The Lobby of the Blind
Goebbels and Ahmadinejad: When the Truth serves their purpose.

by: F. Gridley

The recent speech by Iranian president Ahmedinejad at the UN, where he claimed that the 9/11 attacks may have come from within, has been met with withering criticism by the American press. In a Sept. 27th Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Ahmadinejad is labeled an 'Information Pariah' for 'thumbing his nose at core beliefs of our era' which core beliefs apparently include the official version of 9/11.

This is hardly the first time that the western press has discounted shocking truths that challenge 'core beliefs of the era.' The reaction by the western press to revelations of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union during the 1930s stands out as a masterpiece of intellectual dishonesty.

That there was a famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 - a famine deliberately orchestrated by the Soviet government during the “collectivization period” - and that millions of people perished as a result, is a historical fact, meticulously researched and detailed in "The Harvest of Sorrow" by Robert Conquest.

At the time, reports of the famine were widely available in the west, but these reports were often ignored or discounted by major American newspapers sympathetic to the Communist Revolution. New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty reported that ‘there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be’. But he knew otherwise, and privately estimated the famine victims at around seven million.

As Conquest noted, "This lobby of the blind and blindfold could not actually prevent true accounts by those who were neither dupes nor liars from reaching the West. But they, could, and did, succeed in giving the impression that there was at least a genuine doubt about what was happening and insinuating that reports of starvation came only from those hostile to the soviet government and hence of dubious reliability...."

Those hostile to the communists had no reason to lie, and every reason to expose the truth about the atrocities of the terror-famine of the Communists. On Sept. 13, 1935, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister under Hitler delivered a speech to the annual congress of the Nazi Party in which he said:

"The Austrian Cardinal-Archbishop, Monsignor Innitzer, said in his appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union. During his speech delivered before the House of Lords on the 25th July, 1934, the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking on reports relative to the famine victims in Soviet Russia in 1933, said that the number was nearer to six than three millions."

It is a sad commentary on the intellectual honesty of influential American newspaper publishers that the lie was perpetrated by the New York Times and the truth came from a Nazi propaganda minister. Goebbels had no objection to lying of course, - that was his function basically, - it just so happened that in this case the truth served his purpose much better than a lie. He wrote in his diary on 15 September: "A brilliant success, The Fuhrer was genuinely enthused. A storm of applause, my material was deeply moving."

Which brings us to Ahmendinejad’s recent speech. Like Goebbels, he doesn’t have to lie about the crimes of his enemies when the truth serves his purpose much better. We agree with the WSJ that Ahmendinejad can be expected to lie about the tortures, assassinations and detentions committed by his own regime. But he doesn’t even need to lie about the disgraceful Abu Graib incidents to inflame his audience. And he doesn’t need to lie about the overwhelming evidence that there is something very wrong with the “official” 9/11 story. Even non-scientists, once shown the evidence, know that 47 story steel office buildings do not collapse into their own footprints at freefall acceleration due to “office fires”.