The Absence of Truth
For years, I've been a bit of news junkie. Specifically, during my years travelling around the world on business, usually to places where I had little or no understanding of the native tongue and where either CNN or the BBC World News were the only English language channels on the hotel tv service, the experience turned me into a news junkie as there was bugger all else to watch (except for porn in some of the better hotels and, of course, on the internet - this was pre-Netflix, Amazon Prime and the other streamers). With CNN and the Beeb you could be reasonably sure the reporting was factual since the reporters took pains (and often accepted tremendous personal risks) to go to where the news was - to battlefields, to angry street demonstrations where there was of the chance of a riot developing, to authoritarian countries like Russia and China, North Korea and Iran and Syria - and both film and report exactly what they saw happening. Difficult questions were asked of politicians and their usually mealy mouthed spokespeople, and faithfully reported. It all worked fine.
Then somewhen towards the end of the Obama Administration and the start of the serious Brexit movement (perhaps even earlier, back when the Bush 2 - Blair duo proceeded a War On Terror in the wake of 9/11 that was essentially illegal, overthrew not only Saddam but de-stabilised the entire Middle East, brought about the retribution of al Quaida and ISIS, that all in cost hundreds of thousands of lives and rumbles on today) it all changed. There came an explosion of alternate media outlets peddling stories on a largely unregulated internet, that often ran contrary to the traditional news media and was rarely verified or fact checked prior to publication. Fiction wrapped up as fact.
The conspiracy theorists that infest the internet loved all of the dross and couldn't get enough of it. Low lifes like Alex Jones and his InfoWars website that specialised in peddling it (and often wrote the stuff) made fortunes. The Conspiracist-In-Chief, one Donald J. Trump, lied his way into the US Presidency, largely on the back of another congenital liar and fake news specialist Steve Bannon (and his Breitbart News website), and in short order managed to turn the world upside down, so that the proper and well known global news providers - the "mainstream media" - like the BBC and CNN, and old and respected publications like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the grand old Times of London became branded as Fake News, and newcomers like InfoWars, Breitbart and a host of others switched from being Fake News to mainstream News Media.
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All this has left me, and probably everyone else, completely lost as to what constitutes Truth, what is a misrepresentation, and what an Outright Lie. Take the Brexit Referendum. A lot of misrepresentation went on throughout the campaign with the odd outright lie thrown in for good measure. For the first, the statement that leaving the EU would enable us to set our own rules and sign our own trade agreements (neither of which has happened as predicted by the likes of Farage and Johnson) is a reasonable example. The promise that our border security would be strengthened as we would be able to control it has turned out to be a complete lie: there are more illegal migrants arriving by the year and there is no sign of a solution to the problem - if indeed it is a problem. This too is a topic for another essay to re-visit. The less said about the promise of another three hundred million quid a week (or whatever the amount was) to the NHS plastered all over Johnson's battle bus, or about Priti Patel's assertion that Turkey's imminent accession to the EU would open our borders to 80million Islamic terrorists (a lie on so many levels: Turkey has not acceded and is unlikely to do so for another generation, fpr example, plus the quoted figure was the total population of Turkey, hence the soppy cow was branding new born babes as well as dying old people terrorists), the better.
The Conspiritor-in-Chief, Mr. Trump, lied his way through his term of office and a global Covid Pandemic, lost the next election but continues to protest that he actually won it, that he did not encourage the January 6 insurrection and storming of Congress (his plea to supporters that day, minutes before the storming, to "fight like hell" presumably just a joke, and the calls to "Hang Mike Pence" - recently panned by Trump as being a coward - merely exuberance), and that the hundred-odd court cases that he is challenging, charges including misuse of government funds, inciting the insurrection, false accounting practices and theft of government propertry, to say nothing of tax evasion, are all a sham and a disgrace and a Biden plot to prevent his re-election this year..... Unbelievably, this deranged individual is still the Republican nominee.
Then we have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that Putin says is to de-Nazify the Ukrainian regime and protect the Russian people, not at all a blatant land grab. There is so much Fake News flying about over that conflict, dragging on for a third year now, that I don't know where to start so I'll leave it. But suffice to say that Russia has for years specialised in cyber warfare (there is documented evidence it has interfered in foreign elections and the Brexit referendum by spreading lies on social media) and is not averse to taking more serious action outside its borders when it feels like it (the Litvinenko assassination and Skripal poisonings in Britain and the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine have all been shown as the work of its intelligence agencies and military, despite the Putin regime's denials).
