By Bert Hetebry

Does truth matter?

How is truth discerned?

Or more importantly what is truth?

The German historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote of the Nazi regime in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil…

“This constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and to judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.

With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

Further, commenting that the routines of the day to day work of dealing with the Jews became just a job, the herding of people onto cattle truck, the unloading and deciding who would be fit for work and who would be sent to ‘the showers’, and in the case of Eichmann, his defence was that all he did was record information passed down to him, his was essentially a clerical function, recording the numbers of people dealt with.

”This insulation from the raw facts of what his paperwork meant was the result of totalitarianism’s normalisation of the evil in question. It turns off thought and moral imagination. It deals with numbers. In this context, ‘normalisation’ is the key.”

I read history, I find it interesting to reflect back on past times, see how lives were lived, reflect on the power structures and the challenges faced by those in power, those who challenged that power and how that impacted on the ordinary people of the times, and through that consider the world of today, the power structures and the challenges faced by those in power, those who challenge that power and how it impacts on the ordinary people of today. The lies Hannah Arendt refers to were of the Nazi regime, but that was not the first time lies have been used to delegitimise ethics and morality, to obfuscate, muddy the waters so that truth is lost to rendered as meaningless.

Searching for something compelling to read, scanning the titles on the library shelves, I came across a book from Paul Ham, NEW JERUSALEM: The short life and terrible death of Christendom’s most defiant sect.

The period was 1525 to 1535, shortly after Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Thesis, questioning various doctrinal standards of the Roman Catholic Church. Unintended consequences, this all happened when the Gutenberg Bible was first printed in the 1450s making the Bible more accessible to the leaders of the Catholic Church and threw into question many of the doctrines of the church, which led to the Reformation and a further fragmentation of the church as different interpretations and misinterpretations were found and taught.

The bits of the Bible which suggested that “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 19:24) were not fashionable teachings, and still are not today when we see that preaching can be a lucrative game, tithing ensures a continued flow of income, church owned land and property are not taxed.

Some scholars saw that there were a number of issues, that the church was not acting according to God’s word, for Luther, a sticking point was the selling of indulgences, where in confession, a sinner could pay off the price of his sins in cash, especially since the church had an ambitious Cathedral building programme which needed financing, others though saw the rites of Infant Baptism and the teaching that the elements of the Eucharist, the bread and wine became the literal body and blood of Christ as a mis-interpretation of the scriptural teaching. Those people became the anabaptists, insisting that a person must be an adult, or at least mature enough to understand the meaning of baptism, and so went around re-baptising people who became their followers. It became a very bloody affair when the Anabaptists took over the city of Munster in Germany and became the site of a bloody fight between the Anabaptists and the Catholic Church. Thousands died horrific deaths through starvation and brutality. Beheadings and heads placed on pikes and displayed to instil fear in those who would not repent and return to the Catholic faith.

The brutality of the conflict and the punishments meted out to the leaders of the sect were gut wrenchingly horrific. The normalisation of brutality is made easier through dehumanising the opposition, or in religious terms, where ‘we are God’s people, they are not’. Vengeance was not constrained by the self righteous victors. In the following almost 100 years, the Germanic regions of Europe saw religious wars in which half the population was killed over whether infant or adult baptism was biblical, whether in the Eucharist the bread and wine actually became the body and blood of Jesus or not. They were the arguments, but in essence it was a war for political dominance were the catholic Church had effectively ‘owned’ the region and that was challenged.

The book was published in 2018 and in an afterword, the author explains that nothing much has changed.

Religious warfare runs rampant in various places around the world today. The brutality with which daring to not conform to an established orthodoxy or to challenge the rights of particular believers whether religious or political is met with incredible cruelty. The most obvious is that of the Zionist movement in reclaiming the lands as legend has it, promised to Abraham 4,500 years ago. Among the Christian Churches, particularly the evangelical movement, there is the interpretation that Jews will return to the promised land and convert to Christianity, paving the way for the promised return of Jesus. Jews on the other hand are still waiting for their Messiah to show, the armageddon being played out now paves the way for that momentous event… but which will it be, Jesus or the Messiah or are they one and the same, and that curly question has divided Jew and Christian for a very long time.

Within the Islamic world we see that the Quran is interpreted in different ways, some strictly some less so as a measure of control. The conflict between Sunni and Shia which divides the oil rich gulf area, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia which allowed the saudis to almost agree to recognise Israel, the current conflict stalled those negotiations.

The power vacuum in Iraq after Americans left allowed ISIS to gain power and establish a caliphate in the wasteland of war’s aftermath, the Taliban in Afghanistan a strict interpretation of Sharia law, the laws as laid out in the Quran has restricted the rights of women and their freedom and independence.

Inevitably there is quest for power, and empowering of one group over another. Opposing forces are dehumanised, called names, terrorist is a good name, otherwise reference to animals, dogs, women who seek power become witches or bitches.

Questions of who is right, who has the moral upper hand become clouded through the restrictive interpretations of current events. It is too easy to see the war in Gaza, now extending north into Lebanon. and while eyes are averted, continuing in the West Bank as having started through the brutal attack by Hamas on innocent Israelis, but failing to recognise the marginalisation of the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank since 1948, the dehumanising of Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists diminishes Palestinians and allows for the Gaza strip to be reduced to rubble, and legitimises the invasion of Lebanon where thousands of innocent people have been killed in the seemingly indiscriminate bombing of apartment buildings. And the threat that if Lebanon does not get rid of Hezbollah, it too may be reduced to rubble, just like Gaza.

Truth is hard to find, as the people who are asked to comment are politicians or nominated spokes persons, but the reporters on the ground are silenced, the news offices closed so that the only information which comes out is the official line from the Israeli side. War also becomes a political football, where one side is considered on ‘our side’, the others must then be terrorists, particularly difficult in a nation such as ours which is an immigrant nation, having both citizens and guests from both sides of the conflict living among us. But we must be careful which flag we use in our public protests, lest we be criminalised, branded as supporters of terrorists.

The challenge is to sort out the difference, which is true information, which is misinformation and which are blatant lies?

Both in the news and information presented to us and in the way histories have been framed.

And that task is not easy.