RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s recent, perfectly entitled book: The Truth is No Defense, she recounts how her life as an Austrian woman was turned upside down because she accurately articulated things that Islam deems permissible and virtuous. Including child marriage. As per Mohammed’s example.

For her trouble, she was subject to burdensome litigation that wound its way up to Europe’s highest court. And she lost. Although what she communicated was true – factually correct – the court ruled that expressing some truths may be hurtful, and therefore must be disallowed due to the overriding need to protect the feelings of Muslims.

That Muslim authorities themselves defend child marriage (and other unflattering practices) as something beyond reproach and therefore by definition not hurtful is a massive inconsistency worthy of further exploration another time.

For now, I wish to stress that Suppressio Veri – suppression of the truth – was literally a court order.  Not only because properly functioning courts are specifically meant to venerate the truth and rule against its disregard either by acts of commission or omission. But because it strikes me that, more broadly, Suppressio Veri is quite simply the order of the day – the defining characteristic of our era, along with its correlate Suggestio Falsi – the insinuation of an untruth.

Suppressio Veri most certainly is the lifeblood of the Left. Examples abound so that they can hardly be enumerated. The transgender falsehood is almost too obvious to mention. Yet we have a man named Richard calling himself Rachel serving as the Assistant Secretary for Health for the HHS, and no one bats an eye. Everyone pretends – as if at the point of a sword – that this is real.

It was brought to my attention that a recent champion of the popular show Jeopardy! was a man calling himself Amy. Sure enough, new host Ken Jennings always cheerfully referred to him as her. As if that were true. Could he do otherwise? How interesting it is to ponder that however educated or however successful one may be, acknowledging obvious truths can remain too tall of an order.

I also happened to notice how the Jeopardy! hosts are still “social distancing” from the contestants. After all this time, they don’t greet one another cordially in close proximity as they always used to.  In case we’ve not yet acclimated ourselves to the “new normal”, they are still reinforcing the false suggestion that anyone within a few feet may be a biohazard.

Indeed, the Suppressio Veri, Suggestio Falsi dynamic utterly dominated the last couple years, functioning as the centerpiece of all the corona hysteria and propaganda. It was the operating manual of our public health officials and media counterparts; they pushed falsehood and suppressed the truth at every turn – for our own good, naturally.

It’s not as if the authorities were just a little bit wrong – that they were sincerely operating “out of an abundance of caution”, while earnestly applying sound public health principles to mitigate a bona fide, impending peril. It became obvious early on that concern for the most vulnerable and the general public alike was an absolute sham. It wasn’t just the fiascos at nursing homes; the whole response was rotten to the core.

They suppressed effective and inexpensive treatments. By lying; by saying there is no evidence for them, even as they were proving dramatically effective in real time in other countries. Countless souls could have and should have been provided such remedies. But that couldn’t be allowed – otherwise, there would be no need for a vaccine. For everyone on earth!

The entire concept of vaccinating against a coronavirus – known for its tendency to mutate – was highly unwise, especially while it was already circulating among populations. This was known at the time – as was the fact that no vaccine has ever been successfully developed to neutralize a coronavirus.

Yet everything revolved around this absolutely exclusive “solution”. The lockdowns themselves sure seemed oriented towards the imperative to get everyone vaccinated. All while foreseeable, wide-ranging harms from quarantining the healthy were dismissed out of hand. Never before has the entire healthy population been subjected to such confinement; furthermore, quarantines of the infectious are only supposed to last a limited time – such forty days, which the term itself specifies.

It hardly seems likely that mere incompetence could explain this inflexible, boneheaded “strategy”; willful disregard for the well-being of others (which can go hand in hand with the obvious profit motive), I hate to say, seems far more likely.

We now know that the relevant regulatory agencies (e.g. FDA) and public health authorities (e.g. CDC) overlooked deceitful, fraudulent practices by the Pharmaceuticals; that the injections have caused massive harm with no detectable benefit; that any responsible authority would pull these “vaccines” and lift any hint of mandates or other inane, despotic restrictions that have hounded us the past couple years.

The atrocious behavior of the relevant health authorities, who dispensed with basic, obvious truths and the very principles of their profession, must be emphasized. It’s as if the fire department poured gasoline upon a modest brushfire while forbidding access to available water supplies that would help put it out – and insisted they were just following the “pyrotechnic science”. Then castigated anyone who questioned such a harmful tactic.

The undeniable fact is that great and mounting harms have been inflicted by the preordained requirement that unproven injections be administered to the masses. Are the figures of life insurance companies, actuaries, and funeral service providers that point to exceptionally high mortality rates (from all causes, and notably in the younger, working age cohort) following the vaccine mandate a fabrication? Just a “coincidence” – like the glaring uptick in the numbers of those reporting disabilities?

Yet the media takes no interest in these catastrophic outcomes (or their impact on supply chains or labor shortages), and public health authorities don’t concede their obvious errors. However extensive or long lasting these “adverse events” prove to be, we can already safely say that a great number of people who shouldn’t ordinarily be dropping or injured are tragically dropping and injured.  And they can’t let go of the lies.

That says it all.

One of the worst parts about the mask mandates – aside from the desecration of ordinary interpersonal interaction – is that they sought to force everyone to participate in lies (Solzhenitsyn would not approve!), and simultaneously convey lies to others. The lies being that there was a fatal new threat to the entire human population, and that masks would curtail that threat. Further, if you do not submit to those lies, another lie was added: everyone drawing breath and bestriding the earth as they always had was now a public nuisance – even a selfish killer.

Along the way, a series of highly influential words were surreptitiously redefined, such as vaccine, pandemic, case. Their meanings “officially” changed to contradict their original signification, so none of those things were actually still what most people thought they were.

Even “tests” no longer were what people figured they were. The PCR test, which facilitated the entire charade, was utterly useless in detecting an active pathogen. But it was indispensably useful in perpetuating an ever-expanding aura of crisis. Which is why it was so aggressively deployed.

The disastrous measures imposed on most of the globe could not have occurred without manufacturing fear and manipulating language. As the philosopher Josef Pieper noted in his highly pertinent book Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power, the Sophists (whom Plato decried) corrupted the meaning of words – and did so with a purpose, just like today’s public health authorities and mass media. Their concern is with “verbal artistry” that can be wielded as an instrument of control to achieve certain ends rather than with reality or the truth itself.

This is not mere abstraction, but actually has a highly interpersonal significance. Words are intended to depict reality intelligibly, and to convey that reality to another person.  So manipulative language is in no way relational, like any respectful dialogue between persons – but is instead a “monologue”. It is “the opposite of communication”  – and its intent is nothing less than to “prevent the other’s participation in reality.”

Here we grasp the inherent abusiveness of manipulative language – its absolute disrespect for other human beings. Why would anyone want to deprive others of participating in reality if not to wield power over them? And isn’t that – being forbidden to engage real life – precisely what we have endured with the lockdowns and other inhumane restrictions, one of whose main byproducts has been the severing of interpersonal bonds.

That so many people, near and dear and faraway alike, succumbed to the lockdown lies has been unsettling. It may be understandable, human nature being what it is; we are perennially susceptible to the pull of propaganda and peer pressure. Even still, it reflects just how detached from the truth we have collectively become, which is ultimately a spiritual matter.

Funny how everyone claims to care about respecting others, but few are clamoring for greater respect for the truth to be restored.