The escalating situation in Crimea and the U.S. presidential campaign have more than a few things in common, but two of them are Russian President Vladimir Putin and a dearth of facts.
It remains unclear exactly what happened on the occupied peninsula to trigger such a strident response from Russia, which accuses Ukraine of supporting terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing its hold over Crimea. The confusion is by design.
“It looks like the people who have seized power in Kiev and continue to hold on to it, instead of looking for the compromises that we have talked about…instead of looking for ways to reconcile peacefully, they have resorted to terrorist practices,” Putin said.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement that it had successfully “eliminated an intelligence network” of the Ukrainian Ministry of Intelligence after several alleged attempted “terrorist” attacks, resulting in the death of one FSB officer. Ukraine denies the allegations, and there seems to be little evidence that the events occurred as the FSB claims. As the journalist Leonid Bershidsky points out, the whole operation could be a false flag designed to give Russia an excuse to make further incursions into Ukraine.
Russia devised similar excuses to justify the 2014 annexation of the peninsula and the subsequent campaign in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin successfully painted as a “civil war” through its propaganda outlets in much of the world. Having seen how easy it is to fabricate its way through territorial expansion, it makes sense that the Kremlin might want to push a little farther into its southern neighbor.
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Hannah Arendt warned that rewriting history, recasting the attackers and the attacked, is not a difficult proposition. In her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics,” Arendt tells the story of how French statesman George Clemenceau, in the final years of his life, was asked by a Weimar Republic representative what he thought future historians would make of World War I. “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany,” Clemenceau replied.
“A factual statement — Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 — acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context,” Arendt writes. “But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance. It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action.”
Trump has proven himself uniquely impervious to facts
In Crimea, and in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign, all facts are interpretative. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, seems to compulsively fabricate matters of national security, taking a leaf out of the Kremlin’s playbook.
At the start of this beguiling season, many journalists and politicians thought that a bit of fact-checking would jog Trump’s memory and make him a “normal” candidate. But Trump has proven himself uniquely impervious to facts. We have already seen his revisions to reality turned into action.
Nowhere is more vulnerable to Trump’s revisions than Eastern Europe, a region whose history has been repeatedly and aggressively revised over the past century.
Trump’s meandering opinions and obfuscations on the subject are on par with the manipulations that allowed Russian forces to slip so easily into Ukraine the first time, and those that fuel the perception of the Baltics as a border region that will inevitably change hands every couple of decades. The developments in Crimea are worrying signs that the impact of his fabrications are not confined to the network news.
“OK, well, he’s there in a certain way,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos regarding Putin’s meddling in Ukraine. “But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He take — takes Crimea.”
His remarks on Eastern Europe are as messy as he says the region is. The swathe of land from Estonia to Crimea is already a great unknown for many Americans, full of “places that Americans don’t think about all that often,” as the New York Times’ David E. Sanger remarked in an interview with Trump. And the geographical and cultural expanse separating NATO’s centers of power from its eastern flanks further invites misunderstanding, making Trump’s remarks on the “mess” of Eastern Europe all the more dangerous.
“Just to be clear, the U.S. does not recognize Russia’s forcible takeover of Crimea just as we did not in the Baltic States in 1940,” the House Committee on Foreign Affairs felt obliged to tweet in response to the Republican candidate’s claims.
“Do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all?” Arendt asks in her 1967 essay. She answers in the negative: “factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion, and this may be among the reasons that opinion-holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion. Factual evidence, moreover, is established through testimony by eyewitnesses – notoriously unreliable – and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries.”
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Trump is a master of erasing, or making up, the evidence. Trump habitually bans journalists from his rallies, his supporters chanting “lock her up,” “get ‘em out,” “build that wall.” As the official nominee, he has access to verified facts in the form of classified national security briefings, but has sometimes chosen to eschew them.
He claims not to understand why this U.S. can’t use its nuclear weapons. “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” he reportedly asked one of his foreign policy advisers, multiple times. Generous observers might give him credit for reigniting a philosophical dispute about the state of the nuclear arsenals. Others might reasonably worry that he has forgotten that there is a very good reason why.
Over the past few weeks in particular, Trump has demonstrated he has forgotten — or simply does not know — a lot of things. The topics that escape him happen to be of particular import to America’s European allies, such as why the United States would be compelled to defend the Baltic states in the event of a Russian invasion, or why the U.S. cannot recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Trump makes his pitch in an early ABC News debate | Tolga Bozoglu/AFP via Getty Images
“The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump recently told ABC, in a complete reversal from his earlier remarks on the subject.
Rhetoric is a form of action. Trump’s remarks and a spate of other convenient circumstances have greased Russia’s path toward pushing forward in Ukraine.
“Organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate, although only totalitarian governments have consciously adopted lying as the first step to murder,” Arendt writes.
Trump has already negated the freedom of Eastern Europe. Let’s hope he does not get a chance to destroy it.
Linda Kinstler is a contributing writer at POLITICO.