= Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers =

'''Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers''' was written by Hannah Arendt in 1971. It was originally published in the New York Review of Books, then reprinted in collections such as Crisis of the Republic (1972) and On Lying and Politics (2022, ISBN: 978-1598537314).

Politics has always suffered secrecy and deception, and not through some accident that can be eradicated through moral outrage. The Pentagon Papers represent a monumental chapter of deception.

The author ascribes the concurrent mentality of political science and philosophy to the authors of the Pentagon Papers.
 * A public-relations theory of politics: "...taught that half of politics is 'image-making' and the other half the art of making people believe the imagery..." (p. 67). The authors "lied not so much for their country... as for its 'image'" (p. 70).
 * Problem-solving approach to politics: "...hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality--which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise--into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency." (p. 71).
   * Essentially, there is a parallel between politicians creating believable lies, and political scientists starting from the desired outcome and manipulating the factual context (e.g., assumptions, simplifications, etc.) to achieve it.

== Reading notes ==

This essay builds on top of [[TruthAndPolitics|Truth and Politics]].

Much of the theoretic content is in 'part I', while the subsequent chapters address/rebut specific concepts, e.g.:
 * avoiding a humiliating defeat as a war goal
 * domino theory
 * Bernard Fall hypothesized, in field reports, that "Ho Chi Minh might disavow the war in the South if some of his new industrial plants were made a target" (p. 101; from [[WashingtonPlansAnAggressiveWar|Washington Plans an Aggressive War]]). [[CounteringGuerillaAttack|Rostow's theory of guerilla warfare]] fit this hypothesis, so it became fact for war planning. The bombing of Vietnam did not, in fact, help.



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