Dan · Joined: Jan 01, 1970 Posts: 448 Location: USA

2020-09-17 edit

This quote says it well from "Do Disclosures of Atrocities Change Anything?"

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Counterpunch, July 31, 1010.

twitchy questions such as that asked on The Nation by Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show: I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable?

The answer to that last question was given definitively in 1851 by Robert Lowe, editorial writer for the London Times. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it â€œmust also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.â€

"The first duty of the press, Lowe wrote, is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation¦ The Press lives by disclosures. For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences â€“ to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.".

I can not say this better. We seek the truth as individuals and when enough of us do in public then we become a civilized society. I know it does not have to be a majority, but it must be at least a few percent of us; then the exemplars lead us all.

Right now we live in a cesspool of liars in our leadership establishments. They have become so used to twisting words, they think facts have no bearing on what they do, because they seemingly have not cost them before.

Lies always entrap and destroy the serial liar, be it an individual or a society that tolerates them in the end.
The only cure for a society that tolerates public liars only comes through the public exposing and demanding there
expulsion from society, legally or by completely ignoring them.