The following is a speech given by Ryszard Legutko after he was awarded the Edmund Burke Foundation’s Beaconsfield Prize at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. on July 8, 2024.
I want to thank the Burke Foundation for honoring me with the Beaconsfield Prize. I am very grateful for such a splendid form of appreciation. Let me also say that I am happy and proud of being part of this movement of people who not only have withstood the onslaught of insanity but have grown into a considerable force.
I want to seize the opportunity and share with you, as is proper on such occasions, some thoughts on a more general problem. I am about to leave the European Parliament after fifteen years of parliamentary work. Before engaging in European activity, I was involved in national politics in several important functions. This entire time was not intellectually barren, as first-hand experience in political decision-making gave me more in terms of understanding how politics works than I would have been able to acquire from the position of an observer. The subject I have chosen for this occasion is politics and The Lie.
Well, in politics, there are lies, and there are lies. “I did not have any sexual relations with that woman,” is one type of a lie. Factually, the statement was false, and its opposite was true. But there is a different kind of lie. Let me make a very big jump from Bill Clinton to Joseph Stalin. One of the latter’s memorable sayings was, “Life has become better; life has become happier.” Stalin said it at the beginning of the great terror era, with hundreds of thousands of people being executed, and millions put on trial on false charges, tortured, and sent to labor camps. No one, literally no one, could feel safe, no matter how high in the communist hierarchy. Yet, the Soviet citizens repeated this slogan, and nobody knew how many believed it to be true. Certainly, the number of those who did was not negligible. More or less, at the same time, a Soviet composer wrote a song that became an unofficial anthem of the Soviet Union. It started with “Large is my native land,” and then the stanza ended with “I know of no other country where man breathes so freely.” Again, all Soviet citizens sang this song, and many believed in what they sang. Among the believers were also millions of communists worldwide, including quite an army of fellow travelers.
What are the characteristics of this type of lie? For one thing, it is so monstrous that it leaves you speechless, knocks you off your feet, and blows your mind. Your first reaction would be twofold: first, there is no way that anyone in his right mind could believe it, and then, the person who says it must suffer from a serious intellectual and moral flaw, being unable to distinguish between good and evil. And yet one could see thousands, sometimes millions of people—good people—accept such lies. Why do they do this? Because the nature of these lies is systemic: once you are a part of the system, you accept its logic; once you accept the logic, you accept the consequences. To give an example: whoever accepts a certain version of European history has no problems in acquiescing to the thesis that the 1789 revolution in France was a great triumph of liberty. Unfortunately, mankind’s history has been full of similar cases.
I am not the first person to see the lie as a backbone of the totalitarian system. Several decades ago, Leszek Kołakowski wrote an essay precisely on this; and, fairly recently, Rod Dreher published a superb book that tells us what we can learn from those who refused to live by lies under the totalitarian regime.
How threatening is the lie today? Surely, some would say that given today’s spirit of criticism, pluralistic media, and rampant skepticism, a systemic lie is impossible. Yes, people can and do lie about what they did or did not do, but there is no way one can fool the masses of people and the major institutions. But the odd thing is that one can, and the systemic lie is as entrenched in our society as ever.
The best recent example is my own country, Poland. Having been viciously attacked under the conservative government on trumped-up charges, it became a target for the EU institutions, which launched a punitive action against it for what they called a breach of the rule of law. After the parliamentary elections, the government fell into the hands of the left-liberal coalition, and guess what? Almost overnight, Poland came to resemble a banana republic. This is not to say that, since that time, the law has been merely strained or somehow unfairly applied. No; the law was violated—the statutory laws and the constitution—or raped, if you want to have a more emphatic word, all in order to wipe out any legitimate presence of the conservative party in public space.
This, in itself, would not have been shocking had it not been for the general endorsement of these policies. The endorsement was almost universal. The EU praised the new government openly and lifted the punitive procedures. Other international institutions issued laudatory or, at best, wait-and-see statements, and the West European and American politicians did not conceal their satisfaction. Let me add that the U.S. ambassador to Poland, a rather despicable figure, had been from the beginning supporting the left-liberal parties against the conservative government.
But this is not all. Not only do all those countless institutions and innumerable media support the abolition of all legal restraints in dealing with political opposition, but they also call it ‘restoring the rule of law.’ Restoring the rule of law by turning a country into a banana republic—if this is not a systemic lie, I do not know what is.
The obvious question is: why lie about Poland? Or Hungary? Or national conservatism, for that matter?
