Why Leaders Lie (10 page)

Between 1922 and 1933, the German military trained in the Soviet Union in clear violation of the Versailles Treaty.
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German leaders were fearful that if these activities were exposed, they would be heavily criticized by Weimar Germany’s political left, as well as by Britain and France, who would all push hard to end this valuable but illegal arrangement. Not surprisingly, the German government lied to help conceal it. An even more controversial case occurred in Britain during the mid-1950s, when parliament began to hear stories that the colonial government in Kenya was running a gulag for Mau Mau independence fighters.
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The British government feared that if this story became widely known, public opinion would force an end to Britain’s violent policies in Kenya, which would probably mean victory for the Mau Mau. That precedent, of course, would not bode well for maintaining the larger empire. To deal with these explosive revelations, British leaders lied about the Kenyan gulag and smeared the individuals who tried to expose it.

Finally, we now know that Japan reached a number of secret agreements with the United States during the Cold War. For example, Tokyo agreed in 1969 to allow nuclear-armed American ships to dock at Japanese ports.
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There was also a secret accord that called for Japan to help pay a large
part of the cost of stationing American troops on Japanese soil. These agreements would have been exceedingly controversial had they been made public; in fact, the ensuing uproar probably would have forced Japan’s leaders to abrogate them. After all, the law in Japan prohibited nuclear-armed vessels from entering Japanese ports. Because the leadership thought that the accords were in Japan’s national interest, they were hidden from the public. However, it did not take long before outsiders began to suspect that those agreements existed, and point blank questions about them were directed at Japanese leaders. Not surprisingly, they responded by lying and denying that those deals had been struck.

Stipulating when strategic cover-ups are more or less likely is somewhat complicated because this kind of deception involves two kinds of behavior—hiding incompetence and masking controversial policies—and two different audiences—other countries and the leader’s own public.

For starters, let us focus on the question of when a leader is likely to lie to help hide either a failed or controversial policy from another country. Not surprisingly, the circumstances that are likely to push leaders to engage in inter-state lying also apply to strategic cover-ups. In both cases, leaders are lying to another state because they think it is in the national interest. This means that leaders are more likely to engage in strategic cover-ups aimed at foreign audiences when their country is: (1) located in a dangerous region, (2) involved in a crisis, (3) engaged in a war, or (4) dealing with a rival rather than an ally.

Strategic cover-ups, of course, are more than just inter-state lies; leaders direct them at their own people as well as the outside world. Masking incompetence from the public is most
likely to occur in wartime, especially if the conflict is thought to be a fight for survival. The stakes will be so high in such a situation that leaders will not hesitate to lie to their citizenry if they think that it is necessary to avoid defeat and win the war. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to hide mistakes from the public in the midst of a war, because that is a circumstance in which governments are invariably given lots of leeway to limit and manipulate the flow of information. Plus, deception is widely considered to be an important instrument for fighting a deadly adversary. Finally, botched operations of one sort or another are commonplace in almost every conflict, which means that there will be plenty of opportunities, as well as the incentive, to engage in strategic cover-ups.
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What about controversial policies? They are more likely to be hidden from the public in democracies than nondemocracies. The most obvious reason for this is that leaders in a democracy must pay more attention to public opinion, because they are held accountable for their actions through regular elections. They cannot enunciate a policy that they think is wise but sure to be unpopular and then ignore the political fallout. In such cases, leaders have powerful incentives to adopt the policy, but not announce the decision publicly, and then lie if necessary to cloak what they have done. There is certainly some accountability in nondemocracies, but usually not as much as in democracies. Therefore, a leader of a nondemocratic state will be less inclined to veil a divisive policy from his public than his counterpart in a democracy.

There are also likely to be more situations that encourage leaders to lie to help conceal a controversial policy in a democracy than a nondemocracy. It is commonplace to have vigorous and contentious public debates about weighty issues in democracies, which means that leaders are almost certain to be asked tough questions about their preferred policies.
There is also a powerful norm of transparency in democracies, which means that leaders are expected to provide serious answers to those questions, which includes providing the public with some reasonable amount of information on the issue at hand. These circumstances make it hard to hide a controversial policy without lying. In contrast, there are usually not big public fights over policies in nondemocracies, which makes it easier for leaders to hide potentially divisive policies without having to lie about them. Thus, when dealing with controversial policies, there is a stronger incentive for democratic leaders to lie than their counterparts in nondemocracies.

The bottom line is that the likelihood that states will cover up a policy debacle or conceal a controversial policy is usually determined by the same set of conditions that influence inter-state lying, but with two important twists: covering up failed policies is especially likely in wartime, and concealing a contentious policy is especially likely in democracies.

