Let's All Vote on the Truth

Watching the movie "Exodus," made in 1960 brought me back to that person who exists now only in memory, my 12 year old self.  That twelfth summer of my life I read Leon Uris's novel and was swept away in romance, anger, redemption and hope. The story of the Holocaust, reinforced by newsreels showing the concentration camps, stories in Life magazine, TV shows showing the good hearted American troops liberating Auschwitz, all established the truth of the Holocaust in my mind.

Everyone around me agreed that had happened. Eisenhower had invited news photographers and movie makers into the camp because, as he explicitly said, he wanted nobody to ever be able to deny what these camps were. Eisenhower was a soldier and while I remember him as a tottering old grandfather, he must have know what soldiers know: there are always lies about war and why we go to war and what happens when we do. 

A version of the truth

The movie disappointed me, because it began after the Holocaust, as the Jews tried to escape Europe for a new start in Israel, and the best part of the novel was all the detail about the concentration camps, the "why" of the exodus. The movie focused on the "what" happened when they tried to get into what was then Palestine, and the "why" was treated only in speeches.

Ari Ben Caanan in the flesh

But now, reading a curious book called, "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" I am struck by the passages about the magazines, weeklies and newspapers run by Germans, Austrians and others in the immediate post war years 1945-1960, just about the time when we were seeing "Exodus" and "Catch-22" and "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Young Lions" and Life magazine and Time and documentaries about the Nuremberg trials in suburban America. In a publication called Der Weg, which was apparently a favorite of former Nazis, a very different story was promulgated and elaborated.

Eichmann on trial

By this telling, Hitler knew nothing of the death camps, isolated as he was and preoccupied with the war. The concentration camps were the idea of German Jews who were horrified by the tide of assimilation among German, Austrian Jews, and these Jews wanted a homeland in Palestine for world Jewry, and so they launched the Holocaust, using high Nazi officials like Eichmann, who may have secretly been a Jew himself--didn't he look Jewish? So the camps, the transportation network, the rounding up of Jews in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany were all a Jewish plot. And, by gum! It worked! Look at how the Jews got their homeland!

Oh, that Jewish plot!

These formulations reminded me of that tour guide at Fort Sumter, who insisted the Civil War was a war of Northern Aggression, and all about States Rights and not about slavery at all. In fact, he pointed out, the only slave owner in that room at Appomattox was Ulysses S. Grant, not Robert E. Lee. If that didn't prove it, well, then I don't know what would.

Grant was actually not that dressed up

Of course, a little googling undid this pundit: Lee in fact did not need to own slaves because his wife owned 189 slaves, who he ruthlessly pursued and punished whenever one or two managed to escape. Reading about Lee's treatment of his wife's (and in reality, his) slaves demolishes this image of the saintly Lee.  
As for Grant, he did own a slave once, but he could not abide the reality of slavery and freed that slave within one year.

The Trump of his day

There is another side to the Lost Cause which emerges fitfully--the practical imperatives wrought by keeping an army in the field. As the union army approached Richmond, every male capable of holding a gun was rounded up and thrown into the lines. The myth that the Union army was a rag tag bunch of Negroes, recent immigrants who were forced into service or who were hirelings bent on plunder while the Southern soldiers were all true believers defending their homeland looks pretty thin we you read the memoirs of James Longstreet, Lee's steadfast lieutenant general.

As vicious a slaver as ever was

Longstreet writes Lee repeatedly about the necessity of looting the gold in the Richmond bank and wherever in the South they can find it, to sustain the war effort as Southern brokers and farmers are unwilling to accept Confederate currency and the rich aristocrats who hold that gold have got it because of what the army is willing to do for them and they ought to be willing to give it to the army and if not, it should be "impressed," i.e. stolen.
When Jefferson Davis left Richmond, he left with wagon loads of gold.
And even before the final days, within the first years of the war, wagon loads of Confederate gold were being waylaid, stolen and diverted by Southern bandits and Confederate soldiers.
The "Lost Cause" is that soothing marketing which responds to all the bad press slavery has got over the years, depicting happy slaves (who just loved Scarlet O'Hara) and a wonderful world of chivalry, glory and gentility disrupted by mongrel bandits from the North envious of Southern cotton wealth. Slavery was simply a gentle custom which supported cotton farming. And the slaves were taken care of like children and way better off than they would have been being eaten by lions or starving in Africa.
Lincoln, of course, who actually lived in 1860 and had seen it all first hand, who did not want to make the war about slavery because he thought it was a losing argument, politically, even admitted the war had been about slavery all along, and he came clean in his 2nd Inaugural address:
"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."

