Is Truth Dead, Part 2: One Man's Truth Is Another Man's Conspiracy Theory - The Line Is Thinner Than You'd Think

 

Anyone who grew up in the 1990s or even afterwards will never forget The X-Files.  Even if you never watched an episode, you knew who Mulder and Scully were.  And even if you never saw the show you knew the catchphrase that has become one of the iconic quotes in history: “The Truth is Out There.”

Fans who are more familiar with the series no doubt remember a quote that is such as associated with it, first uttered as the last words of a murdered government informant: “Trust No One.”

The conspiracy theorist builds their reputation first and foremost on the latter statement. What has become clear over the years of ‘the Post Truth world’ is that the former is just as critical to it.   You can not trust what you have been told, but you must find the truth.  This may have become the motto of so much of American discourse in the New Millennium  but the sad truth is, both sides are very good at making sure that you hold to both maxims. Much as the left wants to argue that the right has weaponized it, as I have written repeatedly both sides are very good at twisting the ‘facts’ to fit their truths. And tribalism – which has been done to break down so much of society not merely on political lines but racial, gender and basically everything else – basically exists on both concepts and the fact that only your side has ‘the truth’ and that outside of your circle, you should ‘trust no one’.

Now I am painfully aware of how so many on the right are good at contorting the history of America to fit the conservative narrative. There have been countless volumes written on how FDR’s New Deal did nothing to help the nation recover from the Depression and needlessly created government overreach. There are similar volumes arguing that LBJ’s Great Society did nothing to help African-Americans and the poor but actually hurt them. And I have found more than a few people that argue that Richard Nixon really didn’t do anything that bad and that his paranoid ravings and rantings were an accurate description of the ‘liberal elites’ who wanted to destroy him.  I have little doubt his defenders listen to what he says on his White House recordings and say: “Well, racist and antisemitism only sound bad when you hear it out loud.”

The problem that I have is the argument that the left has been making for at least as long as I have been alive and probably far longer.  That argument has been that America is in truth a monster, that it has been guilty of oppression, genocide and a borderline dictatorship (if not and outright one) since the moment it was settled, that no one has ever been elected to high office has ever done a single good thing for society, not even the sweeping changes, and that America can not and never will live up to its potential because it started on a lie and it will never accept it.

I’m not saying that the people who write or say these things are necessarily entirely wrong about these statements. Where I draw the line, fundamentally, is that they have decided  their narrative is the ‘real truth’ and not the one you learn in school.  You find this in the most critical leftist book: Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of America.  This is a good example of branding and marketing because it implies the people’s history must be the true one.  People is a generic term of course and can mean whatever you want it to mean. It makes you think that Zinn is one of the people and ‘the people’ have no other agenda the truth.

 This is nonsense, of course: everybody has an agenda (I am no different) and everybody has a different way of seeing the world. But this is one of the keys that a good writer will use as a marketing technique. When a writer tells you it’s a book about things he didn’t learn in school, it makes you think you’re being let on a secret. That no one ever gets the full knowledge of everything in their education is a truth I agree with but the writers will use it as code to their tribe that “you have not learned the truth and this is it.”

I could give countless examples of this but I’m going to deal with two major ‘documentary series’ I saw on TV, one ten years, one recently.  I used quotation marks because they are not documentaries but pure propaganda, not interesting so much informing but as preaching to their audiences. And it probably won’t surprise you that one of them involves Oliver Stone.

Now I have to be honest: Stone is a brilliant film maker. Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July are unquestioned masterpieces; he showed he was capable of more intimate stories in films such as Salvador and Talk Radio, and I’m inclined to value movies that are considered mediocrities such as Nixon and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. He is a skilled director and writer and he is capable of incredible images and great stories.

But as we all know Stone is also one of the most political filmmakers and history. And whereas other political filmmakers such as Spike Lee’s will use their films to hold a light on our social inequities, Stone’s movies – at least since JFK and possibly earlier – are rather that of the tinfoil hat variety. Stone claims to want to shine a light on history but he only directs his light into the corners he wants you to see.

I was reminded of that very strongly nearly a decade ago when I saw a project he did in conjunction with Showtime The Untold History of the United States. Because Stone is clever he used the word ‘untold’: like ‘People’s, it makes you think you don’t know the truth. And instead this eight part series told basically the entire history of America – much of which was already public knowledge at the time – but with Stone’s determination to spin it his way.

In reality the Untold History is essentially the same as the People’s History, only Stone chose to completely ignore domestic policy and focus entirely on the idea of America as Empire.  That’s nothing new and indeed I don’t argue with the fact of what he tells. But the operate phrase is ‘he tells’.

This documentary doesn’t feature any talking heads or indeed anyone talking other than Oliver Stone. We see lots and lots of stock footage but no one is interviewed to corroborate anything Stone says. We are basically asks to believe what we are hearing because we believe Oliver Stone, who as we know by now is at best an unreliable narrator.

