MOSCOW – George F. Kennan, adviser to the US Embassy in Moscow in Stalin, warned in a cable car to Washington in 1944 about the occult power possessing lies, noting that the Soviet regime ‘a strange and disturbing case about proved human nature. ”
The most important of these, he wrote, is that in the case of many people, it is “possible to make them feel and believe virtually anything.” No matter how untrue something may be, he wrote, “for the people who believe it comes true. It reaches validity and all the powers of truth. ”
The insight of mr. Kennan, generated by his experience of the Soviet Union, now has a haunting echo for America, where tens of millions believe a “truth” invented by President Trump: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the election in November and became president -elect only by fraud.
Lying as a political tool is hardly new. Niccolo Machiavelli, written in the 16th century, recommended that a leader try to be honest, but lying when he tells the truth, ‘will give him a disadvantage’. People do not like to be lied to before, Machiavelli remarked, but “someone who deceives will always find those who deceive them.”
A readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has in recent years become a driving force in politics around the world, especially in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines, all run by populist leaders who are skilled to shave the truth or think it straight.
Janez Jansa, a right-wing populist who became prime minister of Slovenia in 2018 – the homeland of Melania Trump – quickly dismissed the lie of Mr. Mr. Jansa congratulations after the vote in November, saying: “It is quite clear that the American people have chosen to enchant Mr. Trump and ‘deny facts’ through the mainstream media.
Even Britain, which sees itself as a bastion of democracy, has fallen prey to transparent but widely accepted lies, and voted to leave the European Union in 2016 after the pro-Brexit camp claimed that leaving the bloc would cost an extra £ 350 million a week, or $ 440 million, would mean for the country’s state health service. .
Those who promoted this lie, including the Conservative Party politician who has since become Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, later admitted it was a “mistake” – albeit only after winning the vote. .
Larger and more corrosive lies, which not only figure with figures but reform reality, have found extraordinary traction in Hungary. There, populist leader Viktor Orban, the financier and philanthropist George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, as the shadow brain of a sinister conspiracy to undermine the country’s sovereignty, replaced the indigenous Hungarians with immigrants and destroyed traditional values.
The strength of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, says Peter Kreko, executive director of Political Capital, a research group in Budapest that has long been critical of Mr. Orban, lies in his appeal to a ‘tribal mind-set’ that views all issues as a struggle between ‘good and evil, black and white’, rooted in the interest of a particular tribe.
“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality,” he said. Kreko said. “Lies become truth and explain everything in simple terms.” And political struggle, he added, ‘becomes a war between good and evil that requires unconditional support for the leader of the tribe. If you speak against your own camp, you betray it and you are driven out of the tribe. ‘
What makes it so dangerous, Mr. Kreko said, is not only that ‘tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics’, but that ‘tribalism is a natural form of politics: democracy is a deviation’.
In Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s deeply conservative Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015, promoted its own multi-purpose, reality-changing conspiracy theory. It revolves around the party’s repeatedly refuted allegations that the 2010 deaths of numerous senior Polish officials, including Mr. Kaczynski’s brother – then president of Poland – in a plane crash in western Russia was the result of a plot orchestrated and aided by Moscow, or at least covered by the party’s opponents in Warsaw.
While Polish, Russian and independent experts blamed the bad weather and the pilot’s mistake for the crash, the belief that it was a dirty game resonated among die-hard supporters of law and justice. It both fed and reinforced their view that leaders of the previous centrist government were not only political rivals but also traitors to Poland’s centuries-old enemy, Russia and Poland’s former communist elite.
The utility of lying on a large scale was first demonstrated almost a century ago by leaders such as Stalin and Hitler, who coined the term ‘great lie’ in 1925 and came to power from the lie that Jews were responsible was for the defeat of Germany in the First World War. For the German and Soviet dictators, lying was not merely a habit or an easy way to shed unwanted facts, but an essential instrument of government.
The presidential transition
It tested and strengthened fidelity by forcing subhumans to encourage statements they saw as false and garnered the support of ordinary people who, according to Hitler, “could become easier victims of the big lie than the small lie” because they, although they spend their daily lives on small things, “would never get into their minds to fabricate colossal untruths.”
