The Third Political Lie
Seabury, Paul
founded on equilibrium and reciprocal independence. That the French, t o g e t h e r with many other Europeans, are thinking of the Soviets as an "equal and independent" partner shows just...
...But read on...
...Lenin concentrated on the literati...
...Their point is that the best insurance a g a i n s t the conditions that have led to appeasement is a true independence ("founded on equilibrium") that would r e q u i r e an i n t e g r a t e d West European " f i n g e r " on a West European "button...
...It is odd to hear from qualified specialists in Soviet affairs that there, at least, Marxism is dead...
...The first three and a half years of the Carter presidency have amplified those waves of doubt in our culture...
...He has failed to recognize not only the economic and strategic consequences of these policies, but their moral consequences as well...
...Is it actually possible that those who specialize in political lying may have neither of these objects in mind...
...So it would seem...
...An ambassador," wrote Sir Henry Wooton, "is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth...
...Most experts furthermore contend that the lies which are routinely generated in Soviet-controlled media are believed by no one, and that everyone takes this for granted...
...They render us a purposeless society, and that is a society in grave peril...
...In totalitarian states, where propagandists monopolize all media, everyone can be convinced and contrary beliefs subdued or exterminated...
...Because they condemn poor people to poverty and oppressed people to servitude, policies of no growth and no strength do violence to America's most cherished moral purpose: to champion freedom from oppression and freedom from want for all peoples...
...An influential minority had convinced him that any claims to pride in America's past, in its values and its material attainments, were ill-founded...
...It is quite possible to imagine that Sanguinetti and Strauss floated their ideas mainly for political reasons...
...Axiomatically, modern political leaders are best guided by a coherent view of the world, a view which tells them not only how the world works but also how best to go about confronting the problems before them...
...If the political lie has as its chief object the holding of power, and if everyone knows it to be false, then its function differs radically from all other kinds of lies: It is defiantly used to assert its public uncontradictability, and thus to confirm that those who rule cannot be publicly challenged...
...It may be alive and well in other parts of the world where Marxists as yet have not managed to fasten their clutches, but in Eastern Europe, not so...
...0QQ0000Qg00QQD0ID0QiO0000Q00Q0QQDQ0OQQQgDQ00Q0Q0i0QQ0QIQ00U00Q0QO0iI0~QQ0~QOgDD0000o00Q00I0g0DQ0Q0000~0QOo00oQ0II0iQ000m000Q0000m00000000P0Qm00QOiU~ America entered the 1970s awash in self-doubt and self-recrimination...
...The truths about political reality easily seep in...
...Our heretofore forbidding military capability is now overshadowed by visible Soviet power...
...hardly involves being converted to the adversary's cause...
...The current Soviet "training brigade" in Cuba is an updated version of the same deceit, inspiring self-deception in the White House...
...The first, like Churchill's, aims to deceive your opponents about your intentions...
...They scc it as a demeaning and cowardly vice, engaged in by those who intend to deceive...
...Furthermore, whatever the conditions of Eastern Europe were a generation ago, these countries are now very porous...
...The Truthfuls, oumumbered by the Liars, left their homes in a fit of outrage and established elsewhere a more p e r f e c t community...
...Deference to it serves to convince the undeceived of their powerlessness...
...Our industrial might fades and our economy suffers stagnation...
...Is it possible that Carter may have had the following private thought when he reluctantly accepted the benign Soviet explanation...
...The question was: If Indian marauders break into your house with their tomahawks, demanding your children (whom you have carefully hidden), is it sinful to lie and deny that they are there...
...But I am concerned here with political lying, which has objects in mind other than amusement...
...that the future will be difficult and that we will not be able to do much about it...
...The lie reminds everyone of its own impunity...
...On this question, the town split into two doctrinal factions: the Truthful Baptists and the Lying Baptists...
...No more...
...They threaten us not only materially but spiritually...
...It matters little or not at all whether anyone is convinced...
...And then, how is it possible for Marxism to be both dead and alive...
...The Big Lie seeks to persuade, r e c r u i t , convince, and control...
...lying, and liars, meet with universal disapprobation in moral literature (as can be seen in any anthology of quotations and maxims), in hard cases the moral value of lying is not so clear-cut...
...What then can be the purpose of lying, when its practitioners aspire neither to deceive nor to convince...
...No one" will believe you again...
...But then, these are not the only possibilities facing the Europeans...
...That these policies have placed our nation on a historic threshold is beyond question...
...To take only one example, Alexandre Sanguinetti, a prominent Gaullist, sugg e s t e d last year t h a t the Germans be associated with the French nuclear deterrent...
...there is no intention to capture his mind or heart...
...How is this possible...
...Jimmy Carter has flinched from this ominous fact...
...The average American had become uncertain of his country's greatness...
...Even if one succeeds, the truth may ultimately come out, ruining one's credibility...
