MOSCOW – In a telegram to Washington in 1944, George F. Kennan, an adviser to the US Embassy in Stalin’s Moscow, warned of the occult power held by lies, noting that the Soviet government “has proven some strange and disturbing things about nature human. “
The most important among them, he wrote, is that, for many people, “you can make them feel and believe in just about anything.” No matter how false something may be, he wrote, “for people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity and all the powers of truth. “
Kennan’s vision, generated by his experience in the Soviet Union, now has a frightening resonance for America, where tens of millions believe in a “truth” invented by President Trump: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the November election and became president – select only through fraud.
Lying as a political tool is nothing new. Niccolò Machiavelli, writing in the 16th century, recommended that a leader try to be honest, but lie when telling the truth “would put him at a disadvantage”. People do not like to be deceived, Machiavelli observed, but “he who deceives will always find those who let themselves be deceived”.
The willingness, and even the enthusiasm, to be deceived has in recent years become a driving force in politics around the world, especially in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines, all ruled by populist leaders adept at finding out the truth. or invent it outright.
Janez Jansa, a right-wing populist who in 2018 became Prime Minister of Slovenia – Melania Trump’s birthplace – was quick to embrace Trump’s lie that he won. Mr. Jansa congratulated him after the November vote, saying “it is very clear that the American people elected” Trump and lamenting “facts denied” by the mainstream media.
Even Britain, which considers itself a bastion of democracy, fell victim to transparent but widely accepted falsehoods, voting in 2016 to leave the European Union after allegations from the pro-Brexit camp that leaving the bloc would mean an extra 350 million pounds, or $ 440 million, each week for the service of health of the country.
Those who proposed this lie, including the Conservative Party politician who has since become Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, later admitted that it was a “mistake” – although only after they won the vote.
Larger and more corrosive lies, those that not only mess with numbers, but reshape reality, have found extraordinary traction in Hungary. There, populist leader Viktor Orban called financier and philanthropist George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, as the dark mastermind of a sinister plan to undermine the country’s sovereignty, replace native Hungarians with immigrants and destroy traditional values.
The strength of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, said Peter Kreko, executive director of Political Capital, a research group in Budapest that has long been critical of Orban, lies in its call for a “tribal mentality” that sees all issues as a struggle between “good and evil, black and white”, rooted in the interests of a particular tribe.
“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality,” said Kreko. “Lies become true and explain everything in simple terms.” And political struggles, he added, “become a war between good and evil that requires unconditional support from the tribe’s leader. If you speak out against your own camp, you betray it and you are expelled from the tribe ”.
What makes this so dangerous, said Kreko, is not just that “tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics”, but that “tribalism is a natural form of politics: democracy is a diversion”.
In Poland, the deeply conservative Jaroslaw Kaczynski Law and Justice Party, in power since 2015, has promoted its own reality-changing, multifunctional conspiracy theory. It revolves around the party’s repeatedly debunked claim that the 2010 death of dozens of Polish senior officials, including Kaczynski’s brother – Poland’s president at the time – in a plane crash in western Russia was the result of a plot orchestrated by Moscow and helped, or at least covered up by the party’s rivals in Warsaw.
Although Polish, Russian and independent experts blamed the pilot’s bad weather and error for the accident, the belief that it was a crime resonated with die-hard advocates of Law and Justice. This fed and reinforced his view that the leaders of the former center government are not just political rivals, but traitors in collusion with Poland’s secular enemy, Russia, and Poland’s own communist elite.
The usefulness of lying on a large scale was first demonstrated almost a century ago by leaders like Stalin and Hitler, who coined the term “big lie” in 1925 and came to power with the lie that the Jews were responsible for the defeat of Germany in World War I For German and Soviet dictators, lying was not just a habit or a convenient way of sanding undesirable facts, but an essential tool of government.
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It tested and strengthened loyalty by forcing subordinates to praise statements that they knew were false, and gathered the support of ordinary people who, Hitler realized, “fall more easily victims of the big lie than the little lie” because, although they may lie in their day everyday about small things, “it would never have crossed their minds to manufacture colossal untruths.”
