A generation ago, Hannah Arendt began her reflections on the Pentagon Papers, a forty-seven- volume history of American decision-making during the Vietnam War published by the New York Times, with an essay, “Lying in Politics.” The subject concerned government deception and its consequence, the notorious credibility gap that continued to grow deeper until the war ended.
Americans had simply stopped believing what their government said because they grasped the connection between deception and self-deception, namely that both took place in a “de-factualized” world, a world of fiction. Something similar has been taking place in Canada for the past decade, and as in the U.S., Machiavelli explains what it means.
Granted, truth-telling has never been counted among the political virtues, but it is also true that, generally speaking, reality exposes political liars to heightened threats of defeat. That is one lesson to be drawn from the totalitarian experiments earlier in the twentieth century that Arendt studied in detail.
Unfortunately, totalitarians aim to do more than rewrite history. As Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Harcourt Brace and World, 1966), the aim of totalitarian “education” has never been to install convictions, even ones based on fiction, but to destroy the capacity of citizens to form any. The possibility of disregarding the difference between truth and falsehood has seldom been noticed. Yet, it is one of the most significant consequences of a decade of lying by the government of Canada and is reflected in the growing distrust by citizens of their government. In short, the Government of Canada has its hands in nearly everything to do with the daily lives of citizens but has no answers for the problems its interventions have created.
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