Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 106

"We whom you know as Shing are men. We are Terrans, born on
Earth of human stock, as was your ancestor Jacob Agat of the First Colony
on Werel. Men have taught you what they believe about the history of
Earth in the twelve centuries since the Colony on Werel was founded.
Now we—men also—will teach you what we know.
"No Enemy ever came from distant stars to attack the League of All
Worlds. The League was destroyed by revolution, civil war, by its own
corruption, militarism, despotism. On all the worlds there were revolts,
rebellions, usurpations; from the Prime World came reprisals that scorched
planets to black sand. No more lightspeed ships went out into so risky a
future: only the FTLs, the missile-ships, the world-busters. Earth was not
destroyed, but half its people were, its cities, its ships and ansibles, its
records, its culture—all in two terrible years of civil war between the
Loyalists and the Rebels, both armed with the unspeakable weapons
developed by the League to fight an alien enemy.
"Some desperate men on Earth, dominating the struggle for a moment
but knowing further counter-revolt and wreckage and ruin was inevitable,
employed a new weapon. They lied. They invented a name for themselves,
and a language, and some vague tales of the remote home-world they came
from, and then they went spreading the rumor over Earth, in their own
ranks and the Loyalist camps as well, that the Enemy had come. The civil
war was all due to the Enemy. The Enemy had infiltrated everywhere, had
wrecked the League and was running Earth, was in power now and was
going to stop the war. And they had achieved all this by their one
unexpectable, sinister, alien power: the power to mindlie.
"Men believed the tale. It suited their panic, their dismay, their
weariness. Their world in ruins around them, they submitted to an Enemy
whom they were glad to believe supernatural, invincible. They swallowed
the bait of peace.
"And they have lived since then in peace.
"We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the
Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke,
saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's
truth, the universe at once began to exist…
~ 104 ~