LIES FLYING THICK AND FAST

BY ALEX P. VIDAL

Everytime there is conflict among politicians and business leaders, it is not difficult to notice who is telling the truth and who is lying -- especially among their respective spin doctors and backdoor operators.

It is not hard to decipher why the feud escalates and why molehills became mountains; why Lazarus came back to life in the new millennium; why Benito Mussolini, the bald and eagle-pated Il Duce has sniffed with gusto. Why oh why?

Sa'di in Gulistan said it long before Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels: "To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a saber. For though the wound may heal, the scar of it will remain." Samuel Butler came close when he said: "The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way." And then the Frenchman Jean Cocteau: "Lying is the only art from the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality."

REPORTER

As a field reporter since the time of Tita Cory, I have seen how politicians and their so-called "shock absorbers" lie through their teeth when push came to shove, when pushed against the wall; how their faces turned red when caught twisting the truth and mangling the logic.

In the current imbroglio involving the mayor of Iloilo City and a rich businessman, a pack of lies has been unraveled repeatedly in the past months. I have been observing both camps as they threw mud at each other and how their respective loved ones and die-hards bellyache and seeth in anger as charges and counter-charges flew thick and fast.

Who is lying? Who is concocting stories and promoting falsehood? By their words -- and how they passionately hit their targets and use the hostility as bread and butter -- we should have a hint of what is going on and why the cauldron continues to boil hot.

MASSES

Even Hitler once said, "The great masses of the people...will more easily fall victims to the big lie than to the small one." Just so his Mein Kampf message would swirl into the funnel of the Third Reich, Hitler appointed Goebbels as his public information and propaganda minister.

Between the two of them, they wrenched Germany from the Bible and the Holy Scriptures. They cultivated man no longer in the image of God but  that of the Superman, white, Aryan, imperious, sinewed, infallible, who could walk the face of the earth with the swastika and impale it as he pleased.

GREAT LIE

And so the Great Lie was made flesh and dwelt in the Third Reich as the supreme divinity of Nazidom. Tell a lie a thousand times and it will become the truth. 

As a result, six million Jews in Germany were identified as enemy and perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

And so it was that Hitler's Reichwehr and his marshals goosestepped to Hitler's bloodcurling scream of anschluss and sought to conquer the world during the Second World War. All mankind hand to be liberated. God would continue to reign but his name was no longer Jesus Christ, or Allah or Mohammed or Buddha or Jehovah but Der Fuehrer. 

So, a lie repeated several times indeed becomes the truth. Beware!