The invincibility of narcissism over truth
Airbrushes or ignores history to fortify amour propre
John Milton effused in Areopagitica, “And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
But Milton did not reckon with narcissism. It annihilates truth.
The September 30, 1954, Doolittle Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, blinded by national narcissism fortified by World War II, portentously bugled: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”
The United States, however, had chronically resorted to the dark side with no public resistance long before 1954. Think of our extermination of Native American Indians through the Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, and recurring violations of treaties with Indians indistinguishable from unconscionable contracts of adhesion, e.g., the Sand Creek Massacre and the Battle of Wounded Knee.
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the United States was complacent over thousands of blacks being lynched and the cross-burning terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.
During the war against the Philippines, the United States resorted to waterboarding and shooting on sight any male 10 years old or older.
During World War I, we imprisoned or ostracized any critic of the pointless war that culminated in the vast expansions of the British and French Empires under the counterfeit flag of making the world safe for democracy. The Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Committee for Public Information, and the Four Minute Men, de jure and de facto, criminalized free speech. Moreover, the United States conscripted black soldiers and forced them to fight in segregated units while indulging their lynching on an industrial scale and their wholesale denial of the franchise in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. The aftermath of World War I was no more than intermission before World War II substantially because the United States had closed off discussion of the folly of war except in self-defense to actual or imminent act of aggression against the United States. We were complicit in the multiple injustices of the Versailles Treaty which gave birth to Nazi Germany.
During World War II, we herded 120,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps without a crumb of evidence of espionage, sabotage, or treason. Racism at high tide. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unspeakable war crimes by any yardstick incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians and poisoning even more with radioactive fallout. Overwhelming documentary evidence shows the bombs were dropped not to compel a Japanese surrender without a land invasion, but as the first major play in the Cold War with the Soviet Union to deter its military occupation of Northeast China and Eastern and Central Europe. The United States soon accepted the surrender of Japan conditioned on Emperor Hirohito’s role in a new Japanese dispensation, surrender terms which Japan had offered before the atomic bombings. Indeed, we refrained from prosecuting the Emperor as a war criminal before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
The year before the Doolittle Report, the United State had overthrown the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, in favor of the corrupt, megalomaniacal Shah of Iran ruining the lives and liberties of the Iranian people.
The United States was trained and experienced in the dark side and complacent with its wickedness and wretchedness before 1954. Narcissism blinded the Doolittle Report to historical truths in plain view. It did not propose anything more morally nauseating than had been perpetrated previously by the United States with virtually inaudible public dissent.
There are multiple obstacles to unearthing truth. But the primary obstacle by orders of magnitude is species narcissism in all its moods, tenses, and varieties. It is a trait, however, which is incorrigible. But we dare not fail to try nonetheless. One of the several paradoxes of life.