Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.
Benjamin Franklin
The truth, like cream, tends to rise to the top in a free marketplace of ideas. Healthy people have a natural hunger for truth, they seek it out and generally recognize it when they find it.
A lie has to work very hard to overcome the truth and ultimately can not compete with truth. Even after an extreme effort to promote false propaganda, a lie is often dissolved when the truth emerges.
This is exactly why free speech is so important. It is essential for anyone who truly cares about the truth.
The problem—that truth wins out over lie—is often discovered in Communist or other totalitarian governments with severely restricted public access to information. In such governments, propaganda (false information) has to be propped up by invoking fear or censoring information that might be contrary to government power. In WW2 Germany, the government had to go further than that to crush wisdom, and incarcerated teachers and other professionals who might have lead people out of the darkness of fascism.
They say that the light shines brightest in the darkness, and the light of truth shines brilliantly in the midst of evil. When the Light of Truth involves Christianity, persecution only fans the flame of truth and makes it grow.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Faith,” writes Tertullian, a first century philosopher. He observed even back then that evil’s attempts to destroy Christianity just resulted in its exponential growth,
And so lately, evil has taken a different tack.
Today, the evil do not try to crush Christianity from the outside, but do it from within. Antonio Gramsci, a Communist propagandist described it this way:
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity….In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, Universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society,”
An infiltration is when anti-Christian forces invade or buy out Christian organizations, countries, even churches and subsequently pretend to BE Christian. As the new “Christianity,” it implements the anti-Christian agenda as if Christians are the ones promoting it. The “changes” are couched in euphemisms—for example, when disregarding the Constitution, one describes it as a “living document” (that one may interpret any way one feels like it). And fundamental changes to 2,000 years of church doctrine and tradition, the Bible and the words of Jesus are explained away with the adage, “tradition is not static, it is dynamic.” (“Dynamically” changed by ME, that is.)
In each one of these examples, what the proponent is really saying is that he is going to do whatever the he__ he wants, whether you like it or not, whether it is within the rules, whether it is true or not, whether it is what a true American or Catholic or Christian would do or not.
One example of evil disguised as good is a Communist government that creates a “Catholic church” that worships the Communist leadership, forbids Christmas, burns Catholic churches, rips children from their terrified mothers’ wombs in forced abortions and persecutes Catholics. By calling itself Catholic, it pretends to be the same church — but the only one “allowed” by the government. The appeal is, here is a church that you can belong to and not be tortured. What a deal!
But it is an imposter. Recently “legitimized,” by Communist clerics outside of the country, it has redoubled its persecution of true Catholics and has increased its reign of terror within its borders.
But evil’s technique has gone much further than one country or even one church. It has used the same kind of deception to try to bring down Western civilization, including whole countries and Christian churches, most notably, the Catholic church.
This has been done recently simply by anti-Christian (sometimes virulently anti-Christian) purchases of solidly Christian publications or sometimes, solidly Christian organizations or administrations.
There is so much more to say about this, but for now the most important thing to know is that propaganda’s most powerful weapon is deception. The propagandist uses the trust that people have in him against them, to destroy them, by deceit.
How do you recognize when you are being deceived? Hopefully this blog will help. There’s a pattern, categories of lies with very recognizable buzz words that will tip you off to what they are doing.
So, let’s get started!!