Egregoros

When Obama beat Romney, someone asked Harry Reid about his hilariously transparent lies about Romney's taxes on the Senate floor. Reid did not address the question as an honest man does. He replied, "It worked, didn't it?"

Lying works. It is powerful. This is a war. Not a Saturday afternoon Republic serial. We need all the weapons we can get.

Once my heritage is secured, by blood or alse, then I will worry about whether I can sleep at night after lying about the people who want me genocided.

(I won't, most likely.)

The reason someone like that needs to be destroyed is because he is a liar. How you win, how you fight, etc, vs why you should fight, why you should win, why the other side should lose.

If you do the exact same thing the other side does, the side that should lose, then you just joined the side that should lose.

Subterfuge in war and lying are not always the same thing. You trick your enemies, but you don't lie to your neighbors. One okay, one bad.

Not that him being on one side of the equation means that the other side, romney, was good. It was two bads in a fight.

I can be charitable about it. There is room for a grey area regarding deception in war. You don't email your enemy with up to date numbers on your troops and movements in an effort to be honest. You deceive your enemy in battle. You make him think something that isn't true, so that he doesn't know what is true, so that you can catch him off guard.

That's something different than lying to the pool of potential recruits about why they should join you. "I want you to risk everything to help me fight this guy, but I don't respect you enough to tell you the truth about why."

Atrocity propaganda is a real and constant element of warfare throughout history, but it's probably more heavily weighted on the side that isn't fighting with defensible motives. If you had real and justifiable reasons to fight, why did you make up all that other stuff that didn't happen? Tends to be because the real reason wasn't defensible.