Runaway Slaves and the Empty Portraits of Joseph Stalin

How is the pope going to take this? 

How popes always do. By kicking somebody's ass.
The Exegesis of Philip K Dick

When Stalin decided he could no longer trust a previously favored assistant or other sycophant, he made them disappear. And I don't just mean that the poor fellow was carted off to some horrible fate (likely in Siberia or the bottom of some frozen river). I mean that photos were then altered to remove him from the official party history. I mean that documents were amended and rewritten to exclude him. I mean that Stalin did not cause the man to simply cease to be. I mean that to the utmost of his power at the time, Stalin caused the man to seem to have have never have been in the first place. 

When the Nag Hammadi documents and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, we learned that the early Christian Church had done something very similar to the rival Christian Churches against which they had competed with for control of the message. 

The motto "In God We Trust", is a recent addition to American currency, but is mean to seem like tradition. The Confederate Statues that litter (good word) the southern US states are also recent additions, despite protests to the contrary by southern Racists. Attempts to control the story are not limited to the present and the future, and indeed are less useful in the future if the past is not preemptively altered.

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
George Orwell, 1984

Drapetomania was what slave owners called the phenomenon of black slaves running away. The word translates roughly to Runaway Slave Madness. And the idea was that black Africans and African Americans were in some way genetically predisposed to slavery. This rubbish was one of the many ways that the slave owners justified their monstrous actions and managed to sleep at night. But slaves who ran away punched holes in their lie that black slaves were disposed to being slaves and were fine with slavery. And so, they told a lie that those slaves who ran away were afflicted with a mental illness. The truth would destroy the lie which the system needed in order to function.

Martin Luther famously got in trouble with the Catholic Church when he began his reform movement, but the big issue was his mass printing of the Bible. Because he didn't print it Latin, which the general populace couldn't read. I printed it in German (being German) which the general populace could read. Suddenly, control of message was gone from the hands of the priest and the bishop. Anyone could read the words of the Holy Scripture and argue against the priest if they chose to do so. The church adapted, clever institutions do. But the point stands. 

Wikileaks. Edward Snowden. Deep Throat. Control of the message, and the concealment of how power maintains itself is essential for Empire to function. The Locust King lives on control of message. And why? Because the path of the Locust King is anathema to human nature. We do not want to live within the bounds of modern civilization. We get anxious and depressed. We rebel and revolt. We flee to frontier. We commit suicide (why do you think suicide is a sin? To steal from Magic: The Gathering "Death is no excuse to stop working.") 

In a word: Drapetomania.

We are being lied to. 

We are being told a lie to justify empire and hide the fact that we are still slaves.

 

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

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