Lies Our Leaders Tell Us

Copyright © 2020 by Steffen Skovmand

Lies Our Leaders Tell Us

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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-09833-258-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09833-259-4

Table of Contents

Foreword

The Post-WWII World Order

The Attack on the Post-WWII World Order

The Reasons Behind the Attack on the Post-WWII World Order

Part I

Introduction

1

Nationalism. The belief underlying the EU and the international world order that nationalism is an evil that must be eradicated.

Part II

2

The Lie That Internationalism Is the Recipe for Progress: The UN Compact on Immigration, The UN’s Human Rights Committee, and other examples.

3

The Lie That Internationalism Is the Recipe for Progress (continued): The UN on Climate Change.

4

The European Union and the Soviet Union. The EU claims it stands for everything opposed to Communism, but it is a lie: They are becoming more alike every day.

Part III

5

The Post-WWII World Ideology You Live in Is called Postmodernism. Its Biggest Lie Is a Neo-Marxist Theory That People Are Pitted Against Each Other in a Merciless Binary Game of Oppressed Against Oppressor.

6

Collective Identity. The Lie That Denies Men’s and Women’s Individual Biological Nature and Defines Identity as a Choice of Group.

7

The Lie Feminists Tell Us. It’s never too late to blame men.

8

The Lies the LGBTQ Crowd Tells You

9

Racism. The lie that racism is rampant and that we are all explicit or implicit racists.

10

Putting into Practice What We Have Learned. A real-life example of Postmodernism, analyzed and dissected.

Part IV

11

The Post-WWII International Order Strikes Back: Hate Speech Laws, Internet Laws, Cancel Culture, and Social Control.

Part V

Epilogue

Foreword

The original working title for this book was Post-WWII World Order 1945–2020: R.I.P.

It was not until I started researching that I came to the present title, Lies Our Leaders Tell Us.

The reason? The deeper I got into my research, the more surprised I was at the number of self-serving untruths, mis-directions, and outright lies our political leaders are using to defend their international order.

We all lie. Men lie, women lie, parents lie to their children, and children lie to their parents. Politicians lie; indeed, they have to lie because in order to get elected they have to omit certain facts about their political beliefs when talking to certain parts of the electorate. That’s lying by omission.

Presidents lie. Indeed, the US president, Donald Trump, is accused of being a serial liar by his opponents. The problem is when their man, Barack Obama, was in office, he wasn’t chintzy with the lies either; the biggest whopper—about his health care plan, Obamacare—being, If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, which President Obama told an audience in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 2009.

The truth? Nearly 5 million Americans saw their plans canceled during Obamacare’s first year.

We will let historians tell us in good time who lied the most, but in any event, it is a question of difference of degree: both are proven liars. That’s not very interesting. In fact, the notion that politicians lie is a cliché, to the point that any bar stool conversation from Milwaukee to Madrid will include that truism. What is interesting about the lies our leaders tell us, is not that they lie but what they lie about. And what they lie about is The Truth.

The Truth about what? The Truth about their world order: the present Post-WWII World Order, of which they feel they are the guardians.

The Post-WWII World Order

Historically, the Post-WWII World Order was formed as a reaction to what went on in the first half of the 20th century, namely two devastating world wars: WWI from 1914–1918 and WWII from 1939–1945.

The key concept underlying this reaction was international cooperation. The post-WWII period marks a hitherto unknown degree of international cooperation, in politics, trade, finance, and many other areas known as globalism. Power is localized in its international institutions such as the UN for political cooperation, the World Trade Organization (WTO) for trade, the International Court of Justice for … well, international cooperation in bringing international criminals to justice, the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for the military cooperation of the West, etc.

But nowhere has international cooperation been more pronounced or more successful than in Europe. And the premier symbol of the success of internationalism is the European Union (EU), which since 1958 has united what today is 27 European nations in a cooperative effort that allows 450 million people to move and trade freely in a single market of goods, capital, and services. The EU is the flagship of the post-WWII order.

Let’s call this international cooperation in all areas the Post-WWII World Order.

This Post-WWII Order, though still standing, has seen two major changes since the end of WWII. The first was a cultural sexual revolution, in short-hand called either just 1968 or the Youth Rebellion, which changed the way we thought about ourselves, our sexuality, our elders, family and children, consumerism and money, and laid the intellectual foundations for the reigning intellectual philosophy of our time, Postmodernism, which is discussed further in Part III.

Its political manifestations are most evident on the left: in Democratic Socialism, as in Bernie Sanders in the US or Social Democratic parties in the EU, but arguably it has found its way into non-socialist parties in the center or of the center right such as Germany’s CDU.