History, of course, is one long argument. 
But how can an essential truth, that the Civil War was, ultimately, about freeing the slaves, even if a majority of the Union soldiers (and certainly their generals) were indifferent--the driving force raising the armies in the North was animated by abolitionism and without the abolitionists there would never, could never, have been a war at all--how could that truth be so widely denied and sustained, even today?
Because "The Lost Cause" appeals to people. It's a cotton candy truth, that tastes so good, even if it's basically sugar vapor and because there are enough sources of dissemination, it can be sustained in the population.

There is a difference between "historical truth" and "scientific truth."

There is that old joke about the prostitute who asks a client his name and he tells her "Santa Claus, if you want to believe it." And after they have sex, she tells him, "In a week or so you'll notice a rash. It's syphilis. But you can call it hives, if you want to believe it."

You can call it "hives"

Before microscopes and the concept of micro organisms, when the Black Plague hit Europe, the only explanation for it was "God's Will." And there was an institution in place--organized religion--which could promulgate this explanation. So God's vengeance against those who denied the Church's truths was the prevailing truth.

You cannot wish away the Black Death

Science, however, is about doubting, organizing experiments to prove things and developing technologies to see things which human senses and perception cannot immediately perceive. It was not until 1890 that a man trained by Louis Pasteur, Alexandre Yersin, was able to capture the causative organism of plague, to see it under the microscope and even to raise anti sera against it, to be used successfully in an outbreak in what is now Vietnam.  Until then, the truth was "God's wrath." Just because you want something to be true--that God punishes sinner with plague--does not actually make it true. That much science has provided us.

Trump would have executed these 5 innocent adolescents 

There are times when we vote on the truth because we do not have better options.
A man is accused of rape and murder and a jury hears the evidence presented against him and the  jury is persuaded because of testimony, because they don't like his looks or because they want to get back to their jobs and homes. 
But later, we get DNA testing and it turns out juries and courts often get it wrong and we get the Innocence Project.  And we are all made uncomfortable, because after all the elaborate rules of evidence, after the man or woman in the black robe, sitting up high on the polished wooden bench behind the impressive woodwork, pronounces sentence, it turns out they were all fools, all wrong and the real rapist/murderer is living free, while the wrong man is sent off to prison.

Mass marketing of truth does some weird things. Dennis Burkitt, a renowned epidemiologist, the first doctor to show that a virus could cause a malignancy--Burkitt's lymphoma--gave a famous lecture in London in 1973, in which he postulated that the reason bush people of Africa did not get colon cancer, dental carries, hemorrhoids or colonic diverticulae had to do with the large amount of fiber they ate in their diet. This got taken up by the American food industrial and marketing complex and measurements of "fiber" in various foods were made helter skelter and lo and behold! It turns out Fruit Loops have enough fiber to qualify as "high fiber" food and can be marketed as "heart healthy." Fruit Loops!

Hero of sorts

So what makes for "truth" in a mass society, with mass communications, social networks and a population which has never been rigorously instructed in how to determine the truth, i.e. on how to question the "truths" presented it? 

Volume, repetition and penetrance. 
Fox News, Trump Daily Tweets, Hannity, Limbaugh, Moscow Mitch McConnell. Republican 'talking points." Same tune, repeated often enough. Truth.

Trump's version of a war hero: Eddie Gallagher

Watching TV, listening to the radio, even when most of my stations are NPR--we have 4 NPR stations in New Hampshire--I still can estimate that 90% of what I hear is simply wrong.  Truth may be eternal in some ways, but it is rare. And it is not imperishable. You may think you know that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, but if you hear often enough, from enough sources, that he won by a huge landslide, the biggest in history, eventually, you will believe it.