The Truth is Often Inconvenient
I learned today that I’m doing blogs all wrong. I’m a writer and editor, so the conventional wisdom is I should be writing solely about topics closely related to the practical aspects of writing and editing.
This won’t be one of those articles.
And really, at the end of the day, I truly believe all of life falls, albeit haphazardly, into those categories. I write about life, about what happens in the world, as well as about what happens inside my head. No one writes in a void, and I am a product of a certain history, a certain culture, a set of beliefs, and a lot of disconnected experiences, all of which come out somewhere, somehow, in everything I write.
And today I’m thinking about the inconvenience of the truth. It’s November 3rd, Election Day 2020 in the United States, a terrifying moment not just for this country but for the world. The specter of another four years of a hapless, cruel, arrogant, and fundamentally stupid administration hovers over us all. I should get out for a walk and instead I’m obsessing on things over which I have no control.
Like the inconvenience of truth.
We all know only too well that said hapless administration has essentially found the truth to be inconvenient to its worldview, goals, and ambitions; and, finding it inconvenient, has cast it aside. Any attempts to restore truth as a functioning part of the cultural landscape have been only marginally successful.
Yesterday I watched a film called The Last Witness, historical fiction that takes place in the aftermath of World War Two. “When war ends,” the tagline reads, “the fight for the truth begins.” When a journalist digs into the deaths of Polish veterans in England, he unearths clues to a deep cover-up perpetrated by the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States: Stalin's murder of over twenty thousand Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest in 1940.
The journalist was a fictional device, but both the massacre and the cover-up were only too real. The American mythology of the war involves D-Day and the liberation of Paris, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was the Soviet Union that did most of the heavy lifting; the Red Army fought the battle of Berlin in the spring of 1945 to liberate the German capital and sustained more losses throughout the war than any other country.
The problem, of course, was that this great ally of England and America was not a democracy. It was a totalitarian power. Churchill famously said he’d “sup with the devil” to win the war, and he did just that. The need to cling to the Soviet Union as an ally, particularly in the public eye at home, was why the massacre at Katyn was originally—and loudly—ascribed to the Nazis. There was a handy scapegoat, sufficiently evil in its own right, already on the scene. Why not continue the necessary illusion of the Allies constituting one big, happy family?
It was in fact the Nazis who discovered the graves in the spring of 1943 and pointed the finger at the Soviets. But Churchill and Roosevelt were having none of it. England had gone to war over Hitler's invasion of Poland in September of 1939, and Churchill and Roosevelt didn't want to disrupt relations with Stalin.
Stalin was playing the long game; he already had his sights on a post-wartime Europe. The Polish government in exile in London wanted the Katyn massacre investigated, but Roosevelt clearly hoped to brush their concerns under the international carpet: "I am inclined to think,” he wrote to Stalin, “that Prime Minister Churchill will find a way of prevailing upon the Polish government in London in the future to act with more common sense.”
In 1944 Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the American ambassador to Moscow, traveled to western Russia to visit the Katyn site. She concluded on no evidence that the Nazis had committed the atrocity.
As documents recently released from the National Archives make clear, Roosevelt and Churchill entertained few illusions about what actually occurred in the forest of Katyn. They found that truth inconvenient to their engagement in the war effort and so lied their way out of it, in much the same way that subsequent heads of state have lied their way into more convenient “alternative facts” to feed to the public. There was no yellowcake uranium in Niger, but George W. Bush marched several countries to war because he found that truth inconvenient. Donald J Trump sentenced hundreds of thousands of Americans to death because he found the truth about the coronavirus inconvenient.
When an inconvenient truth is either denied or covered up, people die.
I don’t have any illusions that a Joe Biden government will be a paradigm of virtue and perfection. I am the daughter of a diplomat, and as the saying goes, diplomacy is “lying abroad for your country.” I recognize there are times when lying is both unavoidable and necessary. But it should never happen because the truth is inconvenient. It should never cause a government, a country, or a person to betray their humanity.
I hope we will have the opportunity to see what a Joe Biden government is like. He was not my first choice, but he is my final choice. I hope we can begin to start telling each other the truth again—and agree on the premise that there are, in fact, identifiable, verifiable truths to be had.