The lie pandemic

Original title: PUtini is using the lie machine, but he didn't invent it. British history is also full of untruths

By: George Monbiot / The Guardian
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

For Syrians who have suffered its attacks, the Kremlin's lies about Ukraine are well known. Insisting that bombing victims are "crisis actors", spreading lies about chemical weapons, justifying the mass killing of civilians under the pretense that anyone who resists is a "Nazi" (in Ukraine) or a "beheader" (in Syria ) – his disinformation tactics are now well known.

Organized lying has more or less destroyed the American left and severely damaged the European left. As activist Terry Burke documented in 2019, Donald Trump's left-wing opposition was torn apart by furious internal disputes over Syria and Russian interference in US politics, all from prominent figures reciting the Kremlin's lies. Some of them turned out to have been paid by the Russian government.

Such lies are also known to Ukrainians. During the Holodomor (the 1930s famine made worse by Joseph Stalin's policies) – where 3-5 million people are believed to have died – the Kremlin's position was that the peasants had plenty of food but were hiding it. In some cases, they were even deliberately starved to death. I say you could call it crisis acting.

The current Russian disinformation machine has been blamed for what we now see as an “epistemic crisis” – the collapse of shared acceptance of the means by which truth is discerned.

We must oppose and expose the Kremlin's lie. But to say that the public assault on the truth is new, or only Russian, is also disinformation. For many generations, there was no epistemic crisis in countries like Great Britain – but it was not out of a shared commitment to truth. It was so because we had a common commitment against lies.

I mentioned the Holodomor, but let's take a look at another bad famine: in Bengal, in 1943-1944. About three million people died. As in Ukraine, natural and political events pushed people to starve. But, even in this case, government policy turned the crisis into a disaster. Research by Indian economist Utsa Patnaik says the inflation that made food unaffordable for the poor was deliberately engineered by the policy conceived by that hero of British liberalism, John Maynard Keynes. Colonial authorities used inflation, as Keynes put it, to "reduce the consumption of the poor" in order to extract wealth to support the war effort. Until Patnaik's research was published in 2018, we were unaware of the extent to which the Bengal famine was built. Britain's cover-up was more effective than Stalin's.

The famines created by India's viceroy, Lord Lytton, in the 1870s are even less well-known although, according to the book Late Victorian Holocausts by author Mike Davis, they killed 12-29 million people. When Caroline Elkins' book Britain's Gulag was published in 2005, we discovered that Great Britain had run a system of concentration camps and "closed villages" in Kenya in the 1950s, where almost all the kikuyu population. Thousands were tortured and killed or died of starvation and disease. Almost all the documents recording these great crimes were systematically burned or thrown overboard with the heavy chests produced by the British government. Well, they were replaced with fake files. Evidence of British colonial atrocities in Malaya, Yemen, Aden, Cyprus and the Chagos Islands was similarly erased.

Just as the Kremlin required the disinformation campaign to justify its imperial aggression in Ukraine, the British Empire also needed a comprehensive system of lies. Not only were our imperial crimes expunged from the files, but an entire ideology—racism—was constructed to justify killing, pillaging, and enslaving other people.

At the end of the BBC's excellent podcast series on QAnon, The Coming Storm, Gabriel Gatehouse lamented the loss of a "shared frame of reference" and a "shared sense of reality". I agree with him about the danger of conspiracy theories, but we must remember that when we had a shared frame of reference and a shared sense of reality, they were built on lies. Almost everyone in Britain believed that the empire was a force for good and that we had a sacred duty – the "white man's burden" – to either suppress or "civilize" those races we labeled "inferior" and "inferior". wild". Almost everyone believed the lies of national heroism, the lies of the crown, the lies of the church and the lies of the social order.

But most of us have come out of that era, haven't we? We are more skeptical, less blindly trusting. Most of us know bullshit when we see it. Really? So how can we explain the fact that almost everyone in public life subscribes to the same set of absurd beliefs? Let's put aside the wild conspiracy theories of the far right, even though they are now beginning to infect the mainstream right. Let's focus on the "acceptable" range of political opinion.

Almost everyone in the media, across almost the entire political spectrum, seems to accept that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely on a finite planet. Almost everyone believes that we should take action to protect life on Earth, but only when it doesn't cost too much. Even then we must avoid compromising the profits of legacy industries. They seem to believe that something they call "the economy" takes precedence over our life support systems.

They also believe that the unfettered acquisition of great wealth by a few is somehow acceptable. They believe that adequate taxes to break the cycle of accumulation and redistribution of extreme wealth are impossible. They believe it's okay if it allows a handful of dirty-money billionaires to control the media, set the political agenda, and tell us where our best interests lie. They believe we must pledge unquestioning allegiance to a system we call capitalism, even though they are unable to define it let alone predict where it might go.

It doesn't take terror or torture to convince people to conform to these insane beliefs. Somehow, our system of organized lying has created an entire class of politicians, officials, media commentators, cultural leaders, academics and intellectuals who nod along with them. Reading the accounts of 20th century terror, it seems to me that there used to be more disagreement among intellectuals facing totalitarian regimes than in our age of freedom and choice.

Okay, we have a crisis of truth. But, this is much deeper and wider than what we admit. Perhaps the biggest lie of all is that the crisis is limited to Kremlin lies and far-right conspiracy theories. On the contrary, it is systematic and almost universal. /Telegraph/