The second was the fall of the Berlin Wall starting in 1989 with central European satellite-countries tearing loose from their master, the Soviet Union, which led to the fall of Communism and of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

This end of the Cold War engendered a newly potent transnationalism, contemptuous of national boundaries and supportive of institutions of global governance. In this view, old national loyalties were not just anachronistic but morally unsupportable. Social critic Richard Sennett wrote of "the evil of a shared national identity, and professor of law and ethics Martha Nussbaum warned of the morally dangerous dictates of patriotic pride, commending instead a commitment to the worldwide community of human beings."¹

It was a political victory for the West, that went straight to the head of our present political class, which saw itself and its internationalist principles vindicated over and beyond what any reality-based interpretation of these events could warrant.

It was, in fact, a lie. The truth is the Soviet Union collapsed for two main reasons: through the internal economic inconsistencies of central planning, which meant that the system simply could not deliver basic goods and services, never mind freedom, to its population; and through popular democratic opposition, not from the West but from within. Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn inside the Soviet Union and from the citizens of the Soviet Union’s satellite states, mainly Poland, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia, and The German Democratic Republic.

The view that the West won is an entrenched one often with reference to US President Ronald Reagan’s installation of missiles in the heart of Germany directed East to prevent a Soviet attack at its center. But it’s a self-serving lie. Reagan was regularly called a fascist warmonger by center and left-of-center political parties, and the deployment of missiles was met with huge demonstrations throughout Europe.

The truth is that Europe was in fact heavily divided, usually between a left that was excessively naïve in its assessment of the threat posed by the Soviet Union whom we now know was actively planning to use nuclear weapons in Western Europe in case of conflict and a right that followed the lead of the US, which itself was divided as witnessed by former president H. W. Bush’s so-called Chicken Kiev speech in 1991 where he warned Ukrainians against suicidal nationalism if they voted to leave the Soviet Union. That was three weeks before Ukrainians in huge numbers voted for independence from Soviet Russia. Forty-five days after the speech, the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Post-WWII Order is built on three main but false premises:

Nationalism = bad.

International cooperation is indispensable if we are to avoid a return into savage nationalism.

Internationalism = good; the proof being the triumph of the West in the Cold War.

This World Order is dominated by the reigning philosophy of our time, Postmodernism, with its emphasis on seeing social relations through the prism of the powerful vs. the powerless.

The Attack on the Post-WWII World Order

The period in which we are living is seeing an attack on all the three basic premises of the Post-WWII World Order.

The attack on internationalism was triggered by the refugee crisis caused by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in 2015 broke all the EU’s rules on asylum and refugees, the so-called Dublin Convention, and without consulting any of the other EU member states singlehandedly opened Germany’s borders to 1 million economic immigrants and refugees.

This split the EU down the middle, as certain member states, notably Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Italy not only strongly objected to this unilateral action but refused to accept the EU’s plans for distributing the refugees among the member states. This high-handed action was not unrelatedly followed by Brexit, the UK’s decision in June 2016 to leave that citadel of internationalism, the EU, in favor of a British go-it-alone policy, which eventually happened on 31 January 2020.

The second hammer-blow to the Post-WWII World Order was the election in November 2016 of a new populist and anti-globalist president in the USA, Donald Trump, with a slogan of Make America Great Again, who made no attempt at hiding his contempt for the international order by instantly leaving the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, cancelling Obama’s Iran Nuclear Agreement, and threatening to pull out of NATO if the EU member states, in particular Germany, didn’t start paying their fair share of its expenses.

The final nail in the Post-WWII World Order was the corona-crisis in the spring of 2020. The big loser was trust. The voters, the people, lost trust in three important areas: trust in our political system, internationalism; trust in our economic system, globalism; and last but not least, trust in our cognitive system, our belief in rationality and in science.

When two of the EU’s founding countries, Germany and France, in the initial phase of the crisis closed their borders for the export of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators to another co-founder of the EU, Italy, which was hit much harder by the crisis than they were, the credo of internationalism was severely damaged. It did not help that everyone soon realized that the WHO, in cahoots with China, was complicit in the crisis by hiding its origin and worldwide pandemic impact. These shocks were subsequently followed by the shutdown from one day to the next of the EU’s most celebrated success, the rule-based Schengen Agreement that had set up a single market without borders to allow free movement for its citizens. The clichés about European solidarity started sounding a bit hollow, and even though Germany’s Chancellor Merkel and France’s President Macron managed, after much dithering, to come up with a proposal for a 750 billion Euro plan for restoring the EU economy, it was too little too late.

The big loser was trust in the political system. The proof is the story of the local elections in France by the end of June 2020, which political commentators everywhere interpreted as a big loss for President Macron’s party, La Republique en Marche, and a big victory for the environmentalists and Green parties.

This is not the whole story, however. Macron did lose, and the Greens did win the mayorship of several big cities, such as Marseille, Lyon, and Strasbourg, but they won because ordinary voters stayed away. And left the battlefield to the socio-economically better-off parts of the population, the so-called professional-managerial elites who tend to live in big cities and vote more consistently progressive, green, and left-of-center.