The answer is sadly simple. For some time, we have been living in a world of mendacity or, to be more precise, we have been living in a world that has produced a mendacious language, and we have become either indifferent to or unaware of its mendacity. The fact is that most of the buzzwords through which we interpret today’s world, assess it, and express our desires have come to mean the opposite of what they actually mean: democracy, pluralism, freedom, diversity, tolerance, dialogue, etc. Today’s usage resembles more and more the practice of “doublespeak” that George Orwell described in his books: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
In today’s discourse, democracy is not a system where the voters choose their representatives in accordance with the established and fair rules, but instead a rule of the parties that are considered to be, by definition, entitled to rule irrespective of the electoral results. The rule of the conservative parties that are—again, by definition—not entitled to rule is called autocracy. So what matters is not what the government does, but rather what party constitutes the government. The essential thing is to remember today’s division between democratic and populist parties. Please note the career of the adjective “populist” as a word of condemnation, again acquiring a meaning that has nothing to do with the original one. It means having views that are unacceptable to the parties that are entitled to rule, no matter how sound and legitimized democratically those views are. Whatever the democratic parties do is by definition democratic; whatever the populist party does is by definition undemocratic. If the democratic party closes the populist party within the cordon sanitaire or persecutes it, or if it persecutes a populist politician, it becomes even more democratic. If the populist party exercises power given to it by the voters, it is autocratic.
I am not really quibbling with words. This logic accounts for the fact that 30-50% of Europe’s population (depending on the country) have no real representation in any of the European institutions (and if they do, their representatives are behind the cordon sanitaire) and have no say in anything that is happening in those institutions. This is openly and explicitly called the triumph of democracy. As far as I know, neither Freedom House nor any such organizations have ever made a big deal about this. Yes, occasionally, somebody drops a euphemistic term—a ‘democratic deficit’—but this is of no consequence at all.
The same logic applies to the concept of ‘pluralism.’ Pluralism does not mean a situation where there is a plurality of opinions and a wide spectrum of media. For pluralism to hold, two conditions must be fulfilled: first, that all parties and all people have more or less the same ‘correct’ views, and second, that all declare themselves to be in favor of pluralism. In the European Parliament, about 70% of the deputies had more or less the same views, the remaining 30% being populists, ipso facto, anti-pluralists. The logical conclusion is that at the moment when 100% of the deputies have more or less the same correct views, the European Parliament will achieve full and perfect pluralism.
One could decipher the actual meanings of all the words I mentioned and more. Consider ‘diversity’: everyone in this room knows that all bodies in charge of diversity at the universities, corporations, or governments are, in fact, responsible for imposing homogeneity. Or consider ‘dialogue’: most of us have noticed that when people use the word ‘dialogue,’ they really mean ‘monologue’ or even worse. When the European Commission said that it was conducting a dialogue with Poland’s conservative government, it meant bullying, cheating, and blackmailing.
Finally, a short comment on another mendacious concept: open society. An open society is not a society that is open to various groups and creeds, but it is a society in which a fierce war is being waged against the enemies of an open society. And the enemies are legion, they are profoundly evil, and the omnipresent danger they pose is apocalyptic. It is almost like in the Revelation of Saint John: “a monster having ten horns and seven heads and upon its horns there were ten crowns; and upon its crowns were the names of blasphemy.” Here is a sample of today’s crowns with the names of blasphemy: misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, eurocentrism, phallocentrism, logocentrism, binarism, populism, white supremacy, nationalism, xenophobia, hate speech, far right, Euroscepticism, misgendering, bigotry, fascism, global warming denial, and so on, and so forth. Almost every day, someone discovers a new sin and a hideous head with new hideous horns. As you can see, the more open the open society becomes, the more hydras it has to fight. In other words, for an open society to exist and grow, we need more and more policing and self-policing, as well as more and more censorship and self-censorship.
Are we already in Orwell’s world, where the language is utterly corrupted? Perhaps not, but whoever has eyes to see will certainly see it coming. The most pernicious aspect of it is that it is no longer perceived as a lie. The use of this mendacious language has become a mark of nobility of character, honesty, decency, and respectability. All this—I admit—makes for a rather depressing scene.
However, one can draw a more solacing conclusion from it. If so much in the modern world is built on a lie, then the strategy to oppose it is very simple: we should not lie and we should not participate in the lie. Is that enough? Possibly not. But in a world of omnipresent propaganda and deafening cacophony, we tend to underestimate the power of the true word, the power of logos. We should not underestimate it. After all, our civilization was created and developed on the power of logos. We should bear this in mind and use this power as much as we can, even if sometimes we think—somewhat despairingly—that it looks like a Sisyphean task.
