Betrayal is one of those things mixed up with our flawed and faulty humanity - it is what gets served up when a stew has too much of the sweetness of ego, and not enough of the salt of discipline. It is often served on a platter of golden nobility, thus it blinds many who indulge. It is many-times regretted and regret leaves an opening for shame, and who knows what happens in those infinitisimal moments wherein one is making the transition from life into death, death into life? If God is Merciful as well as Just, He can be trusted to sort it out.
But mendacity - particularly when it is spat out from the sharp teeth of the malevolent - there is something beneath it that speaks of more than simple human weaknesses and missteps. Malevolent Mendacity arrived with a serpentine hisssssss - a flick of the forked tongue and a satisfied, superior sort of smile. It hisses still, but its smile seems plastered on, and it fails to persuade.
Of course, we never needed a Gospel of Judas for all this to happen. Richard John Neuhas had this to say about Cold War traitors, years ago.
Still today many subscribe to the infamous assertion of E. M. Forster that, if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friends, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country. Forgotten is the reality that one is betraying one's friends by betraying one's country. Forgotten, too, is the fact that those who are the friends of tyrants and mass murderers should not be counted as friends.
