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Cargando... The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (2021)por Peter Oborne
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When Peter Oborne wrote The Rise of Political Lying, looking at the growth of political falsehood during the governments of John Major and Tony Blair, he believed things had got as bad as they could be. But then on 23 July 2019, with the arrival of Boris Johnson at No 10, began a new and unprecedented epidemic of deceit. In The Assault on Truth, a short and powerful new polemic, Oborne shows how Boris Johnson lied again and again in order to secure victory so he could force through Brexit in the face of parliamentary opposition. Johnson and his ministers then lied repeatedly to win the general election in December 2019. The government's woeful response to the coronavirus pandemic has generated another wave of falsehoods, misrepresentations and fabrications. The scale and shamelessness of the lying of the Johnson administration far exceeds the lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other issues under Tony Blair. This book argues that the ruthless use of political deceit under the Johnson government is part of a wider attack on civilised values and traditional institutions across the Western world, especially by Donald Trump in the USA. The Johnson and Trump methodology of deceit is about securing power for its own ends - even when they get exposed for lying, they shrug it off as a matter of no consequence. It matters because all Western institutions are built around the idea of integrity and accountability. This means that an assault on truth is an assault on the rule of law, state institutions and the fundamental idea of fairness, and even democracy itself. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)320.014Social sciences Political Science Political Science Political Science Philosophy and Theory CommunicationClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (4.25)
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The Assault on Truth may sound like another book about "post-truth", "fake news" or the threat posed by French philosophers. But make no mistake: this is a book about Boris Johnson. Oborne is clinical and merciless in his account of Johnson's mendacity, building up his case item by item, footnote by footnote. The forensic nature of the task leads him to adopt an entire new citation system, such that the bottom third of a page is often made up of URLs, dates and textual references. The book it most reminded me of was Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger. In a sane world it would be a political obituary.
[...] It is a relief, in many ways, that social media features so little in a book on political lies. There is something determinedly analogue about Oborne's mission, and the faith he places in official documentation such as Hansard. And yet it becomes hard to explain the rise of Johnson's (or Trump's) brand of free-wheeling political entertainment without at some point addressing changes in the technologies and funding of our media. Johnson's lies are no secret, though they have rarely been as well documented as they are in The Assault on Truth. The question is why they – and books such as this – do him so little harm. In a world of peer-to-peer surveillance, where our honesty and character are constantly being tracked by managers, credit-raters, customers and one another, there is a certain relief in the spectacle of the outrageous leader who seems immune to this collection of "receipts". In the meantime, Oborne offers a stirring rage against the dying of the establishment light.