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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Truth Can Prevail
Truth Can Prevail
Dear Readers,
This is my quarterly request for your support.
This is your site. I write it for you. Our deal is that the site stays up as long as you support it.
I promise never to lie to you. I do not speak for special interests. I have no ideological agenda.
My agenda is truth. As I told the Press Club of Mexico last year when I received the press club’s International Award for Excellence in Journalism, “truth is our country.” Unlike presstitutes, the loyalty of real journalists is to Truth, not to a government or corporate advertiser. Once a journalist sacrifices Truth to loyalty to a government, he ceases to be a journalist and becomes a propagandist. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/03/15/truth-country-paul-craig-roberts/
This promise does not mean that everything I write is the absolute total truth. Humans are fallible, and I am human. I make mistakes. I can be deceived. My sources might have jumped to conclusions. Truth is sometimes clear and sometimes elusive. I tell you the truth as best as I can discern it. My education and life experiences give me an advantage in discerning the truth.
The role of truth-teller is difficult and unrewarding. Historically the messenger is shot. People do not want to be pulled out of their comforting illusions and delusions and their inculcated biases. They do not want their emotionally satisfying beliefs challenged. They read a propagandistic screed somewhere that satisfied them, and they are sticking with it.
Those who aspire to be truth-tellers are constantly under attack and slandered. Those whom truth exposes are powerful and numerous. Truth is their enemy and they war upon truth. Far more effort goes into discrediting truth than into discrediting lies.
A truth-teller becomes controversial and, thereby, the truths he tells become suspect. For exposing the lies that serve the oligarchy, he becomes a “conspiracy theorist.” Foundations avoid him. So does the speaking circuit. The wrongs that he exposes, such as the domestic police state and wars of aggression based on lies, are more acceptable to the majority of the public than his criticisms of the wrongs.
For example, the government’s Internet trolls and the narcissistic imbeciles that hide behind phony names use comment sections of Internet sites to try to turn me into a “Reagan apologist” and a “Putin worshiper” who cannot be believed. They are unaware of the comedy that they provide. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist and remained a columnist for 12 or 15 years. There was opposition to me from presstitutes on the staff, and when the editor changed I asked the new editor, who came from inside the magazine, if this was the end of my column. “Certainly not,” he replied, “you have been the magazine’s most effective critic of the Reagan/G.H.W. Bush administrations the magazine has!” I was so effective as a critic that the George H. W. Bush administration did everything it could to get me out of the William E. Simon Chair of Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Today, facts, like truth, are inconvenient. Most Americans get their beliefs from their socialization. They have no idea where the beliefs came from, never having examined them. They just know in their overpowering ignorance that their beliefs are correct.
Those who actually care about truth—the supporters of this website, for example—are always in a minority. But truth is the weapon that makes a determined minority powerful. Unlike the majority lost in the forest of ignorance and lies, those with the light of truth see the way.
So fund this website, and I will stay at the vulnerable throats of the lie-tellers.