In a letter to George Washington dated November 26, 1777, Henry Knox, who later became the nation’s first Secretary of War, wrote that “the People of America look up to you as their Father.” In 1788, Washington was elected president of the newborn United States. The title, “father of the country,” stuck for future generations.
But how much of a father figure was Washington in reality?
This Devil’s Advocate has looked into another angle of this play of symbolism. Like the rest of humanity, at least according to founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, Washington had an Oedipal problem. His first biographer, Reverend Mason Locke Weems, famously made it plain in the 1806 edition of *The Life of George Washington the Great*. I’m, of course, referring to Weems’s “inspired” castration narrative in which we learn that young George profited from his father’s absence to chop down his dear dad’s favorite cherry tree. This set the stage for his famous admission, “I cannot tell a lie.”
Ever since then, as the cases of US Presidents Richard Nixon (Watergate) and Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky) demonstrate, the material crimes presidents commit are always less harshly judged than the fact that they may have lied. Any good Devil’s Advocate will pretty much follow the same rules. The dossiers for canonization can and generally do contain outlandish acts some people might deem criminal. Others see those same acts as heroic or even miraculous. Slaying a dragon, for example, generally meets with approval. Others may, on the contrary, see it as an act of cruelty to animals.
But if a Devil’s Advocate catches any of those proclaimed saints lying, it’s case closed.
All of which leaves me wondering about the state of the world today. In our democracies, no one expects their leaders to be saints. We do, however, want them to be “virtuous,” whatever that may mean.
It’s fine, for example, if they slay modern dragons, as US President Barack Obama did when he snuffed out al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, or Hillary Clinton (under Obama) when her proxies slew and sexually assaulted Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary made it clear she was emulating Washington when she proclaimed with a joyful smirk, “We came, we saw, he died.” I agree, this isn’t quite as frank as Washington’s avowal, but the message was clear.
A new set of moral values honored in modern democracies ostracizes lying as the unforgivable sin but tolerates and sometimes celebrates murder, regime change, or even genocide.
Many people were shocked when, during his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump asserted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” What they may not have understood is that he was truthfully describing a new “normative” moral order.
Today’s political decision-making encourages outright violations of democratic principles, due process, and especially the spirit and letter of international law. The Trump “War Department” summarily destroys private boats in international waters, in the name of combating drug trafficking. The funding of genocide can coexist with policies that brutally punish those who denounce or resist it.
All this is possible for leaders who don’t lie by denying their agency.
Does that mean today’s political leaders have given up lying? No. Prevarication is an essential tool of every politician’s trade. They still spend most of their time lying. They lie about historical reality. They lie about their personal beliefs. They lie about their commitment to issues of general interest.
What’s new is that they avoid, whenever possible, the kind of lying focused on denying their illegal acts. Everyone knew Nixon was guilty of organizing the Watergate break-in. No one doubted that Clinton was engaged in some serious hanky-panky in the Oval Office with his female intern. Their presidencies became paralyzed by the fact that they denied what was obviously true.
### What Leaders Lie About Today
During the Cold War, the US found a solid reason not just for creating the CIA but also allowing it to begin evolving into a secret army. This made sense once the decision had been made to orientate the entire economy around an expanding military-industrial complex. Everything turned around a simple principle: Communism must be opposed and defeated wherever it may emerge.
When the US engaged to overthrow democratically elected regimes in Iran, Guatemala, or Chile or set out to assassinate personalities such as Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba or Cuban President Fidel Castro, they were simply doing what was required to counter the evil of communism. There was no need to lie about the pernicious, anti-democratic skullduggery undertaken so long as the public could believe that there was a communist threat.
An entire nation such as Vietnam was subjected to ten years of mindless massacre on the pretext of being a “domino.” In all such cases, the policy was stated and enacted without having to apologize for the evil it produced.
But does that mean nobody was lying?
As Bill Clinton might have objected, that depends on how you define lying.
Most of the leaders punished by the US in the name of combating communism were reformers, and in some cases called themselves socialists. Lumumba, Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, and Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz did not seek to impose communist dictatorships. But US politicians and the media somehow managed to reach agreement on a somewhat absurd idea: that socialism was a synonym for communism, which was branded, quite officially, as un-American and therefore fell into the category of an evil against which all methods of opposition were licit.
Was that a lie?
It was definitely a ploy used to justify aggression, very similar to the initiative that was recently enshrined as law by the US Congress: that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
It makes things much easier if you can manage things in the way Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty recommended: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” That turns out to be one of the most effective ways not only of getting morally ambiguous things done but also of avoiding being accused of lying.
