Liar! Liar!

I really like UN representative Samantha Power for standing before the Security Council and calling Vladimir Putin what he is. A Liar! Not a revisionist or an apologist or a publicist. A Liar! In her words,

Russia has come before this Council to say everything but the truth. It has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied. So we have learned to measure Russia by its actions not by its words. In the last 48 hours Russia’s actions have spoken volumes. (New York Times, August 29, 2014)

Having grown up in the throes of the Cold War, when Soviet leaders were lying only when their mouths were moving, I have a little pent-up resentment about falsehoods going unchallenged from our side of the Atlantic. The UN was the site of some whoppers, and the home country was not direct in challenging what was plainly contradicted by facts.  We questioned, we disagreed and we objected, but the “L-word” was used sparingly. You don’t call someone a liar without conviction.

Because “a lie is a false statement with deliberate intent to deceive” (Random House). A lie is not inadvertent or erroneous. It is calculated. So you aren’t equivocating when you call someone “a liar.”  At the same time you are clearing the air of disinformation by flatly contradicting what lingers as a manipulation of the truth. So the accusation of “liar” is needed to set the record straight.

Unlike many other names you can call somebody, this one is productive, because it changes how we see events. There is no residual question of whether Russia is really “peacekeeping” when it sends armored personnel carriers into the Ukraine.  And no question about whether there are good intentions behind providing sophisticated weapons to the separatists in the east. It is military aggression pushing toward war.

So if “Liar!” is accusatory, so be it. Better that than to allow the lie to stand and undermine the facts. No better place to go on record than the United Nations for all the world to hear. If you buy this fellow’s whoppers, then I have some PAC’s on our native soil you can support.

Well done, Ambassador Powers! I wish you had been here in the 1960’s. In those days we called it “propaganda.”

 

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