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发帖数: 3942 | 1 No wonder they seem to like each other; they are akin in their abuse of the
truth.
Among the many dangers of Donald Trump is that he will make the United
States “great” again in exactly the way that the GOP front-runner’s one-
time admirer, Vladimir Putin, claims he is making Russia “great” again.
In other words, fraudulently.
In Russia today, thanks to Putin, spectacle, theater and lying pervade the
media, confuse the discourse and have turned the viewing public into an
electorate that no longer seems to care about the truth. The Russian people
have grown indifferent to or remain in denial of the basic truth of present-
day Russia: that in exchange for the order Putin promised them in 2000, he
has brought them corruption, economic and social decline, international
denunciation, and partial diplomatic isolation. The geopolitical posturing
of his temporary intervention in Syria has not changed that.
In Russia, as the journalist Peter Pomerantsev explains in his captivating
and disturbing book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, the news
media provide entertainment spectacle to the public and delivers Kremlin
messages that change according to the audience and the moment; they are
alternatively socially conservative/religious; ethnic nationalist; imperial
or pan-ethnic; and liberal modernizing. Toward the end of the Cold War,
people in Russia didn’t believe in communism; they pretended to in public,
not always in private. Today, they believe in imperial Russia, the Orthodox
Church, the Russian Federation, modernization and capitalism. They “put on
” ideologies as if they were new outfits, unflummoxed by the contradictions
between them. They don’t even pretend to be true believers, because they
don’t care which idea represents the truth. The elites alternate between
expressing different incompatible world views and lifestyles, as if they
were practicing doublethink: One day they are nationalist bureaucrats, and
the next they are vacationing and investing in the West and sending their
children to study in Western Europe. ”It’s almost as if you are encouraged
to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next,” says
Pomerantsev.
All this serves Putin’s purpose of imposing whatever truth he pleases. In
the past two years alone the Russian president has uttered a stream of fact-
defying statements that could easily rival Trump’s. In March 2014, after
Crimea was seized by what journalists called “little green men”—soldiers
of mysterious provenance—Putin insisted they were local militia, but the
next month he admitted Russian troops had invaded the peninsula. In June of
that year, Putin stated there was no Russian military presence in eastern
Ukraine, but in December he admitted Russian military personnel had been and
were there. In September 2015, Putin declared he was sending troops to
Syria to fight the Islamic State, but focused instead on saving Bashar Assad
; when he announced his recent drawdown, he said Russia’s objectives had
largely been met, even though the Islamic State received only a small
proportion of airstrikes and remained a threat. And on the domestic front, a
fact-check of a December 2015 Putin news conference by the online newspaper
Meduza highlighted six alleged lies he told on topics including toll rates
between cars and commercial trucks, parking fees in Moscow and foreign
adoption of Russian children.
“This is not merely an ‘information war,’ in other words, but a ‘war on
information,’” Pomerantsev said in April 2014. “If the very possibility
of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no
grounds for debate. Sooner or later, the public will give up trying to
understand what happened, or even bothering to listen.” This statement
illuminates the deeper danger Trump poses to democracy in America today.
Trump, in his own way, is seeking to turn the United States into a post-
factual society analogous to Putin’s Russia. He makes claims that are false
, doubles down on them when challenged and seems to care not a whit for
video or documentary evidence that proves him wrong. He says over and over
that America is “losing” and he can make it “win” without substantiating
either claim. It’s not that the media don’t challenge him a lot, but
simultaneously they give saturation coverage to everything he says and they
don’t seem able to keep up with the torrent of nonsense issuing from his
mouth.
Thus, as in Russia, Trump’s lying is enabling and feeding an indifference
to the truth. In a March 28 speech, President Obama cited the work of
Politico reporters who fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and news
conferences and identified more than 51 lies, or as David Brooks of The New
York Times put it, “one every five minutes.” This past week alone, Trump
made false and irresponsible statements about the Geneva Conventions,
nuclear proliferation, and NATO and our Asian allies’ contribution to
security. More recently he offered up a view of the U.S. economy that
forecast a coming “very massive recession,” which Washington Post writer
Jim Tankersley called a mix of “economic conspiracy theories with magical-
thinking accounting.”
Despite such attempts at fact-checking, reporters just don’t seem to know
how to counter Trump’s large-scale deployment of WMD — Weapons of Mass
Denial (of the truth). There are so many lies to dispute now, it seems an
overwhelming task; where to start? Intentional or not, the end result is
Trump’s statements are not being sufficiently exposed as falsehoods. As
with Putin in Russia, his many misrepresentations are enabling and feeding
an indifference to the truth in this country.
Where could it end, if Trump does gain the presidency? In Putin’s case the
people’s indifference to the truth has allowed him to secure and retain
power, to run the Russian Federation as an autocratic, Mafia-style
capitalist state, to pursue a neo-imperial foreign policy for its own sake
and to keep him in power, and reportedly to amass vast fortunes for his
friends that he may secretly benefit from. The Kremlin hypes the more recent
Russian military deployments in Ukraine and Syria (the ones in Georgia,
Moldova, Armenia and Tajikistan and elsewhere receive little attention) as a
demonstration that Russia is great again. In 2010, the Kremlin announced a
10-year roughly $700 billion modernization initiative for the armed forces.
The defense budget, until this year, has been largely protected from the now
-necessary and increased belt-tightening.
But—if I may be permitted to indulge in actual facts for a moment—Russia
is becoming less great each year. The International Monetary Fund forecast
Russia’s economy will fall in 2016 by another 1 percent, on top of last
year’s 3.7 percent decline. Inflation is well above the official 6 percent
target and the ruble has fallen precipitously to the dollar. Sanctions have
cut Russian banks’ access to capital. The Russian economy remains energy-
dependent, and undiversified. The government has failed to spur innovation
or even build upon Soviet scientific achievements (with some exceptions,
such as in the information technology field), satisfied for the most part
with manufacturing based on Cold War era technology and propping up
uncompetitive state-owned enterprises. As a result, the steep drop in oil
prices from a high of about $100/barrel to a low of about $30/barrel earlier
this year has dealt a crushing blow to Russia’s budget. Meanwhile, the
average lifespan of the Russian male remains low for the developed world,
about 65, and the government has failed to curb chronically high levels of
alcoholism, drug abuse and HIV/AIDs.
Putin has blamed all of this on sanctions and outside actors, including the
United States, not his poor economic policies and state-sanctioned
corruption. He has kept the truth from the Russian people. They blame their
local officials, and appeal to the Kremlin for help. Putin’s staged
responses include theatrical dressing-downs of local politicians or managers
and occasional firings.
In Trump’s case, he is fostering and exploiting indifference toward truth
in the service of fear, hatred and a mishmash of poor foreign and domestic
policy ideas — including potentially repudiating our alliances in Europe
and Asia, undoing decades of free trade reform and trying to force Mexico to
pay for an expensive, likely ineffective North American Berlin Wall.
America has long had an anti-intellectual strain, dating back to our
earliest days, but we have also always had a willingness to examine and re-
examine facts, to understand and reconceive our history from Columbus’
landing through colonialism up to the recent past. We have used our interest
in the truth to acknowledge the persecution of African-Americans, Native
Americans, Jews, homosexuals, transsexuals, the mentally and physically
disabled and others. Through independent media and civil society, we have
fostered debate and sought the best truth in the service of democracy. This
American pursuit of truth — through media, Hollywood, television (and yes,
intellectuals) — is what has made America great and the only way to keep
America great.
How then are we drifting toward a situation where we resemble Putin’s
Russia?
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/donald-trump-2016-vladimir-putin-liars-213788 |
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