Lies, Secrets and History

[Companero]

"Lying is a deliberate attempt not only to conceal, but to conceal well. There is such a thing as a bad, stupid lie, but it’s outside the scope of this article.

Good lies are crafted, they have to be negotiated with a specific audience, and they have to be made to stick—a lie, a cover story, not only camouflages but explains.

Many theories of performance claim no one would take such care with the truth. I’m not so sure—a good story is a good story, but only false stories are crafted with the anxious goal to make them sound true, or if not true, reasonable.

Historians often express surprise that in the history of diplomacy, every shred of evidence contradicts every other, or that every confession can be explained by common sense. These historians protest too much, however. Isn’t the point of intelligence and counterintelligence, of information and disinformation, that no single story can be made to stick, that there is no one version of events that can stand without contest or contradiction? Isn’t the whole point of cover stories that they are told, that they tell a lot?

Cover stories contain information and the analysis of that information. They just don’t tell a truth" - Luis White on 'Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History'

 

[Companero]

"Lies and secrets are explanations about the past that are negotiated for specific audiences, for specific ends. Secrecy and lies conceal, they camouflage, but they certainly don't hide everything" - Luise White (Ibid.)

 

[Companero]

"Secrets and secrecy are social acts, constantly aware of audiences and publics and how to keep them from learning a specific version of events.

When we realize how poorly secrets are kept, how selective and managed tellings “leak” information to a wide variety of audiences, it seems clear that secrets ironically are ways of making information known.

Secrets give a charged status to information. The entire negotiated nature of secrets makes them a rich lens into daily life; they reveal a shifting terrain of ideas about danger, about risk, about importance, and about the public meaning of those conditions.

Lies on the other hand are more private, and reveal individual participation in social worlds as people appropriate circulating stories and commonplace vocabularies to complicate a narrative account of their lives" - Luis White (Ibid.)

 

[chamakh]

Cover stories contain information and the analysis of that information. They just don't tell a truth" - Luis White on 'Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History'

what is the truth?