Delusion Confusion—The Tortured History of Truth in America

"To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle."   --- George Orwell

 

What does an old, artsy Italian film have to tells us about truth in America? Let’s take a look.

In 1962 – a moment in time when meaning was often the defining factor in both film and literature – Italian author Georgio Bassani penned The Garden of Finzi-Continis. Turned into a movie in 1970 by director Vittorio De Sica, the story portrays the downward spiral of a wealthy Jewish family in Ferrara, Italy, caught in the encroaching, genocidal storm of Nazi fanaticism during the 1930’s.

The Continis own a fine, walled estate in the heart of the city, replete with gardens, tennis courts, and pools. There they enjoy tennis, games, and intellectual pursuits as the world around them crumbles into murderous violence. Of this, they take no notice. I saw the film as a young man and – despite my youth and the difficulty of sub-titles – clearly understood the obvious self-deception and willful evasion involved in the Continis’ downfall.

For the Continis and their friends, the story does not end well, as the agents of doom finally make their inevitable house-call. I can recall at the time shaking my head and wondering how they could have deceived themselves so completely. How could they have ignored the coming storm, obvious as it appeared to the entire movie audience – the clanging Nazi sirens just outside the walls, the escalating persecution of Jews, and so on, and so on. The story was a profound portrayal of just how individuals – and, yes, whole nations – looked the other way as the Nazis rose to power, consumed in hopeful worlds of self-delusion until it was entirely too late. The film won the Academy Award in 1972 for Best Foreign Film.

Yet truth is now, and has always been, an elusive commodity to corral. Indeed, the search for truth requires a firm commitment and tireless effort simply to catch a meager, fleeting glimpse, a glimpse that often blurs maddeningly under more rigorous inquiry. Nevertheless, with effort, the glimpses can pile-up like nuggets of gold, blessing the mind with sudden visions of clarity. Unfortunately, today in the United States the search for truth has been stifled exponentially by means of the abrupt insertion of vast fraudulent claims, launched like malicious missiles into the American narrative, all capable of momentarily bewildering even the clearest of minds.

During those same 1930’s that ultimately destroyed the Continis, Englishman Eric Arthur Blair – later writing under the pen name of George Orwell – was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. There he faced the actual fascist elements that would later consume the fictional Continis, as well as millions-upon-millions of very real human beings. A clear-eyed observer of world events, he later wrote his two most famous novels, Animal Farm, and 1984, chilling, dystopian chronicles of the frightful totalitarian obsession to control every facet of individual’s lives through instruments of physical and mental coercion.

As such, Orwell became one of the world’s preeminent authorities on totalitarianism’s fundamentally deceitful nature, thus his insights are worth revisiting. In 1984 Orwell demonstrates how authoritarians – since they can never make an honest case for their desired goals – must attack and destroy truth, replacing well-worn certainties with vast lies of their own creation. These are falsehoods so upside-down they literally turn truth on its head, insisting, for instance, that night is day or that up is down. Like this classic slogan from 1984:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

For decades now in the United States, a strange consensus has formed that authoritarian attitudes, pogroms, and regimes are, and have always been, a product of the political right. It is now accepted fact that the Nazi jackboots of WWII were, in fact, the ultimate result of extreme rightwing worldviews long on the march across Europe. Almost like a formula in physics, conservative policies are now presumed to lead invariably to political repression, along with the prisons and death squads ultimately required to implement their goals.

But let us briefly interrupt this program for a moment of truth: Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were both socialists – indeed Nazi is merely an acronym for National Socialist German Workers Party (NationalsoZlalistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) – and fascism was, is, and has always been, a product of the political left. Mussolini was a communist before converting to socialism – a switch he made for political convenience – and, as a socialist, Hitler detested liberal, democratic governance. These are historical facts anyone can verify.

Today’s American left, however – just as with its Jim Crow Laws, implementation of eugenics, repression of black Americans, etc., etc. – has successfully imprisoned its early infatuation with both Stalin and Hitler within the dark closet of its authoritarian past. Interestingly, it was Hitler’s socialist henchman, Joseph Goebbels who once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Big lies have been the preferred instrument of the political left for almost a century now, and today in the United States they are being wielded like clubs.