By promoting a colossal lie of his own – that he won a “sacred overwhelming electoral victory” – and adhering to it despite dozens of court decisions stating the opposite, Trump outraged his political opponents and even left some of his longtime supporters shaking heads at your lie.
In embracing this big lie, however, the president chose a path that usually 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, President Vladimir V. Putin, for example, showed that Kennan was right when, writing from the Russian capital in 1944, he said: “Here men determine what is true and what is false. “
Many of Putin’s falsehoods are relatively minor, such as the claim that journalists who exposed the role of Russia’s security service in poisoning opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny were working for the CIA. Others are not, such as his insistence in 2014 that Russian soldiers played no role in taking Ukraine’s Crimea or fighting in eastern Ukraine. (He later acknowledged that “it is clear” that they were involved in the capture of Crimea.)
But there are differences between the Russian leader and the defeated American, said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor and specialist in Soviet propaganda and other forms of propaganda at the New School in New York. “Putin’s lies are not like Trump’s: they are tactical and opportunistic,” she said. “They are not trying to redefine the entire universe. It continues to exist in the real world. “
Despite her open admiration for the President of Russia and the system he chairs, she said, Trump, by insisting he won in November, is not so much imitating Putin as borrowing more from the Stalin era, which, after engineering, was a catastrophic famine who killed millions in the early 1930s, declared that “living has gotten better, comrades, living has become happier”.
“That is the big lie,” said Khrushcheva. “It covers everything and redefines reality. There are no holes in it. You either accept the whole thing or everything falls apart. And that is what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. “
Whether the Trump universe will collapse now that some allies have taken off and Twitter has snatched its most powerful megaphone to publicize falsehoods is an open question. Even after the siege of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, more than 100 members of Congress voted against the election result. Many millions still believe in him, his faith strengthened by social media bubbles that are often as hermetically sealed as Soviet-era propaganda.
“The unlimited control of people’s minds,” wrote Kennan, depends “not only on the ability to feed them with their own propaganda, but also on seeing that no other subject feeds them with his own”
In Russia, Hungary and Turkey, the realization that the “other guy” should not be allowed to offer a rival version of reality has led to a constant crush of newspapers, television stations and other media out of step with the official line. .
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has closed more than 100 media outlets and, through intimidation from the tax police and other state agencies, has forced major newspapers and television channels to transfer ownership to government supporters.
This attack began in 2008 with claims by Erdogan and his allies that they had discovered a large clandestine group of coup and subversive conspirators made up of senior military officers, writers, teachers, editors and many others.
“The group was completely invented, a total fabrication,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkey Research Program at Washington’s Middle East Policy Institute and author of “The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Modern Turkey Crisis”.
This great lie, built around some fragments of fact, convinced not only devout Muslims hostile to the country’s secular elite, but also liberals, many of whom considered the military to be the greatest threat to democracy. The trials dragged on for years before Erdogan recognized that the case against the alleged underground group was a scam.
Long before Trump, said Cagaptay, the Turkish leader, who has governed since 2003, “saw the power of nativist and populist politics” rooted in falsehoods and “brought up the idea of the deep state to justify repressions on his political opponents.”
Trump’s rise also helped to strengthen a cousin of the big lie – a boom in misinformation on social media and the fiction of far-right conspiracy theory.
It was most notably incorporated by the global expansion of Qanon, a once obscure peripheral phenomenon that claims the world is run by a conspiracy of powerful liberal politicians who are sadistic pedophiles. Mr. Trump did not repudiate Qanon’s disciples, many of whom participated in the chaos on Capitol Hill last Wednesday. In August, he praised them as people who “love our country”.
To some extent, each new generation is shocked to learn that leaders lie and that people believe in them. “Lying has never been more widespread than it is today. Or more shameless, systematic and constant ”, wrote the Russian Russian philosopher Alexandre Koyré in his 1943 treatise,“ Reflections on the lie ”.
What most distressed Koyré, however, was that the lies don’t even have to be plausible to work. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “the rougher the bigger, the rougher the lie, the more readily it is believed and followed.”