The accusations between London, Washington and Moscow continue to fly back and forth, along with retaliations and threats. It would be childish if the stakes were not so frighteningly high. My immediate reaction to all this is to believe the absolute worst of all political figures, both East and West. I never trust anyone in politics. All politicians are guilty until proved innocent in my book. The reason is simple. Even when I am feeling particularly optimistic about my species, I think that only half of them are truthful. The rest are shameless liars. The problem, to paraphrase a grammar school riddle, is that when asked, everyone will immediately claim to be a truth teller. For example, when Vladimir Putin was asked if he actually ordered the Litvinenko murder, of course he denied everything. And when George Bush was asked if he ordered the invasion of Iraq, that has so far lead to the deaths of well over half a million innocent Iraqis, simply to get at the oil, or to get revenge on Saddam Hussein for attempting to assassinate his father, Mr. Bush also immediately denied the accusations. Lets be clear. Guilty or not, of course Bush would deny having ordered the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay, just as Putin would deny complicity in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. I know that in these comparisons, I am skipping over vast differences in numbers. But didn’t Stalin say “when one person dies it’s a tragedy, when millions die its statistics”?
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Stalin’s quote brings up another complexity that’s even more confounding to anyone really interested in truth. In addition to out and out lies, there is the simple fact that very often truth depends on one’s point of view. For example, the British are well known for a stubborn instance on the rule of law. Anyone, regardless of station, who commits a crime in London must be tried and punished, even if it means extradition against the laws of another country. It doesn’t matter if London itself is harboring heinous criminals at the same time. The poodle-like loyalty that lead England into an illegal war in Iraq along side their American friends shows that either the stubborn British instance on the rule of law can become a little lax at times, or else they see these issues from a rather different vantage point than most of the world. This moral stigmatism isn’t a particularly British trait.
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