Concern for the Truth
    By Tzvetan Todorov
    Lib ration

    Tuesday 19 December 2006

The foundations of democracy are at risk as soon as a country accepts - as the United States did with the war in Iraq - lies and illusion.

    One of the most interesting conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton report resides in the observations that, since the war in Iraq, the American government has often sought to rule out any information that runs counter to its policies, and that this refusal to take the truth into account has had calamitous effects. The report says so in measured, but firm, terms: "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." In other words, the American government has held truth to be a negligible value that could easily be sacrificed to the will to power.

    This reflection is not really a surprise for observers outside the United States. The preparation and unleashing of the war were based on a double lie or double illusion - that is, that Al-Qaeda was linked to the Iraqi government and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, biological, or chemical. Since the fall of Baghdad, this casual attitude to the truth has been in constant evidence. At the very moment when the images of torture in Abu Ghraib prison were being revealed to the whole world, the US asserted that democracy was being securely implanted in Iraq. Then, while hundreds of prisoners had already been moldering for five years in the camp at Guantanamo, subjected to degrading treatment, without any trial or any possibility of defending themselves, [the US government] declares that the United States is using its forces in defense of human rights. The very same people who declare that they are the incarnation of freedom have legalized the use of torture. The Baker-Hamilton report chose not to go into the past; it simply notes that the refrain repeated until recently that "everything is going well in Iraq" does not strictly correspond to the truth.

    What is surprising, on the other hand, is that it was possible in a great democracy like the United States to parenthesize the question of the truth for close to five years. That is worrying: In spite of the pluralism of the parties, in spite of the freedom of the press, it is therefore possible to convince the population of a liberal democracy that black is white and white, black. How to explain this vulnerability?

    We must first concede that, in any country whatsoever, the greater part of the population blindly obeys opinion makers, politicians, and media officials (while advice from abroad is habitually treated with contempt). If, as of September 2002, there were plenty of lucid statements in the United States from some politicians and some organs of the press, these statements were not carried by institutions in the foreground, by the Democratic Party, the big television stations, nor the main newspapers. The country allowed itself to be submerged under a wave of patriotism that relegated concern for the truth to the background.

    This abandonment of the duty of truth among opinion makers does not reflect some nefarious intention, but rather the fear that seized the country's population following the September 11, 2001, attacks. The need to protect one's own life, to assure the security of one's loved ones, to eliminate threats judged to be imminent, made everyone forget habitual precautions. Verifying and evaluating the news, arguing and reasoning were perceived as signs of a lack of courage and sense of responsibility. Meanwhile, fear is a poor counselor, and we must be afraid of those who live in fear.

    Are European countries better protected than their American friend against this deviation produced by fear - this propensity to ignore the truth in the rush toward the objectives they have set for themselves? It may be that they possess some additional defenses, the reverse side of their very deficiencies: their plurality and the consequent obligation to listen to the neighbor's opinion, the awareness that their recent past is hardly entirely glorious. But one should not count too much on these differences: It would be enough for an enemy to make threatening statements, for a few spectacular events that arouse overpowering emotion to occur for the French, Italians, or Spanish to decide in their turn that danger is imminent, that all means are good ones in combating it, that it is not the time to patiently seek out the truth. Thus, already, here and there, people talk about Islam, its army of terrorists, and its future atomic bomb.

    It's not because a danger is real that the measures taken to counter it become legitimate. Immediately after the Second World War, the Soviet Union inundated Western countries with their spies and sought to influence their policies; nonetheless McCarthyism and the 1950-1954 witch-hunt inflicted lasting harm on American society. In the 1930s, the Soviet threat to Europe was indeed real, but it was Hitler who pushed Germany into war, and he did so by (among other things) exacerbating his fellow citizens' fear of the Bolsheviks.

    In totalitarian countries, truth is systematically sacrificed in the struggle for victory. But in a democratic state, the concern for truth must be sacred: The very foundation of the system is in play. Germaine Tillion understood this very well: a member of one of the first resistance networks in Paris, she wrote a tract in 1941 in which she called on her comrades-in-arms to never compromise over the truth, even if that didn't immediately contribute to victory: "For our homeland is only dear to us on the condition that we never have to sacrifice the truth for it."

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    Tzvetan Todorov is a historian and philosopher. Born in 1939 in Bulgaria, Tzvetan Todorov moved to France in 1963, fleeing communism. Since 1987, he has directed the research center for the arts and language at CNRS [the French National Social Sciences Research Center]. A globally recognized intellectual and theorist of structuralism, he belongs to the tradition of humanist thinkers.