And his contortions to get to his points are often ludicrous. He mentions things falling apart at Yalta but does everything in his power to say that Stalin was the aggrieved party. He actually goes as far to say that Stalin was an ‘honorable man’. And while he was willing to show nuance and even sympathy for Richard Nixon and the Bush family in the fictional films he made of them, in a documentary they are just ruthless monsters.  Of course, this does not apply to the sainted Jack Kennedy, who yet again Stone goes out of his way to say was assassinated because he wanted to change things. In order to prove Kennedy’s good intentions he shows film footage from the movie of Thirteen Days which was based on a book by Robert Kennedy.  He doesn’t trust anybody else but he utterly trusts a wealth family that might have stolen the Presidency,  a man who had countless extramarital affairs and was in bed with the Mafia, and who tried multiple times to have Castro assassinated. If that isn’t bias I don’t know what is.

The ‘Untold History’ is just another version of the People’s telling you that you can not trust your elected officials to do anything in the nation’s interest. More disturbing was a documentary HBO made last year that I have seen bits and pieces of Exterminate All The Brutes.

This documentary is not propaganda in the same sense. The description in imdb.com is: “an unsettling and intricate story of genocides. Conquest, slavery and the fabrication of ‘whiteness.” It wants to shock and horrify you with ‘the truth’ even though again, there’s nothing new here, at least not relatively. Raoul Peck tells a story in four parts about how Western Civilization is built on the history of genocide. He tells the story of how Africa was divided by the European powers and how millions were slaughtered. He tells the story how America was founded on the genocide of Europeans and how our country was built on the slaughter of native Americans and on the backs of African-Americans. He says that American history is fundamentally built on the back of militarization and slaughter (which is the founding principle of much of the people’s history). Some of is more inventive – he says Washington’s presidency was built on the idea of militarization – but it is just more of the same.

Peck’s story is built on a book by Sven Lindqvist, a Swedish historian so its less fundamentally American and based on a larger principle. It’s harder to denounce Lindqvist’s ideas in principle or even the ideas that Peck tells. What is more troubling is the theme that I find in both Untold History, Exterminate and so many of these other documentaries.  Why is the story being told?

I realize that no civilization is perfect. I realize that humanity is a monstrous species in general, that rarely needs an excuse or justification to kill, either on a small scale or a genocide. What I don’t get is what purpose these stories serve and who they are being written for. They’re not being told to enlighten, not in the traditional sense, nor to illuminate. At a certain point we keep hearing this and we ask: “What are we as an individual or a society supposed to do with this information? How can we fix a society built on genocide and racism. How can we make it right?” And neither of these series even try to answer the question because there is none. There’s no punishment to fit the crime; no absolution to make this sin go away.  The old maxim is ‘those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” These two documentaries only agree with the second part.

 But that is not why either film was made, really. They are not made to enlighten or inform. They are each, in their own ways, being written to sew seeds of distrust and to preach to their own choir.

‘Untold History’ tells you can not trust democracy or what you are taught in schools.  ‘Exterminate’ goes further and tells you that so much of our society is fundamentally built on racism and lies.  These may be noble intentions but they are filmed in such a way to sew distrust and dissension. Both of these documentaries might be meant to tell the unenlightened but they will just as easily serve as confirmation bias to as many if not more.

Now I can hear defenders saying that I am basically saying these ‘truth-tellers’ are little more than ‘conspiracy theorists.” Well as we all know by now, this is a very thin line and has always been one and if they both end by causing people to distrust their institutions and their fellow man, then there is little difference.

Division has always been one of the easiest things to play upon in our society and I know what this will sound like, but those who have been the victims of the greatest prejudices are just as willing to buy into it as the ones who are oppressing them. If an African-American reads a book or sees a film tells you that our society is built on institutional racism , then they’ll keep believing that because it agrees with how they have lived their lives.  Woman read stories about how men admired by society were sexual predators, they trust men even less if they ever trusted them at all.  Let’s not even talk about organized religion in which everyone believes the worst of everybody not of their faith and the atheists think they’re all deluded. I won’t pretend that there’s so much in the news or in history to not back up  the validity of every single one of those viewpoints. But those who use them to say this ‘proves’ you can only trust ‘your tribe’  do as much to so distrust as those who argue for hatred.

The talking heads will argue as hard as they can that the internet, social media and cable news have done everything possible to divide the world by making ‘the truth’ harder to comprehend. That’s a nice thing to believe but I think all that it did was accelerate a process that our society has been inclined to do since – well, maybe the first society that ever existed. The truth may be out there, as The X-Files once said, but as it also demonstrated very clearly, most of the world doesn’t want to hear it if it doesn’t agree with they already believe. We want to believe our truths and no one else’s. And films like the ones Stone and Peck make imply in some cases, you’re better off trusting no one.