The image of red-jacketed arms shoving Emmanuel Macron, framed in the doorway of his presidential plane, ricocheted around the globe this week.
The French President’s visit to Vietnam had begun badly. The Elysee Palace media team whirred into damage control and it is telling that its reflex was to lie, claiming the image was a deepfake.`
That is disturbing. It may not be the first time a Western leader has taken refuge in the fog of the digital age, but it won’t be the last.
Welcome to the era of political illusion: no longer a nod to something real but excuses that rely on a world unmoored from reality.
In an age where images can be seamlessly manipulated, who knows what is true? In the haze of doubt lie new possibilities for deceit. When everything can be fake, anything can be denied. But when democratic governments step into those shadows, we are in dangerously uncharted waters.
When the lie didn’t fly because there were witnesses to the altercation, the second gear was to gaslight: you did not see what you thought you saw. What did it look like? As if French first lady Brigitte Macron was having such a furious argument with her husband that she lashed out, pushing both hands into his face.
Most people in a healthy relationship would find this deeply disturbing. If the roles had been reversed, Emmanuel Macron would now be facing calls to resign. Perhaps divorce.
To counter the evidence of our eyes, the state’s ministry of appearances workshopped a line delivered by the President.
“There’s a video showing me joking and teasing my wife, and somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe, with people even coming up with theories to explain it,” Macron said.
This sentence is a masterclass in sophistry. First, minimise: “joking and teasing my wife”. Here the shove is erased and Brigitte Macron becomes a bit player as Emmanuel Macron shifts focus to himself, cast in the role of loving husband. This is designed to normalise the event, even frame it as fun, a reasonable man caught in an absurd over-reaction. It invites us to doubt what we saw.
Next, overstate: “geo-planetary catastrophe”. This hyperbole turns scrutiny into a perversion. The implication is that anyone discussing the video is hysterical, conspiratorial or unhinged.
Macron also builds a straw man. No one but the President said the incident was a global emergency. But by exaggerating the reaction, Macron sets himself up as the voice of calm in a storm of irrational outrage.
Let’s be clear: the Macrons’ relationship is of vanishingly little importance to this column, but the state’s attempt to retouch a shopsoiled official portrait is a vivid display of how most governments instinctively respond under pressure. It’s no revelation that politicians evade, distract, dissemble and sometimes lie, for good reasons and bad. It’s behaviour as old as the profession. Maybe it’s a sign of age, or the times, but bald lies now seem more common and more shameless, as agreed facts have become artefacts and the tools of manipulation have grown more sophisticated.
That toolkit now includes artificial intelligence, deepfakes, synthetic voices and real-time image manipulation. Politicians and their minders will find it hard to resist crying digital foul to cover future missteps, or arming themselves with these powerful weapons and using them in political warfare.
Around the world, politicians of all dispositions have already adopted US President Donald Trump’s catchcry of “fake news”, weaponising partisanship, stoking doubt, denying reality and reframing the truth to manipulate public opinion. This is why governments and public servants should never be entrusted with deciding what is and isn’t true. Because, globally, politicians and bureaucrats are among the most prolific sources of lies.
A survey of 81 countries produced by the Oxford Internet Institute in 2021 showed organised social media manipulation campaigns in every one.
“Governments, public relations firms and political parties are producing misinformation on an industrial scale,” the report said.
From Vladimir Putin’s 2014 claim that no Russian troops were involved in taking Crimea, to the Spanish government’s insistence that its recent nationwide blackout had nothing to do with the fragility of wind and solar generation, tyrants and democrats alike are proving that when facts become inconvenient, they turn their hand to fiction.
Those in power always resort to the classical rhetorical concept of ethos, that authority bestows credibility and truth. If the government says it is so, who are we to say otherwise? Alas, the cry of “trust us, we are the government” rings pretty hollow around the Western world these days, and politicians only have themselves to blame.
Examples are legion, and here are some lowlights from the home front.
In the Robodebt scandal, politicians and bureaucrats repeatedly insisted the automated scheme to claw back money from welfare recipients was fair and legal, even after internal legal advice made clear it was not.
The response to Covid-19 is a deep well of administrative deceit, but there were few darker chapters than the curfew imposed in Victoria. Documents uncovered under Freedom of Information legislation reveal people were stripped of their liberty not for their safety but for the convenience of police enforcing lockdowns.
This was cloaked in the doublespeak that confinement was care. That imprisonment was protection. This subversion of language was distilled in the slogan that appeared behind Victorian premier Daniel Andrews at every press conference: “Staying apart keeps us together.” It’s a cliche to reach for George Orwell when criticising politicians, but the Victorian dictum would have fitted effortlessly into the official creed of The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Covid revealed something disturbing about our governments. And about us. For a moment, Oz stepped out from behind the curtain. In lockdowns, mandates and curfews, we caught a glimpse of how quickly governments drift towards authoritarianism, how readily fear becomes a tool of control and how easily we surrender our freedom.
Those who questioned lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine orders were vilified, assaulted by police, lost their jobs and imprisoned. The thousands who drove to Canberra in protest were dismissed as “cookers”, Australia’s version of the deplorables.
This disturbing descent into autocracy was led by both major parties, with the imprimatur of our health aristocracy. It was well-intentioned. It was pitched as for our own good. And it was profoundly misguided, deeply undemocratic and did lasting damage to our community. History will show the long tail of the cure did more harm than the disease.
Is it any wonder that trust in authority is now at such a low ebb? That most precious of commodities has been squandered by politicians who lie about trivial things, such as fights on a plane, and serious things, such as why power prices will keep rising.
The only defence against this is a healthy scepticism of those in power and the democratic right to dissent. As a rule of thumb we should trust no government to arbitrate truth and resist every effort to limit free speech, no matter how noble the cause might seem.
If we don’t, one day we may wake up and discover that we all love Big Brother. And that the Macrons have a perfect marriage.
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