The Third World War

I spent an evening not long ago with an historian who was born in East Europe, and has lived most of his sixty years in Russia, central Asia and the Mideast. Much of what he said circled around a thesis that I shall reduce to the confines of this page:

Westerners believe (he said), or rather assume, that the purpose of discourse is the statement and communication of truths. They realize that words sometimes state error or falsehood, but this they consider a perversion of the proper purpose, resulting from either an unconscious defect (ignorance) or a deliberate defect (fraud, deceit) in the speaker.

JB

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James Burnham

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I spent an evening not long ago with an historian who was born in East Europe, and has lived most of his sixty years in Russia, central Asia and the Mideast. Much of what he said circled around a thesis that I shall reduce to the confines of this page:

Westerners believe (he said), or rather assume, that the purpose of discourse is the statement and communication of truths. They realize that words sometimes state error or falsehood, but this they consider a perversion of the proper purpose, resulting from either an unconscious defect (ignorance) or a deliberate defect (fraud, deceit) in the speaker.