The deliberate falsehood and the outright lie, used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics
As we dedicate much of the week to the relentless, systematic lies and falsehoods of Scott Morrison, it’s worth remembering that he is, in historical terms, an amateur — albeit a deeply enthusiastic and committed amateur. As Bernard Keane pointed out earlier this week, his lies are needless and inconsequential just as often as they regard serious policy matters. It’s interesting to contrast them with some of the biggest and most consequential lies in history.
Julius Caeser
By 58 BC Caeser had — after an election that was corrupt even by Roman standards — been elected consul. But he was deeply in debt, potentially facing prosecution for his conduct while in office and had seen his political alliances collapse. So he undertook a move that would become a go-to for struggling political leaders: he started a war. As Michael Kulikowski writes in the London Review of Books:
He needed glory and he needed cash. The quickest route to glory was beating up barbarians; stealing their wealth and selling their bodies into slavery got him the cash. And, as had long been the Roman way, he would justify his rapacity as necessary to defend the Roman state…
It was all based on lies, and it lead to a genocide. Kulikowski continues:
With his political future at stake, Caesar had every reason to pick fights with Gallic peoples both friendly and hostile, to manufacture threats where none existed, and to allege the treachery of Rome’s allies … He also had every reason to maximise Gallic casualties, whether dead or enslaved, because even with ten thousand legionaries at his command, he could only control so vast a landmass by massacring those most able to resist.
While it’s impossible to know the exact figures, it’s estimated as many as a million Gauls were killed in these wars.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
While the “big lie” quote often attributed to Joseph Goebbels (“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”) was something he almost certainly never said, it’s hardly news that the very core of the Nazi party and their actions was based on categorical lies.
One of their seminal texts was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — an act of forgery that purported to set out Jewish plots of world domination. Fabricated some time around the turn of the 20th century, it was published around the world (Henry Ford funded the publication of half a million copies in the US). Despite being exposed as a fraud as early as a Times of London investigation in 1921, excerpts were read to schoolchildren in Germany throughout the reign of the Nazi party, and it remains a popular basis for conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites to this day.
The Great Purge
Conservative historian Robert Conquest argued that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s lies went beyond show trials and the unexplained disappearances of public figures, but in the “invention of a factually non-existent society”.
For one example, the purges of the late 1930s were based on elaborate conspiracy theories, usually revolving around “fifth columnists” or anti-government forces who intended to assassinate him. Indeed, it’s been argued that the event that was used as the pretext for the first purge — the assassination of Sergei Kirov — was arranged by Stalin himself.
Again, it’s hard to assess exact numbers, but it’s estimated somewhere between 950,000 and 1.2 million people died in the purges.
Watergate
Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 US election points to a possibly intractable problem; even pre-Trump, lying didn’t necessarily lead to any real electoral consequences. It’s not as though “Tricky Dicky” had a reputation for scrupulous honesty prior to the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate hotel in June 1972.
Still, his denial of any involvement in or knowledge of the break-in was just the start of it. The vast conspiracy Watergate came to represent — the bugging of political opponents, the use of state agencies such as the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service as though they were party property — became clearer and clearer. On August 5, 1974, the White House released the “smoking gun” tape, recorded in June 1972.
It revealed Nixon did know about the break-in, directed the FBI not to investigate, and went on to lie about it. This convinced Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who had previously voted against impeachment to switch their votes. Nixon resigned.
The invasion of Iraq
Georgia Wilkins and Bernard Keane have already touched on Australia’s role in this most catastrophic of decisions. But no one in the “Coalition of the Willing” escapes judgement.
There is considerable evidence that then-US president George Bush and his vice Dick Cheney knowingly lied about Saddam Hussein’s possession and development of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). There is Bush’s assertion Hussein had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons, or Cheney’s description of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent that he’d been told by the CIA and the FBI hadn’t happened, and many many others.
This has since been buttressed by statements of those in the rooms where these decisions were made, particularly former CIA officers.
Two former agents told Salon that then-agency head George Tenet briefed Bush that Saddam had no WMDs a week after 9/11, but Bush dismissed it because he’d already made his decision on going to war. The intelligence was omitted from the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated that Iraq possessed WMDs.
Fomer CIA deputy head Michael Morell, one of Bush’s intelligence briefers, has also admitted Cheney fabricated claims about Hussein’s ability to acquire/reconstitute nuclear weapons (apparently it “wasn’t [his] job” to correct the record when it could have made a difference).
