[ The president’s falsehoods are dizzying in number, but they
follow a predictable, time-honored tradition of how dictators and
totalitarians rule.] [[link removed]]

THERE’S A PHILOSOPHY BEHIND TRUMP’S LIES - HOW TO FUDGE,
OBFUSCATE, AND LIE OUR WAY INTO A NEW UNIVERSE - THE WAR ON WORDS IN
DONALD TRUMP’S WHITE HOUSE   [[link removed]]

 

Karen J. Greenberg
November 21, 2019
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ The president’s falsehoods are dizzying in number, but they
follow a predictable, time-honored tradition of how dictators and
totalitarians rule. _

Prelude of things to come… Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump speaks during the final session of the Republican National
Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 21, 2016., Reuters / Mike Segar //
The Nation

 

These days, witnessing the administration’s never-ending cruelty at
the border, the shenanigans of a White House caught red-handed in
attempted bribery in Ukraine, and the disarray of this country’s
foreign policy, I feel like I’m seeing a much-scarier remake of a
familiar old movie. The cast of characters and the headlines are
different, but the thinking underlying it all is, in many ways, eerily
reminiscent of what we as a nation experienced during the early years
of the Global War on Terror, particularly when it comes to the
interactions between the White House and the public. As then, so
today, there is distrust, there are conflicting facts, and there is
little in the way of a widely agreed upon narrative about what’s
happening, no less how to interpret those events.

The most blatant attack on facts comes in the form of the unabashed
lying of President Donald Trump, who obfuscates and changes his many
stories with impressive regularity. By this October, after almost
1,000 days in office, according to the _Washington Post_’s Fact
Checker's database, he had made
[[link removed]]
13,435 false or misleading claims. He had lied about immigration, the
stock market, the impact his sanctions and tariffs were having on the
American economy, U.S. troop withdrawals from the Middle East, the
size of his crowds, and even the weather
[[link removed]],
which, of course, is just the beginning of a far longer list.

Still, despite the breadth of his falsehoods, the president’s
behavior has actually been anything but novel at a fundamental level.
After all, President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick
Cheney, took this country to war based on an outright lie -- that
there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal
in Iraq -- a falsehood which cost the U.S. more than a trillion
dollars
[[link removed]]
and took staggering numbers of Iraqi and American lives, a war that
has never really ended and is widely seen (as Trump and Bernie Sanders
have both said) as the worst mistake in our history.

The corrosiveness of official lying has long been the subject of
philosophers. Hannah Arendt, writing
[[link removed]]
about the Pentagon Papers and the corrosive effects of falsehoods back
in 1971, called “the right to unmanipulated factual information”
basic, one “without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel
hoax.” But it’s important to note that, when it comes to the Trump
presidency, there is so much more to the strategy of degrading public
discourse and debasing the facts than anything as simple and
straightforward as mere lying. Political scientist Kelly Greenhill has
aptly termed Trump’s assault on the truth “extra-factual
information
[[link removed]],”
pointing to “distraction, threat conflation, normalization, and
repetition” as among the methods he employs to make facts anything
but what they used to be.

For Trump, lying is but the tip of the iceberg and in this he reflects
far more than his own predilections. He reflects as well our moment,
our age. George Orwell, that prescient twentieth-century observer,
warned in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language
[[link removed]]”
about one key aspect of such a lying mindset: the way “lack of
precision” in language can pose a danger to society and to political
stability.

When it comes to imprecision today, the dangers couldn’t be more
real. In fact, the strategies employed in Washington to confuse and
mislead the public have subtly eaten away at the country’s
collective mindset, creating fertile ground for Trumpian-style lying
to successfully take root.  In many ways, the focus on Donald
Trump’s blatant and persistent lying only serves to obfuscate other
no less destructive methods of deceiving the public that preceded him
into the White House and helped create the conditions that make the
president’s lies so destabilizing.

Consider just six ways in which, in this century, imprecision and
cloudiness have come to define American political discourse.

THE RECASTING OF LANGUAGE: The gutting of the customary uses of
language and the substitution of new, imprecise replacements has, as
Orwell warned, set the stage for lying and duplicity to multiply.
Officials of the Bush administration, for instance, redefined basic
legal terms specifically to circumvent the law. Instead of
“prisoners” at their Guantanamo Bay detention center, they had
“detainees.” Instead of “lawful enemy combatants,” they just
had “enemy combatants,” a term without a commonly understood or
precise definition that conveniently skipped the idea of lawfulness
entirely.

