There was a time when words shaped reality. When truth was not something that could be bought, or annexed, or secured through force or it's threat.
For truth is not an argument, nor a decree. It is simply what is; not what power wishes it to be.
It requires no permission. It does not wait to be authored. It exists as it is: indifferent to banners, immune to slogans, and stubborn against every hand that tries to reshape it.
When I stood in the Senate chamber five years ago, I believed, perhaps naively, that truth still possessed weight within those walls. To stand in that chamber is profoundly humbling. A thousand platforms, each bearing a world, each suspended over a a void. It is analogous, deliberately so, to the galaxy itself. The chamber is vast enough to swallow voices, to make suffering feel distant, theoretical.
I remember how small Ghorman sounded in that space. One name, spoken into an ocean of indifference. I spoke of crushed streets and shattered bodies. Of a people ground beneath the machinery of “order.” I believed, even then, that if I described the horror with enough clarity, if I named it for simply what it was, the chamber would have no choice but to listen.
But I also remember what followed. For a moment, the chamber was still. Then it erupted. Not in horror at what had been done, but in fury that it had been said.
I was told I had broken decorum. That I had endangered stability. That I had mischaracterized events every sentient being already knew. The outrage was not for Ghorman. It was for the discomfort of those forced, however briefly, to look at it.
Then the protests came, as they always would, that Ghorman was an exception. That the suffering inflicted on it's people was tragic, yes, but contained. That what was done there could never be done elsewhere. That the Empire had merely stumbled. That this was not who we were.
They were wrong.
On Ghorman, the unthinkable became possible. And once the unthinkable becomes possible in one place, it becomes viable in another. From viability comes repetition. From repetition, normalization. And from normalization, inevitability.
Tyranny is spread mostly by precedent. It is banal. It is boring. It wears the mask of routine.
Long have I feared that the terror visited upon the Ghorman people would not remain on Ghorman. That a government willing to crush a world beneath its heel would, in time, learn to crush a street, a home, a single life.
The scale is what changes. The logic does never does.
And now, on Coruscant, no less, we have seen that fear come to fruition. The truth is visible. Unmistakable. Yet the official record declares something else entirely, conjured after the fact, a danger invented to justify the irreversible.
And again we are being taught to treat truth as negotiable, as partisan, as something that may be overridden by uniform and title. Taught to look away when that logic comes home. When it no longer falls on a distant world, but on a familiar street. When it is no longer them, but us.
Democracy, or any system of governance, or any society for that matter, that values justice, in truth, not merely in name — cannot survive that lesson.
We are told this is the price of safety. That fear must be met with force, and force must be shielded from question. But safety built on silence is not safety.
It is submission.
And a society that cannot speak what it sees will soon be unable to see at all.
Five years ago, I said that the distance between what is said and what is known to be true had become an abyss.
We are told to stand back from it. To accept it. To let it define the limits of what may be spoken.
I will not. That abyss exists only so long as we agree not to cross it.
Every lie that goes unchallenged widens it. Every truth that is spoken, plainly, without permission, becomes a crossing.
The Empire depends not on our belief in falsehood, but on our silence. It does not require that we accept its narratives, only that we cease to contest them.
That act alone is our salvation.