By promoting a colossal untruth of him – that he ‘achieved’ a ‘holy election victory’ – and sticking to it, despite numerous court rulings that state otherwise, Mr. Trump angered his political opponents and even shook some of his longtime supporters. on his spoilage.
In accepting this big lie, however, the president has followed a path that often works – at least in countries without strong independent legal systems and news media, along with other reality checks.
After 20 years in power in Russia, for example, President Vladimir V. Putin has shown that Mr. Kennan was right when he wrote from the Russian capital in 1944: ‘Here people determine what is true and what is false. ”
Many of the lies of Mr. Putin is relatively small, as is the claim that journalists who exposed the role of the Russian security service in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny to the CIA are not, as is his insistence in 2014 that Russian soldiers no role in the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine, or in the fighting in eastern Ukraine. (He later admitted that they were “naturally” involved in the capture of the Crimea.)
But there are differences between the Russian leader and the defeated American leader, said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor and expert on Soviet and other forms of propaganda at the New School in New York. ‘Putin’s lies are not like Trump’s; it is tactical and opportunistic, ‘she said. “They are not trying to redefine the whole universe. He continues to exist in the real world. ”
Despite his open admiration for the Russian president and the system he presides over, she said that Mr. Trump, when he insisted he won in November, not so much Mr. Putin imitates not borrowing more from Stalin’s age, which after engineering a catastrophic famine that killed millions in the early 1930s declared that ‘life got better, comrades, life got happier’.
“That’s what the big lie is,” she said. Khrushcheva said. “It covers everything and redefines reality. There are no holes in it. So you accept the whole thing, or everything collapses. And that is what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. ”
Of mnr. Trump’s universe will collapse now that some allies have fled and Twitter has snatched away its most powerful bullhorn for broadcasting falsehoods is an open question. Even after the siege of Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, more than 100 members of Congress voted to resist the outcome of the election. Many millions still believe him, their faith being strengthened by social media bubbles that are often as hermetically sealed as Soviet-era propaganda.
“Unlimited control over people’s minds,” he said. Kennan wrote, depends on “not only the ability to give them their own propaganda, but also to see that no other fellow feeds them from him.”
In Russia, Hungary and Turkey, the realization that the ‘other’ is not allowed to present a competitive version of reality has led to a constant pressure on newspapers, television stations and other shops out of step with the official line.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has closed more than a hundred media outlets and, through bullying by the tax police and other government agencies, forced leading newspapers and television channels to transfer ownership to government loyalists.
This assault began in 2008 with the allegations of Mr. Erdogan and his allies that they have discovered a vast underground group of coups and subversives, consisting of senior military officers, writers, professors, editors and many others.
“The group has been completely invented, a total fabrication,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey.”
This big lie, built around a few shards, convinces not only pious Muslims who are hostile to the country’s secular elite, but also liberals, many of whom the army then considered the greatest threat to democracy. Trials continued for years before Mr. Erdogan has admitted that the case against the alleged underground group is a sham.
Long before mr. Trump, Mr. Cagaptay said the Turkish leader, who has ruled since 2003, “saw the power of nativist and populist politics” rooted in lies and “brought the idea of the deep state to its right to redress its political opponents. ”
The rise of mr. Trump also helped empower a cousin of the big lie – a surge in disinformation on social media and fitness of far-right conspiracy theory.
This is especially embodied by the global expansion of Qanon, a once obscure fringe phenomenon that claims the world is ruled by a cabal of powerful liberal politicians who are sadistic pedophiles. Mr. Trump did not reject Qanon disciples, many of whom took part in the chaos of Capitol last Wednesday. In August, he praised them as people who ‘love our country’.
To some extent, every new generation is shocked to hear that leaders are lying and that people believe them. ‘Never lying was more widespread than it is today. Or more shameless, systematic and constant, “writes the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Koyré in his 1943 dissertation,” Reflections on Lying. “
What has hurt Mr Koyré the most, however, is that lies do not even have to be plausible to work. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “the grosser, the greater, the grosser the lie, the easier it is to believe and follow.”