In her famous book _Eichmann in Jerusalem_
[[link removed]]_,
_Arendt reminded us how new “language rules” became part and
parcel of the Nazi propaganda world in ways meant to confuse the
public about the changing German reality. The forced imprisonment of
Jews in concentration camps was, for instance, referred to as a
“change of residence.” In _The Death of Truth_
[[link removed]],
Michiko Kakutani reflects on Trump’s version of such an “assault
on language,” his penchant, in particular, for “the taking of
words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating
them with personal agendas and political partisanship.” As examples,
she notes his use of words “to mean the exact opposite of what they
really mean,” particularly the way he took the words of his accusers
and robbed them of meaning by turning them back on the accusers
themselves. For instance, Hillary Clinton “colluded” with Ukraine,
not he with Russia (ditto, of course, for Hunter and Joe Biden).
Words, in other words, become exactly what he cares to make of them.

UNCERTAIN NUMBERS: Numbers, which otherwise might seem so precise,
have similarly been used to create a sense of imprecision in
Washington.  A short trip down memory lane should remind us of some
of the ways in which vagueness and imprecision were instrumental parts
of the war on terror in particular. For Donald Rumsfeld, President
George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, numerical precision of a
distinctly imprecise sort provided an effective means of refusing to
offer any meaningful information to the media on the
administration’s illegal acts. He had, for instance, a penchant for
referring to the number of detainees at Guantanamo in approximate
rather than specific terms. “More than 150,” for instance, sounded
innocuously close to precise, but also served his purpose -- creating
a lack of transparency around the administration’s war on terror.

The detention of migrants at the border in the Trump years echoes
Rumsfeld’s refusal to share real numbers, but has gone even further
in creating a kind of numerical imprecision around reality itself.
 The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has, for
instance, been strikingly obstructionist when it comes to announcing
the numbers of migrants in its custody. Last July, for instance,
Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kevin
McAleenan claimed
[[link removed]]
that fewer than 1,000 children had been separated from their parents.
As it turned out, he wasn’t even close to accurate. Under Attorney
General Jeff Sessions alone, 2,800 families
[[link removed]]
had been separated in this fashion. Only recently, a suit brought by
the ACLU led to the release of government statistics showing that an
additional 1,500 families
[[link removed]]
had, in fact, experienced such separations.

WILLFUL IGNORANCE: Hiding or ignoring facts has been yet another
tactic integral to the deception of these years. The Bush
administration, for instance, purposely disregarded then-CIA Director
George Tenet’s comments
[[link removed]]
about the striking lack of certainty regarding the presence of nuclear
and biological weaponry in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Instead, they
relied on false claims about the presence of WMDs in Iraq as the
premise for invading that country.

Sometimes, Bush officials quite deliberately put their heads in the
sand rather than face reality. For example, when the first accounts of
the grim abuse of Iraqi captives at the American prison at Abu Ghraib
in Iraq were reported by CBS News (and later even by Fox News) in
2004, according
[[link removed]]
to journalist Andrew Cockburn, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith
“sent an urgent memo round the Pentagon warning officials not to
read [such reports], or even discuss [them] with family members.”

More recently, upon the release of the Mueller Report, President Trump
expanded on this strategy, applying it to himself when he boasted
[[link removed]]
that “I have not seen the Mueller report. I have not read the
Mueller report. I won. No collusion, no obstruction.”

Unabashedly choosing to bury his head in the sand in a similar
fashion, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told the media that he
wouldn’t read
[[link removed]]
the transcripts of witnesses at the initial closed Congressional
impeachment proceedings when they were made public. “I made up my
mind... There’s nothing there.”  Several Republican senators,
including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have similarly said
[[link removed]]
that they won’t be watching the House impeachment hearings, claiming
they have “better things to do.”

Click here

WITHHOLDING EVIDENCE: In addition to ignoring facts and embracing
ignorance, withholding evidence has been one obvious path to blunting
awareness. From the first Abu Ghraib photos
[[link removed]]
to today’s military commissions
[[link removed]]
at Guantanamo, evidence of torture has, for instance, been purposely
withheld or misrepresented.  Likewise, the Trump administration has
consistently withheld
[[link removed]]
documents and records about its migrant detention system and the
methods used in it, as illustrated by a determination to claim
absolute immunity for officials refusing to testify in Congress on the
subject. Similarly, ICE has refused
[[link removed]]
to release records of the agency’s surveillance and data-collection
methods, including the use of facial-recognition software at the
border. It’s no surprise then that the White House has employed the
same tactic -- not allowing
[[link removed]] officials of all
sorts to testify before Congress -- in the ongoing impeachment
hearings. As the whistleblower in the Ukraine _quid pro quo_ bribery
scandal has informed us, White House lawyers were directed
[[link removed]]
“to remove the electronic transcript [of Trump’s phone
conversation with the Ukrainian president] from the computer system in
which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination,
finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE RECORD: A fifth tactic meant to confuse and
enable governmental lying in these years has been the destruction of
the facts themselves.  Worse than linguistic sloppiness, omissions,
and willful ignorance has been the actual destruction of potentially
incriminating documents. (We, of course, only know about examples of
this that have come to light.) The Bush administration pioneered such
tactics. We know, for instance, that Jose Rodriguez, director of the
CIA’s National Clandestine Service, destroyed
[[link removed]]
tapes of sessions with war-on-terror prisoners in Agency “black
sites” around the world in which so-called enhanced interrogation
techniques (acts of torture) were used. Prosecutor John Durham, who is
now tasked by Attorney General Barr with looking into the origins of
the Mueller Russia investigation, was asked
[[link removed]]
by Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey and then Obama Attorney
General Eric Holder to look into the destruction of those tapes, only
to conclude that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue charges.

