Lest we forget: A short trip down memory lane

The meaning of post-truth goes beyond being a fool or a liar — “in its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd's reaction actually does change the facts about the lie (...) what seem to be new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself.” In this regard, although political lies have always existed, “post-truth relationship to facts occurs only when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than truth itself. Thus, post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not.” So, while truthiness locates the responsibility for lying, post-truth is more vague and collectivist in this regard, providing no clear way to define who is responsible, when, and to what extent. Hence, post-truth gives rise to “a world in which politicians can challenge the facts and pay no political price whatsoever.” -- A. Fasce, The upsurge of irrationality: post-truth politics for a polarized world, Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin, 9(13):0-00, 2019 (note the strange page numbering 0-00 -- something is amiss)

Memory can be short. Much is happening. Times are confusing and complex. Sophisticated liars, manipulators and crackpots are a scourge of poxes upon the land. Blithering lunatics with loaded guns roam free in congress. Dogs sleep with cats. There is a fly in the ointment. Transgender bathrooms are popping up all over the place. Christian nationalist extremists are rampaging through the federal courts because they are the federal courts. The horror, the horror . . . . 

Speaking of memory, here's a short blast from the past. This is from a 2018 article by Politico,
Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’:

President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Sunday claimed “truth isn’t truth” when trying to explain why the president should not testify for special counsel Robert Mueller for fear of being trapped into a lie that could lead to a perjury charge.

“When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth,” Giuliani told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning

“Truth is truth,” Todd responded.

“No, no, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani said. “Truth isn’t truth. The President of the United States says, “I didn’t …”

A startled Todd answered: “Truth isn’t truth?”

Giuliani: “No, no, no.”

Todd said: “This is going to become a bad meme.”

Last week on CNN, he rejected Chris Cuomo’s assertion that “facts are not in the eye of the beholder."

"Yes, they are," Giuliani said. "Nowadays they are."

In May, the former New York mayor pursued a similar line of thought in an interview with The Washington Post about the Mueller investigation: “They may have a different version of the truth than we do.”

The statement also recalled Kellyanne Conway’s statement in January 2017 referring to “alternative facts” offered by the White House about crowd sizes at Trump’s inauguration.

What a pleasant little trip down bad memory lane this has been. I'm all excited (and fortunately, unarmed).

Question: Has “Truth isn’t truth?” become a bad meme?

OK then, how about now? Bad meme or not? Not yet? How about this plausibly true commentary from 2009?:

“People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

What about America's staunch ally, Israel?

Since Israel came into existence by its own fiat in 1948, no other country has been generously blessed by the US with as much political, financial, diplomatic and military support. Israel is America's top foreign aid recipient and has been for years.[1] The US-Israel friendship runs deep and strong.

Axios writes:

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield protested to her Israeli counterpart over Israel's refusal to join 87 countries in backing a U.S.-led resolution to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the UN Security Council on Friday, Israeli officials tell Axios.

Apparently, Israel's friendship with Russia runs deeper and stronger. In fact, its friendship with itself is far deeper and stronger than with any other nation on Earth.

Questions: With friends like that, who needs enemies? Is it time to cut the umbilical cord?

Footnote:
1. "Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. Successive Administrations, working with Congress, have provided Israel with significant assistance in light of robust domestic U.S. support for Israel and its security; shared strategic goals in the Middle East; a mutual commitment to democratic values; and historical ties dating from U.S. support for the creation of Israel in 1948. To date, the United States has provided Israel $150 billion (current, or noninflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. At present, almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance; from 1971 to 2007, Israel also received significant economic assistance." -- Congressional Research Service, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, Feb. 18, 2022 

U.S. Training Birds to Spread Bio Weapons

 After accusing the U.S. of producing bioweapons in Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense has added another feather-ruffling theory to their accusation: That the U.S. is training birds in Ukraine to spread deadly diseases among Russian citizens.

Major General Igor Konashenkov, the chief spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, discussed the plot Thursday on RIA Novosti, a TV media outlet controlled by the Russian government.

Konashenkov claimed that U.S. forces had planned to infect birds with a spreadable form of the H5N1 flu strain "with a mortality rate of 50 percent" as well as Newcastle disease, the privately-owned Russian news outlet Pravda reported.

