How much deception is too much?
The Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers
The Vietnam War went on from 1955 to 1975, with the U.S helping South Vietnam and its allies from North Vietnam spreading Chinese communist influence over the country. The U.S’s involvement within the war caused huge debate as not only were they not successful, but also caused major public and economical harm to both U.S and Vietnam.
The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret, highly classified investigation done, exploring the United States’s involvement within the Vietnam War between 1945 and 1968. However in 1971, these were leaked, with the United States to step down from combatant action in Vietnam in 1973. The Pentagon Papers looked at how the public reacted to the war, what intel drove U.S involvement, and how Southeast Asia as a region was affected by it.
Secrecy and Deception in Politics
It is normal for deception to occur within politics, not only for malicious reasons but also for the sake of national security.
→ An example of this is when politicians claim that they were misunderstood, misheard, or that they misspoke in order to not receive any backlash on comments they make, whether from public or their own government. This can be regarded as its own form of deception as there is no for-sure way to prove that what they said is what they meant.
However, this also means information from the government isn’t always accurate as access isn’t available to the public of what happens behind closed doors. This can lead to misinformed decisions being made by the public on who to elect, but also by government staff too on finance, trade, economy, and relations. The public’s trust in any political figures is based on the belief that there will be fundamental truth within what that political figure says, speaks out for, promises made, updates communicated, and policies implemented.
Hannah Arendt’s piece, Lying in Politics, emphasised for the public to recognise and decide on to what extent can the government lie. This would mean pushing on clear boundaries for the government to agree upon with the public and pushing back on pressures from political representatives to allow for more deception. Arendt’s argument is that truth will prevail and that honesty is valued more and will work better for everyone, public and government, over lying and deception.
Public Relations and Mind Manipulation
Within politics, public relations and mind manipulation takes up a significant role and is employed as follows:
Using public relations and advertising / marketing as a deception tool, including curating and ‘selling’ political fronts / images for the public to perceive. This can also be done through lobbying and influencing members of government to make alternate decisions on a current policy problems.
Mind manipulation assumes that people’s minds, values, and beliefs are easy to shape, mould, and adapt to whatever the highest power-holder believes. Rather than wanting to create a better future for the public, political figures are more bent on saving face and preserving political image by selling a front to the public that they want to hear.
→ However, this is still a reality in the United States, allowing the government to be highly influenced and coerced by lobbyists and public relations targeting.
→ During the Vietnam War, most political power-holders, ‘experts’, and ‘professionals’, would interact in such mind manipulation tactics of the public in order to get their way and have them believe. This included promoting that the war was necessary to have to the public and government officials but also convincing North Vietnam plus their allies that the U.S was a strong enough military power to defeat them.
These ‘experts’ were really just power-holders with a strong sense of identification to a certain ideology and disregarded actual expert advice, like JFK ignoring any advice from Congress to not send combatants into Vietnam.
Deception: New or Increased?
Hannah Arendt’s take on deception is that it can be solved through electing power-holders / political figures who believe in honesty that truth will triumph all issues. She sees the outcome of war as black-and-white and that when the public would see how much U.S was actually via media coverage, they would become aware of the deception and lies and the truth would come out. However, Arendt’s perspective is from a lived Vietnam War context, which could probably not be fully applied today due to the differences in how society and politics works.
This is mostly because of how media’s role in society has developed; it has now become social with news programs becoming polarised as being manipulated to say / present certain information by power-holders, siloing from the public as they only consume media that fits their worldview, and media algorithms that are able to be influenced and shape to manipulate the public.
The Vietnam War showed evidence on how likely and willing the United States government was to destroy proof and lie to the public about the realities of it all to save their own face and image. However, by also publicising and making it known to the public of their deception is strategic too, leading the public to believe that they will always end up telling the truth, when actually this is unlikely.