What happened to the post-truth? Or better: How is the truth in the West today? I admit it can be a difficult reflection in the middle of summer, but this is also a time of quiet, and quiet invites reflection. So, if you happen to be wondering what we call the truth, I suggest you think, for example, of the Putin regime’s communications offensive since invading Ukraine, its systematic untruths, its suppression of dissent, or its scandalous rewriting of history . I guess they see where I’m going. Of course, the lies didn’t go away in the US either when Trump fell from power. Much of the Republican Party continues to speak of the Democrats’ “stolen election” and pokes fun at the work of the Congressional inquiry into the January 2021 Capitol storm and speaks without blushing of an attempt to divert public attention from the Truth. And in the face of such examples, all I can think of is returning to the work of Hannah Arendt, perhaps the best thought leader for these troubled times.
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The author of Truth and Lies in Politics, first published in The New Yorker in 1967, described lying as an act that is part of human freedom, the totalitarian variant of which is the loss of what distinguishes us from the truth. But where should we locate ourselves today with these coordinates? Because it seems clear that we are facing a second wave of post-truth, the phenomenon that emerged in 2016 with the Brexit stories and Trump’s famous “alternative facts”, which even then called for an urgent re-reading of Arendt. When Trump yelled mid-campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose voters,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1951, offered us the keys to understanding that the tycoon was no simple politician candidate for the Republicans, but the leader of an incipient mass movement. When the White House used “alternative facts” to deny the empirical evidence showing that Obama’s inauguration was much more massive than Trump’s, Arendt helped us understand that movements thrive on the destruction of reality, since they conjure false but consistent world. “more appropriate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself”. The promise of returning to an idyllic past offers security and grounding, the irresistible guarantee of a possible desire that enables us to deny reality itself.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meeting in 2018. Photo: Getty
Today, the fictional world that Putin invented appears in the form of “there is no war” but (as his spokespersons point out) a “special operation,” a subterfuge that allows us to insinuate that Russians and Ukrainians are the same, single people , which incidentally demonstrates the leader’s Luciferian ability to, in Arendt’s words, “isolate the masses from the real world”. Hence this superlative propaganda, based on Soviet nostalgia and the arrogance of the old empire, on the glory of a past that allows it to compare itself to Peter the Great and to claim almost painfully that “we had no choice”. , than to act in Ukraine . His propaganda seeks to produce a single truth about which no opinion can be formulated, a new objectivity “as real and inviolable as the rules of arithmetic”. If for Arendt the public sphere is that pluralistic, visible space in which freedom can develop, it is framed by autocratic propaganda in a repressive framework that attempts to impose a single truth. In democracy we discuss and talk about what is happening in the world; In a totalitarian regime, propaganda lies are “woven around a central fiction”. Consider, for example, the persistent appeal to an alleged “brotherhood” with Ukraine while its schools and hospitals are bombed and civilians executed as a control strategy. The important thing is to act and react according to the norms of this fictional world, romanticizing war or spreading the narratives that legitimize it.
Journalists Isabeau van Halm and Michael Goodier explained in The New Statesman how the Putin regime uses images of Russian soldiers helping Ukrainian children, creating the narrative of this “little brother” being helped. For his part, writer Peter Pomerantsev told the New York Times that more than three-quarters of Russians believe they need “a strong hand” to run the country, someone to protect and discipline the people, and how exactly that is history , which the Kremlin often uses to describe Putin. The equation is clear: the tyrannical truth is imposed by propaganda that ends with the disappearance of publicity, which deprives people of reality. Reading Arendt, therefore, helps us to pinpoint the totalitarian dyes that are increasingly staining Putin’s regime, his willful disconnect between discourse and reality. Remember the mass celebrations marking the 8th anniversary of Crimea’s annexation, when the Russian president spoke of the need to “free the population from genocide” and insisted on calling the massacre a “liberation mission.” His rhetoric references Arendt’s declaration of mass allegiance: the steadfast adherence to the Führer, the same that invokes Trump’s maxim (“I could shoot someone and not lose voters”), is invoked from the suggestion of a world huddled in the face of its uncertain and chaotic reality . Putin offers an ideologically consistent narrative that fits all the pieces of the puzzle. The repetition of key ideas, the slogans coming out of the mouth of a strong leader give the masses this sense of rootedness and create this alternate reality where fact checking is useless because something much more powerful than reality is being offered: the Certainty of a world that gives meaning to uprooted lives.
Arendt may not be useful for fact-checking or enlightening the world through tweets, but her work helps us to decode the emotional responses that propaganda evokes in us and to identify the values it promotes. It also speaks to us about the democratic referent as an interpretive counterpoint to authoritarian regimes, the need to preserve a public space where it is possible and desirable to confront our opinions, and the inevitable claim of all authority (here, there, yesterday , now and always) to monopolize the story of truth.
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