Fascism, exported to South America in the 1920’s and 30’s, caused a reign of terror across that continent for decades. Today, most totalitarian regimes in the world are communist (far left), all of which have gained (and maintained) power through thuggery, intimidation, and violence, often of historic proportions. Indeed, violence and intimidation are methods of predatory conquest straight-out of the communist playbook, and today those techniques are on open and obvious display for anyone willing to see them.

While the communist playbook is chock-full of deceptive and thuggish techniques, the predatory kickoff for any left-wing campaign always begins the same. Orwell explains: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Attack history, delegitimize the past, deconstruct, then reconstruct language, condemn historical leaders to oblivion without the slightest consideration of fact. Sound familiar?

For fifty years now, the working text for this mayhem has been Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, published in 1972. For example, rule # 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.” Almost like a Voodoo curse, many American politicians have feared having this rule hung around their necks like a cowbell for decades, hence they refuse to confront the falsehoods. Caught in a whirlwind of delusion confusion, they race-off and hide under rocks as soon as the finger of ridicule is pointed toward them, leaving their constituents to fend for themselves.

Or rule # 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions, people hurt faster than institutions.” So, people, or corporations, or simple pizza shops are targeted, vilified, forced into either compromise or destruction. Those looking for the source of today’s “cancel culture” need look no further.

But this moralistic savagery (yes, an oxymoron) of the cancel culture demonstrates something critical for our polarized times, which is that today’s left suffers from a case of delusion confusion just as significant as did the Continis in the 1930’s: that is, a profound, seemingly willful, avoidance of important truths. The left’s deliberate, bizarre reconfiguration of American history into a sort of dystopian narrative of racial oppression is such an obvious bag of hot air – at least for those who know anything about true history – that it is eventually bound to blow apart from its own internal contradictions.

Never a Republican or Democratic, self-described progressive or conservative myself, I have watched this bizarre, irrational phenomenon devolve for decades now and – just as with the Continis – I suspect it will not end well. Aldous Huxley, a friend and contemporary of George Orwell’s, once wrote, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” which means that truth, like gravity, will ultimately have its way. But, of course, that day of reckoning will not occur before a great deal of human carnage has been inflicted by those who have married themselves to this deceitful mirage.

This is by no means to ignore slavery and its effects, or the violence that sometimes erupts from the extreme right, or in any way to discount the very real racial strife that has plagued this nation since its inception. But facts, not hysteria, is the only lens through which history can be sensibly viewed.

Huxley also wrote, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all lessons that history has to teach.” Sadly, we are reminded nightly of this truth as we stare at our television screens in befuddled silence. New Jacobins condemn the past, trendy Bolsheviks shout old Marxist slogan’s, while Mercedes Benz driving Maoists prepare to wipe-out centuries of learning, literature, art, and fact, eager to replace all of it with their own, fictional dogmas.

Of course, we have seen and heard much the same posturing and rhetoric for years now without it making much of a ruffle in our lives. But lately something far more ominous has reared its ugly head. On June 12, 2020, the City of Seattle hosted a training session for white employees only, advertised as “Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.”

According to internal documents, this training session was little more than an opportunity for “diversity trainers” to hector employees, solely on the color of their skin. “In order to be considered ‘accomplices,’ White employees must give up ‘comfort,’ ‘guaranteed physical safety,’ ‘expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,’ ‘control over other people and over the land,’ and ‘relationships with some other white people.’”

This perverse, inhumane bullying went on for 2 ½ hours, a routine that was obviously not about training, but intimidation. Lastly, the employees were provided a chart that cataloged the characteristics of “Internalized Racial Oppression” for which they were urged to constantly examine their souls for the slightest hint or heartbeat. I list these characteristics below, and for those still unclear as to the willful deceit and inversion of truth totalitarians traffic in, I have taken the time to connect the dots.

...perfectionism, individualism, imposition, arrogance paternalism, silence, intellectualization, control, violence comfort, appropriation, cognitive dissonance, objectivity and anti-blackness...

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Hint: When someone tells you it’s time to stop thinking critically about what they are telling you, then it’s time to start thinking critically about what they are telling you.

