Peter Isackson | Fair Observer

The problem with any war is that both sides always believe they are right. In this age of electronic communication and sophisticated tools designed to distort reality, both sides also heavily invest in propaganda. Those who attempt to introduce nuance while a conflict is raging are typically bullied by one of the sides to fall into line, as we pointed out in our analysis of an astonishing interview by a Western journalist of India’s Minister of External Affairs, Dr. S Jaishankar. In times of war, perspective itself becomes the enemy.

Decades after the final victory or peace treaties, historians may calmly assess the events that led up to a war, tease out the play of rivalries that triggered it, elucidate the economic and cultural factors that defined its emotional character and assess the impact of the the personalities involved in launching and prosecuting the war. Such analyses, when conducted by objective historians, reveal complex networks of meaning and multiple factors hidden from public view at the time of the war. The “truth” concerning the causes of any war can never be fully described. More significantly, for a true historian, it can never be reduced to a simple attribution of blame.

The title of a well-argued article by Bhaskar Majumdar that appeared on Fair Observer a week ago illustrates a risk that has become all too common in today’s journalism. It is the temptation to reduce the analysis of every conflict to a simple blame game. Its ultimate aim is to identify a single individual who will bear the brunt of the blame. Who can forget the evil Saddam Hussein, purveyor of weapons of mass destruction so deviously hidden no one could ever find them? Our politicians and media explained how he had to be eliminated to usher in a glorious period of peace and prosperity that would inevitably follow. Or Muammar al-Qaddafi? Or Bashar al-Assad? To say nothing of Ho Chi Minh, Salvador Allende or Hugo Chavez, who were never elevated to absolutely Satanic status but still became the focus of a noble combat to replace pure evil with unadulterated good.

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None of the cases cited above ended well. So why do our politicians and media persist in the same vein even today? Is it just a lazy habit or is there a novel strategy this time around? Psychologists understand that attributing blame to one group of people for some social, political or economic ill is easy to do. One day it’s Mexicans and another, Asians, Arabs, Russians, Jews or simply immigrants in general. Animosity towards such groups obviously becomes exaggerated in times of war. But we should also be aware that, even in times of peace, this tendency persists. It is at the core of every form of racism.

To successfully stir the emotion of the population of any nation committed to war, propagandists cannot rely only on suspicion or hatred of the group alone. An effective war mentality requires two other essential factors that will become the foundation of every effective effort of propaganda. The first is an ideological gap, a factor of cultural differentiation that claims to describe what another group of people believes in or is committed to. The second has become even more important in this age of media celebrities. It is the focus on a single personality to bear the blame. Eliminating that agent of evil will restore purity to the world.

Ideology can be many things. It can even be assembled from diverse components. These include religion, language, economic theory (capitalism vs. communism), implicit or explicit moral codes, and style of government (e.g. democracy vs. autocracy). The ideology need not be real in the sense that it is consciously embraced by all or even a majority. It can simply be a convenient label based on officially inculcated aspirations. In today’s Western anti-Russian propaganda, the preferred choice for labelling the ideology combines one abstract notion, “autocracy,” and one supposedly concrete reality, “Russian imperialism.” Both notions appear rather nebulous, a simplistic formulation of a far more complex reality. The key to believing that they amount to an ideology is the identification of a unique and consummate evil-doer, whose mind is focused on that credo. The arch-villain who embodies the ideology we are authorized to hate today is of course Vladimir Putin.

In his article, Majumdar makes a number of pertinent points about the Russian context that help clarify some key aspects of the conflict. He evokes the background to the conflict and acknowledges its complexity. He also reminds readers of the tendency, in times of propaganda, to revert “subconsciously, if not consciously” to the reflex developed during the Cold War. He describes it as putting “things in easy perspectives: a binary black and white, the US against Russia, us versus them.”

After this promising start, the mood changes. In the course of the article Majumdar even appears to contradict himself. He slowly builds up to a position that denies the very nuance and perspective he promoted in the opening paragraphs. Towards the end of the article, he simplifies history to the very pattern of black vs. white that he earlier warned against. How else may we interpret this pair of assertions? “US President Joe Biden may have been at fault in Afghanistan but he is not at fault for Ukraine. Putin is the man responsible for this conflict.” Back to the Manichean blame game.

How did the author slide into the kind of reasoning he derided? He commits three common errors of pseudo-historical reasoning that deserve our attention. They can be seen as illustrative of the process by which, in times of armed conflict, propaganda falls, “subconsciously, if not consciously” into place. The first is logical, the next, linguistic. The third is what literary critics call the “intentional fallacy.”

In the very first sentence Majumdar aptly calls into question “the popular narrative of the Cold War.” He identifies it with George W. Bush’s famous assertion: “If you are not with us, you are against us.” In other words, it reduces a problem to two competing and mutually exclusive narratives, one of which will be considered right or good, and the other wrong or evil. At this point, we would expect the article to highlight the importance of nuance and complexity in its analysis of the conflict in Ukraine. Nuance means that attribution of an absolute moral quality to any position is likely to be inaccurate. Complexity means two things. The first is that there will likely be other factors that will inevitably lead to formulating more than two competing and mutually exclusive explanations. But, whatever the number of causes identified, even when they seem contradictory, they may prove to be complementary. For example, Russia’s motivation may be simultaneously imperialistic (expansive) and anti-imperialistic (countering NATO’s expansion). Selecting one and ignoring or suppressing the other is what propaganda typically does.

Majumdar appears to veer towards propaganda when, after evoking the fact that the US might be justifiably blamed for “neo imperialism and more,” he tries to answer the question that........

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