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THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: The Deep Roots of a Modern Blood Libel
by Daniel Clarke-Serret
Introduction: The Genocide of Truth
PART 1: The Tree of Knowledge
Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority
PART 2: The Descent to Babylon
Chapter 9: Declaration // Chapter 10: Confusion // Chapter 11: Conversation // Chapters 12: Democratisation // Chapter 13: Sophistry // Chapter 14: Image
PART 3: The Rise of Byzantium
Chapter 15: Guilt // Chapter 16: Belief // Chapter 17: Christ // Chapter 18: Mission (see below)
Chapter 18: Mission
Greta Pan and The Tik-Tok Crocodile
The desire to be a forever child, this time in 24 hour news cycle technicolour. To shout simplistic slogans, to provide simplistic solutions, to construct a world divorced from reality: such is to be celebrated in our modern, post-linguistic world. To be an activist has never been easier. All you need do is write a three word cliché on a placard and you’ll have the world’s cameras lapping at your feet. Show them some old razzle dazzle and they’ll make you a star. The days of grappling with difficult issues are over.
Greta Pan is always in search of Captain Hooks to fight. Evil fiends who can be easily identified and slayed by a crocodile in a 30 second tik-tok. Just assemble your group of Lost Boys and be Tinker Belled to a land that only exists in your imagination. A world where arrested means kidnapped, where aid means your pack lunch and where genocide means anything you damn well please. Don’t worry about the consequences; you’ll stay immature forever to the applause of the crowd.
The picture of Greta picking up her Israeli packed lunch was ever so apt. The young girl, who had run away from home, had been rescued by her childminder. Just as the Mediterranean heat was beginning to drain away her idealism; just as the “essential aid” for Gaza was beginning to run out; Mummy and Daddy arrived just in time so that Pan could dream for another day. An adult of the same age, who had lived the horrors of war and the fear of an unstable “peace”, could provide bread for a girl who had never finished her education. “22 years old” means a very different thing in countries on the front line.
How long have we been told that Greta is an inspiration? How brave she is to travel around the world to lecture us that we must never travel around the world! How noble she is to suffer a “kidnapping” to damn the fate of the true kidnapped!
Even were her conclusions right on any of her chosen issues, of what use is her activism to real world progress? She provides us no route map, no detailed economic analysis, no geopolitical strategy and no scientific breakthrough in carbon capture. She mocks the politicians who have to make the tough decisions and chides the people who have to live with them. She lives in a movie of her own creation where right intentions are all that are needed to save the day.
It isn’t only Gaza. It isn’t only climate change. It isn’t only Greta. It is the whole university student culture of simplistic sloganising. Of calling for bleeding the fleeing rich to pay for ever more unfunded entitlements. Of cranking up the national debt to make us feel better. Of calling for the end of civilization to ensure its future.
No-one is denying that climate change, the Middle East, poverty reduction and other issues aren’t serious. We all acknowledge that they are. Which is precisely why we demand serious science, serious research, serious dialogue and serious, adult, grown up analysis to arrive in a better place than where we are now. Yet our current crop of what Kemi Badenoch calls “student union politicians” are bringing their unenlightened, Peter Pan analysis to the mind-boggling complexity of the real world.
It doesn’t work. It isn’t serious. Captain Hook doesn’t really exist.
What I want from my leaders and future leaders is the understanding that some issues are so complex that, though they may be ameliorated, they may never truly be “solved”. Even our most blessed achievements, from liberal democracy to free speech, were slow in the coming; and their foundations need to be relearnt in every new generation. The world of false Messiahs and Greta Pans with their childish calls for "Utopia Now!” have never improved our world nor will they ever do so. Rather they lead their band of adolescent sheep to the destruction of Jerusalem.
This polemic may seem out of place in a serious, philosophical work. Have I lost my mind? Did I think and am I still “am”?
The reader may rest assured. My marbles are still in the container and my cogito definitely exists. But there comes a time where art must imitate life; where explanation must be demonstrated, not just delivered.
Polemic, poetry prose and stream of consciousness: they are all that is left when reason is cast aside and language is held uncommon. If all the activist need do is cry “Free Palestine” and wave a triangle tricolour, how is argument meant to persuade them back to sanity?
