WAR, TRUTH AND FREEDOM - THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE

By Neville Raymond

War, Freedom, Truth. Three concepts that are royalty in the world of ideas. If one of them is the king of kings, it would probably be Freedom. Freedom reigns supreme in our hearts and minds. And so it is not surprising that both War and Truth are anxious to pay court to Freedom and attach themselves to its cause.

Take the idea that we owe our freedom to the brave efforts of men who fight wars. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - these wars were all fought to keep Americans free, or so we are told. If freedom has a price, it is paid in the currency of human blood. And so every Memorial Day we are treated to a barrage of articles and speeches about how all these wonderful freedoms that we enjoy here in America are brought to us courtesy of the enlisted men in the armed forces.

Then there is that other celebrated idea - that speaking the truth is a liberating act. We can all attest to this in some personal way. There is something refreshingly liberating about throwing off all social constraints and inhibitions and telling it like it is. In politics, there is the ideal of speaking truth to power. It seems that our rights and freedoms are being continually encroached upon by the powers that be, and so, in order to tell the state where to get off, it is necessary to speak truth to power. And of course, the need to speak to truth to power increases in proportion that the freedom of the press is muzzled. All you have to do is a little digging to realize that the corporate media carefully picks and chooses what it tells the public - because if it were unsparing with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the option to renew the system as we know it would not be picked up by the American people. I believe it was Napoleon himself - as powerful a political and military leader as he was - who was most candid in his assessment that truth-telling in the media had to be kept to a bare minimum. “If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.”

And finally, there is the real-life observation that during time of war the suppression of free speech is at an all-time high. At best, those who speak out or engage in dissent are the first to have their patriotism questioned. At worst, they run the risk of being branded traitors. Even during peace time, we know that the Pentagon is a watchful censor, rigorously filtering out any sort of historical reality, embarrassing fact or human feeling - whether in TV news or Hollywood movies - that undercuts the righteous image and heroic aura that the military likes to project. Naturally all of this has been summed up in a statement that was made by a U.S. Senator back during World War I, which by now has become axiomatic: “The first casualty when war comes is the truth.”

For most of us, these axiomatic notions casually hang out in our heads, and they come and go without our being aware of how they lethally opposed they are to each other’s existence. We never realize that Freedom, War and Truth are locked into an eternal love triangle. Freedom cannot be legitimately partnered up with War, without shamelessly playing Truth false. And conversely, Freedom cannot be married to Truth without exposing its relationship to War as a sham. But as soon as you get them all in the same room, so to speak, the double-dealing and deceit can no longer be kept up. And as things begin to sort themselves out, you are left with an inescapable conclusion.
If war is the great defender of our freedom, then you would think that war would be the great champion of truth, for as Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. But that is hardly the reality. What you find instead, in a thousand different real-time contexts, is that truth is the first casualty of war - and nothing has proved more subversive to a culture of militarism than the practice of telling the truth.
So what you are left with is an institution like war, that is always claiming to defend our freedoms, and yet as a matter of practical policy is downright hostile to the truth, which, coincidentally, is the very thing that sets us free.