A Fable Agreed Upon

“What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” ??????????????????????????Napoleon Bonaparte

There’s an interesting vignette from the Yalta Conference in 1945.

Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were having a private conversation – probably over cocktails – and Roosevelt asked Churchill: “Winston, what do you think history will say about us?”

Churchill replied without hesitation: “It will say that we were great men.”

Roosevelt asked Churchill how he could be so confident.

“Because,” the Prime Minister replied, “I intend to write that history.”

It is likely that much of history – going back to Thucydides – has been written by the victors. And certain authors and works have had a disproportionate impact on the subsequent conventional wisdom.

But today’s politicians prefer not to wait for the historians. Using what has become a state-complicit media controlled by the equivalent of corporate oligarchs, governments nowadays attempt to imprint their version of “history” on their populations as it happens.

What we used to call “history” now presents itself ?as “narrative.”

One of the things that terrifies governments about the Internet is that it permits discussion and debate capable of escaping control by the government and its surrogates in the so-called “press.” And that means that the official narrative can be cracked.

One of the reasons that Elon Musk catches so much flak is probably his purchase of Twitter. Under Musk, X (as it’s now called) is a beacon of still independent thought no longer subject to government monitoring and editing.

This drives the authoritarians crazy.

An interesting feature of the narrative process is what’s called “the memory hole.”

The memory hole is where the narrative managers dispose of real events – or facts - that they deem disruptive to the narrative. ?

Here’s how it works.

Something does happen in reality, but then it’s as if everyone has been inoculated with an amnesia vaccine. It is no longer talked about. The media cease to cover it. It’s as if it never happened.

This suits the government and Deep State just fine.

Our military fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan have already been consigned to the memory hole. Once our failure in Ukraine begins to become a bit clearer, into the hole it goes.

The coup against Joe Biden fits into this category. That he was dumped, and Ms. Harris was installed as the ‘approved” candidate for the Democrats without winning a vote is already being memory-holed by the media-driven campaign to lionize the new candidate. Forget Joe – even if he’s still supposed to be “running the country.”

See the pattern?

The recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump is another current example of this. The government wants it memory-holed. But independent citizens are doing private investigations and sharing them online…thus at least temporarily thwarting the process. And, by the way, if you’re expecting a professional, timely, and credible investigation of that event by the F.B.I., I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.

The challenge for the self-aware citizen in all of this is to draw logical conclusions from your own lived experiences.

You are being officially lied to and manipulated… constantly.

The people doing it take you for an idiot.

Don’t allow them to feel secure in that belief.

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