The Lies They Told
Sometimes, the implausibility is the point. Also this week: the even truer-size map; and some extremely late but mercifully-brief film reviews.
“Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town,” one of the suspects in the 2018 Salisbury poisoning told Russian state television a few months after the event. (You remember: the former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal, his daughter and a police officer, all in critical condition for weeks; the bottle of perfume which turned out to contain the nerve agent novichok turning up in a charity collection bin months later, and fatally poisoning the poor woman who received it as a gift.)
His companion was no more convincing. Salisbury Cathedral, he said with the confidence of a man who’d been on Wikipedia recently, is “famous not just in Europe, but in the whole world. It’s famous for its 123-metre spire, it’s famous for its clock, the first one [of its kind] ever created in the world, which is still working”. I’m not giving their names, you notice. That’s because they used several, and it’s just not worth the hassle.
The British authorities dismissed the denials as “risible”; they were mocked on social media and topical comedy shows, generally on the grounds that even, in Britain you’d struggle to find someone either that knowledgeable or that enthusiastic about Salisbury’s admittedly fine Cathedral. Looking back though, I wonder whether the distinctly implausible nature of the lies was an entirely deliberate feature. We have to deny this, for form’s sake, for the consumption of domestic audiences and to reduce the chance of reprisals, the logic goes. But we do nonetheless want you to understand we did it, and that we would do it again. Skripal, after all, was working with British intelligence services. The purpose of a deterrent is to deter.
I’ve been thinking about all this because of the similar lies recently spilling from the government of a country we used to tell ourselves was not like Russia at all.
If you haven’t seen footage of Renee Nicole Good’s death at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last week, I wouldn’t seek it out: the world is quite distressing enough already without going hunting for literal snuff footage. But it is difficult, to put it mildly, to reconcile the US government’s claims that Ross acted in self defence in response to the 37 year old mother trying to run him over, with the cheery way she told him “I’m not mad at you” just moments before. More likely something close to the opposite is true, and his impulsive actions weren’t because he was scared but because she wasn’t.
At any rate, the line from ICE and the White House and Republicans in congress and an unnervingly large number of their outriders on social media, even those who have never set foot within a thousand miles of Minneapolis, is – in a far more literal sense than is comfortable – Orwellian. We may be able to see this was not an aggressor, let alone a terrorist, just an ordinary American mom: but the party tells its supporters to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.
Do they really expect anyone to believe this? Well, I suspect that rather depends on who “anyone” is. For those broadly on their own side, it gives them something to say in arguments – or hell, even, for the softer brained, to believe. Those working for media outlets who use balance as their lodestar are extremely likely to follow protocol, put their own views to one side, quote the official response, and absolutely not say this response is obviously untrue. It creates deniability.
It also – this observation shamelessly nicked from a chat with Tom Phillips, with whom I am currently updating Conspiracy for the new US edition – binds those who speak in support of the administration to it. It’s always hard to admit you were wrong – how much harder would it be to admit to yourself that you colluded in the cover up of a murder?
But for the huge part of the audience that doesn’t like Trump or his footsoldiers, I suspect the very unbelievability of the lie is the entire point. The administration wants them to be scared, and to see where not being sufficiently so can lead. They want progressive Americans to know that they did this and that they will do this again. Some of them are even – this is far from the only example – saying the quiet part out loud.
They know they have to say they didn’t do it. They know they need to give their supporters the fig leaf. But they still, nonetheless, want us to understand that they did this, and they would do it again.
The point of a deterrent is to deter.
Map of the Week: The Even Truer Size Map
“Map fans: make sure you’re sitting down for this exciting news,” friend of the newsletter Alasdair Rae posted to LinkedIn a couple of weeks back. Normally I’d expect that sort of comment on that sort of platform to be ironic, or possibly delusional – but on this occasion what followed made me so excited that I made a noise which woke the dog up with a start. “The True Size Of have added zillions of sub-national geographies to the site.”
Some background here for the uninitiated: The True Size Of... has for some years been the internet’s premier way of dealing with the geographical distortions thrown up by the Mercator projection. As long as anybody’s been trying to produce geographically accurate maps of the world, cartographers have faced the problem that the Earth has three dimensions while maps only have two. One solution, first used by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in his world map of 1569, is to pretend a sphere is actually a cylinder, and give every parallel of latitude the same length as the equator.
All this is great if you’re, say, a ship’s navigator, trying to plot a route across the Atlantic. It’s less good if you want to understand the relative size of different countries – because one side effect is to exaggerate landmasses in the far north or south. The result is that we tend to understate the size of Africa or South America, while imagining Greenland to be massive, with consequences for contemporary geopolitics you don’t need me to spell out.
Hence The True Size Of..., which allows you to drag countries to different points on the globe and see that – to pick another topical example – Venezuela is not, as one might think from the map, comparable to France, but to the whole of central Europe:
