You can try and fight the truth, but you won't win
Momentary political expediency, self-aggrandisement and the peddling of political falsehoods may work for now, but they will eventually wreck themselves upon the immutable rocks of reality.
They say that all political careers end in failure. This is truer for some careers than others, of course.
Today in Great Britain, the ruination of our B-rate politicians is usually the result of some minor personal perversion which, having become drunk on power, they are unable to resist. Such are the well-known tawdry tales of MPs with rent boys or those who abandon a long-suffering wife of many years to run off with a piece of office totty.
It's all very PG-13 compared to some of history's more gruesome examples, mind. Think Napoleon shipped off to Saint Helena or Ceaușescu on the receiving end of some summary justice dished out by a band of cheesed-off Romanians. While I'm strictly against the latter, I can think of many a politician whose talents would be much better applied to tending small plots of land on that volcanic isle as opposed to swanning around select committees and donor dinners.
But there might be some consolation for those who end up like old Ceaușescu. Think of 'Romanov' instead of 'Romania' and you've a good example. To say the least, things were looking pretty down for Nicholas II after the October Revolution. Within less than a year he and his family had been wiped out by the barbarians recruited by the Ural Regional Soviet.
The house in which it happened, the Ipatiev House, was destroyed in the late 1970s. Brezhnev's Politburo believed the site was one 'lacking historical significance'. That it was becoming a pilgrimage site for monarchists, which the local Reds weren't too keen on promoting, can't have helped. With the demolition of the Ipatiev House, however, it appeared that the Romanovs, whose bodies at that time still lay undiscovered, were entirely lost to history.
Yet the reforms that soon followed – glasnost, perestroika – as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 itself were to change the Romanovs' lot. Suppressed by the government for decades, those wishing to find out the true fate of the Romanov family were finally able to do so. The final two bodies of the family were found only in 2007 – those of little Alexei and his sister Maria.
Now on the site of their callous murder stands a magnificent Russian Orthodox Church with the unwieldy name of 'Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land'. The family, as well as the steadfastly loyal Dr Botkin, were canonised in 2000: an act that was, admittedly, not without its controversy.
Although the Communist Party tried to cover up the repugnance of its crimes for decades, the truth ultimately emerged. There is little wonder it sought to do so – the cold-blooded murder of innocent young children and even their family pets is a sin beyond redemption.
But ultimately, the truth usually finds a way of coming out. All it requires is a few people to hold on to it amid a barrage of falsehoods and deception. Those who hold onto such things amid the grinding intellectual suffocation of totalitarianism, such as existed behind the Iron Curtain, are among the true heroes of humanity.
As we march through a period of unparalleled attacks on the fundamental premises of reality, it is something we must all seek to emulate. It may take years, or decades, but it behoves us all to do so as the consequences of retreating are too great.
Momentary political expediency, self-aggrandisement and the peddling of political falsehoods may work for now, but they will eventually wreck themselves upon the immutable rocks of reality. It is something that our politicians and their lackeys throughout the upper echelons of society would do well to bear in mind.