Absenteeism, according to Le Monde, increased by 20% compared to the first round of local elections, which also took place under the cloud of the corona-crisis. On average it reached almost 60%, and among the less-well-off parts of big cities went as high as 90%.

Ordinary voters had lost confidence in the system.

The second negative effect of the corona-crisis has to do with the economic model of the Post-WWII Order, which is based on an economic theory called the theory of comparative advantage: if all countries in the world produce what they are best at, we will all be better off economically. It has been a success, which has brought increased wealth to the West and helped many emerging countries out of poverty. But it has an Achilles’ heel our leaders have forgotten to tell us about: it only works if everybody plays by the same rules. Everybody obviously does not, most of all China, which not only allowed the virus to develop into a devastating pandemic, but then subsequently sold PPE and ventilators—often defective—produced by their state-subsidized factories at a huge profit to the hardest-hit countries around the world. Globalism’s reputation took a hard hit, and as a result the IMF has already warned countries whose economies are export-based, such as Germany and my home-country, Denmark, that they had better reevaluate how their economies can adapt to the new economic realities.

The third big loser due to the corona-crisis was our belief in rationally and scientifically based decision-making. Not only as far as public health is concerned, but in scientific modelling per se, including models predicting imminent global extinction due to climate change. During the corona-crisis we have been presented with not just one or two truths about how to combat the virus but many, often contradictory ones, ranging from the benefits of total lockdown to encouraging herd immunity, from the benefit of wearing masks to models showing no benefits, from the dangers of asymptomatic transmissions to models showing the opposite. All science based.

By way of example, Imperial College in London, advising the UK government, came up with a model predicting 510,000 fatalities in the UK and 2 million in the US, a prediction that became the scientific basis for the brutal and economically devastating lockdowns of the UK and American economies. The model was not just wrong (by July 2020, the respective number of fatalities were 45,000 in the UK and 140,000 in the US) but exponentially wrong because the assumptions upon which the model was based were catastrophically inaccurate. It didn’t help that its creator and main advocate, Dr. Neil Ferguson, was caught breaking the quarantine his own model prescribed by having several amorous rendezvous with his married lover.

A hypocritical elite guilty of double standards was so-to-speak caught with its pants down, and Dr. Ferguson, dubbed Professor Pants-down by a gleeful mass-media, had to resign from his job in disgrace.

The Reasons Behind the Attack on the

Post-WWII World Order

Underlying these events was something more profound: a disillusionment with the reigning cultural philosophy of the elite, the professional class, defined as people who’ve achieved advanced education, who cluster in the major urban enclaves of our countries, and who serve as bureaucrats in our governments, managers in our corporations, and educators in our schools and universities.

Michael Lind, a scholar at the University of Austin, Texas, argues that people feel that "Western democracies are undergoing a significant upheaval because Western elites have rebelled against the working and middle classes of their own countries. Those elites have invested in globalized labor arbitrage in China and other countries instead of building productivity in their own nations. In the process, they have created a labor market where working-class people have found it harder to find the kind of work that enables them to live the kinds of lives they want. And they have made a social world where the institutions—unions and churches—that working-class people rely on, have been decimated."²

Add to that a feeling that not only these institutions, but more generally social traditions and norms relating to concepts like family, gender, and sexual morals, are being rapidly and radically eroded.

As Lind puts it: "The populist wave in politics on both sides of the Atlantic is a defensive reaction against the technocratic neoliberal revolution from above that has been carried out in the last half century by national managerial elites. Over the last half century, the weakening or destruction by neoliberal policy makers of the intermediary institutions of mid-twentieth century democratic pluralism, particularly labor unions, has deprived much of the working class of effective voice or agency in government, the economy, and culture."³

For example, the election of Trump as the US president was felt all over the world, but particularly in the EU, as a return to nativism, nationalism, xenophobia, and racism. But it is mirrored by a nationalist, populist movement in the EU itself, as witnessed by the rejection in Poland and Hungary of extreme, liberal left-wing policies such as pro-LGBTQ legislation and same-sex marriages.

In Spain, a hitherto obscure local populist party, Vox, soared to third place, going from 1% to 15% of the votes in the November 2019 general election, inter alia on the back of a so-called parental PIN-policy: a requirement that parents approve their children’s attendance for classes taught by non-teachers on topics such as sex and gender, including schoolroom meetings with LGBTQ activists. The policy has already been implemented in Murcia, a region of Spain that was won by Vox, but the left-wing governing coalition of Socialists (PS) and far-left Marxists (PODEMOS) have already threatened legal battles.⁴

In Lind’s view, the crisis of the Post-WWII World Order is at its heart a crisis of democracy. Why?

