Janet Daley:
Russia’s TV interview and the Labour leader’s duplicity on Mandela are two sides of the same coin
When an adult looks you straight in the eye (or straight into a camera) and tells preposterous lies, you may conclude one of three things: he thinks you are a gullible idiot; he actually believes what he is saying and is therefore delusional; or he is deliberately mocking his impotent accusers – in modern parlance, taking the p***.
Having encountered Kremlin “spokesmen” who state with absolute certainty that Alexander Litvinenko killed himself by accidentally dropping the deadly polonium into his own tea when he had intended to murder his Russian contacts, I have faced precisely this dilemma. Is it more alarming to assume that the man spouting this nonsense might think that his listeners are fools, or that he could really believe that what he is saying is true? It is important to note that the three possibilities listed above are not mutually exclusive.
The Russian goons, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – if indeed, two such named individuals exist – who have so entertained us with their recitation of Salisbury’s tourist attractions and their aversion to snow, may, in fact, embody all three of those interpretations simultaneously. Yes, the Russian leadership does regard Western populations as stupidly deceived by their own media, and, yes, it is also technically paranoid to the point of believing absurdities and, yes, it is defiantly confident that there is nothing to fear from a divided and compromised West and it may therefore say anything it likes.
The current incarnation of brazen Russian mendacity is, as has been widely noted, peculiarly chaotic and indiscriminate. Unlike the coherent disinformation campaigns of the Soviet era which were designed to undermine capitalism, there seems to be no clear objective to this unfocused programme of deceit and disruption. Russia, as the Corbynite Labour party seems not to have noticed, is now a capitalist country where wealth is less equally distributed than in many Western social democracies. The cowboys who benefited from its post-Soviet fire sale of national assets – many of them Putin’s personal cronies – now run amok both inside and outside its borders. So if this isn’t an ideological argument any longer, what is the purpose of the new Lie Machine?
Answer: it is exactly what it appears. There is no coherent objective because confusion is the whole point. This is all about sowing contradiction and doubt: about undermining the self-belief and trust of Western populations in their own leaders and institutions. In truth, it is all about power, and the recovery of Russia’s pride after what its leaders saw as the catastrophic collapse of its position in the world. What could be a greater reassertion of a nation’s own strength than flagrant attempted assassination followed by ridiculous public disclaimers?
While the circumstances may be new – the collapse of the Soviet super power and the neurotic need to restore national confidence – the tradition of using lies and self-advertising exaggeration is not. This is a great tradition on the Left and it remains a feature of Western hardcore activism, always excused by the overarching moral imperative of defeating the class enemy. Objective truth, as we were all taught on the New Left, is a bourgeois construct. The “facts” are whatever you need them to be to accomplish your ends – which are unimpeachable. Your adversaries are inhuman demons who must be defeated by any means possible. Telling untruths, or casually misrepresenting your own actions, are trivial moral faults by comparison to the monstrous evil which you are dedicated to undermining.
That brings us to a rather less deadly, but no less telling, instance of falsification in the name of the cause – this time home-grown. A Corbyn story that did not receive the attention it deserved last week, what with the ongoing furore about hounding Jewish supporters of Israel out of the Labour party, was the sad tale of Jeremy’s disappointment over Nelson Mandela.
As you might expect, the truly sainted Mr Mandela was a great hero of the young Corbyn who participated, again as you might expect, in numerous public demonstrations demanding support for the anti-apartheid campaign led by Mr Mandela’s African National Congress. In fact, so vociferous and well-publicised was his participation that he was famously arrested while picketing the South African embassy to demand Mr Mandela’s release from prison. But the
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ultra-Left protest faction, the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group (CLAGG), which organised the protest in which Mr Corbyn was arrested was repeatedly refused a meeting with Mr Mandela after his release because the ANC believed that an association with Mr Corbyn and his friends would damage their cause. Have you got that? One of the greatest freedom fighters of the last century, whose life had been dedicated to the cause of defeating racism, regarded the Corbyn Leftists as too damaging to meet. Note: this is not how Mr Corbyn presents his heroic life-long fight against racism.
What is more, Colin Adkins, the campaigns organiser for the AntiApartheid Movement has said that CLAGG, which was run by the hard-Left Revolutionary Communist Group, was regarded as an outside infiltrator by the mainstream anti-apartheid campaign because its actions were primarily designed to discredit the established leadership and take over the movement.
In other words, it was a classic Left-wing operation: an attempt at a fratricidal tactical coup which, once again, was all about power. And the most important weapon in a contest for power – short of committing murder, which Mr Corbyn himself has not done but some of his proclaimed “friends” have – is through manipulation of perceptions, or “altering consciousness” as it is known in the trade. This is a world of relative truths and alternative realities in which nothing should be accepted as it seems. If you can disrupt the way people perceive and think, you can derange them and prepare them for the changes you plan to impose. At the very least you can prevent them from believing what they are told by anyone else, or even what they see with their own eyes.
‘If you can disrupt the way people perceive and think, you can derange them and prepare them for the changes you plan to impose’