In Elena Gorokhova’s 2010 memoir “A Mountain of Crumbs” she famously writes: “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
I guess that’s the only difference between us and the Soviets. A lot of us didn’t know how much they were lying to us. Probably it’s because the living is so much easier here than in Soviet Russia, that for most people we could assume that things were being run pretty well and we didn’t have to mistrust everything that our government said and did.
So maybe we didn’t get smarter. Instead, life got tougher and so it was easier to see when they were lying and cheating us. After all, when things are great and you have everything you need the fact that a lying skunk like Joe Biden is skimming a little from government contractors doesn’t seem like the end of the world.
But when the bottom falls out and they’re selling off your country by the metric ton and telling you it’s your own fault. And then when they cause a plague and then gaslight you into locking yourself in your house for a couple of years it kind of becomes obvious what’s going on. They lied about the border, they lied about crime, they lied about inflation, they lied about energy prices, they lied about COVID, they lied about the vaccines, they lied about transgender children, they lied about the elections, they lied about Trump, they lied about Joe Biden’s dementia and finally they lied about Kamala’s polls.
But in our favor, we didn’t pretend to believe them. At least not those of us with normal intelligence. So, we’re not as bad off as Soviet Russia. The difference is we haven’t let them cow us into saying that 2 + 2 = 5.
But all of this came up because of that NY Times opinion article that owned up to all the lies about COVID that the government and the experts told. A lot of us didn’t believe the lies because we had a little sense about how ridiculous it was to think that anything less than a biohazard pressure suit and a washdown airlock would keep us safe from an airborne respiratory virus. But I shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people would think, “The government wouldn’t lie to us about something that important.”
Well, guess what? They did. And that’s what’s so powerful about this moment. Eureka! Now what else have they lied to us about? Until now the government has been protected from the worst suspicions because no one wants to feel like a paranoid mental case.
“There’s no way the CIA killed Kennedy.” Wanna bet?
“There’s no way we knew Sadaam didn’t have a nuclear program.” Wanna bet?
“There’s no way the FBI had men on the ground on January 6th. Wanna bet?
“There’s no way the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service were responsible for letting that kid get a clip of ammo off at that Trump rally.” Wanna bet?
Are all of these things 100% certain? No. But now that we know what goes on with our government is it as likely as not? I’d say certainly. So, let’s say half of them are true. Look where that leaves us if half of those are true. Look at where we are even if none of those are true but their actual lies make us all conspiracy theorists from now on. And we have no choice. Once you’ve seen some of the things we’ve seen; the COVID lies, you can’t unsee them. You can no longer trust your government. They have to be kept in check. They have to be held accountable. It’s different world.