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Thursday, Apr 28, 2005

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Opinion - News Analysis

False claims, lying politicians

Hywel Williams

In power politics, it is the big lie that matters — the deceit that is so implausible no one thinks you could have had the cheek to invent it.

FRAUDULENT CLAIMS, lying politicians and deceiving documents litter the historical record of humankind. Sometimes the forgeries are obvious. The Zinoviev letter of October 1924, supposedly written by the head of the Communist International (Comintern), urged British communists to organise themselves into revolutionary cells within the British army. The document was publicised during the frenetic atmosphere of an election campaign, with Britain's first Labour government up for re-election. Sustained by fear, the letter was believed by those who wanted to believe in it — with its implication that the government was naive in its dealings with international communism.

Once the election was lost by Labour the Zinoviev letter gained extra historical importance. For it induced a deep feeling within the party that the Tories were abnormally vicious liars, and victimhood and paranoia came to play a part in Labour politics.

Trail of slime

The forger's arts leave an obvious trail of slime. But they can also enter very quickly into the collective consciousness, that murky area where people feel that they know what they know — when in fact they should only know that they do not know.

And in power politics, it is the big lie that matters — the deceit that is so implausible nobody thinks you could possibly have had the cheek to invent it. Papal history's most effective forgery is the Donation of Constantine. This eighth-century document, supposedly written by the emperor four centuries earlier, granted the Popes the right to control Italy as territorial rulers. The Donation would be used to justify the expansion of the medieval Church, its wars, crusades and dogmas, until in 1440 it was shown by the Italian humanist, Lorenzo Valla, to be a forgery.

New standards of literacy and criticism helped in the general acceptance of Valla's detective work. But what really made the difference was Renaissance power-politics. By the mid-15th century the idea that Church authority should be derived from representative councils rather than from papal pretensions was helpful to that aggressively growing force, the Renaissance prince.

The unmasking of the bogus is not just an innocent question of scholars in their studies. In order to be really effective that process needs powerful sponsors — who may use a new truth to implement a new domination.

Mass communications have given legs to lies — for modern societies are just as prone to collective mental frenzy as the peasant societies. In 1870, the French were opposing the idea that a member of Prussia's Hohenzollern dynasty should succeed to the Spanish throne. German rejection of this demand was expressed at a meeting between the French ambassador and the Prussian ruler, William I, at the spa town of Ems. The Ems telegram, sent to the chancellor, Bismarck, described the meeting in reasonably diplomatic terms. But Bismarck changed the wording of the telegram, turning it into an inflammatory document recording French arrogance. Once it had been amended, the Ems telegram did the trick. Bismarck got the war he wanted — the Franco-Prussian one of 1870-71 that crushed France and gave Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. Changes of emphasis and re-wording were the prelude to 75 years of Franco-German hatred.

Pleasing social myth

It is possible to unmask the lies of particular documents but the other kind of historically powerful lie is more difficult to deal with. This is the lie of the pleasing social myth — propaganda told as a fable which inculcates correct behaviour. Plato, the rationalist with a soft spot for social control, was the first to talk of the need for a "magnificent myth." The claims of hierarchical order required people to be persuaded that some were born to rule and others born to be ruled. To get the population on side they should be taught socially useful stories about their origins.

The "noble lie" said that all were brothers "born of the same mother earth." Thus far, thus consensual. But mother earth had put gold into the rulers' composition and silver into the auxiliary rulers, while farmers and "other workers" were made of iron and bronze. Social effectiveness involved eugenic separation of these classes.

Political mythology illustrates the recurrence of such stories and the power slogans used to sustain a deceptive harmony.

"Property-owning democracy," "dictatorship of the proletariat," "trust the people" are all crowd-pleasing and crowd-controlling mechanisms. In this department persistence pays off. Plato himself thought it would be difficult to get away with his lying story in the first generation but that he might succeed with the second. As our own political mythologists might put it: "Forward not back — as long as you're thinking what I'm thinking."

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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