By John Torgrimson
Lanesboro, MN
When the priest who taught my religion class my sophomore year in high school asked if anyone wanted to attend a lecture by Mulford Q. Sibley, four of us raised our hands.
Sibley, an avowed socialist and pacifist, who encouraged civil disobedience, was a Sociology professor at the University of Minnesota. He was a Quaker who became a conscientious objector during World War II. He was an early and loud critic of the Vietnam War.
My hometown of Austin, Minn., was all stirred up that a “commie-pinko” was being given a platform to espouse his wicked ideas. And at a public middle school no less. It was 1965. The Cold War was in full bloom and we were being told that we needed to stop Communism 6,000 miles away in an Asian country that most of us couldn’t find on a map. And here was this guy saying that America was off its tracks – Socialism was better than Capitalism; war solves nothing; and people in developing countries have the same right of self-determination as we do.
I was curious about what the fuss was about and wanted to see this person who some were calling a Communist up close. I was 14. My parents, when asked by the school, said that I had their permission to go.
What I remember from that evening was the man’s courage. To stand up in front of a standing-room-only auditorium (many of them WW II veterans) and talk about what he believed in, to share his ideas and beliefs, knowing full well that most of the people in the room had it in for him. Many came just to see the fireworks and there he stood at the end of the night answering questions and taking chest-thumping insults from many who didn’t come to listen in the first place.
I remember Sibley’s main message being about truth, giving an example of a light on the ceiling.
What I see as truth, you may not see as truth. Look up at those lights on the ceiling. Now, I say that the light up there is yellow and I am pretty adamant about that. But no, you say there is a blue tint to it, that you can’t say that it is yellow. It must be blue you think. So, you see, we may hold different truths. The fact is that we are looking at the same light, but its color is subjective to our individual selves. We hold different truths.
She says, “God exists.” He says, “God doesn’t exist.” These are truths. Beliefs. Not facts. Truths may include facts, but facts are indisputable. They exist in real time and are identifiable.
When Putin calls an invasion of Ukraine a Special Military Exercise, he too is playing with the facts. We know it as an act of war. Yet, when my nephew’s wife, who is Russian, tells her family in Moscow about what Putin is doing in Ukraine, they don’t believe her. Putin is fighting the Nazis aggressors they said.
Dictators alter the facts to create their own truths so that they can manipulate the masses. It’s called propaganda – the deliberate manipulation of facts and half-truths to influence public opinion. What Putin is doing in Russia is what Xi Jinping is doing in China, saying the minority Uighurs are going to vocational school and not forced re-education. It is what Donald Trump is doing when he says the election was rigged, altering the facts to serve a different truth.
If you tell a lie long enough some people believe it. It becomes their truth, regardless of what the facts say otherwise.
Sibley died in 1989. A quiet grove on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, described as a place to rest and think, is named in his honor.
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