It is not surprising, however. Because the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.
The idea of a “good lie” is a dramatically Orwellian device, designed to deceive and to patronise. A lie is a lie, whether your intention is to convince people that Saddam is evil and must be bombed or that Gideon Levy is a brainy and decent bloke. Lying to communicate a “vital message”, a liberal and profound “truth”, is no better than lying in order to justify a war or a law’n\’order crackdown or whatever.
Quite. Johann is being castigated for this.
As should be the Robin Hood Tax people. They\’re lying to us all for what they consider to be \”the greater good\”.
Scumbags.
That’s disappointing. I thought he might have interviewed Robin, Little John and Friar Tuck from their hideout in Sherwood.
All the above draw their inspiration from Stalin’s observation that, “the truth can be smothered in a thousand little lies”
99% of the population believe that their ideas are in the public interest. Hari is in favour of general, anarchic lying by nearly everyone.
“…manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth…”
I think that shoots down all the major religions then.
But there’s no surprise in this. It’s why I like to chunter on about the Left’s Puritan origins; they are at core moral crusaders, who believe in a higher truth, and will do literally anything to bring this “truth” to the rest of us. The physical world, the one the rest of us call “real” is to them more of a phenomenological reflection of this higher Platonic level that only they can perceive. For instance, it doesn’t matter to a crusader whether or not actual girls are actually being kidnapped and chained to beds in brothels; because that is the Platonic essence of prostitution, even if it doesn’t actually happen in the real world.
This is why these people are so incredibly dangerous. They don’t lie as such, they tell the truth about this imaginary other world that they hold to be more real than our mundane world. Hari of course can’t perceive that he has actually done anything wrong. He didn’t lie. He brought us a greater truth than the mere mundane world could provide- and what could be more virtuous than that?
+1 Ian.
Hear, hear.
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@ Ian B,
they’re ‘post-millennial pietists’, intent on building the Kingdom of God on earth and exterminating all those who stand in their way. Of course, they’ve taken God out of the equation since Marx, but otherwise it’s all much the same.
Boilerplate right-wing chuntering. All tedious and standard practice until I checked the byline, at which point I very nearly died laughing.
Brendan O’Neill on journalistic ethics, factual accuracy, and ideological lies? Brendan “Living Marxism and Spiked Online” O’Neill? In other news, King Herod has been confirmed as the new editor of Mumsnet.
@Trooper Thompson
Indeed. The PMPs were the second wave (or third wave?) Puritans. Anglosphere statism is indeed secularised post-millennialism.