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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
66 July 22
It comes not just
from the Kremlin but
is almost universal
T
O THE Syrians who have suered its attacks,
the Kremlin’s lies about its heinous Ukraine
war must sound horribly familiar. Insisting
that the victims of bombings are “crisis
actors”, spreading falsehoods about
chemical weapons, justifying the mass murder of
civilians by claiming it has been perpetrated by the
army of the country invaded and that anyone who
resists is a “Nazi” (in Ukraine) or a “head-chopper”
(in Syria): its disinformation tactics have been tested
and honed.
This organised lying has more or less destroyed the
US left, and severely damaged the European left. As
the activist Terry Burke documented in 2019, eective
left-wing opposition to Donald Trump collapsed amid
furious internal disputes about Syria and Russian
By George Monbiot
interference in US politics, triggered by prominent fig
-
ures reciting Kremlin falsehoods. Some of them
turned out to be paid by the Russian government.
Such lies are also familiar to Ukrainians. During the
Holodomor (the famine in the 1930s exacerbated by
Joseph Stalin’s policies), in which between 3 and 5
million people are believed to have died, the Kremlin
line was that the peasants had plenty of food but were
hiding it. In some cases, they were deliberately starv-
ing themselves to death. I guess you could call it
method crisis acting.
The current Russian disinformation machine has
been widely blamed for what we now see as an
The truth
Only when Caroline Elkins’s book, ‘Britain’s Gulag’,
was published in 2005 did we discover that the
UK had run a system of concentration camps and
“enclosed villages” in Kenya in the 1950s
about lying
ENVIRONMENT
July 22 67
“epistemic crisis” – the collapse of a shared accept-
ance of the means by which truth is discerned.
We should contest and expose the Kremlin’s lying.
But to suggest that the public assault on truth is new,
or peculiarly Russian, is also disinformation.
For generations, in countries such as the UK there
was no epistemic crisis – but this was not because we
shared a commitment to truth. It was because we
shared a commitment to outrageous lies.
As I’ve mentioned the Holodomor, let’s take a look
at another exacerbated famine: in Bengal in 1943-
1944. About 3 million people died. As in Ukraine,
natural and political events made people vulnerable
to hunger. But here too, government policy trans-
formed the crisis into a catastrophe. Research by the
Indian economist Utsa Patnaik suggests the inflation
that pushed food out of reach of the poor was delib-
erately engineered under a policy conceived by that
hero of British liberalism, John Maynard Keynes. The
colonial authorities used inflation, as Keynes
remarked, to “reduce the consumption of the poor”
in order to extract wealth to support the war eort.
Until Patnaik’s research was published in 2018, we
were unaware of the extent to which Bengal’s famine
was constructed. Britain’s cover-up was more eec-
tive than Stalin’s.
The famines engineered by the viceroy of India,
Lord Lytton, in the 1870s are even less well-known,
though, according to Mike Davis’s book, ‘Late Victo-
rian Holocausts’, they killed between 12 and 29
million people. Only when Caroline Elkins’s book,
‘Britain’s Gulag’, was published in 2005 did we dis-
cover that the UK had run a system of concentration
camps and “enclosed villages” in Kenya in the 1950s
into which almost the entire Kikuyu population was
driven. Many thousands were tortured and murdered
or died of hunger and disease. Almost all the docu-
ments recording these great crimes were
systematically burned or dumped at sea in weighted
crates by the British government, and replaced with
fake files. The record of British colonial atrocities in
Malaya, Yemen, Aden, Cyprus and the Chagos Islands
was similarly purged.
Just as the Kremlin requires a campaign of disinfor-
mation to justify its imperial aggression in Ukraine,
the British empire also needed a system of compre-
hensive lies. Not only were our imperial crimes
deleted from the record, but an entire ideology –
racism – was constructed to justify the killing, looting
and enslavement of other people.
At the end of his excellent BBC podcast series
about QAnon, The Coming Storm, Gabriel Gatehouse
lamented the loss of a “common frame of reference”
and a “shared sense of reality”. I agree with him about
the danger of conspiracy theories, but we should
remember that when we last possessed a common
frame of reference and a shared sense of reality, they
were built on lies. Almost everyone in Britain believed
that the empire was a force for good, and that we had
a holy duty – the “white man’s burden” – to either
crush or “civilise” those races we labelled “inferior”
and “savage”. Almost everyone believed the lies of
national heroism, the lies of the crown, the lies of the
church and the lies of the social order.
But most of us have emerged from that era, haven’t
we? We’re more sceptical, less trusting now. Most of
us recognise nonsense when we see it. Really? So how
do we account for the fact that almost everyone in
public life subscribes to the same set of preposterous
beliefs? Let’s set aside the wild conspiracy theories
of the far right, even though they’re now starting to
infect the mainstream right. Let’s focus on the
“acceptable” range of political opinion.
Nearly everyone who appears in the media, across
almost the entire political spectrum, seems to accept
that economic growth can and should continue indefi-
nitely on a finite planet. Almost all believe that we
should take action to protect life on Earth only when
it is cost-eective. Even then, we should avoid com-
promising the profits of legacy industries. They
appear to believe that something they call “the econ-
omy” takes priority over our life support systems.
They further believe that the unhindered acquisi-
tion of enormous wealth by a few people is somehow
acceptable. They believe that taxes sucient to break
the cycle of accumulation and redistribute extreme
wealth are unthinkable. They believe that permitting
a handful of oshore billionaires to own the media,
set the political agenda and tell us where our best
interests lie is fine. They believe that we should
pledge unquestioning allegiance to a system we call
capitalism even though they are unable to define it,
let alone predict where it might be heading.
No terror or torture is required to persuade people
to fall into line with these crazy beliefs. Somehow our
system of organised lying has created an entire class
of politicians, ocials, media commentators, cultural
leaders, academics and intellectuals who nod along
with them. Reading accounts of 20th-century terror,
it sometimes seems to me that there was more dis-
sent among intellectuals confronting totalitarian
regimes than there is in our age of freedom and
choice.
We have a truth crisis all right. But it is much deeper
and wider than we care to admit. Perhaps the biggest
lie of all is that the crisis is confined to the Kremlin’s
falsehoods and the far right’s conspiracy theories. On
the contrary, it is systemic and almost universal.
This article first appeared in the Guardian.
www.monbiot.com
Inflation that
pushed food
out of reach of
Bengal’s poor
was deliberately
engineered under
a policy conceived
by that British hero,
John Maynard
Keynes
Bengl fmine 1943: British government policy induced fmine tht killed three million