...Hitler put it this way: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 13 The g r e a t masses of t h e p e o p l e will more e a s i l y fall v i c t i m to a big lie t h a n to a s m a l l o n e . (Hitler was no intellectual...
...While Paul Seabury is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Such observations pose a paradox: If Marxism is dead as ideology in such countries, why then is it that Marxism there is so alive--so ubiquitous, so domineering, and so unresponsive to reports of its extinction...
...This opprobrium seems not to apply to pathological liars who, in Hazlitt's words, "invent falsehoods not to gain any end, or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves...
...She _9 . . told such Dreadful Lies, It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes...
...But consider a third possibility...
...How can it be that such emptiness is so strong...
...they listen to foreign radio programs (and in East Germany routinely watch West German television...
...Nobody there believes it any more...
...He is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...Poor devils such as she, who practice their foul art even knowing that no one believes them, are the subjects of this essay...
...For one thing, Marxist dogma and depictions of reality are contradicted by Soviet reality...
...Yet of the two, the Big Lie is more ambitious and formidable...
...Foreign Minister Gromyko's stodgy lying to President Kennedy in the 1962 missile crisis was of that 3ort: His orders were to deceive the Americans until the nuclear bases were faits accomplis...
...Clearly the time has come to turn things around...
...In either case, lying is risky...
...Everyone must accept its monopoly of public discourse...
...An odd situation...
...People travel more than before...
...No more...
...That the French, t o g e t h e r with many other Europeans, are thinking of the Soviets as an "equal and independent" partner shows just how far the Western Alliance has moved from its original purpose and resolve...
...No one is misled, convinced, deceived, or self-deceived...
...Last night I saw upon the stair A red brigade that wasn't there...
...The respected Polish ~migr6 philosopher Leszek Kolakowski confirms this as far as his own country is concerned...
...But one must have a grudging respect for those who practice this novel form of lying, an endless form of verbal calisthenics...
...Lying of this sort can occur at low or high levels, sometimes with good intentions...
...How long can it last...
...Whether lying is wrong or right in circumstances such as these, in politics it rcgularly assumes two forms...
...During Kentucky's frontier days, on a dark and bloody ground, moral controversy once agitated a community of devout Baptist settlers...
...Veritatem dicam, pereat mundus...
...Needless to say, it has been clear since he first took office that Jimmy Carter 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...
...Several years ago, for example, George Kennan remarked that he had never met more than ten convinced Marxists in his most recent trips behind the Iron Curtain...
...The second type of political lie, however, transcends mere deception and aims at real conversion...
...There are good reasons, of course, why such lies are not believed...
...It wasn't there again today...
...Preeminent among these failures are those domestic and foreign policies of the Carter administration which have led us, in essence, to a position of neither military strength nor economic growth...
...In politics, as is well known, some people lie in order to gain, keep, and use power...
...This is not Orwell's 1984, where everyone is a robot...
...It promises to go away...
...he accepts the lie in order to save face...
...In the first case, lying seeks to throw the opponent off balance or off guard...
...A sense of foreboding pervades the country, a sense Richard Lugar is the Republican junior Senator from Indiana...
...If they remain in place, the future will be very different from the past, not only for America but for the entire world--most especially for the emerging Third World...
...In World War II, Winston Churchill's "Bodyguard of Lies" rose up to defend the truth...
...Yet our strategy for American recovery must follow from a proper finderstanding of the failures of Democratic liberalism...
...Which brings us back to Henry Kissinger's memorandum to Nixon and the melancholic reminder that the longer difficult choices are deferred, the more likely it becomes that bad ones will have to be accepted...
...What is certain is that they are extremely important ideas...
...it matters greatly whether the lie is respected in silence...
...the second is more ambitious, aiming to gull and win over the minds and hearts of the credulous to your cause...
...Such obstinacy in itself is a display of power and will...
...Such thinking is certainly not the basis for a proper European strategy on the "Central Front," nor is appeasing the PLO p r o p e r l y p a r t of a sound foreign policy in the Middle East...
...How can the lie be so vigorous when nobody, including its manufacturers, believes in it...
...In one of Hilaire B e l l o c ' s s u p e r b Cautionary Verses, Matilda--an exemplary little fraud--was one such liar...
...Ordinary people have a simple opinion of lying...
...To explore this possibility let us enter the labyrinth of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe...
...But even in such an instance, to accept the lie ("what else can we do...
...M a t i l d a ' s sad end came when no one believed her at a time when she had a dire need to be believed...
...Here, the victim is by no means deceived...
...This may have been intended to dovetail with Strauss's revival of a division of NATO into North American and West European commands, or it may have been a coincidence that the two ideas came out (again, for they had been heard before) around the same time...
...Nevertheless, it is not at all clear that this idea is making any p r o g r e s s . The leading nuclear s t r a t e g y e x p e r t in the French foreign ministry, Jean-Louis Gergorin, at any rate, does not think so...
...they go abroad on business and holidays...
...In some Soviet-dominated countries such as Hungary, foreign newspapers and magazines are accessible...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
