EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY JUNE 9, 2023

Are You Addicted To Being Lied To?

June 8, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—What is it about modern Western culture that begs for it to be lied to? And, on a personal level, how fatiguing is it to have to keep track of all the lies one imbibes these days?

Five hours before explosions destroyed the Kakhovka dam in Russian-controlled Kherson, the critical Togliatti-Odessa pipeline to carry ammonia from Russia through to Ukraine’s Black Sea, for the manufacture of fertilizers to be shipped to a starving world, was itself bombed. It has been a key element of the July 2022 Black Sea Grain Deal, whereby Kiev gets to ship grain from three ports, and Russia is supposed to be able to ship ammonia for fertilizer, agricultural products, and such. The West and Kiev act like Lucy in the “Charlie Brown” comic strip’s running joke, where Lucy holds the football for Charlie to kick and jerks it away every time, promising she won’t do it the next time. This real-life “black comedy” is in its 12th month, and last week Moscow put its foot down, saying Kiev’s shipping will be restricted until it allows the ammonia pipeline to be opened. Five days later, it was bombed.

It turns out there is a “partisan guerrilla” outfit that has been bombing people and institutions around the town of the Kakhovka dam, Nova Kakhovka, for at least eight months now. But, rather than a trail for evidence, they are the ones Ukraine uses to claim that the Russians blew up the Kherson Oblast hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River under their control.

How is it that Afghanistan’s Taliban, with all their problems, can eliminate 99% of the infamous Helmand Province opium crop in the first year of their effort, when anti-drug efforts throughout the Western world go nowhere? And it is accepted “common knowledge” that the drug epidemic is here to stay.

Unfortunately, one can continue with such examples every day. But, simply put, there is a soul-sickness in the culture. That Kiev’s regime can bomb two critical pieces of infrastructure in one night and deny, with a straight face that anything they might do wrong, intentionally or accidentally, is automatically a Russian disinformation operation—such behavior is not meant to be believed. Kiev’s leaders get in a corner over their lies; they do something unbelievably ugly; and then, with not even a pretense to old-fashioned evidence, they try to stampede the world toward a thermonuclear Armageddon. This is more a matter of rubbing the impotence and demoralization of modern Western culture in our faces.

This Saturday, June 10, is the 60th anniversary of one of the last potent and moralizing acts in American public life, the American University Commencement address by President John F. Kennedy.

First, listen to it today and give up the fatiguing exercise of living in lies; and then you will know how to spend the hours on Saturday, helping your tired family and friends “take a load off.”