The truth can be a precious commodity

IT IS understandable that Ukraine’s parliament has passed a law banning the importation and sale of books from publishers in Russia or Belarus, and the occupied parts of Ukraine, sources of so much misinformation.

This raises the question about our use of Russian authors at a time when the country is committing unbelievable atrocities.

I take comfort from the fact that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are unlikely purveyors of Putinism and that Tolstoy once said that: “The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn’t gold.”

Somebody once said that if you ask a politician to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you will get three different answers. The importance of truth underlies so much of what is happening in the world at present.

George Orwell argued that history stopped in 1936 – after that, there was only propaganda.

Indeed, Hitler and Stalin’s control of the media and people’s minds and their webs of deception were the crude predecessors of Putin’s lies and Trump’s treachery.

Last week as Boris Johnson clung embarrassingly to his political life, reminiscent of the last days of Rasputin, the letters from Richy Rishi and Sad Saj were not just about competence but principles, integrity and values.

Last month was published Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist in which he recounts the horrific story of Rudolf Vrba, a Slovak-Jewish teenager, who was deported to Auschwitz and one of only five people to escape from the concentration camp.

It’s a grim but compelling read and one early insight of Vrba as he worked on the ‘ramp’, where prisoners took their first steps from the train into the camp, was that the Nazi plot to destroy the Jews depended pre-eminently on ignorance and lies.

It was the porkies that got Exit done for the PM, who was in danger of growing a longer nose than Pinocchio, and it is a lack of transparency and integrity that sows seeds of mistrust in both local and national politics. When it happens we need to call it out.