Jewish Chronicle, 14 May 2004

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. Now, however, it seems that war has become the casualty of the disintegration of truth.

It has become clear that the Daily Mirror’s photographs of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners were faked. Yet the paper’s editor Piers Morgan — while refusing, at time of writing, to admit they were fabricated — carefully said the pictures ‘accurately illustrate’ serious abuse of the kind being investigated among British soldiers, and represented actual incidents which otherwise would not have been made known.

In other words, even if the pictures were faked we should apparently still thank him for performing a vital public service in publishing a lie.

This is what might be termed the ‘Gilligan defence’. The infamous story by the Today programme reporter Andrew Gilligan that the government ‘sexed up’ its Iraq dossier and thus took the country to war on a lie was shown to be false. Yet his defenders maintain that the story’s many flaws were irrelevant because it reflected a ‘broader truth’.

These are by no means isolated incidents. For the past two decades or more, post-modernism has written the very concept of truth out of our culture’s philosophical script. Objective reality was replaced by ‘truth-for-me’ as everything was reduced to a matter of personal opinion.

In journalism, this was translated into the view that, since all journalists had views, the pursuit of objectivity was a dishonest pretence and should be abandoned for the ‘journalism of attachment’ —more vulgarly known as twisting the facts to fit a prejudice. This doctrine first shot to prominence during the war in the Balkans, when journalists justified inventing descriptions, characters and quotes on the grounds that these reflected a ‘broader truth’. So broad, in short, that it was a lie.

Only this week, I heard an academic dismiss concerns about a dodgy educational initiative for schools by saying: ‘But everything [ital ‘everything’] is propaganda’. The consequences of such contempt for truth is that propaganda based on lies is accepted as fact, if it accords with prevailing prejudices. Both Israel and the US in Iraq are victims of this phenomenon, with public opinion manipulated by a culture of pathological delusion in which lies, distortion and prejudice are substituted for facts, balance and rationality.

Both the Iraq war and Israel are routinely presented in the worst possible light and events misrepresented, distorted or fabricated to fit. The outcome is a moral and intellectual inversion, in which those defending free societies are presented as even more diabolical than the tyrannies attacking them.

In the Guardian this week Richard Overy, a history professor at London university, likened the coalition soldiers in Iraq to the Nazi Wehrmacht. Moreover, he said that the term ‘terrorist’ had been used by the Nazis to demonise resistance movements throughout occupied Europe. Thus he implied that President George Bush was like the Nazis, while Islamic terrorists were akin to the wartime resistance.

In similar vein Peter Oborne, the political editor of the Spectator, wrote in the London Evening Standard of the ‘evil and bestial occupation of Iraq’ and said: ‘America under Bush is a rogue state, no longer fit to belong to the community of nations, and it needs to be contained’.

These outbursts were prompted by the appalling pictures of ill-treatment meted out to Iraqi prisoners by US forces. Of course, this was disgusting, indefensible behaviour which has besmirched the US army and shamed America. But it was the unspeakable beheading of Nick Berg which was the real barbarism. And to compare the Americans to the Nazis and ascribe heroism to terrorists bespeaks a moral and intellectual bankruptcy which would be astounding in anyone, let alone a professor of history.

Yes, many very serious mistakes have been made by the Americans in Iraq, whose fate remains perilously uncertain and where insurgency still poses a desperate threat. But to call the occupation ‘bestial and evil’ when its aims were principled, it has already delivered tranquillity, growing prosperity and a return of civil society in much of the country, and is welcomed by most Iraqis as a deliverance from the true bestiality and evil of Saddam’s regime, amounts to distortion of a high order.

It is precisely this kind of grotesque, upside-down thinking that has cast Israel, the democratic victim of terror, as the tyrannical perpetrator of violence in so much of British public discourse. And indeed, it was no surprise to find Oborne writing of Israel’s ‘state terrorism’ and, more ambiguously, Overy’s reference — at best, amorally even-handed — to ‘routine murders and atrocities against civilians’ in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

With such a mindset, the danger is that people may become happy for Israel to be thrown to the wolves, while national self-flagellation over Iraq may tip a public softened up by months of relentless defeatism into a final pressure for surrender. For in a culture of lies, it is the real forces of evil and bestiality which are always the winner.

Posted by melanie at May 14, 2004