The pen is mightier… but words will never hurt me.

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
These can’t both be right, surely?

In the propaganda state that I’ve not been alone in recognising for the past nearly seven years, our governments (and others) seem to have come down firmly on the side of the first adage. To allude briefly to my last post, the subversive cults tend not to present their doctrines by force of argument, or by simply pushing forceful leaders into unsuspecting churches. They prefer to infiltrate using the bait of theologically acceptable songs as a hook. This has always been the preference of false Christian teachers: early heretics like Pelagius and his kind worked hard to appear orthodox by using ambivalent language when communicating with critics, rather than simply to present their alternative teachings straight in the “marketplace of ideas.”

That’s why in 2 John v.10 we are warned that even to welcome false teachers into our house, let alone to let them teach, is to share in their wicked work. At first the teacher (or the Bethel songs) will seem to be not only utterly pleasant and personable, but orthodox. But once the foot is in the door, most of their hard work is done.

But the same is true in spades on the political scene. NATO has sought to defeat Russia’s military weapons with propaganda, and Hamas likewise. In this they have both been very successful, mobilising world opinion to their respective causes through stories of atrocities, genocides and so on. Why the enemy would want to commit such atrocities so regularly, knowing the P.R. consequences, escapes logical explanation. Hence Putin must be a madman, and the Jews are … well, “the Jew,” probably named Emmanuel Goldstein. When one is able (and more importantly bothered) to check out the facts on the ground, more often than not the accusations are false. It is true that bombs and bullets kill, whereas newspaper headlines do not, directly. But if the whole world is persuaded to sanction, marginalise and hate one side in a conflict, that may very well turn out to be a war-winner, proving that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

Sadly, the same principle has been championed on the domestic English scene. Local people in leafy suburbs spontaneously demonstrate against criminal behaviour by massed illegal immigrants they never invited, and indeed voted to abolish in multiple elections. In non-propaganda states the police would crush such protests mercilessly, and might well succeed thereby. But instead, we now see masked and professional Antifa demonstrators from outside the area (funded, according to David Starkey, largely by the National Lottery!) being escorted by the police, still masked, to the protest, and bussed out again in police vans.

Even then, the aim is not simply to use state-sponsored Blackshirts to beat the hell out of the local mums and working men, but instead, more subtly, to use their intimidation to provoke a violent response, enabling arrests and heavy legal police suppression. In this way the story can continue to be sold in the media that it was the original demonstrators who were all Far-Right thugs, possibly from distant cities, and to bury the real professional thugs in the lede so they can move on from Epping to Diss, or wherever they are paid to go next.

Meanwhile, the authority figure of the local Chief Constable is able to get away with first lying through his teeth, and then obfuscating the police complicity in violent affray by mouthing platitudes about his duty to allow both sides the right of protest. I shouldn’t need to say that organising parties of masked outsiders to and from the mainline station, and then confronting the locals with your cordon to protect the unauthorised incomers, is not what that’s about. Nor is it what we’ve noticed from the police, should a local resident wave an Israeli flag whilst pro-Hamas demonstrators are passing.

I used to be both a police surgeon and the Force Medical Officer for Essex police, meaning I “appointed” several Chief Constables by dint of doing their final medicals. And I don’t think any of them would have thought of perpetrating such deception in a million years, for all the political element in their role. But what counts is what the general public believes, and the authority of a uniformed senior policeman still counts for a lot, as do selectively chosen photographs in the press, and the fear still aroused by dark rumours of Far Right terrorists (and the potential fear suppressed by the non-mention of actual Far-Left terrorist groups funded by the taxpayer).

But the Chief Constable’s authority in the public eye has been rapidly shrinking, as had trust in both government and the press. And that’s another way of saying that the pen is only mightier than the sword whilst people have cause to believe what the pen is writing. Once the Writer of the nation’s narrative is recognised as a malevolent fraud, then sticks and stones, the weapons of untrained and disillusioned mobs, turn out to be very much more effective at breaking bones than mere words. Even big bones like political systems.

The one exception to this is the Word of God, which unlike both swords and words can change the hearts of men to seek peace and truth. Sometimes it can even transform States, but whether peacefully of by letting human words and weapons act out their folly depends on factors known only to God. Ultimately, though, I hope my readers remember that the coming of the Word in person is what finally trumps the deception both of force and lies.

But for now, our rulers prefer to take refuge in the lie (see Isaiah 28:17), until such time as

Your covenant with death will be annulled; your agreement with the realm of the dead will not stand. When the overwhelming scourge sweeps by, you will be beaten down by it.

With that in mind, I suppose this post will be a small test of the new Online Safety Act, which criminalises telling the truth about liars who have power. See you in a police cell, maybe?