trump does.

 

Bruni pointed out validly that for decades, at least 60 years if not more, America has been known around the world for the quality of its universities. They are not perfect, they at times slip into anti-semitism, though not as often or as consistently as Trump claims nor his supporters. American universities have been a driving force in the steep rise in quality of economic life during this time. And that has given The US an incredible global economic advantage over its rivals. As Bruni said,

 

“Among our most significant competitive advantages are our scientists, our laboratories, our system of higher education. They’re a kind of superpower, their output an engine of our wealth — of frontier-expanding technology, medical breakthroughs and production innovations that enrich companies as they improve lives.”

 

No one should try to claim that they can’t be improved, but frankly to defund our scientists and universities is about as stupid as defunding the police would be.

 

The most important thing is not to cherish ignorance. Both the left and the right can do better.

The only thing we have that resembles a super power is our smarts.

As Frank Bruni said: “America can’t be great if America is stupid.”