Lies are mighty powerful: they can change the course of history, whether at a personal level or geopolitically, as has happened throughout times past.
Lies and deceit are particular tools of winning political strategies, to our shame. What is more, repetition of lies successfully fosters new beliefs as facts, for personal, political and financial gain.
In the 2024 Australian federal election, Labor trotted out the Medi-scare campaign for the third time, contributing to defeat of the Coalition. That the Coalition when in power, not only supported but reinforced Medicare, seemingly meant nothing to Labor nor to the unthinking constituents so terrified of losing free medical treatment. Lies exploited fear to win advantage.
That lying has become so endemic appears to reflect the population at large, as values on which the nation was based have dissipated in a post-truth world. Everybody fibs, making it easy for pre-election promises to be flouted once gaining incumbency.
Nowhere is this demonstrated better than the promise that pursuing Net Zero would make power bills cheaper by $275/year. Most families and businesses have experienced increase in their bills over a thousand dollars, some doubling. Without any adjustment in strategy, dogged pursuit of Net Zero threatens to send ever more homes and firms to the wall. No shame. No admission. No apology.
Every bit as damning is the pre-election promise not to increase taxes. Yet the recent Budget overturns that lie by taking a further $77 billion from the elderly and productive sector of the community to pay for expansion of the public service and care economy, without any intention of reining in spending.
Lies draw an unwitting public ever more rapidly into a socialist paradise where we are all controlled by the state, whether through dependency, regulation or penalty. People’s aspirations are dashed. Amongst Labor elites, the plan is on track.
Lies documented
Two books I have been reading provide stunning revelations of lies: The Greatest Lies in History (2009) by Alexander Canduci looks at the past, while a recent (2026) publication, Mindless, by outstanding researcher Bella d’Abrera, outlines how the education system uses lies indoctrinating children to destroy our civilisation.
The Greatest Lies in History
The book begins with a quote from Mark Twain pertinent to the topic:
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, is sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie told well is immortal.
Perhaps our PM Albanese will be immortal after all.
Greatest Lies covers the range of ways and means by which we are lied to and deceived, from spin and doublespeak, passing the buck, official deceptions and cover-ups, as well as acting under false pretences. Invariably, stated intention of initial lies have unintended long term damaging consequence. Following are examples of lies Canduci analyses in each of the categories which had long term consequences.
- Spin and Doublespeak
Fourth Crusade, ostensibly to liberate Jerusalem, was really aimed at sacking Constantinople, a goal which failed at great cost of men and treasure, despite repeated urgent supplication to the Crusaders from Pope Innocent III not to do so. Legacy of the folly crippled the power of the Byzantine Empire and with it the main barrier preventing the forces of Islam from entering Europe. In 2004 Pope John Paul II apologized to the Patriarch of Constantinople.
How often have we seen spin and doublespeak upend our lives at great personal cost!
- Passing the Buck
Forgery that ‘proved’ the Jewish conspiracy (1905) has relevance even today. The lie expounded in the forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was that Jewish leaders gather in a cemetery every 100 years to plan the conquest of the world. In truth, the Protocols were created by Russian secret police, the Okrankha, to promote antisemitism and crush potential revolutionaries at a time when small revolutionary groups to which Jewish intellectuals were attracted agitated for social change for relief from oppressive rulers.
The Russian Revolution (1917) and massacre of six million Jews in the holocaust have not allayed fervour from the forgery. Even today some Middle Eastern governments including Hamas explicitly refer to the Protocols forgery as being a factual account of the goals of the Jewish nation. A lie that seems eternal, as Twain said, unfortunately.
- Official Deceptions and Cover-ups
Partition of India (1947) was based on a lie that Muslims in India had always been separate, so they needed a separate state. Yet truth was that Hindus and Muslims had lived side by side for centuries in India and it was Muslim leadership that was fearful of losing its power and influence, given Hindus outnumbered Muslims at the time (320m to 50m).
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became first President of Pakistan, argued for a political voice for minority Muslims was unlikely in a united India and that a two-state solution was the correct and just one. Britain handed over two countries India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947. Sectarian violence raged as mass migration of between 12 and 14 million people crossed the borders of East and West Pakistan. Millions of innocent people died as unity was sacrificed for political ambition in a fruitless struggle. Jinnah had his wish, though died within a year of partition.
