Truth: The First Casualty of War -- and Politics

That war and truth have never coexisted happily is something a cliché nowadays. The phrase "Truth is the first casualty of war"  has been knocking about for centuries. The idea, if not the exact words, has been attributed to various figures from the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus to Hiram Johnson, a 20th century US senator. 

People continue to debate who said it first, but the oldest traceable expression of the idea came from the pen of another Johnson, the 18th century lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson: "Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages." [The Idler 11 November 1758]

[Image: Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds. Johnson as nearsighted]

Johnson's sentence not only contains the basic accusation -- war annihilates truth -- but an explanation: interest dictates lies and credulity encourages belief in them. "Interest" could be the interest of the country, but more likely, the interests of political leaders. "Credulity" refers to a public willingness to believe the leaders' claims without verifiable proof. 

Johnson's main target was journalists. With the emergence and expansion of newspapers and journals in the 18th century, the tribe of "scribblers" had multiplied. Their chief employment was "inventing new amusements for the rich and idle." 

The most necessary qualities of these new journalists was "contempt of shame and indifference to truth." War provided the scribblers with new opportunities to showcase their skills and make a living. Johnson's claims about journalists may seem unduly harsh, but his basic contention about war and truth has been proven correct again and again. 

But as he knew, war is not unique in abusing the truth. He also coined the phrase "politics is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Even in peacetime, politics is a kind of war: a fight for power. In the heat of political battle falsehood is a routine tactic. "Interest dictates" and "credulity encourages" lying. 

Credulity is essential to the success of political lies. To paraphrase the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough, credulity gives the lie wings to fly. Without credulity the lie would go nowhere and die. With it the lie can go "viral," especially in the world of social media.

History abounds with political liars, some successful, some not. The most glaring examples, like Hitler or Stalin, can be misleading. Their whoppers were so big we can easily overlook the more modest liars of today, in politics and other realms, like advertising.

Recent figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have had a long history of playing fast and loose with the truth before emerging as leaders of their countries. In spite of that, they attracted huge support from the credulous, thanks in large part to a media that either spread their lies or allowed them to fly without serious scrutiny. 

Ask yourself, how could these mega-fibbing clowns be elected leaders of two great democracies? How could a deluded lightweight with crackpot ideas manage to succeed Boris Johnson as Tory leader and Prime Minister? I mean, Liz Truss?

We can't blame the meteoric rise of Truss on British voters. They had no say in the matter. A majority of Tory Party members, less than 100,000 people "elected" her as the leader of a nation of nearly 70 million. That almost makes the US Electoral College look like a democratic way of electing a president. 

It is true that her own Tory MP's pushed Truss out of the job in a few weeks, making her the shortest serving prime minister in British history. But she had enough time to do huge damage the British economy and help her old employers, Shell Oil, make record windfall profits. [Image: Liz Truss announcing her resignation]

Truss, like Boris, is a shameless opportunist who says whatever she thinks will achieve power. If her intelligence matched her lust for power, she would be a formidable force. If.

Why did so much of the media treat these amoral and incompetent characters as if they were credible leaders? What interests were directing their rise to power? Why were so many people credulous in the face of their lies, bogus promises, and fantasies? 

More importantly, perhaps, is there any prospect of change? Or are we condemned to an endless parade of charlatans and fools ascending what Benjamin Disraeli called the "greasy pole" of power?

A brief glance at what claims to be accurate media does not arouse a sense of optimism. Many media figures today are little different from the sort of scribblers Samuel Johnson denounced. Actually, they may be far worse and far more dangerous, as are the "interests" behind them. 

Consider Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and the general run of FOX "news" reporters. Multiply them by hundreds of others like them on TV, radio, and social media. Consider the scribblers write for tabloid newspapers such as The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Express. Have a nice day. 

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The Real War on Christmas was waged by Christians

Ho! Ho! Ho! It's that jolly time of year again! That hilarious time in the USA when FOX News, Republicans, and rightwing Evangelicals profess outrage at the "War on Christmas." A fake outrage, of course, trotted out at years' end for political and cultural reasons, like keeping the poor in their place working for peanuts. Not to mention keeping up donations to TV evangelists with huge mansions. 

Today's War on Christmas is a Phony War. But a real war on Christmas once took place. It was several centuries ago in the UK, with spillovers into Puritan America. And guess what? It was waged by Christians. They were called Presbyterians in Scotland and Puritans in England and New England. 

In England, the Puritans were on the winning side of of the Civil War between Parliament and Charles I in the 1640s. They famously closed the London theaters as dens of immorality. They also abolished the celebration of Christmas as a "pagan celebration." They ordered that it be kept as a day of "fasting and humiliation." No singing, no dancing, no merriment at all. Try that today. 

In New England, transplanted Puritans did the same. They kept the ban in place until the 1850s. The war ended for good after President Ulysses S. Grant declared Christmas a federal holiday in the 1870s.