If this were no more than one city having lost its mind, it would be sad, but not unnerving. Unfortunately, this is part of a widening pattern, perhaps the most flagrant example of an entire movement gone nuts, and not in an amusing way. We would be horrified, but not be surprised, to learn that the German Jewish population had been subjected to this sort of “training” in 1936 by elements of the Gestapo. But the incident mentioned above did not happen in 1936 Berlin. No, it happened on June 12, 2020 in the United States of America. Racial stereotyping of any stripe is unjust, but stereotyping this ignorant, this deceitful, this unabashedly racist, is in a class by itself, and may soon be coming to a theater near you – or worse, your child’s school.

For some Americans unfamiliar with history, this assault on “whiteness” has been momentarily accepted as a new, breathtaking insight into the deepest aspects of their subconscious. Some seek books or counseling such that they might discover and hopefully squeeze or purge or even exorcise this invisible darkness from the microscopic elements of their DNA where, we’ve been told, it apparently resides. But they’re being played, of course. In fact, the image, oft repeated, of screaming white youths hurling insults and profanities at professional black police officers, lecturing them about racism in America, is so absurd, so utterly revealing, it tells us everything we really need to know.

Indeed, many of these same, decent Americans, who today are dutifully scanning the sonar screens of their inner-lives for the faintest, submerged blip of racial animus, might be infuriated to learn that today’s “revolutionary” attacks upon “whiteness” they’ve been fed, have been lifted directly from the Nazi denunciations of “Jewishness” during the 1930’s. It is the same, vile madness that destroyed Europe 80 years ago, simply repackaged.

American author Jonah Goldberg – who has written the seminal text on the origins, spread, and violence of fascism – writes: “The Nazis played the same games against the Jews that today’s left plays against ‘Eurocentrism,’ ‘whiteness,’ and ‘logocentrism.’ When you hear a campus radical denounce ‘white logic or ‘male logic,’ she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced ‘Jewish logic’ and the ‘Hebrew disease.’” Goldberg sums up the left’s attack on whiteness: “The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.”

Meanwhile, whole American sports leagues, university and public school administrators, governmental officials too numerous to count, joined by an entire phalanx of corporate giants, are today quite visibly posturing, tapping their collective toes in unison, moralizing over slavery that occurred hundreds of years ago, while somehow unaware of the slavery that actually produces their products, or exists in the burgeoning markets they so love – today. If moral hypocrisy were electricity, the United States could light the world for the next six centuries. I have a suggestion: These frauds should jettison the Stars and Stripes and run-up a new flag over their cities, stadiums, schools, and corporate offices – a massive, green dollar bill, should do – so they can all collectively bow in reverence to their one true god, and spare us the farce of their sanctimony.

Truth is the foundational element for mental, intellectual, and spiritual well-being. Unfortunately, truth is under assault as never before, but fortunately there is a remedy. The cure for lies is – and has always been – the truth, and those gallant people willing to stand-up and embrace it. Even Goebbels understood its overwhelming influence when he admitted, “The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie,” thus, as Orwell explained: “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

As for me, these days I go to bed most nights still comfortable I am sleeping in the United States of America, yet nervously fearful that one day – perhaps in the not too distant future – I will awake in the Garden of Finzi-Continis. As I said before, I have seen the movie, and it does not end well.

 

Jim Stempel is the author of numerous articles and nine books on American history, spirituality, and warfare. His newest book regarding the American Revolution – Valley Forge to Monmouth: Six Transformative Months of the American Revolution – will be released this fall. For a full preview, pricing, and pre-publication reviews, click here:  Or, visit his website for all his books, reviews, articles, biography, and interviews.

"Delusion Confusion -- The Tortured History of Truth in America" © 2020, Jim Stempel

Comments

[Jon Metes]

Thaank you. You have excellent insight and your historical perspective is precise. Incidentally, when Mussolini left the Socialist Party he did so only because the Party wanted to keep Italy out of the War, whearas he thought it personally advantageous to join the war and thereby share in the spoils thereafter.

re your quote of Goebbels: other sources put it as "If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it, and you will come to believe it yourself." Sounds like a good description of those who start off peddling much of today's nonsense.

[A Facebook User]

Could not have said it better if I wrote it myself.You hit the head of a pin bullseye!