the uses of lying

Democrats are having a hard time (and Republicans are completely disintersted in) saying that the Trump Administration is lying about why it killed General Suleimani last week even though all presented evidence points to the conclusion that the Trump Administration is lying about why it killed General Suleimani last week. Leon Panneta, a defense secretary under President Obama, got as close as it’s going to get to calling a spade a spade:

They often say that truth is the first casualty of war but you could also say that truth may be the first casualty when you’re leading up to war. I think there’s a great deal of concern that the American people, and the world for that matter, is not getting the straight story about exactly what’s happening.

It’s not uncommon for governments to lie in the name of law and order, national security, or some other political invention that makes infringements on liberty go down easily. The most famous and relevant lie in recent history was that the U.S. needed to invade Iraq in order to destroy weapons of mass destruction that never existed. One of the more insidious results of the notion that lying is required to spread democracy is that lying then becomes required to sustain democracy. In proclaiming its own virtue, American democracy produces a culture of deceit. As Evangelical Christians continue to provide a base of loyal support for one of the most brazenly dishonest and immoral presidents in American history, bell hooks’s analysis of how cultures of domination use lying to pervert is on point:

Slaves often told “lies” to white oppressors to keep from being brutally punished or murdered. They learned that the art of hiding behind a false appearance could be useful when dealing with the white master and mistress. Skillfull lying could protect one’s safety, could help one gain access to greater resources, or make resistance possible.

[…]

Any reader of slave narratives knows that religious black folks expressed anger and rage that they were forced by oppressive social circumstances to commit the sin of “lying.” Slaves expressed righteous indignation that oppressive white people created a dehumanizing social structure where truth-telling could be valued but not practiced and where black people were judged inferior because of their “inability” to be truthful. (“Seeking After Truth,” Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery)

When a society operates according to the maxim that a lie is only a lie if certain people tell it, there is a more sinister and destructive problem in the midst than the fact of a bad president.