The Chilcot Inquiry paints a similar picture about the evidence, deliberately ignored, presented by intelligence agencies to then-UK prime minister Tony Blair.
This is to say nothing of the US denials that torture was taking place at Guantanamo Bay — couched in the argument that terror suspects weren’t covered by the Geneva Convention, which is the kind of thing you always point out when you’re not torturing someone.
There’s no way Watergate is Nixon’s biggest or worst lie. It’s the one that brought down his presidency, but that’s trivial compared what he did in 1968 when he sabotaged the peace negotiations that might have ended the Vietnam war that year. He was likely to lose the election if peace broke out and the Democrats got the credit. He had no authority or business getting involved in the negotiations when he was not in government, but he lied to the South Vietnam government about getting them a better deal if he won the election that year. So the South Vietnamese refused the terms on offer, the war continued, Nixon won his first term as president and he extended the war for another seven years. He increased the bombing and general slaughter as well as dragging Cambodia and Laos into the quagmire, with consequences that including the overthrow of the Cambodian government by the genocidal Khmer Rouge. President Johnson regarded Nixon’s action in 1968 as treason, but Johnson stayed silent because he had found out what Nixon did through an illegal wiretap.
There’s also Nixon’s War on Drugs lie, which his chief of staff John Erlichman later admitted was designed to wreck Black communities in particular. In 1994 Ehrlichman said,
“You want to know what this was really all about? […] The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The cost of the war on drugs is beyond quantifying. Whole countries have become failed states, millions of lives lost ands ruined, corruption spread throughout the world by the huge profits of organised crime and it was all done by Nixon for a short-term tactical political advantage.
The current collapse of democracy and the rule of law in the USA and beyond can be a traced in a continuous line back to Nixon and the failure to hold him to account. Even after Watergate he was given a pardon. The clear message was that you can get away with anything and Nixon’s real mistake was resigning. Now there’s Trump and open sedition with no serious resistance.
In part 3, of 4, eye opening, brain melting Nixon Interviews in 1977, David Frost asked Nixon whether the president could do something illegal in certain situations such as against antiwar groups and others if he decides “it’s in the best interests of the nation or something”.
Nixon replied: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal, by definition”.
From that basis, Reagan financed the mujahadeen in Afghanistan & Contras in Nicaragua, Bush Snr’s duplicity Iraq#1 US Ambassador April Gillespie, transcripts released by Bush Library of discussion with Saddam & Aziz July 25th,1989 “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”, Shrub’s WMD gave us Iraq#2, and the all time champion Trump (40,000 documented lies & counting) January 6 and maybe 2024 Make Amerika GRATE Again to braindead Biden’s Ukraine.
Nixon’s belief that anything a president does must be legal derives from the theory that equates a president, being head of state, with a monarch. It is quite curious how the supposedly republican USA has never quite shaken off the underpinning of monarchy, where all the the monarch is the source of all law and it is therefore absurd to put the monarch under the law rather than above it. Every criminal case recorded as Rex/Regina v. [defendant] illustrates the point. Rex v. Rex obviously is problematic.
The English put this theory to its greatest test with the trial of King Charles I. It remains controversial.
I’m drifting badly off topic but I can’t forget the con artist who managed to sell an entire Norweigan fishing fleet to a credulous American. Now that was real style.
In all this the egregious behaviour of honest johnny howard doesn’t get a mention. It was unlikely that Australia would ever produce a prime minister as despicable as honest johnny but scumo pushes that belief to its limits.
In his image and pushed to be PM by religious nut cases and Fossil Fuel criminals to be able to allow the rorts and thieving from the public purse to continue
Did the job so well he is now the GOLD STANDARD in the following rorting money for mates, money for dodgy sports rorts, money for dodgy scientific research ,money for companies to rort the Pandemic as they make record profits.
How rich has the PM become in his job of managing our money ?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would have to be the greatest lie ever. Based on a piece of French fiction, adapted by the Czarist secret police for malicious purposes and believed by the German nation. Millions of deaths could be attributed to its influence.
The worry is that a lot of the garbage is being recirculated in all sorts of manipulated media. Be afraid.
“Freedom of speech ends when the lies begin” (Hadassa Ben-Itto)
Yes, The Protocols was created and published in Russia in 1903, so it’s rather odd that the article implies it was the work of the Nazis.
Yes, The Protocols was created and published in Russia in 1903, so it’s rather odd the article implies it was the work of the German political party that cannot be mentioned here.