When Truth Dies: Mon Mothma and the Fight Against Authoritarianism
“Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I’ve spent my life in this Chamber. I came here as a child. And as I look around me now I realise I have almost no memories that pre-date my arrival, and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly.
“Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honourably and upheld our code of conduct. This Chamber is a cauldron of opinions, and we’ve certainly had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.
“I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
“This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide. And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber. And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we’ve helped create, the monster who will come for all of us soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine.”
The words hang in the air, electrifying and dangerous. “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.” Not a philosopher’s abstract musing, but the desperate warning of a politician who has finally shed the diplomatic veneer that has defined her career. When Mon Mothma stood before the Imperial Senate to denounce the Ghorman Genocide, she did more than commit political suicide — she laid bare the essential truth that authoritarian regimes fear most: their power rests on lies, and those lies can be shattered by a single voice willing to speak truth, whatever the cost.
The Day Truth Died on Ghorman
What happened on Ghorman Plaza? The Empire’s official narrative was clear: a necessary security operation to quell dangerous insurgents threatening Imperial peace. The reality? Unarmed civilians slaughtered en masse, their only crime being their Ghorman identity and their resistance to the Empire’s rapacious mining operations that were destroying their homeland.
The scale of the deception was matched only by the scale of the atrocity. Imperial propaganda machines worked overtime, their efforts focused not merely on justifying the massacre but on recasting the very nature of what occurred. This was no unfortunate incident or regrettable excess — it was the deliberate extermination of people based on who they were. The Empire had been methodically building hostility toward the Ghormans, tightening control over them, and setting a trap designed to begin their elimination.
What makes Mothma’s stand remarkable is not simply that she named the horror for what it was — genocide — but that she identified the deeper crime: the Empire’s assault on truth itself. “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss,” she declared. In that abyss, democracy dies.
The Machinery of Untruth
Authoritarians understand what many democrats fail to grasp — that controlling the narrative is more powerful than controlling territory. The atrocities on Ghorman followed a playbook familiar across history: create an enemy, isolate them, dehumanise them, destroy them, and then control the story told about their destruction.
The Empire’s approach mirrors what political scientists have termed a “regime of post-truth” — where institutions once interdependent on each other to stabilise the public circulation of truth are systematically corrupted. Media become complicit, either through direct control or through the erosion of journalistic standards. Educational institutions are defunded or repurposed. Experts are undermined, and dissent is criminalised.
This isn’t merely propaganda — it’s the deliberate destruction of the infrastructure that makes shared truth possible. As Mon Mothma understood, when objective reality becomes negotiable, power belongs to whoever shouts loudest.
Hollowed Democracy
The Imperial Senate where Mothma stood represents the perfect cautionary tale — democratic institutions that persist in form while being gutted of substance. The Senate retained its grand chamber and procedural trappings even as Emperor Palpatine methodically stripped it of meaningful power. It became political theatre, a performance of democracy while actual decisions were made elsewhere.
This hollowing out is precisely what occurs when truth becomes subjective. Democratic institutions require a shared factual baseline to function. Without agreement on basic reality — that people were indeed murdered on Ghorman Plaza, that the Empire ordered it, that civilians rather than insurgents were targeted — meaningful debate becomes impossible. Politics degrades into competing narratives divorced from factual accountability.
The Senate’s impotence before Mothma’s speech reveals the fatal weakness of institutions that have abandoned their commitment to truth. Despite their grand chambers and procedural trappings, they become mere stage sets, incapable of restraining power because they’ve surrendered their foundation in reality.
Our Own Post-Truth Politics
We need not travel to a galaxy far, far away to witness truth under assault. Our democratic societies face their own crises of truth. Public trust in media has reached historic lows, with only 31% of Americans reporting a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media. Meanwhile, democratic indices show global declines in the quality of democracy, with civil liberties and electoral processes suffering the steepest falls.
The deliberate erosion of shared truth creates fertile ground for authoritarianism. As one analyst bluntly puts it, “the attack on epistemic infrastructure is bad for all sorts of reasons. It dumbs down the populace and opens them to greater manipulation, it weakens the country’s ability to respond to crisis, and it means it is more likely that we’ll repeat the past because we’ve ignored it”.
This isn’t abstract philosophy — it’s the practical mechanism by which democracies decay. When we cannot agree on basic facts, we cannot hold power accountable. When narratives matter more than evidence, the most ruthless storytellers win.
The Courage to See
What Mothma displayed wasn’t merely political bravery but moral clarity — the refusal to participate in collective delusion. “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” she said. This isn’t hyperbole but clear-eyed assessment. When we surrender the concept of truth, we surrender the tools to resist oppression.
Consider what Mothma risked. Her entire life had been spent in that chamber. She had no memories before it, few bonds of affection that cleaved so tightly. Yet she was prepared to sacrifice everything — position, safety, perhaps life itself — rather than participate in the fiction that what happened on Ghorman was anything other than genocide.
How many of us would show such courage? How many would instead rationalise silence, finding comfort in euphemism and ambiguity rather than confronting the stark horror of reality?
Truth as Resistance
What makes Mothma’s speech so powerful is her understanding that exposing truth is not merely a moral act but a strategic one. The Empire’s power rested not just on force but on the population’s acceptance of its narrative. By naming the genocide, by identifying Palpatine himself as the monster “screaming the loudest,” she created a fracture in the regime’s carefully constructed reality.
Her speech became the catalyst for uniting the scattered rebel factions into what would become the Rebel Alliance. Without that moment of truth-telling — without that clear moral stand — the resistance might have remained fragmented and ineffective.
So too in our world. Resistance to authoritarianism begins with the refusal to accept convenient lies. It requires building and protecting the institutions that safeguard truth: independent journalism, academic freedom, scientific integrity, and above all, a citizenry committed to factual reality over comforting fiction.
The Choice Before Us
We stand at our own Ghorman moment. Will we accept comfortable lies or demand uncomfortable truths? Will we retreat into tribal narratives or insist on shared reality? Will we allow truth to slip away, or will we hold fast to it even when it costs us?
The stakes could not be higher. As Mothma knew, once truth is surrendered, we become “vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest”. Democracy depends not just on voting but on the shared reality that makes meaningful voting possible.
Authoritarians understand this. That’s why their first target is always truth itself — discrediting independent media, attacking scientists and experts, flooding the zone with disinformation until citizens throw up their hands and decide there’s no objective truth at all, only competing narratives.
Mon Mothma’s stand reminds us that truth is worth fighting for, not as an abstract ideal but as the essential foundation of freedom. When she declared the Ghorman Massacre a genocide, she wasn’t just speaking truth to power — she was reclaiming the very possibility of truth in a system designed to destroy it.
Our task is no different. Like Mothma, we must refuse the comfortable lies, reject the false equivalences, and insist on reality even when it’s inconvenient. The death of truth may be the ultimate victory of evil, but its defence is the first duty of the free.
Bob Lynn / 20-May-2025
