Load o’ Ballog

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

April 15, 2010 on 11:13 am | In General | No Comments

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Misdirection.

It is the tool of illusionists, confidence tricksters and those in power.

Illusionists are not always confidence tricksters, but confidence tricksters are always illusionists to some extent.

Confidence tricksters are not always in power, but those in power are always confidence tricksters to some extent. They have to be because those who seek positions of authority want to keep those positions. Of course they do, they are human. Very few people who take, or are given, power have the strength of character of Cincinnatus.

Power requires a power base and that power base is people. In democratic societies, re-election is the main aim of every politician, not doing good for the people and the state. Politicians use misdirection to draw the voters’ attention away from political flaws and mistakes (usually by pointing out the flaws and mistakes of their opponents). In authoritarian societies, the power base is two-tiered, the first being the enforcers and the second being the people. Authoritarians know that despite having the people under their thumb, revolution is always a threat, so they use misdirection to point out how evil some external power is. President Ahmadinejad of Iran rails against the West to draw attention away from the fact that Iran is the kind of society where girls are punished for the crime of being raped, punished by hanging. He rails against Israel to draw attention away from the fact that his parents were Jews.

I grew up in an authoritarian society, a dictatorship if you will. A society which had a supreme leader who was officially considered to be incapable of making a mistake. Indeed his (because only a man could become supreme leader, or indeed reach even the medium level echelons) enforcers were also regarded by ordinary people to be infallible. Even if one of those enforcers was disliked, he was afforded respect. I must emphasise that many people joined the echelons of the enforcers because they believed in the System and they believed they could do good. I believe such people would have done good without the System. The good was in them, not in the System.

Just as some of the enforcers were good people, most were ordinary people and some were bad people. They had the same spectrum of characters as ordinary people because they were ordinary people, just in black uniforms.

The bad people were very bad, but despite their crimes, the ordinary people still considered them (and the System) infallible. Even when an enforcer raped a child, society would blame the child, disbelieve the child, silence the child.

But as I said, only a few enforcers were that bad. Surely a few bad apples would not make the System as a whole bad? The problem was that the System protected the rapists of children. Because the System itself was sacrosanct, the reputation of the System was more important that the wellbeing of any child. Even the police believed this. So when an enforcer raped a child, his superiors would simply move him to another town, where he could rape more children.

Now the people have woken up to the charade and the people are angry.

At first the System tried to soothe their anger by admitting the problem existed. The System apologised and thought that would be enough. But those in the upper echelons of power refused to accept responsibility, such was their addiction to power and their disdain for the people. Eventually, those in power became irritated by the sustained anger of the people. Apology, it seems, was not enough.

True contrition requires humility. If you have ever been to the beautiful obscenity that is the Vatican, you will know that humility is not a word the System understands.

And so we come to the misdirection.

Priests raped children. The Catholic Church has acknowledged and accepted that. What it does not want to accept is responsibility. It is willing to pay money to the abused, but it refuses to accept that those who were accessories to the crimes should be arrested. So it uses misdirection.

The Catholic Church has acknowledged the crimes of individual priests. It blames pedophilia on homosexuality, thus causing another row. But the row is a tactic whose purpose is to draw attention away from the fact that it was those in power who committed the criminal act of covering up the rapes and allowed priests to continue raping children.

Upper echelon enforcers also use misdirection by taking up the role of victim, claiming that recent criticism of the Church is akin to anti-semitism, others want us to believe that recent criticism is some kind of Zionist conspiracy.

Now that the individual crimes have come to light, the Catholic Church wants us to stay focussed on the rapes themselves, but they are also at pains to point out that child rape is a society-wide problem and not simply a problem within the Church.

The other crime that they are so desperate for us to forget is that those in power colluded in the rapes. It is not enough to see the rapists up on criminal charges, every parish priest, bishop, archbishop, cardinal and pope who was involved in covering up the crimes should face charges. The Catholic Church knows that, hence the misdirection.

DO NOT AROUSE THE WRATH OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!