To Lind, power is manifested on three levels—government, economy, and culture—and over the last generation, blue-collar Americans and average Europeans have lost most of what influence they had over all three. In short, populism is driven by people’s sense that they have lost power over their lives. And feel they have been lied to. With good reason.

Just one example: Economist Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize–winning US economist and longtime defender of global free trade, now admits that globalization has failed American workers. In a column for Bloomberg titled What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization, Krugman admits that the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades failed to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working and middle class workers.

What went wrong? Krugman writes that pro-globalization economists like himself "relied on models that asked how the growth of trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who didn’t go to college…in the long run, but that Consensus economists didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake—one in which I shared a hand."⁵

A major mistake, indeed, but a telling one, which confirms the underlying premise of this book: Our leaders are not telling us the truth.

Even Krugman should have known that in the long run, as the saying goes, we’re all dead, so what really should matter, to economists as well as the rest of us, is not just trade models or economic models or climate change models or immigration impact models, but their short-term effect on people.

The people, whom our leaders call populists, nationalists, racists, and xenophobes, are none of these things. They are, as Lind says, just angry.

Trump’s election in 2016 in the US and Boris Johnson’s win in 2019 in the UK, is a testimony to the validity of Lind’s thesis. Trump broke through the traditional blue wall of Democratic states in the North like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan, and Boris Johnson targeted and won traditional working-class Labour constituencies in the north and northeast of England.

The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) months-long protests all over France in 2019, which were met with such severe police repression that the French government was reprimanded by the courts, as well as the January 2020 mass demonstrations over President Macron’s pension plans, the longest lasting protests for decades, speak to the same popular working-class discontent. And the same fierce resistance from our elites.

Why such resistance? Because Krugman and Lind are the exception to the rule: this is definitely not the way our leaders see it. On the contrary, the consensus point of view of our political leaders is that what fuels Western populism is almost entirely driven by a cultural backlash, which is a catch-all for racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.⁶

The international system, and the international elites on both sides of the ocean, stubbornly refuse to accept that the main pillars of its system, the international institutions ranging from the EU, over the WTO, the European Court of Human Rights to the UN, were built without the consent of the governed and are de jure and de facto unaccountable to the populations whose leaders set them up. They are decidedly not, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, of the people, for the people, by the people.

Others, often of the left-wing persuasion, see economic inequality as the root cause of the crisis and want to reorganize society by demonizing the rich and returning to the failed Marxist and socialist totalitarian policies that led to the mass genocides of Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. None of these solutions will work because they do not address the real issue: man does not live on bread alone, and the main cause of the crisis is that people in the post-WWII paradigm of rampant internationalism and rapidly changing cultural norms feel powerless.

Why? Because they are.

This book is not about the failure of the Post-WWII World Order, but about the lies that our leaders tell to defend it. The key institutions of the Post-WWII World Order have, in fact, failed the voters on one important parameter: trust. People have lost faith in their leaders not only because they have not delivered on their promises, but more importantly because they lie to us about the shortcomings of their system, their world order; and when called on their lies and confronted with reality, they try to suppress our voices. The corona-crisis is only the latest example.

The methodological approach of this book is that of a bottom-up analysis. It is in fact a worm’s-eye-view of the world we live in, starting with what meets the eye and the ear, the misleading headlines, the mis-directions, the selective reporting, the spin, and the downright falsehoods and lies, over the analysis of these lies to the question of why? Why do our leaders feel they have to lie to us? The answer to that is the same as the answer to another question: cui bono? Which is Latin for who benefits, the old legal question used by every police department in the world. Who benefits from the lies? Answer: they, our leaders, do.

Why? Because if the truth came out about climate change, systemic racism, glass ceilings and sexism, and all the alleged faults of the West, researchers, Green politicians, and Greta Thunberg would be out of a job and lose face; with racism exposed as a sham and a hoax, leaders from Black Lives Matter to Al Sharpton would be out of commission; and with Postmodernism exposed as the intellectual and philosophical dog and pony show it is, Neo-Marxists and radical progressives would have lost out. Again.

If the truth were to come out, the ideological, radical, and progressive project of Postmodernists and Neo-Marxists of taking power by first undermining the institutions upon which the successful societies of the West are founded, and then using this power to radically reorder society in their ideological image, will fail. Turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving, and voters—despite the recent surges in popularity among millennials of openly Marxist Socialist leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US—will not vote for Utopian socialist projects with a disastrous track-record in terms of loss of human lives and social misery.

So, this book is about having the truth come out by exposing the lies and the people behind them: our leaders, our elites, our professional and managerial class. It is through the prism of exposing the lies our leaders tell us and asking why that this book is structured.

Part I is about the lie that nationalism is a cancer on society and causes wars.

Part II tests