June 29 1974
Hitler said, and his experience proved him right, that one could convince most people of any lie if it were big and bold enough and repeated so often that they came to accept it as the truth.
He fooled most of the people, of Germany, of Britain and France and of the United States and the Soviet Union, most of the time until, and in some cases after, the outbreak of World War II.
It is not so much that people are entirely gullible. It is that most of us, unless we use our heads pretty coolly and our hearts hardly at all, are inclined to believe what we want to hear. It is more comfortable that way; it requires less effort; it saves painful heart searching and hard thinking; it sustains our myths.
The facts, usually, are quite different from what we want to hear. In the thirties most people wanted to believe in peace. The fact was that Germany under Hitler was re-arming at top speed.
On this island we have a number of people who for one reason or another – the pursuit of power, the mistaken belief that violence can provide an answer to problems, the simple and brutal obsessions of the hater, the refusal to emerge from a situation now out of date – give their time and energy to saying at the tops of their voice words which are not true, which obscure the facts and which fool a number of people.
They are postponing still further the end of this community’s agony and the longed for day when a mature people can see each other as they really are instead of a caricature.
Two main untruths are being promulgated by those who long for power over their fellow men.
One is that if a Protestant ascendancy could take a grip of this area, supported by armed force, the Catholic population would somehow melt away; or consent to become a kind of second-class, serf-like body like the blacks of South Africa.
The other is that if the British Government withdrew its army and, presumably, its sphere of influence, the Protestant population would, like the Catholics in the other proposition, present no problem but would meet happily with the Catholic population to discuss the running of the whole island on a basis quite different from that which they have hitherto experienced through union with Britain.
