October 31, 2003
It's crude but...
The image is crude I admit, given that politics is 99% administration.
But it does capture the two levels of discourse of the Howard Government, and the way that this government has used a version of Plato's noble lie (Tampa and Iraq) to manage public opinion.
Tampa refers to asylum seekers throwing children overbroad whilst Irag refers to the threat posed by the Iraq regime.
The image is need of interpretation to avoid the conspiracy theory reading. The noble lie for Plato is a myth told to the people by the rulers to motivate them to do what is good and right. Without this religious myth they would not behave in a good fashion, even if this was what was ultimately in their best interests. It was no use explaining to them why they should behave well because they would not understand.
Under this strategy our political leaders chose their words precisely and exactly, using ellipses and rhetorical evasions to convey hidden meanings to the political elite while concealing them from the rude and undiscriminating gaze of the grubbing multitudes.
Shadia Dury describes it this example of lies in politics this way:
"Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States – the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the war party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.So what were the real reasons? Reorganising the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel? Expanding American hegemony in the Arab world? Possibly. But these reasons would not have been sufficient in themselves to mobilise American support for the war."
Hence the need for the noble lie by the executive deployed to mange democratic public opinion and the Parliament. The context for the usefulness of lies in politics is the slow paralysis endemic to the legislative branch in a federal nation state, which makes the function of the executive more necessary than ever in times of national crisis.
What Tampa and Iraq showed clearly is the secrecy in politics. The executive conceal their views to shape the people’s feelings and to protect the political elite from possible reprisals.
Shadia Drury argues that the neo cons in the Bush Administration engaged in this Platonic practice of the noble lie but that they learned their political philosophy from Leo Strauss.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 31, 2003 07:22 AM | TrackBack