And more recently, and in my view sickeningly, we have the Israel - Hamas conflict. The sheer number of untruths being peddled over this is simply breathtaking. The cause of the current explosion is largely defined as the Hamas atrocity of October 7, the raid on a kibbutz that left a thousand odd Israeli men, women and children dead and more than 200 Hamas captives. The preceding 80 or so years of successive Israeli governments carrying out policies that have left the Palestinian people either exiled around the world or penned into enclaves on the Gaza Strip and West Bank, under round-the-clock surveillance by IDF forces that also control the water, electricity and medical supply provision, are overlooked or denied. These actions gave rise directly to Hamas, as desperation led to calls for some kind of direct action to help the stateless Palestinians make a homeland to call their own and govern on their own. The atrocity triggered a violent response from Israel, understandably, in defence of its homeland (at least, that is the official line) but the number of Palestinian dead has risen to almost 35,000 (depending on which set of figures you read), most of whom are women and children. Gaza is now a wasteland, pictures of it resembling Hiroshima after the Bomb, Warsaw and Berlin and Stalingrad - indeed any number of cities in Europe - at the end of the Second World War. But by any stretch of the imagination Israel's response could hardly be called, and certainly not accepted as, "proportionate", nor "effective and successful" since half the Hamas captives are still held in Gaza. Negotiations to free them have dragged on for six months, collapsing time and time again, with each side blaming the other and denying responsibility.
There are allegations, backed up by hard evidence, of daily war crimes being carried out, all of them denied by Israel. There are continuing missile attacks by IDF forces against alleged Hezbollah camps (allies of Hamas and blamed for assisting with the October 7 atrocity: a claim denied by both groups) across the border in Lebanon. Israel also carried out (but will not admit) a strike on a building next to the Iranian embassy in Damascus in neighbouring Syria that killed a couple of high-ranking Iranian generals who, Israel maintains, were also assisting Hamas, Predictably the claim was denied by Iran, and a missile and drone strike carried out by it against Israel. This was largely ineffectual, but drew the US and the UK into the conflict as USAF and RAF fighter planes assisted the Israeli defence effort. With all sides blaming each other for the carnage, how is the truth to be defined here?
Whatever the truth is, there are certainly falsehoods in the offiicial statements being made by the Foreign Secretary Lord David (Brexit was nothing to do with me) Cameron in his defence of Britain's involvement. The attack by Iran was "unprecedented", one sovereign country against another: this ignores Russia's invasion of Georgia some years ago, and more pertinently its invasion of Crimea (part of Ukraine) in 2014, the forerunner to its full scale invasion of Ukraine, with the assistance of its ally Belarus, in 2022. It also ignores Iraq's invasion of Kuwait preceding the first Gulf War, and the joint US/UK invasion of Iraq post 9/11. And many other instances throughout the world over the last hundred years. There is nothing "unprecedented" at all. Cameron also states there has never been such a "concerted aerial bombardment using drones and missiles" - again, totally false: similar tactics were used against Iraq in Operation Shock & Awe that kicked off the US/UK invasion, and have been used by Russia against Ukraine on a daily basis for the past for two years. It begs the question why the US and UK are not prepared to allow their air forces to assist Ukraine in its aerial defences as well - Putin's Russia is a far greater threat to world peace than Iran and Hamas.
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Clearly, "Truth" is a concept that most politicians are now unfamiliar with, under any circumstances. They peddle so much disinformation, so many outright lies, that reporting anything accurately is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with the proliferation of a cyber warfare using social media platforms like Facebook and X hosting, often unwittingly, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fake accounts managed via troll farms in Moscow and (probably) Tel Aviv and Beijing, Langley Virginia, and GCHQ in Cheltenham. How is anyone supposed to make an informed decision in any election or referendum, in any survey, almost any life decision, when the facts needed to guide their choices are virtually impossible to detect and separate from the fictitious nonsense? How do you decide what is Fake News and what is Real News?
I don't have the answers. But I firmly believe that unless and until there is a return to truth-telling and an abandonment of bullshit, then we are all in a very dangerous place.
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