### The Vassals Who Lie About the Lie of the Land
So, politicians do lie, but most politicians understand clearly what they can and cannot lie about.
Trump is an exception. His capacity for lying is a major feature of his brand. If he doesn’t lie, he fails to live up to expectations. He’s a successful bully, whose success depends on his playing the bully. But it’s a risky act. Even a successful bully will ultimately undermine trust, as we can now see in the effect his wavering on the Epstein files has had on the MAGA movement. His bullying and lying have become identified with America’s brand, tarnishing it, possibly irreparably.
On the other side of the ledger and the Atlantic Ocean sit those who allow themselves to be bullied: Europe’s ruling class, the vassals of the bully’s empire. They lie by repeating the lies they’ve been fed, not out of genuine self-interest but self-preservation. Their interest should be their economies and their people. But they have subordinated those motives to the interests of their feudal masters in Washington, New York, and Silicon Valley.
Vassals play the role that was written for them. They must at all costs stick to the script. They suffer at the core of their narcissistic souls when the author of the script is an outright bully, like Trump. His bombast exposes their weakness.
Europe’s current cast of leaders includes a motley collection of presidents and prime ministers from individual nations, the European Union, and NATO. Their current embarrassment stems from the fact that the script they’ve been acting out was authored not by the supreme bully, Trump, but by US President Joe Biden and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, two political has-beens whose bullying was a projection of the power of their empire, not of their own personalities.
Joe’s and Boris’s earlier script supposed that the US would be the reliable lead actor in the play. Their supporting roles reflected the brilliance of the star. Biden taught them their lines, for example, that Ukraine must be defended for “as long as it takes.” Boris showed them how to stand on stage and recite.
But Biden and Johnson left the scene in the middle of Act III, and Trump has turned the script on its head.
The Europeans find themselves forced to keep repeating lines that contradict not only the material reality of the situation—a war the side they identify with cannot win—but, more worryingly, the varying whims of the volatile new scriptwriter in Washington. To survive, they must keep lying.
One effective way of lying, without it being necessarily perceived as a lie, is to cite “facts” about the future. They benefit from a media that has been trained to underreport Russia’s success and highlight the smallest Ukrainian damage done to Russia as marking a turning point in the war. In such cases, the media rather than the politicians are the ones doing most of the lying about the present. But the leaders still have the ungrateful task of finding ways to stick to their given script without seeming to lie.
That’s where evoking the future comes in handy.
The standard “objective description” we regularly hear of events that have not yet taken place follows a now familiar pattern.
How many times have we been told that once Russian President Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine, he will seek to invade other European countries?
Interpreting Putin’s intentions and asserting them as facts about the future can be effective. It evokes a remote future possibility while subtly expressing a lie about the past.
And it does so by not appearing to contradict any verifiable truth.
The lie about the past concerns Putin’s supposed intention of conquering Ukraine. That’s a story invented by politicians, confirmed through the subjective reasoning of pundits, and then quoted as authoritative by the media.
The problem is twofold:
The Kremlin has never suggested a desire to conquer Ukraine, and doing so would be folly. As analysts such as international relations expert John Mearsheimer like to point out, Putin knows he could never govern a region dominated by Ukrainian nationalists who despise him. That’s why he has consistently focused on Russian-speaking oblasts.
The Quincy Institute in Washington reaches a similar conclusion concerning other European nations: “Trying to occupy any state of NATO’s eastern flank is not in Russia’s interests and contradicts Moscow’s core objective of reducing NATO’s military presence along Russian territory.”
That obvious reality hasn’t prevented a chorus of voices among European leaders who believe preparing for war is, in practical terms, the only thing they might ever agree on. This is done without even considering that Europe’s citizens and voters, who haven’t been consulted on issues of war and peace, may see a conflict with Russia as the last straw that will lead them to revolt against such improvident leaders.
The approval ratings of French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have descended to never-before-seen numbers, close to or even well below 20%.
Could it be that the spirit of war will not be what motivates voters but, echoing the eternal wisdom of Bill Clinton’s political adviser James Carville, “it’s the economy, stupid?” And do they seriously think the kind of wartime economy that successfully unified Germany under Adolf Hitler is the model to follow? Or perhaps they imagine that Europe could duplicate on its fragmented continent the powerful military-industrial complex that the US built after World War II and which, as US President Dwight Eisenhower warned 64 years ago, has finished by undermining democracy itself?
These are questions it isn’t easy to lie your way out of, even for the best rhetorically trained European.
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*The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself—political and journalistic rhetoric—to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?*
*Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.*
https://www.fairobserver.com/devils-advocate/europes-scripted-march-to-war/
