How Reactionary Lies Become Historical "Fact"

The short answer is: through sheer repetition.

For example, with the current "crisis" in Egypt- in fact a crisis for the U.S. rulers, not for humanity, for whom it's an exhilarating breaking of a tyrant's shackles on a people- reactionaries are trotting out the old lie that Jimmy Carter lost Iran. (Funny how the Democrats let the GOP smear them as quasi-traitors all the time, constantly "losing" U.S. property- China, Cuba (for which JFK paid with his life), Vietnam, Nicaragua, and now Egypt. The despicable Wall Street Journal in particular is pushing this lie.

Let's review the facts. In 1953, the CIA (under orders of that great foe of the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower) and MI6 overthrew the elected President of Iran, Mossadegh, and destroyed Iranian democracy, installing a weak tyrant, the Shah, on his throne. This was done because the "West" didn't like Mossadegh's plans for taking a bigger cut of Iran's own oil to use for the Iranian people. (Leaders trying to use their countries' own resources to benefit their own people is a crime that frequently leads to their overthrow by the U.S.) The CIA set up one of the most monstrous secret police organizations in history, the SAVAK, to make sure that anyone with even a thought of social reform would be tortured and murdered. Amnesty International rated Iran under the Shah as the world's worst violator of human rights.

The Shah managed to murder a quarter million Iranians during his reign, including 10,000 gunned down in the last week before he had to flee in 1979. At that point his army lost its stomach for killing the Iranian people. Unfortunately, since the CIA and SAVAK did such an excellent job of murdering any and all progressives and preventing any civic organizations at all from developing, only Islam was left as an organizing principle for society. Thus the senior religious figure, the reactionary Khomeini, and the religious cadres filled the power vacuum.

How exactly Jimmy Carter overthrew the Shah is a mystery. The Shah certainly didn't shrink from using maximum force to crush the Iranian people. There were idiotic calls at the time for the U.S. to invade Iran and pick up the murdering of the Iranians from where the Shah's army had left off. Maybe if they had killed millions, like they did in Vietnam, they would have "won" and could have reinstalled the Shah. (Oh wait, that didn't work in Vietnam anyway.)

How does this Big Lie become a fact? By constant repetition and the absence of anyone in the bourgeois media calling it out.

Here's another Big Lie that NEVER is exposed, even though simple arithmetic shows it to be false: JFK "stole" the 1960 election from Nixon by "stealing" Illinois.

To see, how ridiculously false this is, all anyone has to do (doesn't anyone ever do this?) is look up the numbers for the electoral count of 1960. Numerous websites, including government ones, have the necessary data.

The electoral count in 1960 was: JFK: 303, Nixon: 219. Illinois that year had 27 electoral votes. Now here comes the tricky part. Assume Nixon "really" won Illinois. What would the outcome have been? To determine whether history was changed by Kennedy family nefariousness, we have to use complex, advanced mathematics: subtraction and addition.

First, we subtract 27 from the election-stealing JFK's 303, leaving him with 276 electoral votes. Then we add 27 to the rightful winner Nixon, who was cheated out of what he earned by a bunch of Ivy League snobs, giving him 246. Voila: JFK: 276, Nixon: 246.

Now, in the actually-existing world that normal people habit, using the mathematical system that actual mathematicians use, 276 is bigger than 246. Thus JFK STILL WINS.

But in the imaginary "reality" that reactionary fanatics inhabit, 246 is bigger than 276, apparently. Or maybe the rule is that whoever gets fewer votes win. Whatever.

There's two points here: 1) U.S. reactionaries are as deranged as Nazis, and tell as whoppingly fantastic lies as the Nazis ever did, and 2) the entire establishment media and commentariat aids and abets them by NEVER EXPOSING OR CONTRADICTING EVEN OBVIOUS LIES LIKE THIS. Even the "alternative" paper, the NYC Village Voice, ran a rant a few years back by reactionary dog playright Tom Stoppard asserting the canard that Kennedy "stole" the election- and the "alternative" rag refused to print a correction pointing out the factual fallacy on which the canard is based. The phonies who control the rag wanted to dupe their readers with right-wing disinformation.

In such an extremely reactionary political environment, it's no wonder that the U.S. is socially, economically, and politically one of the most backward countries on earth. (Yes it is, but proving it will take another, lengthier, essay.)