Newcastle disease is a contagious, fatal bird disease affecting the respiratory, nervous and digestive systems, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-conspiracy-theory-says-us-training-birds-spread-bio-weapons-1687399

Of course the White House are denying these charges:

A U.S. State Department spokesman called the claim "outright lies" and "total nonsense" adding, "These claims have been debunked conclusively and repeatedly over many years." Pentagon spokesman John Kirby described the allegations as "absurd", "laughable" and "propaganda." White House press secretary Jen Psaki also called the claims "preposterous."

The Russian invasion shines light on global ideological splits

An interesting opinion piece the New York Times published raises the question of whether the West is playing into Putin's hands by solidifying an image of clashing cultures. This is worth at least considering. The NYT writes:

Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It?

Russia’s invasion has also provided the geopolitical equivalent of CPR for NATO. Washington’s perennial requests that Europeans pay their share for the security organization that defends them has been met with an unprecedented vote in Germany to increase its country’s military budget and its contribution to the alliance. ....

The unification in Europe that Mr. Biden speaks of is certainly real, but in a cruel paradox, European cohesion appears achievable only by further binding itself to the mast of American power and prerogatives. The idea of a geopolitically autonomous Europe acting independently of the United States — a vision historically dear to the French — is rapidly becoming unutterable. .... 

As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he [Putin] shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine. Protesters such as Pussy Riot and others who struck directly at this neo-civilizational image came in for swift retribution.

Mr. Putin’s turn reflected a broader phenomenon of authoritarian-led liberalizing economies trying to fill an empty ideological space that seemed poised to be filled by Western idolatry. In China, too, in the late 2000s, there was a turn to a civilizational understanding in Beijing, where dutiful readers of Mr. Huntington have spread notions of Chinese civilization in the forms of global Confucius Institutes or a program for “cultural self-confidence,” and which President Xi Jinping today expresses in his elliptical “thought.”

Turkey, too, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has pushed a vision of a neo-Ottoman sphere stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, which is a direct repudiation of Ataturk’s more bounded vision of Turkish nationalism. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has revived ideas about Hindu supremacy, glorifying his nation’s ancient past — Hindustan is his Kyivan Rus — and using it as a bludgeon against his opponents. The turn to civilizational imagining provides a useful lever for ruling elites who want to suppress other forms of solidarity, whether class, regional or ecologically based, and to restrict the attractions of cosmopolitanism for their economic elites. 

For all the talk about how Ukraine is — despite whatever losses on the battlefield — winning the P.R. war, there is a sense in which Mr. Putin has already won at another level of framing the conflict. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian invasion, but they do not seem prepared to follow the West in its preferred countermeasures. Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result from, as Senator Rob Portman phrased it, “putting a noose on the Putin economy.” North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basics from fertilizer to wheat; Central Asian populations rely on its remittances. Major disruptions to these economic networks seem unlikely to relieve Ukrainian suffering.  

Mr. Putin himself came to power atop the rubble of Russia’s 1990s economic chaos. It would be rash to think that out of the new economic chaos inflicted, a phoenix to the liking of the West will rise.

That vision of clashing civilizations feels like it has significant grounding in reality. Some others suspect that Putin's agenda is deeper than just obliterating Ukraine.[1] If so, it raises the question of what should we do differently, if anything? Maybe it is true that Russia will never culturally integrate with the West.

Footnote: 

1. An interview with Russian journalist Masha Gessen got the title, Putin Is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World. The transcript is here. It includes this:

And as of today [March 10], the two polls I’ve seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it’s war? The Russian government does not call it a war. It’s a special military operation.

And under a new law, to say anything that Putin’s government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He’s wiping out independent news operations. He’s tightening access to social media. This is a country that already was filled with propaganda where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition and information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly.  

The state narrative is already that — and, in fact, it has been the narrative since at least 2014, since the sanctions imposed on Russia for its first invasion of Crimea — the narrative has been the West is waging an economic offensive against Russia, an unmotivated, unprovoked economic offensive, which makes sense because it’s always us against the world. It’s always as against the West. And the West is just doing the thing that it does, which is wage war against Russia.

The idea that sanctions could possibly change Putin’s behavior, or motivate the elites or the masses to coalesce and protest and overthrow Putin is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong. It’s been tried over and over and it doesn’t work. Now, obviously we’ve never seen sanctions on this scale and it is mind-boggling.