Home to roost

I've been warning about this for years, now we're past the Rubicon. If you deny the virtue of the truth in a particular matter, then the greatest liar will rule that matter soon enough.

By now there's open mockery. Just two examples without wanting to mention names. As I've pointed out recently, denial of the holocaust isn't free speech, but obstruction of justice by withholding evidence, if it comes from a German who has lived through the Hitler years, for to claim that there were no signs of such a thing is an open falsehood - signs like empty Jewish quarters and such.

Yet not understanding the very elementary nature of the wrong of such a thing, vast swathes of the public have accepted too readily the idea that to disagree with scientific findings is the root of the evil and all instances of this should be likened to holocaust denial.

If, in light of the reliability of scientific findings, projections in particular, someone were to revise this stance and not call it evil, but critical thinking, when they are being challenged, he'd not done in itself anything wrong, but he would have, if he would, possibly even unknowingly, have inherited the asinine assumption that there's no difference between denying what has happened next door in a criminal case and not believing the weather report, and if we consider the legislative process, the way definitions are built upon other definitions, the way precedent is respected, it becomes almost inevitable that at some point someone, inheriting current madness, will make a boo-boo.

It's a general principle, and it erodes sanity in a very general way: Make yourself indiscriminating and see how much sense you can make of the world. Is it advisable to lobotomise judges?

Jürgen Rieger, head of the NPD at the point of his death and copyright owner of Günther's books on race, began his lecture on race with the admission that race, as opposed to biological differences, is a construct, owing to the difficulty to find discrete borders in a continuum. Now, since whether you're male or female is considered a construct, guess what? Now brave anthropologists step to the fore and suggest that race is no construct, just like whether you're male or female isn't.

Introduce idiotic conventions, let a be equal to b, although it isn't, let some idiots have fun with that equation and deride b, then defend b and by virtue of it a. More dangerous though than applying this to the usual suspects, holocaust denial and racism, is applying this to yet unknown a', b' that are in the same class as a, respectively b.

For instance, let a guilty person be equal to an innocent person in terms of prosecution.

You say, well, that's not so? But it is. No matter how you turn the General Flynn business, you'll always find someone who is innocent and prosecuted and/or someone who is guilty and not prosecuted.

So who's it going to be? Who will face prosecution on the grounds that his guilt or innocence doesn't matter? Almost as much fun as spinning a bottle.

And at the end of this, when the wrong of it is evident, you could add to the crime by declaring the most blatant criminals who were prosecuted martyrs and absolve them.

No, this has gone too far already. Legal pressure is building and insistence on considering personal as opposed to corporate guilt or innocence is fading. Reminds me of Max von Sydow's little speech in Cadaveri eccellenti. And how do you avoid this episode, when you can't undo the equation?