With the rise of nationalism over the past two centuries, numerous ethnic or national groups around the world have established or have tried to establish their own state, or what is commonly called a nation-state. In the process, each group has created its own sacred myths about the past that portray it in a favorable way and portray rival national groups in a negative light.
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MIT political scientist Stephen Van Evera argues that these chauvinist myths “come in three principal varieties: self-glorifying, self-whitewashing, and other-maligning.”
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Inventing these myths and purveying them widely invariably requires lying about the historical record as well as contemporary political events. “Historical error,” as the French political theorist Ernest Renan succinctly put it, “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”
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The elites who dominate a nation’s discourse are largely responsible for inventing its myths, and they do so for two main reasons. These false stories help fuel group solidarity; they help create a powerful sense of nationhood, which is essential for building and maintaining a viable nation-state. In particular, these fictions help give members of a national group the sense that they are part of a noble enterprise, which they should not only be proud of, but for which they should be willing to endure significant hardships, including fighting and dying if necessary. This need to accentuate the positive in a nation’s past is reflected in a law passed by the French government in February 2005, which mandated that high school history courses and textbooks must henceforth emphasize the positive aspects of French colonialism.
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The creation of national myths, however, is not simply a case of elites concocting false stories and transmitting them to their publics. In fact, the common people invariably hunger for these myths; they want to be told stories about the past in which they are portrayed as the white hats and opposing nations as the black hats. In effect, nationalist mythmaking is driven from below as well as from above.

Elites also create national myths to gain international legitimacy.
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The payoffs on this front are usually small, however, because it is difficult to hoodwink outsiders with stories that are at odds with a fair reading of the historical record. Still, there are two possible exceptions to this rule. Leaders might be able to sell their national myths to a close ally who has a vested interest in accepting those false stories as true. In the wake of World War II, for example, German elites created the myth that their military—the Wehrmacht—had little to do with the mass killings of innocent civilians on the Eastern Front during that brutal war.
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It was said that the
SS—which represented a much narrower slice of German society and was closely identified with Hitler—was largely responsible for those vast horrors. The Wehrmacht, according to this legend, had “clean hands.”

The United States largely bought into this false story during the early years of the Cold War, because it was then working closely with former Nazis, Nazi collaborators, and former members of the Wehrmacht, and also because it was committed to rehabilitating the German army and making it an integral part of NATO. Not surprisingly, as Christopher Simpson notes in his book about Washington’s recruitment of Nazis after Word War II, “a review of the more popular histories of the war published in the West during those years, with a few lonely exceptions, leaves the distinct impression that the savageries of the Holocaust were strictly the SS’s responsibility, and not all of the SS at that.”
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Beginning in the late 1960s, however, German scholars began to unravel the real story, which was that the Wehrmacht had been an integral part of the German killing machine during World War II. But, by then, the new German military (the Bundeswehr) and NATO were well established, and it was not a serious political problem for the United States to accept the truth about what happened on the Eastern Front between 1939 and 1945.

It is also sometimes feasible for a state with an influential diaspora to export its myths to the countries where the diaspora is located. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon involves Israel and the American Jewish community. There was no way that the Zionists could create a Jewish state in Palestine without doing large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Arab population that had been living there for centuries. This point was widely recognized by the Zionist leadership well before Israel was created. The opportunity to expel the Palestinians came in early 1948 when fighting broke out between
the Palestinians and the Zionists in the wake of the UN decision to partition Palestine into two states. The Zionists cleansed roughly 700,000 Palestinians from the land that became Israel, and adamantly refused to let them return to their homes once the fighting stopped. Of course, this was a story that cast Israel in the role of the victimizer and would make it difficult for the fledging state to win friends and influence people around the world, especially in the United States.

Not surprisingly, Israel and its American friends went to great lengths after the events of 1948 to blame the expulsion of the Palestinians on the victims themselves. According to the myth that was invented, the Palestinians were not cleansed by the Zionists; instead, they were said to have fled their homes because the surrounding Arab countries told them to move out so that their armies could move in and drive the Jews into the sea. The Palestinians could then return home after the Jews had been cleansed from the land. This story was widely accepted not only in Israel but also in the United States for about four decades, and it played a key role in convincing many Americans to look favorably upon Israel in its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. Israeli scholars, however, have demolished that myth and others over the past two decades, and the new history has slowly begun to affect the discourse in the United States about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that make at least some Americans less sympathetic to Israel’s past and present actions toward the Palestinians.
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Nations continuously purvey their core myths, because most individuals in the group need those stories to make sense of their own identity, and because they foster group solidarity.
So, one could say that nationalist mythmaking happens all the time. Of course, those stories have to be updated from time to time, as new information about the past emerges, and fresh myths have to be created to deal with significant new episodes in the nation’s history. Thus, one would expect the telling of nationalist lies to intensify in the wake of wars and other high-profile incidents where there are serious disputes about the behavior of the nation in question, which might even trigger renewed controversy about older disputes which had been quiescent. In such cases, elites will work overtime to portray their nation in the most positive light and rival nations in the harshest possible light.

One would also expect nationalist mythmaking to be especially intense when there are serious disputes about a country’s founding. The legitimacy of a state is bound up in important ways with the circumstances surrounding its birth, and most people do not want to think that their country was “born in sin.” How much lying takes place in such cases is largely a function of two factors: the level of brutality involved in creating the nation-state, and how recently it happened.

Specifically, the more brutal the state-building process is, the more bad behavior there is to hide, and thus the greater the need for elites to lie about what actually happened when the state was created. Self-whitewashing myths, as Van Evera notes, are probably the most common of his three kinds of nationalist lies.
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And the more recent the relevant events, the more likely it is that people on different sides of the conflict will remember and care deeply about them. In short, when the founding of a country was recent and cruel, the elites will have to work overtime to fabricate a story that portrays their side as knights in shining armor and the other side as the devil incarnate.