Lies

Let's take the testimony of Neil Barofsky, formerly Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and author of Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (2012). Here's Barofsky in conversation with Bill Moyers:

I think one of the interesting things of Washington for someone who had not previously been there was the comfort and frequency with which people lie to one another. It is not something that I had experienced. And I had spent eight years as a prosecutor prosecuting fraud cases and narcotics cases.

And the lies were almost like a currency in Washington. People would lie to you, and, I mean, people within the government would lie to you. And you would know they were lying. And they would know that you knew they were lying.

And they would lie nonetheless, as this is just the normal way people communicate with each other. And I guess it was a somewhat — I mean, I would hate to describe myself as being naive. Because, you know, I'd spent eight years in the trenches with some truly horrific human beings, and fraudsters who committed billions of dollars of fraud.

But I'd not seen anything like it, where just the presumption level of dishonesty, that really permeated the town. And so it took me a little bit to realize it, and to realize that government officials who were presidentially appointed, and you ask them for information, and they give you information, where they tell you something, and they're not telling you the truth.

And you almost have to, at least include in your calculus the possibility that somebody's lying to you all the time. . . . [I]t was a light-bulb moment when I realized that there's just nothing people won't say if they think they can gain advantage from it. And it’s a very strange way to operate when you're not used to it.

Peter Ford, former British Ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) and Bahrain (1999-2002), has a delightful essay on decoding the doublespeak on Syria.

Here's his lede:

The prospect of US withdrawal from Syria has taken the use of doublespeak by frothing neocons and their liberal interventionist fellow travellers to a new level. Here to help the confused observer is a glossary of some of the most frequently used key terms and their true meanings, along with guidance on usages deemed taboo in Western policy-making and media circles.

And a sample:

Stabilise. Our programmes support local administrations aimed at helping to stabilise the areas outside Syrian government control. Meaning: Destabilise, help engineer partition.

Caitlin Johnstone takes a similar approach in her recent piece on how to beat a manipulator:

There's someone [sic] in psychology called projection, and anyone who has done a good deal of inner work will tell you that it's a handy self-enquiry tool to see if what you hate in others, you can find in yourself... Manipulators particularly use projection as a tactic to hide what they're doing to you in plain sight. A manipulator can have you chasing your tail by simply suggesting that you or others are doing what you are seeing them doing with your own eyes... Here's the key: simply reverse the pronouns. When faced with a manipulator, everything he says about you, he is saying about himself, and everything he says about himself, is what he thinks of you. If he's telling you you're duplicitous and you're a liar and you're trying to take him for all he's got, he's actually saying he's duplicitous and he's a liar and he's trying to take you for all you've got. If you have good grounds to believe you are being manipulated by someone, reverse the pronouns in your mind and let them tell you who they are. It works from personal relationships right up to the grand manipulators employed by the plutocrats.

In a link-rich debunking of routine imperial lies regarding Venezuela, the charge of corruption illustrates projection:

The accusations of the elites of Venezuela are a form of projection: they are the corrupt parasites who for generations have fed off the productive people of Venezuela, as in all nations. . . . this is why we hear so much about corruption in Venezuela: an utterly worthless class of human beings is angry that some small share of the wealth they used to skim exclusively for themselves is now being distributed with just a bit more equity across social lines.

Here's Armstrong confirming projection in a recent update on Putin Derangement Syndrome:

Serious observers have long understood that when Washington and its minions accuse Moscow of something it's an admission that they are already doing it

Long-time businessman and Russia specialist Gilbert Doctorow offers a remarkable instance of projection in a recent essay bearing on the US incitement of war in Ukraine:

The media differ only in the degree of foolishness by which they explain Russian objectives and thinking processes. Even the most prestigious and seemingly serious Western media like the BBC have been handing the microphone to utter nitwits whose only merit for their purposes is hatred and disdain for Russia. On this morning's BBC news broadcast, several minutes of air time were given to a dunce who rattled on about how Russia's coming invasion was intended to distract attention from domestic woes such as the faltering economy and the poorly managed fight against the Covid pandemic.

I ask instead what does Washington hope to achieve by pouring kerosene on the flames of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation.

First, to the extent that Washington can keep the guard rails in place and not touch off an all-out war with Russia, it seeks to do precisely what that gal on the BBC was attributing to Mr. Putin: to create a diversion from its own political travails at home. Going back 70 years to the start of the first Cold War, domestic U.S. politics have always been a major factor in the ratcheting up or down of the conflict with Russia over global leadership.