Lying has consequences. It might take a long time for them to manifest. But manifest they will.
As we can see in Russia today.
Vladimir Putin became president of Russia in 1999. He has subjected his people to a steady diet of baloney ever since. In 2014, separatists armed by Russia fired a Russian missile and downed a Malaysian Airlines jet, killing 298 people. Putin’s media machine said that the Ukrainians did it. Most Russians believed him, or at least acquiesced.
Shortly after the tragedy, I was at a party where I met a woman from Russia, about my age. We had a lively conversation. She was a highly cultured person, an engineer by training, well-to-do, and lived part-time in Britain. The subject turned to the downing of the Malaysian Airlines jet. “The Ukrainians did it,” she declared, haughtily. I replied: “You are the only people on earth who believe that, you know!” After some back-and-forth, she finally admitted, in a very round-about manner, that it was hard to get accurate information in Russia. But I was still boggled. How could this person, who had easy access to Western media, have been so quick to repeat such a Big Lie?
A question well worth asking about the millions of Big Lie believers here in the United States.
For two decades, Vladimir Putin’s lies have corroded Russian society even as the country seemed more or less intact, much like salt on winter roads rusts out the undersides of vehicles while their bodies look okay. But finally Putin’s lies have caught up with him. The wheels are falling off the Russian bus.
He lied, so – funny thing! - the people around him lied. They told him that victory in Ukraine would be easy. His military officers lied to their soldiers, who had no idea where they were going or what they were doing. So it is little wonder that morale in the Russian military is abysmal. So bad that the generals must get out in front of their soldiers in order to motivate them to fight – resulting in a remarkable number of generals being killed in battle. Now the liar-in-chief is furious at the liars who work for him, so he is firing them right and left. Whom can he possibly trust? Can he even trust himself, since he has come to believe his own BS?
There is a lesson here. A culture of lies and liars will, in time, cripple a country’s ability to function. Covid is a case in point in Russia, where the excess death rate – an indicator of the impact of the disease - is well over twice that of the United States, and we’re hardly poster-children for success in dealing with it compared to other countries. Why was it so bad in Russia? Because of the culture of lies. Russia’s government rolled out a vaccine fairly quickly, but people’s trust in their government is so low that an alarming number of Russians refused to take it. They didn’t believe anything the government said about the epidemic – neither the good news nor the bad. So a lot of people died.
Just as hundreds of thousands of Fox-watching Trump-followers died, but would be alive today had they instead watched PBS and read the New York Times and taken Dr Fauci and Dr Birx seriously.
They died of lies.
Our country has not come to terms with this fact. Those dead people, victims of willfully distributed misinformation, are buried in the mind-numbing statistic of 1,000,000 total Covid casualties in the US.
Nor has our country come to terms with the fact that Trump’s Big Lie has frightfully corroded the undercarriage of American democracy. If people won’t accept the outcome of a free and fair election, then democracy is done. Kaput. Finished. Most Republican leaders – if such they can be called – lack the spine to defend democracy against the Big Lie that is snuffing it out. And once it is snuffed, what’s happening in Russia today will happen eventually in America. Lies will multiply. Liars will lie to the liars, making rational decision-making impossible. Nobody will trust anybody or anything. And the wheels will fall off the American bus.
Priority number one is commitment to truth, to facts, to reality. And to the effective dissemination of facts. And to voting out anyone who associates with the Republican party, which, sadly, has become the party of lies. Liars must be called out, every time.
Priority number two is everything else: dealing with climate change, fighting racism, ending inflation, extending medical care to everyone, etc, etc. Without democracy, without a population believing in a common set of facts and agreeing to abide by the results of elections, priority number two is going nowhere.
What is happening in Russia ought to give Americans chills. Because not only can it happen here, it is happening here. An overwhelming percentage of American people believe that Ukraine's Zelenskyy is the good guy and Russia's Putin is the bad guy. So this gives an opening to have a chat among ourselves about why this is the case… a conversation, across partisan divides, about how to prevent America from going down the road of lies that has led to Russia’s ruin.