Under Trump, a strategy of destroying government records has evolved
into one of not creating such records to begin with. In 2017
[[link removed]],
for instance, the National Security Archive and Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a suit charging the
Trump administration with violating
[[link removed]]
the Presidential Records Act (PRA) by using an encrypted application
designed to delete the contents of the president’s email messages.
This May
[[link removed]],
the two groups, along with the Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations, filed a complaint against the White House for
violating the PRA and the Federal Records Act by failing to create
records of conversations with foreign leaders. Last month, the
plaintiffs intensified their efforts by asking
[[link removed]]
a judge for an immediate injunction to require the White House to
preserve the records of all calls with foreign leaders.

SPREADING CONFLICTING FACTS: Trump and his team have added a new layer
of confusion to all of this by making the spreading of contradictory
stories a normal part of everyday life in Washington. The impeachment
hearings are a case in point. Potential administration witnesses say
one thing one day, only to contradict it without blinking soon after.
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, for instance, said
[[link removed]]
that there had indeed been a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s dealings
with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, only to retract his
statement hours later. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the
European Union who became a key figure in the Ukraine negotiations,
first claimed that there was “no quid pro quo,” only to later
revise
[[link removed]]
his testimony. “I now recall” otherwise, he acknowledged, in a
supplemental declaration issued three weeks later. Military aid had,
in fact, been withheld pending a Ukrainian agreement to investigate
Hunter Biden and Burisma.

This is increasingly the norm and not just in relation to the
impeachment hearings either. Only recently, for instance, White House
economic advisor Larry Kudlow told reporters
[[link removed]]
that China and the U.S. had reached an agreement about reducing
tariffs, only to be contradicted within hours by the president’s
senior trade advisor who swore that no such agreement existed. And so
it goes in Washington as 2019 comes to an end.

THE NEW NORM IN WASHINGTON

Of course, neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump invented such
methods of compromising truth and facts, but in recent years this has
become something like the new norm. Through the centuries, as Orwell
and Arendt made clear long ago, the connection between the integrity
of language, the validity of facts, and the strength of any country
has been acknowledged. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing
[[link removed]] about the
Peloponnesian Wars thousands of years ago, associated the gutting of
language with the dissolution of the state. “Words had to change
their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.
Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally...
moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all
sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.”

Historically, the degradation of words has gone hand in hand with the
undermining of stability for which the accepted meaning of things
remains essential. Armed with the integrity of words, knowledge can be
shared among a citizenry, otherwise chaos becomes the order of the
day. In his farewell to the nation, George Washington, himself an
admirer
[[link removed]]
of the classical thinkers, tied such diffusion of knowledge, the means
by which the government could “give force to public opinion,” to
the strength of the republic.

Today, in Donald Trump’s Washington anything goes, linguistically
speaking. Sadly, words are more important than we as a nation seem to
believe. They are the bedrock on which facts are built and facts are
the bedrock on which nations stand in order to make decisions. The
Trump administration has little respect for the integrity of words, no
respect for educating the public with the facts, and every intention
of clouding the space between fact and fiction, certainty and
uncertainty.

Perhaps the best strategy for finding our way forward is to hold one
another accountable, first and foremost, for the very words we use.

_[Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]],
is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law
[[link removed]], as well as the
editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief
[[link removed]] and the
foreign-policy blog Vital Interests. She is the author and editor of
many books, among them Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State
[[link removed]]
and The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days
[[link removed]].
Julia Tedesco helped with research for this article.]_
 

_Follow __TomDispatch on Twitter [[link removed]] and
join us on Facebook [[link removed]]. Check out
the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the
second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands
[[link removed]],
Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story
[[link removed]],
and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War
[[link removed]],
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The
Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
[[link removed]]
and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
[[link removed]]._

_Copyright 2019 Karen J. Greenberg. Reprinted with permission. May not
be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
[[link removed]]._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]