Something struck me as I was working my way through William Shirer’s massive and
insightful “The Collapse of the Third Republic”, which is his accounting
through first-hand insight as a newspaper correspondent, and massive research
after the fact, of the weaknesses that brought about the quick collapse of
France in WWII. It serves as a companion
to the equally massive and equally insightful “The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich” which he also wrote. In his
account of the chaos and strife that enveloped France from the time period
before WWI until their defeat by Germany in WWII, Shirer lays much of the blame
for the divisions and hatreds within France upon the invective and clear
falsehoods of the publications of both the Left (Communist, Socialist) and the
Right (Fascist, Royalist). The papers
were filled with shrill accounts with little basis in reality that stoked fear
and pitted Frenchmen against each other as each side envisioned that the other
was on the verge of a coup that would destroy the Republic. The press, and the politicians who were no
better, treated each electoral defeat as the end of the world for their side,
and vilified the opposition to the extent that mobs took the streets when urged
to take matters into their own hands: assassinations, protests that turned
violent, and other such drastic measures pushed France further and further down
the road that had already destroyed the Weimar Republic in Germany and replaced
it with Hitler’s Fascist police state.
Why all
this talk about France almost one hundred years ago, and what does any of this
have to do with Facebook? The reading of
history is of course its own reward, a pursuit that enlightens today as it
revels to us yesterday. I saw just this
week on Facebook, yet another dubious story about the imminent overthrow of
America at the hands of the insidious Islamic revolutionaries who are even now
plotting to take over the country and impose Sharia Law. This latest version, reported by plenty of
people on Facebook as if it was a proven fact, is saying that the FBI knows of
dozens of terrorist training camps in America, but isn’t taking any action
against them. The story should be, on
its surface, so ludicrous that no one would be willing to pass it along, yet
there it is on Facebook, shared and re-shared over and over. Stop and think for a moment; in order for the
story to be true, the FBI would have to have sold out their own country, these
brave men and women of law enforcement, some of the best patriots in our
nation, would not sit by and choose political correctness over their own
country. Certainly there are terrorists out there trying to establish a worldwide Caliphate, but they're not evenly remotely close to doing anything of the sort, they've taken over pieces of a few war torn failed states, they're not a threat to topple the world's most powerful country. Stories such as this, and there
are plenty of other topics equally butchered on Facebook and other online sites
by both the Right and the Left, contribute nothing to a democracy but fear, cynicism,
division, and hatred.
The
willingness of a population to let their fears cloud their judgment so that
they accept what they fear as the truth without questioning it, is not in any way a
new facet of democracy. It has happened
before in our own history, at the very beginning, when John Adams, as ardent a
patriot as the Founding Fathers ever had, was accused in the press by the
opposition of secretly desiring to return America to King George if Adams
should win the Presidency. Ridiculous nonsense, yet willingly spread by those opposed to Adams’ politics and believed
by far too many regular people who should have known better. A similar story could be told of Athens
during its glory days, when Alcibiades was convicted in absentia of desecrating
the gods and condemned to death; when he heard the news he was in the middle of
fighting for his city on foreign soil, a fact that his enemies used against him
as he could not defend himself in the courts.
Likewise, the aged war hero and philosopher of Athens, Socrates, was
also vilified without factual basis and convicted of corrupting the youth of
the city, he too was condemned to death, and unlike Alcibiades, who fled and
switched sides to fight for Sparta, Socrates willingly took the hemlock to die
as a martyr.
There
are two equally unpalatable explanations as to why ridiculous scare tactics
would be utilized by a free press: (1) the people writing these stories know
that they’re false, but care so much about their cause, and hate their
opposition so much, that they don’t care about the Truth. (2) The people
writing such stories believe them to be true because their ideology has clouded
their rational minds to the point that everything is seen through that
prism. Neither of those scenarios are a
good one. The first envisions a
limitless supply of morally repugnant behavior in the pursuit of an ideal, and
the second requires a human mind so blinded by its own convictions that rational
thought is not to be found. When a
society is infected with this sort of rancor, both purposeful falsehoods and
willing blindness are at work.
The
reason why this diatribe about the portions of the Press (which includes many outlets claiming to be journalism, but falling far from that standard) that are partisan, and the ongoing manifestation of truth-less claims in
Facebook arguments, are being included in my blog about the Christian Faith and my life as
a Pastor is that I have personally witnessed the negative effects of this on morally upright Christian men
and women. There are people I have
known, some for decades, who now only listen to one side of any political
story, who now assume that the opposition is full of scoundrels and turn a
blind eye to the moral deficits of their own champions, and who seem to have
accepted the false premise that the cure for what
ails America is to be found at the ballot box, in Congress, the White House, or
before the Supreme Court. This is a
false hope, one that will continue to cheat and frustrate those who put their
trust in it. The only true hope for
America, for any nation, is to bring about spiritual revival through the local
churches, one person saved by the grace of God and transformed at a time. The time, energy, and passion spent indulging
in fears about the future, in listening to and creating salvos about the
wickedness of the other side, and in looking for a political savior when only a
spiritual one will do, is sadly time, energy, and passion that could have gone
far in building up the Kingdom of God.
I’m not surprised that Facebook, and the
internet in general, are where those without a filter indulge their capacity
for spreading rumors as if there were facts, but I am saddened and troubled to
see Christians, those taught by the Word of God, committed to the Truth, and
servants by choice of the Kingdom of God, joining in on this farce to their own
detriment. This isn’t a new problem, for
democracy or for Christianity, but it is one that we ought to be on the side of
combating, or at least ignoring, instead of passing it along.
