Gaslit to Armageddon

A placard I saw on an 800,000 strong London protest rally, thirty-four days after the onset on October 8th of genocide in Gaza, supplied the title for my photographs of that rally:

Even now, after ten further months of mass murder, I find myself frosted out by former friends who say there are “two sides to this”.  These are not cruel or, in any general sense of the word, stupid people. Nor are they card-carrying Zionists of either the Jewish or Christian Right.

Just too brainwashed to realise – like those who fondly suppose themselves unswayed by the commercial propaganda we call advertising – they are brainwashed.

Says former Guardian columnist Jonathan Cook, writing yesterday, September 13:

Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction. 

The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.

The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee. ¹ 

The friends I just referred to will reject with fury what I’m about to say. Some will cry Godwin’s Law. But those who insist there are two sides to the Gaza horror show would, had they been citizens of Nazi Germany, have said – and meant it ²  – that The Jews were to some extent the authors of their Shoah. As in so many contexts, when the facts grow hard to deny, and/or the storytellers fall out among themselves, apologists for hire are brought in to muddy the waters.

The gaslighting of the tobacco lobby sheds useful light: “it isn’t black and white, you know …”  ³

And it works because as I will keep saying, we are more psychological than logical beings. Facts count less with us than narratives. This served us well enough, a few dark lapses aside, for tens of millennia as homo sapiens sapiens, individuated yet deeply social, evolved in small groups of hunter-gatherers; tightly bound on the one hand by the objective circumstance of our being ill equipped to survive alone, on the other by the myths with which we made sense of the world and our place in it.

But now, as in other aspects of the human condition, a deeply embedded trait has outlived its usefulness. Why? Because first the neolithic revolutions which delivered surplus wealth and the rise of small elites, second the age of mass media heavily influenced if not controlled by those elites, made our elevation of story over empirical reality a means of enslavement.

Even that had its positive side when, as I put it in Broken: the implicit contract between rulers and ruled:

… for all their bloodshed, tyranny and exploitation, each ruling class was progressive insofar as it oversaw advances in human productivity – right up to the point where it didn’t. At which point, with new and better productive forces blocked by existing relations of production, something had to give. The new had to find ways of overcoming the old. More often than not, those ways involved violence.

(Two examples being the French Revolution and American Civil War. Both appealed to noble sentiments but their real drivers were less altruistic. In the one, an aristocracy was thwarting the aspirations of an up and coming bourgeoisie. In the other, slavery on southern plantations was a bottleneck to the flow of wage labour to northern factories desperate to compete on a level playing field with those of Britain and Germany. )

From these dozen or so millennia of class societies of one form or another, an implicit social contract can be inferred. In return for the masses’ subservience, surrender of the surplus fruits of their toil and readiness to kill and be killed in – or nowadays simply cheer on – its wars of plunder, the duty of every ruling class has been to provide stability, security and the conditions for prosperity. Peace at sword or gun point is no oxymoron. Not for nothing do we speak of a Pax Romana. History shows that exploited peoples will tolerate entrenched privilege and high (though not infinitely so) levels of social injustice if the only perceived alternative is the tyranny of lawlessness and destitution. Never more so than when narratives which appear as simple common sense make the case for said privilege and injustice.

The last sentence of this (edited) extract points to ideology, a subject beyond my scope here but touched on in posts like this one.

But the thrust of the post from which the extract is taken is that the implicit social contract has been broken. It’s not just that the world has shrunk to what Marshall McLuhan called a global village – so that a genocide thousands of miles away will show on our screens, albeit in forms muted here, amplified there, and always shaped to suit elite agendas. It’s that this genocide is part of a wider context in which the interests of the rulers now diverge so sharply from those of the ruled as to have brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction.

And not just in the Middle East. Those same mass media storytellers, fully answerable when it most counts to those same tiny elites, have likewise brought us to the brink of thermonuclear destruction on Russia’s southwest border. Our widespread failure to grasp this infuriatingly simple truth is due, for reasons I restated less than a fortnight ago in Musings on Ukraine and Gaza, to their absurdly successful ability to gaslight us by playing on the human trait I began with: a preference, once useful but now perilously dysfunctional, of myth – in this case West Good, Russia Baad – over reality.

It is not possible for an honest person acquainted with the facts to say that Russia’s invasion of east Ukraine was unprovoked. ⁴ As with genocide in Gaza, the extent to which Western publics are oblivious to what happened and continues to happen furnishes proof irrefutable of both the criminality of our rulers, and the systemic inability of our their media to call them out.

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Final word – for now. Two useful sources of relevance here are a Duran podcast yesterday, in which Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou speculate on the thinking of London, Moscow and Washington on allowing NATO weapons to strike deep inside Russia. Since such weapons require hands-on British, German or US expertise, I have stressed the WW3-inducing potential of so allowing. Today WSWS strike a similar note.

A more nuanced view, however, is offered by the two Alexes.

Also yesterday, John Mearsheimer – he of the Chicago based ‘political realism’ school – spoke with Judge Napolitano about not only the two arenas discussed here, but that third flashpoint for WW3 in the South China Sea. While I don’t entirely subscribe to his political realism or the places it can take him, ⁵ Professor Mearsheimer is always measured, always well informed and on both counts, amid these heavy fogs of war, always worth a listen.

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1. Strictly speaking Jonathan Cook is wrong to say Britons are “required by law to pay [the BBC] licence fee”. It is simply an offence to watch television without one. But with TV a near essential condition of being plugged in to British society, especially for the most vulnerable, the licence is in effect a form of taxation; a regressive form at that.
2. I add the “and meant it”  as a way of differentiating – easier in principle than in practice – those who fully believed Nazi propaganda from those who pretended to. (See on the one hand the work of predominantly Jewish social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Irving Janis, on the other my comments in a recent review of The Zone of Interest.)
3. With Big Tobacco, the water-muddying I speak of took the form of promoting outliers, however unrepresentative of relevant scientific consensus, to imply  that the risks of smoking were overstated. (Whilst scientism is crude, in my experience those who bone-headedly parrot that science is about facts not consensus show an equally crude grasp of epistemology, in particular the relationship between theory and empirically observable reality in science’s 21st century forms.)
4. I have a lesser gripe with those who acknowledge that Russia was provoked, but say she still should not have invaded. It is on them to set out alternative paths Moscow should have taken; something they have conspicuously failed to do.
5. His political realism can lead to glaring blind spots for the professor. As one comment below the Judge Napolitano podcast remarks:

   He does not answer the question: “Why are we [the US] there [South China Sea]?” except to say because we have been their [sic] for a long time. The judge should be more skeptical of Mearsheimer.