Country of lies

A few years ago, I thought that America had become a real country of lies: President Johnson’s lies about the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair, the unclear story of the mysterious role of Senator Edward Kennedy in the death of his girlfriend in Chapakweddick, the senator’s plagiarism Biden and the lie of former Senator Gary Hart during the presidential campaign in 1984 regarding his secret affair. But not only politicians are lying; Lately, the lie in the business world comes to the forefront - Wall Street lies and savings and loan scandals, as well as lies in sports - famous baseball player Pete Rose concealed himself gambling, and Olympic champion athlete Ben Johnson - that uses drugs. But in May 1990, I came to lecture in Russia.
I first visited Russia in 1979 as a “Professor of Fulbright” ^[263] and was amazed at how much more open people have become here. They were no longer afraid to talk to an American and criticize their government. I was often told: “You came exactly where you want to go. This is a country of lies! Seventy years of lies! ”Again and again, the Russians told me that they always knew how much their government was lying. However, during the five weeks of my stay in Russia, I had time to see how they were amazed when they learned about new cases of lies that they had never even suspected before. A bitter example is the discovery of the truth about the sufferings of the inhabitants of Leningrad during the Second World War.
Soon after the attack of fascist Germany on Russia in 1941, fascist troops surrounded Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The blockade lasted 900 days. According to official data, one and a half million people died in Leningrad, mostly from starvation. Almost all the adults I met told me about the members of their family who died during the siege. But during my stay in Russia, the government announced that the number of civilians who died during the blockade was too low. On May 9, when the whole country once again celebrated Victory Day over fascism, the Soviet government announced that the losses in the war were so great due to the fact that there were not enough officers to command the troops. The government stated that before the war, the Soviet leader Stalin was purging the ranks and many officers were shot.
But it is not only the revelations of the old lie that are taking place, the lie continues now. A year after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, a nuclear catastrophe occurred in Chernobyl. A cloud of radiation spread over some parts of Western and Eastern Europe, but the Soviet government initially tried to hide everything. Scandinavian scientists have determined that the level of radiation in the atmosphere has greatly increased. And three days later, the Soviet authorities admitted that a major accident had occurred, and reported thirty-two deaths. Gorbachev spoke for the first time publicly on this topic after several weeks and devoted most of his speech to criticizing the reaction of the West to the accident. The government did not recognize that the population of Chernobyl was not evacuated on time, and many people were sick with radiation sickness. According to modern Russian scientists, 10,000 people may die from the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.
I learned about it from a Ukrainian doctor, with whom I went to Kiev in a night train compartment. He said that party workers evacuated their families, while everyone else was told that there was no danger. This doctor has now treated girls for ovarian cancer, which under normal conditions does not develop at such an early age. In the hospital department for children suffering from radiation sickness, he saw how their bodies glow in the dark (though, due to poor knowledge of the language, I cannot say with absolute certainty whether he spoke it literally or metaphorically). He said: “Gorbachev is lying, as they are. He knows what happened and he knows that we know that he is lying. ”
I met with a psychologist who was assigned to conduct a survey of residents of the Chernobyl area in order to assess how they are coping with stress now, three years after the accident. He believed that their plight would be somewhat easier if it were not for the feeling that the government had left them to fend for themselves. He officially recommended Gorbachev to speak to the people and say: “We made a terrible mistake by underestimating the intensity of radiation. We had to evacuate much more people and much faster, but we had nowhere to place everyone. As soon as we understood our mistake, we should have told you about it, but we did not do that either. Now we want you to know the truth and know that the country sympathizes with you. We will provide you with the necessary medical care and we hope that everything will be fine with you. " But this recommendation remained unanswered.
Anger over the lies about Chernobyl has not yet passed. In early December 1991, more than five years after the accident, the Ukrainian parliament demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev and seventeen other Soviet and Ukrainian government officials be brought to justice. Volodymyr Yavorivsky, the chairman of the Ukrainian Legislative Commission that investigated the accident, said: “The entire leadership, starting with Gorbachev and ending with encrypters who decrypted secret telegrams, knew what the true level of radiation contamination was.” The Ukrainian leadership said that President Gorbachev "personally helped to conceal the extent of radiation leakage."
For decades, the Soviet people have been learning that in order to achieve anything, it is necessary to avoid and circumvent the rules in every possible way. Russia has become a country in which lies and fraud have become the norm in which everyone knew about the corruption of the system and the injustice of the laws - and in order to survive, it was necessary to defeat the system. If everyone thinks that the rules must be violated or circumvented, social institutions will not be able to work. I am not sure that simple changes in the government can quickly lead to a change in this policy. Now no one believes anything that the current government says about anything. Very few of those with whom I met believed Gorbachev, and that was a year before the attempted coup d'etat that failed in 1991.
A nation cannot survive if no one believes any of its leaders. In such a situation, the population is ready and even wants any strong leader to come to power with rather courageous claims and decisive actions and return the confidence of the people.
Americans have such a short joke about politicians: “When does a politician lie? - When moves lips! ". However, my visit to Russia convinced me that, contrary to this anecdote, we still expect our leaders to be fair enough, although we admit that sometimes they can lie. Laws are valid only when most people believe in their justice, and only a very small part of the population believes that it is allowed to violate laws. In a democracy, the government successfully works only when most people believe that they are mostly told the truth, and they have every reason to expect fairness and justice.
If trust is completely lost, then no deep relationship is possible. If you find that your friend has betrayed you and has constantly lied to you for selfish purposes, then your friendship will not be able to continue. Marriage is also destroyed if one spouse finds out that the other has cheated him, and not just once, but many times. I doubt that any form of government can exist for a long time without using force to suppress its own people, if the people believe that their leaders always lie.
I hope that we have not yet reached such a position. The lie of statesmen is still an event that causes condemnation, not admiration. Lies and corruption are part of our history. They are not new, but are still still considered abnormal. We still believe that we can get rid of scammers.
Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair can be considered evidence that the American system of government is untenable, but it can also be viewed as proof of the opposite. Nixon had to resign. When Chief Justice Warren Berger swore in administration officials Gerald Ford, who replaced Nixon, he told one of the senators who attended: “It (the system) worked, thank God, it worked” ^[264] . North, Poindexter, and now others have been prosecuted for lying to Congress. During congressional hearings on the Iran-Contra affair, Congressman Lee Hamilton shamed Oliver North, quoting Thomas Jefferson: "The art of government is the art of honesty."