The big lie

Dear Editor,
On Monday, May 25, Joe Harmon floated his outrageous APNU/AFC 86,000 lie. Coming on the heels of APNU/AFC won, the election was fraudulent, and hundreds of dead and migrated voted.
What the end game of this buffoonery is remains to be seen. But it certainly is divisive and hurts the nation.

There’s a psychological principle that the big lie is much more likely to be believed than the small lie. The reason is that most people have a limit to the falsehoods they would promulgate. People know that people, including themselves, occasionally lie. They, for example, exaggerate or lie to make themselves look good. But few would dream of uttering a gargantuan lie of the size that Harmon did.

Given their own self-restraint and their experiences with people they know, they come to generalise this restraint to other people’s conduct also. Even the habitual liars they may know have some ceiling to the size of the lies they utter. So when the country is assaulted with one of these big whoppers, some assume that there must be some veracity to the statement.

The dictator Adolph Hitler, who was a master propagandist in Nazi Germany, described the big lie in his book Mein Kampf this way: A lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.

That’s what Joe Harmon and the APNU/AFC attempted on Monday, May 25 as the evidence of the Mingo fraud in Region Four continued to pile up.
• He did this contrary to the factual evidence while more and more details of the Mingo fraud continued to emerge. Not only has the evidence continued to emerge, but the fraudulent margin of victory Mingo gave to APNU/AFC has so far been reduced by some 5750 as at May 21

• Furthermore, in the five Regions completely recounted – One, Two, Three, Five and Seven – the total difference between the SoRs and the SoPs is only 11 votes as shown in the table below. Yet, every day, APNU/AFC trots out more baseless allegations

Firehosing
The reach and scope of the big lie have evolved. With the ubiquity in the electronic age of audio, video, and instant communication worldwide – now that people can see more with their own eyes, the big lie is increasingly about power.
Harmon was not just lying, he was asserting that he and the APNU/AFC cabal are not constrained by objective reality, and that everything, even the totally obvious, can be challenged.

Throughout the year and a half that it has refused to give up the reins of Government, the APNU/AFC cabal has been asserting it has the power to keep urinating on the sidewalk, and the country has to keep wiping it up. It’s wiping the country’s face in the dirt.

The perpetrators feel no embarrassment when their lies and inconsistencies are revealed. They’re saying we know that you know, and we don’t give a rat’s arse. We have the power – we make the reality. We will gut facts of their power. And we will reduce reality to picking sides, and relegate truth as straws for the disempowered to clutch. There is no objective truth – just sides to take.

This nine-minute video illustrates this well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nknYtlOvaQ0

From the video, all Guyanese would be able to recognise the methods they use:
1. High volume and multi-channel
2. Rapid, continuous, repetitive
3. No commitment to objective reality
4. No commitment to consistency

Examples of the absence of commitment to objective reality were the assertion that 33 is not a majority of 65, which had to go all the way to the CCJ. Imagine how this is viewed outside Guyana. Then there was the claim that the PPP/C and an ugly mob stormed GECOM, which is completely disproved by video. They do no better on consistency. First, APNU/AFC said it won the election. Now that is being disproven, it claims the entire election was fraudulent.
Meanwhile, APNU/AFC never mentions the guy who threw himself under the bus for them. Did you know there was a GECOM RO named Mingo? Well, don’t let objective reality get in the way – he no longer exists.

Where we go from here
Is this what we want our country to be? These purveyors who promulgate there is no objective truth have damaged the country and the culture. Who would imagine going to court to prove 33 is more than 32?
Their only allegiance is to power. They have now also thrown their own polling agents under the bus – in the blink of an eye along with the ordinary GECOM staff members who worked on Election Day. How long will it be before they turn on the cronies like Lowenfield and Meyers?

Maybe Madam Singh should be looking over her shoulder now.
This is why it’s critical for the media and the country to understand what’s going on and to build national awareness. Journalists, in particular, should understand firehosing so they aren’t exploited by it, but rather help in calling it out. Don’t chase every lie, choose your focus and hold them on that point or points. They will try to shift to another point as soon as they are exposed, don’t let them do that.

With greater awareness, the firehosing will lose its power and people can focus on dealing with reality and truth.

Sincerely,
Ron Cheong