It may seem odd for Christians to ban Christmas, but the Puritans found no biblical justification for celebrating the birth of Christ. Nobody knew when he was born anyway (we still don't). The Puritans also associated Christmas revels with sinful, ungodly pagan rites and behavior, not to mention Papists (Catholics). 

A wit once defined a Puritan as a person who was angry because somewhere, somebody was having a good time. That is a bit simplistic and unfair to Puritans as a whole, but the accusation fit some of them.

The Scots had preceded the English in the War on Christmas, as in so many aspects of British life. After the Presbyterian Church of Scotland came to dominate Scottish religious life in the late 16th century, they abolished the celebration of Christmas. John Knox, the Calvinist preacher who led the Scottish Reformation, was a dour sort who darkened Scottish culture for centuries. 

Scotland's Christmas ceased to be a holiday of feasting, fun, and folly (if it ever was). It became just another dark, dank, and dreary winter day -- like a Scottish Sunday until recently. 

During the Civil War, Scots Presbyterians allied with like-minded English Puritans. They also made common cause in the war on Christmas. 

[Image: Parliamentary soldiers enforcing the ban on celebrating Christmas, c. 1640s, William Barns Wollen, 1900] 

In England, the Restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II ("The Merry Monarch") in 1660 also led to a restoration of traditional Christmas celebrations. They were still light years away from the materialistic orgies of today. That required the influence of grasping, greedy American capitalism.  

In Scotland, the restoration of Christmas took much longer than in England. Presbyterian leaders continued to stifle enthusiasm for Christmas enjoyment for a couple of centuries. The difference shows in the holiday hierarchy of Scotland, compared to England, and most other civilized countries.

In Scotland, Christmas comes in a distant second to Hogmanay (New Years' Eve) as a real blowout. Think about it. The canny Scots simply transferred their serious celebrating from a sacred day to a secular one. Touché, Puritans! Freud would have understood. 

If you want to witness Scots letting their hair down these days, go to Edinburgh during Hogmanay! Or, just visit any Scots pub on a Saturday night. 

Scotland's elevation of New Year spread to the rest of the globe by the 20th century. For what do we sing at midnight on 1 January? "Auld Lang Syne" by Scotland's national poet, Robert (Rabbie) Burns, of course!

PS. If you go to the USA these days, be careful not to say "Happy Holidays!" or "Seasons Greetings!" And do not write "Merry Xmas" on your cards or gifts either. You may be accused of making war on Christmas, or even of Satanism. Or, even worse, of being a liberal. 

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History is Messy: Memo to FOX news

History is messy. It is often unpleasant. It is seldom as simple as we would like it to be. Historical myth is the opposite: neat, generally pleasing -- at least to our prejudices --, and comfortably black and white. 

The myths are essentially "alternative facts" or "fake history." Not surprisingly, myths tend to dominate if not obliterate actual history in the popular consciousness. FOX news could not survive if this were not the case, and Donald Trump would long ago have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

By "actual history" I do not mean the "truth" but the result of painstaking historical research, writing, and interpretation. Often the result is only an approximation of the truth. In that sense, history resembles science, although science is a more exact business. 

Scientists can use repeated experiments to confirm their hypotheses. Historians do not have that tool. They cannot repeat history, and in general they would not wish to!

Historian Sir Lewis Namier wrote that the writing of history "is not a visit of condolence." He might have added that the same is true of reading it. Learning our history is often troubling and confusing. If it never is, we are reading the wrong stuff. 

Some people avoid all the trouble by ignoring history. The inventor and businessman Henry Ford is supposed to have said, "history is bunk." He didn't say exactly that, but he did reject the past as dead and meaningless, not worth thinking about. 

Abraham Lincoln would have disagreed. In his Second Inaugural Address he declared, "My Fellow Americans, we cannot escape history." He understood that the terrible war that was nearing its end was the direct result of the country's failure to abolish slavery. * 

Novelist William Faulkner held a similar view: "The past isn't dead. It is not even past." His characters are prisoners of their history, in this case the history of the Deep South. 

Karl Marx wrote in a similar vein in one of his lesser-known works, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

Marx prefaced that statement with "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

You don't have to be a Marxist to agree with that viewpoint. Like it or not, our history, like our biology, constrains us. And that is not necessarily bad. It is a cliche by now, but an awareness of evils past can help us to repeat the same mistakes. True, we seem to keep repeating many of them anyway, but things could be far worse if we lacked any awareness of the past. 

People do learn lessons from history: some good, some bad, some irrelevant. The difficulty is to learn the proper lessons, the ones that will improve life on this planet -- and not just for humans. 

History often resembles a chaotic scene, like this 19th century Christmas cartoon by George Cruikshank, "At Home in the Nursery." But the party goes on and tomorrow it will have a history.

   

*Comparing Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address to that of Donald Trump in 2017 provides a good measurement of how far the Republican Party has fallen since the days of the first Republican president.