Commentary 23/12/14 People of the lie

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People of the lie

Lies demean and demonize the 'other' and rationalize the unjust and inhuman treatment of anyone not like ourselves

Israel's President Isaac Herzog (2nd-R) looks on as his wife first lady Michal Herzog (C-R) assists an elderly family member of one of the hostages held by Palestinian militants since the Oct. 7 attack as she lights the candles on a Hanukkiah, a nine-branched menorah candelabrum used in the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, during a gathering with other hostages' families in Tel Aviv on Dec 14, 2023. (Photo: AFP)

Many of us live untruthful lives. Put more bluntly, we are “people of the lie."

But this is not how most people describe themselves. The “conventional wisdom” — that mixture of half-truths, prejudices and assumptions — generally carries us through our dealings with family, friends and acquaintances.

And the conventional wisdom is misleading, for as the poet said, “Mankind cannot bear too much truthfulness.”

Everyday untruthfulness

How do we share in untruthfulness? I don’t speak here of the personal deceptions we engage in to curry favor or to escape blame. These are all small-scale.

I speak of a wider scale. All of us in the modern world are subject to the barrage of sophisticated advertising that promises “the good life and the goodies of life” here and now, instantly, and in abundant measure.

And all of us know how meretricious such promises are. Yet we willingly choose to believe, and adjust our lives accordingly.

Then there is government propaganda — blatant or sophisticated, overwhelming in its volume, insidious in its connotations, veiled in its threats.

And the state always has the media on its side. “The only way to a lie believed,” urged Dr Goebbels, “is to tell a bigger lie, and to repeat it until it is accepted.”

This is fine in most normal times. But turbulence shakes the structures of corporate advertising and state propaganda. The conventional wisdom begins to unravel.

This turbulence can be a personal tragedy or loss. But it is also socio-political, affecting the larger community — like war, revolution, and exile. Or earthquakes, famine and climate change.

Every day we experience turbulence of many kinds. In this article, I will reflect a bit on how political turbulence affects people of the lie.

Political turbulence and the lies we tell

Gideon Levy, a senior Israeli journalist working at the Jerusalem newspaper Haaretz, speaks of three lies that most Israelis have swallowed uncritically, and which influence their daily behavior.

But not just Israelis.

The first lie is the sense of victimhood. “We are the world’s greatest victims because of what the Nazis did to us. The Holocaust  is our perennial claim to martyrdom.”

This is a distortion of history, for the Jews are not the only people to have suffered at the hands of others. In the last century alone, the Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks [1915-23], and millions of Ukrainians who resisted Stalin’s forced collectivization were starved to death in the gruesome “Holodomor” [1932-33].

It is usually forgotten that the persecution of Jews is a European phenomenon. For centuries Jews and Christians lived peacefully together in the Muslim societies of West Asia.

A second lie that has great currency among Zionists is: “We are  God’s chosen people — and so we can do whatever we want!”

It is important to note that God has no specially “chosen” people [see Matt 3.9, Acts 10.34], and that all allusions to such passages in Scripture are literary fiction, put down to justify the significance a given community arrogates to itself.

White Americans did something similar with their doctrine of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny; and many modern Hindus think in similar terms with their belief in punya bhumi [“holy land”] and pitr bhumi [“fatherland”].

In a word, these are lies destined for export.

A third lie may be the most dangerous of all: it demeans, denigrates, and demonizes the “other” and rationalizes unjust and inhuman treatment of anyone not like ourselves.

This is at the root of all racist, sexist and antagonist behavior, and the impulse behind hate crimes everywhere.

Whether it is Nazis calling Jews “vermin,” Israelis calling Palestinians “animals,” upper caste Hindus despising others as ”mlecchas” and  “terrorists,” white supremacists referring to others as “kafirs” and “niggers,” here is where hatred for the “other” begins.

Every society with hegemonistic aspirations traffics in lies and untruths. These lies begin with an appeal to self-glorification, but they invariably end in mass murder and genocide.

Hitler, Stalin, Talaat Pasha and Pol Pot are perennial examples of such.

Last month, we learned of the death of Henry Kissinger, America’s most famous war criminal.

As Paul Blumenthal wrote in HuffPost recently, “In his eight years in power, Kissinger unnecessarily prolonged the Vietnam War for five years, ordered the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos, provided arms for Pakistan’s brutal war in Bangladesh, gave the green light to Argentina’s “dirty war,” endorsed General Augusto Pinochet’s deadly coup in Chile, enabled a genocide in East Timor and fueled civil wars in southern African countries.” His policies caused the deaths of around 4 million people, Asians most of them.

For all of this, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, as public an act of cynicism as anything.

Is there a more contemporary example of someone who lived by the lie?

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.