India continues as a democracy in which religious freedom prevails.
- Acting under False Pretences
Two hundred and fifty years after signing the USA Declaration of Independence from Britain, just celebrated, one cannot but help admire the eloquence of the document written by 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson and the religious basis claimed by the founding fathers. Preamble of the Declaration reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Noble as the document states, author Canduci asserts other intentions. Many of the Founding Fathers were successful businessmen who owned slaves. They felt Britain constrained expansion of settlements and business west beyond the Mississippi River. Britain held reservation about treatment of native Indians as settlement expanded, given their cost and effort in abolishing slavery. Further, taxes in the new colony were to pay for protection from the French, who moved north to Canada following independence. History shows exploration and development west expanded apace, with railways and industry, seeding the can-do attitude of a frontier nation still evident today. 250 years later there is much to celebrate in American enterprise from which Australia has been a significant beneficiary.
Regardless of whether the Founding Fathers embodied every aspect of the Declaration, the nation was gifted with values to which all democracies can aspire.
Mindless
Recent publication, Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying our Civilisation, is a product of the decade author and commentator Bella d’Abrera spent immersed in school curricula, arts funding and university policy, charting the ideological conflicts that increasingly dominate Western institutions.
D’Abrera uses deep research and historical context to assert the current education system pursues a monomaniacal obsession across the Anglosphere… producing conformists and activists who are angry about the past, bitter about the present, and terrified about the future, to be ready and willing to help bring about a better, equitable and socially just new world. Classic communist breakdown of a society.
Children under capture by the state from K-Y12 and University may be unable to read an entire book, write a coherent sentence or perform numeracy, separated as they are from values of family and community, indoctrinated in the globalist lies of climate catastrophe, gender fluidity, evils of colonialism and racism for which an evolved western democratic system is being held accountable.
The current system emulates Stalin’s Soviet Union coercion and propaganda, commanding loyalty to the State above family and faith, as did Hitler’s Germany. The “new person” created by the contemporary Western system, is, in many cases, utterly miserable, nihilistic, and sometimes suicidal. Youth suicide rates and suicide ideation have dramatically escalated. When meaning can only be found through political activism, why try? Ignoramus Greta Thunberg is the patron saint.
D’Abrera cites Jonathan Haidt who called those born after 1997 the anxious generation, over-protected in the real world and under-protected in the virtual world. By 2012 arrival of the smart phone coincided with rising rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide. Classroom content and social media created the perfect storm of indoctrination and despair.
What is to be done?
D’Abrera cites WHO’s own data that now admits what common sense has long told us: children need a sense of purpose, not a constant barrage of nihilist propaganda.
Solutions to counter the takeover of children by the state begin firstly, with universities. Free speech must be restored so that robust debate and sound learning can be recovered, speakers, ‘offending’ academics and students (e.g. Jewish) no longer bullied and chased from campus. To do so, DEI bureaucracies within the university must be dismantled, academics chastened and student bodies corrected from a belief of living in the midst of horrid oppression – an oppression that can, conveniently be alleviated only by joining what is essentially a cult that the vast majority of adults would reject as ridiculous (citing Rosiak).
Censorious, stifling, identity-obsessed institutions have lost their way, which was why Charlie Kirk was assassinated while opening debate on campuses, doing what the universities failed. “Toxic masculinity” has lost its punch as young men regain stature and return to church. Trump’s financial penalties on universities pushing DEI over merit has compelled change of policy.
Independent universities, colleges and schools have been gaining ground, basing learning on the richness of history and traditions that have advanced western civilization. In Brisbane, St John Henry Newman College has been established for just that purpose. Others have opted for home schooling to avoid indoctrination on race, transgender, climate catastrophe, and overly apologist colonial guilt and aboriginal ‘science’ permeating every subject, dumbing down, loading guilt and despair in a culture of oikophobia (hatred of one’s country).
That we are more blessed than any other generation before us is an unwelcome reality for haters.
Advance Australia fair.