On Lies as Truth

 

On Lies as Truth

November 21, 2022

 

I have said many times that we live in a post-fact world. Donald Trump is the best example. Essentially every statement he makes is filled with lies. Yet millions of people believe his statements to be true. If the Trumpists’ Dear Leader says something, anything really, his deluded followers take it as true though there is no evidence to support it and lots of evidence that contradicts it. Trump’s Big Lie is the best example of this phenomenon. Trump says that his electoral victory in 2020 was stolen from him by a corrupt, left-leaning political establishment. There is no evidence that that claim is true and an enormous amount of evidence that it is a lie. Yet the absence in Trump’s lie of facts supported by actual evidence matters to his followers not at all. They take the statement as true just because Trump said it. Because Trump spoke the lie, that lie functions for them as truth.

I find it surprising and important that the same dynamic prevailed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) said that the Soviet Union was democratic and its people were free. The facts undeniably prove that claim to be false. The CPSU said that workers in the Soviet Union were better off than workers in the capitalist West. Because the Party issued that lie it functioned as the truth though all of the available evidence showed it to be false. The CPSU said the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put down a counterrevolutionary uprising fomented and financed by the CIA. All of the facts show that claim to be false, but in the Soviet Union it functioned as the truth because the Party said it. Soviet domestic propaganda often used the phrase “vsem izvestno,” which means “everyone knows,” some alleged fact. In fact, no one knew the supposed fact, but that non-fact functioned as the truth because the Party said it was true.

This dynamic from the old Soviet Union is the same as a foundational dynamic of Trumpism, or at least the Trump dynamic is very similar to the Soviet dynamic about the truth. The CPSU issued lie after lie and made their lies function as the truth. Donald Trump issues lie after lie, and his lies function as the truth for his deluded followers. In neither case did (or does) the total absence of facts to support the lie make any difference to those who are either forced to take it as the truth as in the Soviet Union or to those who choose to take it as the truth in our country today.

There is one significant difference between the way lies functioned in the Soviet Union and the way they function with Trump’s supporters that we must point out. In the Soviet Union publicly calling the CPSU on its lies very probably led to your arrest and punishment. So, hardly anyone said anything publicly against the Party line. The failure of Soviet citizens to speak up for the truth can, I think, be excused. They had no access to the actual facts of any matter of public concern. They knew that it was legally, politically, socially, and economically unsafe to contradict the Party’s lies in public. There were a few brave souls who did speak up for the truth. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov are good examples. The Soviet government threw Solzhenitsyn out of the country and put Sakharov in isolation in the city of Nizhnyi Novgorod as punishment for their speaking the truth, but at least they spoke it. The vast majority of Soviet citizens did not. They could not and/or had valid reasons for not doing so.

The way our contemporary Trumpists take Trump’s lies to be the truth is much less excusable. Although Donald Trump would very much like to head an authoritarian government that could punish people who criticize him and call him on his lies, we don’t have such an authoritarian government. Though the Trumpists would probably like to repeal all of the Bill of Rights except the Second Amendment, we still have as much freedom as anyone in the world to call everyone, up to and including the president, on their lies. We have legally unfettered access to the actual facts of any situation we are in. We can call a Trump lie a lie and not be arrested or lose a promotion at work or lose our job altogether the way Soviet people did for speaking the truth. We can speak the truth and not have the power of the state come to shut us up and punish us.

Because we can call a lie a lie, we should, indeed we must, call lies in the public arena lies regardless of who has asserted them as true. We must do so if our democracy is to survive. One important role of the media is to speak the truth when our politicians do not. And no, Mr. Trump, those media are not the “enemy of the people” (a phrase from Stalin’s reign of terror in the worst years of Soviet life) that you say they are, or at least most of them aren’t. They don’t always, or perhaps ever, get everything perfectly right. Some media outlets are even prone to repeat Trumpist lies as though they were the truth. Fox News and Breitbart are good examples. That unfortunate reality to the contrary notwithstanding, our media, at their best, are both suppliers of truth and a forum for the free discussion of public issues. A democracy must have such media. The Soviet Union did not. Today Russia under Putin and China do not. Tyranny of any sort cannot survive when people have access to the truth, when people are free to determine the facts of any matter themselves.

The parallels  between the dynamics around truth of the USSR and our contemporary Trumpists are troubling at best. We must rid ourselves of the Trumpian notion that lies are just “alternate facts.” We must somehow get people to stop calling the truth “fake news” the way Trump so often does. If our democracy is to survive, and it is far from certain that it will, we must restore a culture in which statements of an alleged truth in our public arena must be supported by actual facts. A post-factual world is a world built in lies. No system built on lies can last for long, but such a system can cause immense damage while they exist. We must not let Trump’s lies damage our country the way the CPSU’s lies damaged Russia. Trump may find Russia a model to be followed. It isn’t, and those of us who know that it isn’t must not keep silent.