There are few people who would disagree with the assessment that all politicians are liars. However, this sweeping statement needs to be broken down, given the place where we have found ourselves in this post-truth world where we have to contend with Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump.
First off, we need to look at what is, or is not, a lie. In reality, some politicians make campaign claims or manifesto pledges that turn out to be unrealistic when it comes to the pragmatic business of governing and the need for political compromise with an opposition party. These cases aren’t lies, they were (in every likelihood) genuine plans for specific causes of action, but undelivered promises are not the same as lies.
The next piece of wayward thinking that needs to be taken down is the absurd notion that all politicians, parties, campaigns lie on a more or less equal scale. No, they don’t. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election statements made by both candidates were equally rigorously checked for honesty. Every now and then Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton slipped up, but Trump clearly showed a far greater disregard for any semblance of truth. He won the election anyway.
The same is true of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s shambolic withdrawal from the European Union. There’s only one side who have been accused of “dishonesty on an industrial scale,” and it is the side who encouraged an exit from the EU. A fabulous recent example of this sheer dishonesty, and fear mongering, came to light when top Brexit figure Boris Johnson claimed at a press conference on Jan. 18 that he had no need to retract any comments relating to Turkey during the referendum campaign because he had not made any such comments.
A journalist then proceeded to read to Johnson, the man who desperately wants to replace Theresa May as the UK’s next prime minister, his exact words dated April 17, 2106 related to Turkey, in which he erroneously claimed that if the UK remained in the EU then 77 million Turkish citizens could come to the UK without any checks at all. What did Johnson do when faced with his own words? He walked away, as if this wasn’t happening at all.
The problem with people like Johnson and Trump is that they simply do not believe that they are accountable for their words and actions. They don’t care about the consequences of their actions. This pair of narcissists shows the need for we, society in general, to drop the flawed thinking that all politicians lie in roughly equal measure.
In the meantime, we have reached the point where some have abandoned the very idea of there being a basic set of facts that can be agreed upon. Two examples highlight this point, both relate to people I consider dear friends, and nothing in these examples relates to political differences of opinion.
One long-standing friend of mine is an evolution-denying young earth creationist. I have presented him with the facts: evolution is proven, there is abundant scientific evidence. He absolutely refuses to accept reality, which is a shame because maybe his daughter (if she had a basic understanding of the concepts of scientific processes instead of being told that science was some kind of conspiracy) could have gone on to be one of the brightest scientific minds of her generation.
Another friend of mine – I was at his wedding and he was at mine – was absolutely certain that if he vaccinated his baby daughter he exposed her to a health risk, which is the exact opposite of the truth. When he once proudly proclaimed, in my home, that his daughter was still unvaccinated, I snapped the question “how are you proud of that?”
The thread connecting the lies given above is fear. Johnson used a fear of a horde of Turkish migrants taking over the UK. Trump does the exact same thing with his Muslim bans and fear mongering over the exaggerated threat from migrant caravans. And there’s no point in sugar coating their tactics – it is thinly veiled racism.
In the case of the creationist, he has a literal belief in a place called Hell. He fears that accepting a belief forced into him from a young age may not be true could lead to an external existence of flame aside the devil.
But maybe the worst of these cases (though this is debatable, facts are facts and opinions are opinions and people are entitled to have different opinions) is the anti-vaccination movement. These people, some genuinely motivated, but by the antithesis of fact, prey on our greatest natural instinct, to care for our offspring. They have been convinced by lies that they risk harming their children, when the exact opposite is true, and there’s no debate about this. The World Health Organisation has recently declared, in fact, that the anti-vaccination movement is one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019, on a list also containing Ebola, Dengue, and HIV.
How does any of this relate to Ukraine? Ukraine’s fledgling democracy deserves the same standard as any other democracy, and that is an expectation from voters that there should be a minimum basic standard of honesty. The citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom deserve that too, but currently the leaderships of those countries are guilty of dragging down the standard of what is acceptable from the people elected to or vying for high office.
This threat to democracy is real and the people who are best served by the erosion of democratic standards we are living through are autocratic tyrants like Vladimir Putin. That’s why his fingerprints are on both the Trump and Brexit campaigns, and why he wages war in and against Ukraine, democracy (from the Greek “demokratia”, meaning “rule by the people”) is his greatest challenge and biggest fear. The idea that there are multiple possible sets of facts serves Putin well, notably for Ukrainians it helped create the smoke screen for the war he created in the Donbas.
The other reason why this is all relevant to Ukraine is again the fear factor: Ukraine is heading into a double election cycle, and Ukrainian politics is known to be a place of dirty games and black PR. We see the same old faces competing to be the first pig to the trough, because following the revolution, although the pack was shuffled, we are still playing with the same deck of cards, we will no doubt see efforts to stoke fear and spread disinformation about other candidates.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead, we were to see a candidate with a message of hope and inspiration? Even if that candidate might not, in the final reckoning, deliver all that they pledge, as long as the pledges are genuinely made and grounded in fact, that will be good enough for me.
