In August 2014, an independent report commissioned by British authorities established that at least 1,400 children were victims of organized sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, while social services, the police, and local elected officials were aware of it and did not act.
The reason was not incompetence: the report, written by Alexis Jay, documents in black and white that the silence was due to the fear of being accused of racism (the majority of identified perpetrators were of Pakistani origin) and mentions warned police who allegedly refused to intervene.
This silence was not an accident but a choice, deemed necessary in the name of a greater good. And English gangs are not an isolated case, as we have seen many similar "oversights" in Europe, for the sole reason that the truth could have fueled hatred towards foreigners and racism.
The noble lie of Plato
In The Republic, Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates what he calls a “noble lie”, that is, a foundational story, false but useful, that rulers would tell the people to ensure cohesion and social order. For Plato himself, it was not about deceiving to harm, but about deceiving to unite. He did, however, set a strict condition, soon forgotten: only rulers could resort to it, never citizens among themselves.
This highly questionable idea survived, became widespread, and is part of the modern progressive catalog; for them, certain truths would be too dangerous to say, because they would fuel bad causes, and silence or distortion would become a moral duty rather than a fault.
The problem is not that this reasoning is cynical; it is that it always ends up turning against those it intended to protect, because reality continues to do its work while it is silenced.
The French writer Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature, rightly said that “calling a thing by the wrong name increases the misery of the world”, and this constitutes the perfect argument against Plato. By refusing to name reality, our leaders exacerbate crises instead of mitigating them, which is very dangerous.
Caracas, or the lie that traveled
The Chavista Venezuela offers the economic version of that phenomenon. Starting in 2015, the Central Bank stopped publishing its inflation and growth statistics, forcing the IMF to make its own estimates for a country that never officially recognized hyperinflation that would soon be counted in millions of percent. This lie was not confined to Caracas, but also found enthusiastic amplifiers in Europe.
On the day of Chávez's death, in March 2013, Jeremy Corbyn, future leader of the British Labour Party, greeted on social media a man who “showed that the poor matter and that wealth can be shared”; that same week he presided over a vigil in London where he described Chavismo as a better way of doing things.
In 2014 he congratulated Maduro by phone, live on Venezuelan state television, where he was presented as a “friend of Venezuela.” As we well know, the Chavista regime lied shamelessly to its citizens to prevent any uprising and maintain the image of an exceptional socialist regime. The reality was very different, but thanks to certain Western “useful idiots,” it was able to continue its lie and make the population suffer even more.
Rotherham and Caracas have nothing in common except this: in both cases, an institution or a public figure decided that an uncomfortable truth deserved to be silenced or disguised, for a reason that was intended to be generous. In both cases, it was the most vulnerable (the girls of Rotherham, the Venezuelan people impoverished by the Chavista regime) who paid the price of silence; never those who had chosen it on their behalf.
