ANOTHER VOICE murray swart Validated by lies

ADOLF Hitler was born on this day, April 20, just shy of 13 decades ago and while he may be long gone he is by no means forgotten.

Not many people have shaped the course of history, purely through personal ambitions and aspirations, with such efficiency and while the trail of devastation left in his wake is going to take generations to mend, his life will forever be a story of rags to riches.

However, his defiance of the odds isn’t a fairy tale, but a cautionary one.

With every step he took towards turning his dream into a reality, his vision proved more the world’s nightmare until he was within a whisper of being all powerful, all knowing and all owning.

He came closer than most to having the world at his fingertips but never considered that having the blood of millions and millions on your hands leaves a layer so thick that you will never actually feel what seems within reach.

We can’t change the past but if we fail to learn from it, we are in for a rough and very repetitive ride.

As easy as it is to point all the blame at that crazy man with the “snorretje”, it’s important to remember that his rise came as a result of popular consensus.

This type of endorsement from the masses really wasn’t difficult to obtain.

In fact, it still isn’t.

All you need to do is divide your audience on a moral issue and then feed the misinformed enough misinformation to manipulate and entrench their opinion with fictional facts.

What counts in your favour, as a narcissistic megalomaniac, is that those who know what they are talking about and those who talk what they are knowing about don’t agree on any level, while those that fall outside these categories neither know nor talk.

A few masters of misleading misinformation spring to mind but I’m not getting into that right now.

On that note, April 20 is also set aside to raise awareness on another issue causing immeasurable suffering, pain and death, for the greater good of a handful at the expense of the masses, validated by lies.

At 4.20pm today, a growing circle of cannabis users around the world will be sparking up in protest against rules and regulations that are killing us.

You see, this day is known as 420 and has been earmarked to raise awareness on the need for a change in legislation, public perception and our day-to-day relationship with a plant that is so entwined with our very existence that no amount of misinformation, abuse of power and straight forward bull could ever wipe out its use by us as a species.

The problem the handful face is that it’s too useful, versatile, affective and abundant to be monopolised for a selfish agenda and while there are still many questions, claims and concerns that need to be addressed, it is already abundantly clear that the most harmful part of this plant are the ingrained misconceptions of it and the rules around it.

Hitler lied to the masses and many people have lied about cannabis.

Both lied about the nature of the threat to our everyday way of life and about the cause for their concerns, the catalyst for their actions and their motivation.

Both even lied about the number of lives lost as a result of their personal pursuit for prosperity.

However, this is where the results of the two begin to differ.

Precisely how many millions of deaths Hitler is accountable for is subject to who you are asking.

Marijuana has never ever killed anyone.

The number of deaths and amount of suffering that could have been avoided, had marijuana been available, if only for medicinal research, is anybody’s guess.