Discourse and war
I don’t know if you have been following the news but we live in times of war. This is of course a rhetorical question: you can’t have missed all the killing, no matter how much you might have tried to hide away from it all. And yet there are some that seem to be under the impression that the current state of the world results from cruelty being under-reported; that (other) people, the media, politicians, the Powers that Be, aren’t saying enough about any of the many concurrent atrocities.
This is both a sign of naivety and an admission of impotence. Naivety, for you can say and report as much as you want and military-men and spineless politicians will continue to do their work, unless you say it in a way in which they get truly worried, something that in increasingly policed and authoritarian societies is all but impossible. Impotence because in the past few decades, as grand narratives died infected of postmodernism, as the climate collapsed, as illiberal neoliberalism became total and totalising, we have been reduced to discourse. Discourse is everywhere now — there have never been more words to describe the world than there are today.
The problem is that all these words are rather useless at changing the course of world events. If discourse is now ubiquitous, this is mainly a discourse produced in a state of political solitude, for an audience of likeminded solitary and mediated individuals, who are all busy performing their own verbose liturgy online. The question, as always, remains how to turn words into praxis. A question few of those constantly commenting on every world event will ever be able to respond to, lest they are willing to walk into the streets and produce the discourse in the company of others, articulating a coherent collective utterance so loud that it can’t be ignored.1
It’s only propaganda when the other team does it
There is a phrase that is wrongly attributed to US senator Hiram Johnson (1866-1945):
“The first casualty of war is truth”.
I say “wrongly”, because he might have said it but there are several earlier iterations of this idea. For example, there’s one version that can be traced all the way back to 1758 and The Idler:
“Among the calamities of War may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehood which interest dictates and credulity encourages.”
And there’s another version that goes back even further, all the way to Greek tragedian Aeschylus (c525 BC- c456 BC):
“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
And there are more. Luckily whoever expressed this now commonplace idea first didn’t patent it.
I prefer The Idler’s version because it’s less hyperbolic than the other two — everyone knows that the first casualty of war is invariably an unarmed civilian — and it includes an element the other two overlook in their blind faith in truth: credulity. I write this thinking of propaganda, how it manipulates truth,2 and how we only seem to have eyes for it when it’s produced by the other team. Or at least it’s easier to spot it when we disagree with the main points the propaganda text3 makes. When it comes to our propaganda we are always ready to suspend disbelief in order to confirm our biases.
But ours is always the most toxic type of propaganda to consume, because when we eat it whole this gullibility results in the weakening of our position — a state that now appears as the outcome of the uncritical brainwashing that propaganda entails.