Really? No, You're Kidding Me...

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Political expediency and moral bankruptcy pretty much always go hand in hand: twas ever thus. We've watched a couple of particularly good movies on two successive nights this week, "Don't Look Up" and "Mr. Jones". On the face of it, two completely different scenarios portrayed in two completely different cinematic genres. But at their core, between them, a single truth:  that truth itself it is so easily traduced in the service of politics and populism. The truth can hurt, but lying in the service of political and ideological expediency cuts deeper and causes far more lasting damage.

While "Don't Look Up" is played blackly comedic, it scarily encapsulates the surreal lunacy of the Trump era - continuing to this day online, and well off the grid of common sense - serial denial of the blatantly obvious and the insertion of 'alternative facts' into the discourse, creating a wish fulfilment narrative of epically infantile proportions that bore the fruits of disaster in the movie, and came so close in real life. "Mr. Jones" is an altogether more bleakly-portrayed narrative, based around the big lie that the Stalin era Soviet Union propagated about its successes in self-sufficiency of production - particularly food - despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, with the famine in the Ukraine at its heart.

The allied powers had decided that in order to defeat the Nazis in the imminent World War, they would have to enlist the support of that erstwhile threat to Western Democracy, the Soviet Union. What ensued was a carefully orchestrated suppression of the truth by western governments and the press in order to achieve that alliance, convincing the population that it would be founded on a common humanity to defeat a common enemy. Contrast the position of the West and the USSR immediately on cessation of hostilities in 1945, when the map of Europe was carved up by the two now opposing sides. Given what's happened politically since 2016, both movies serve as exemplars. It's a pity we can't run the world in the real world, rather than the fantasy one beloved of most governments. People deserve more from their servants.

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