Most political leaders talk about truth. Not all are as confident—or as frank—in their view about truth as Joseph Stalin. These are Stalin’s words: ‘We ourselves will be able to determine what is true and what is not.’
We have known for over half a century what kind of truth Stalin determined for his people, and how catastrophic were the consequences. Stalin died in his bed, but was responsible for the violent deaths of tens of millions of people, many of them his compatriots. Truth finally delivered its summons upon Stalin’s regime. But the people of the former Soviet Union are still paying the price—social, psychological, spiritual and economic—of having been forced to live with and through lies. Lies are a contagion. Systematic lying corrupts the body politic. It also taints ordinary people. Ask anyone of German descent, or any South African, black or white, about the legacy of lies in their private lives.
We know what happens to societies that are founded on lies, dishonesty, evasions and ‘weasel’ rhetoric: innocent people suffer. Institutions, designed to protect us, crumble; the law is made a mockery; education, in schools and universities, is co-opted. We see examples of that in some of the madrasas that serve as training grounds for militant Islamic fundamentalism. We see it in Western academies, even in our own universities, where direct political pressure or indirect financial squeezing serves to undermine institutional independence and integrity.
We can’t say we don’t know. We can all read. We can watch and listen. Many of us have the internet at our fingertips. We are witnesses, not passive bystanders. Many of us have personally seen the creep of corruption in our own lifetimes: in Richard Nixon’s Watergate America, for example. We have seen corruption in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, Cambodia, Chile, in Greece and Argentina under the generals. We have seen it too in Australia, under our mendacious immigration and detention regimes, devised by Labor and developed by the Coalition.
None of this is ancient history. All of it is documented. And, all along, we have been alerted by inveterate truth tellers, like the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, or by whistleblowers or investigators, like the Washington Post journalists Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, or the New Yorker magazine’s Seymour Hersh. Or here at home by Andrew Wilkie, or, most recently, the modest intelligence analyst and weapons inspector Rod Barton, interviewed on the