Truth is the first casualty of war: Old wisdom with a new twist

The argument in the axiom is simple and persuasive. Information is a powerful weapon at all times, but especially so during war. All parties in a conflict, governments in particular, seek to show themselves in a favourable light and make claims about the moral justifications for their own actions and the moral inferiority of their enemies. 

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The tools that governments use are also well known. Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and the suppression or censoring of facts. This manipulation of information has two audiences: the international community (which requires a whole other discussion) and, even more important, their own populations (for without public support, it is hard to sustain a war or ask the people to sacrifice).

Hermann Göring, the Nazi war criminal who was the supreme commander of the Luftwaffe (the air force of Nazi Germany) declared during the Nuremberg trials that to get the public to acquiesce to war, “all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism… It works the same way in any country.” 

Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural psychologist and Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote that a “reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

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What we have come to call ‘fake news’ about war is not recent. For example, the infamous ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ came to signify for the British the cruelty and lack of civilization and morals among Indians. It became a public justification for empire. Later, it became a rallying cry for Indian nationalists. The story was certainly hugely exaggerated, if anything had happened at all.

The Gulf of Tonkin lie launched the US war on Vietnam and the Saddam Hussein ‘weapons of mass destruction’ lie launched the US invasion of Iraq. One of Vladimir Putin’s key justifications for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is his contention that the government of Volodymyr Zelensky (president of Ukraine and a Jew) runs on Nazi ideology.

It’s not hard to find big lies (such as the justification for an invasion) and small lies (so many enemies killed, so many fighter jets shot down) that litter the literal battlefield.

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Historically, it is the state that creates propaganda and falsehoods. The actual disseminators of information, the media—newspapers, radio, TV, and now the internet—often simply repeat what they have been told. The media rarely, if ever, has independent means of verifying war claims. Media representatives are never in the rooms where national security decisions are taken and almost never at the scene of the action. They can therefore easily become loudspeakers of the state.

But something newish appears to have emerged in last week’s conflict with Pakistan. Social media forwards of purported TV screenshots suggested all manner of wild claims made by some TV channels with subcontinental audiences: for example, Karachi port and Islamabad had been destroyed and Pakistan’s Balochistan province had become independent, or that India’s airfield in Bathinda had been destroyed and Pakistan’s digital retaliation had both crippled India and inflicted major economic losses on the country.

While I am reasonably sure that very little of what was said happened (certainly not to the degree claimed), it’s hard to know what was actually reported by various channels and what was not. No individual could have possibly watched the many hours of war coverage on television. Were tales told that felt true (in the sense of Stephen Colbert’s ingenious term ‘truthiness’)? Are feelings all that matter in such times?

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I also feel as if I am in the middle of a fun-house mirror in which each image I see has been so distorted by multiple concave and convex mirrors that the original is unreadable.

If truth no longer matters in broadcast news and if consumers of news know that it doesn’t matter and that what they are consuming is not the true truth but their truth (the narrative that will give them satisfaction), then we are indeed in a new information realm. In this realm, the product being sold and consumed is not news, but patriotism. The apparent goal is not to inform but to generate a dopamine rush of pleasure.

The dangers of this are obvious. The state no longer needs to manipulate and distort the truth of war because the media will do it willingly. Media outlets that refuse to peddle patriotism could find themselves left behind in the news marketplace, their caution and scepticism finding few buyers because they fail to provide the heady brew of patriotism.

Noam Chomsky, the renowned MIT linguist, had famously argued that the US mass media is an ideological institution that helps “manufacture consent” for wars that benefit the US economic and political elite.

We may have gone beyond that point now. Consent does not need to be manufactured because it is taken for granted. What is manufactured instead is war euphoria.

The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.