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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
PCR addresses An International Conference: Where is the World Headed?, Argentina, February 23-24, 2024
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An International Conference: Where is the World Headed?, Argentina, February 23-24, 2024
On February 23, I addressed an important international conference, or congress as it was called, organized by Norma Pimienta in Argentina. The conference addressed international concerns about the failure of Western leadership to put the world on a peaceful path. Also addressed was the problem of the privatization of government throughout the world. Even in the democracies the elites who control government use government for their benefit and not for the benefit of the people. Powerful countries in the West, such as the USA, and in past times much of Europe, use financial power and their currencies’ value as reserves to control Latin American, African, Arab, and Asian countries. The Western world’s control over others has prevented the normal economic and social development of much of the world. How is it that the West, which professes democracy, does not permit it?
I used my opportunity to address the congress to speak about the importance of truth and of the determination of the elites who control America to destroy all vestiges of truth because truth stands in their way.
The Western world comprises the first empire in history that is destroying itself and the institutions of freedom to which the West gave birth: government accountable to the people, a rule of law in which law serves as a shield of the people instead of as a weapon in the hands of rulers, respect for life and property, free speech and free inquiry in order to prevent proclamations of self-interest and ideologies from becoming unchallenged agendas.
All of these defenses erected to protect truth and freedom have been dismantled throughout the West.
Truth is dying, and truth has fewer and fewer defenders. Defenders of truth are labeled “enemies of the state.”
Everywhere in the Western world to speak the truth when it contradicts an “official explanation” is a certain way to trouble.
Here is what I said to the international congress:
Can Truth Survive?
Paul Craig Roberts
I appreciate the opportunity to address this important Congress. My topic is truth.
Those of us who understand that there is more to life than material existence know that even the richest material life is insecure if there is no justice and no accountability for governments and criminals. Justice depends on truth, as does freedom, scholarship, and science. Yet now in our time truth is endangered and can be banned because some privileged groups find it “hurtful” and other privileged groups find truth inconsistent with their agendas.
This leaves us with the realization that the defense of truth is a major task of our time.
Intellectuals should be the main defenders of truth, because without truth what is their profession? But intellectuals today will ask, “what is this truth of which you speak? How do you define it, measure it, weigh it?”
Others will deny an independent existence to truth and say it is an expression of class, race, or gender interests. It is widely taught in American universities that truth is a tool of white racists for suppressing people of color. Those who say this don’t realize that it cuts both ways and that under their definition they use truth to serve the racial interests of people of color.
We have learned nothing from the violence that ensued from Karl Marx’s denial of truth as an independent force. If there are only class interests, there is nothing but violence to mediate between the classes. Similarly, if there are only race and gender interests, how can differences be mediated except through violence? If truth is not an independent force that we respect, violence and tyranny are our future.
We should be alarmed that it is in the Western countries, where constitutions were devised to protect truth with free speech and assembly and with prohibitions of a state religion and status-based law, that truth is being suppressed. In the United States the print and TV media, Google, and social media cooperate with the federal government and its agencies in censoring and suppressing truth. This has been revealed in many ways. For example, Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter files and Amazon’s suppression at the White House’s demand of books written by experts that warned of the dangers of the Covid “vaccine.”
Today in the United States debate and free speech are no longer permitted. What can be said is closely controlled, even down to the use of pronouns. Today feminists, people of color, and sexual perverts put the most preposterous interpretations on words and ordinary expressions of language that allow them to suppress the words and condemn the speaker for being “offensive.” The term I just used, “sexual pervert,” is no longer permissible. It has been replaced by “the other attracted.” In other words, sexual perversion has been normalized.
Historians are at work revising history in keeping with the Woke interpretation. Any challenge to any official narrative brings the charge of “misinformation,” “domestic terrorist,” “white supremacist,” “transphobic,” “misogynist,” “racist,” “anti-semite,” “Holocaust denier.” It is no longer possible for a person at any of America’s prestigious universities to defend the US Constitution, Western Civilization, or the existence of white ethnic countries. Diversity is a value, but not so far as to include white nations, all of which are being systematically overrun and turned into towers of babel.
With white ethnicities silenced from their defense and the defense of their values by restrictions on free speech and open debate, will people of color take up the defense of truth or is it outside their tradition and does not favor their material interests?
My view is that the belief system, which provided protection against tyrannical government and robber barons, that imbued public and private institutions with integrity, that provided equality under the law as the ruling principle if not always in practice, and that pursued truth by leaving it subject to discovery, is being systematically dismantled everywhere in the Western World.
In the United States for more than a half century privilege in law has been created for blacks, women, the handicapped, sexual perverts, illegal aliens, and government officials and sons thereof such as Hunter Biden. Laws have been passed, such as the asset forfeiture laws, that destroy the Constitution’s protection of property. One American president, George W. Bush, took it upon himself to declare his right to violate the US Constitution and to detain American citizens indefinitely without due process just like a medieval feudal lord who could at his whim throw people into a dungeon for keeps. Another American president, Obama, declared his right to assassinate American citizens in violation of the US Constitution on suspicion alone without due process, and he did.
Neither president was impeached for violating his oath to the US Constitution. Their tyrannical behavior was simply accepted by the Congress, the judiciary, the universities and their law schools, the bar associations, the media, and the public as necessary measures of the “war on terror,” which was, in fact, a war on Israel’s enemies in the Middle East.
The question I leave you with is: If the West has abandoned its own belief system, a belief system that gave truth power over authority, that made law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of the state, and that freed the individual from his overseers, what part of the world is going to stand in for the missing West and defend these historic accomplishments from the Satanic evil that is beginning to overwhelm us?