The tragedy of war and disinformation
Why do we have the feeling that everything is failing around us?
One simple answer is that hopes for peace and prosperity are being dashed daily by rising fears of war.
At the anniversary of the Ukraine invasion on Feb. 24, war seems closer to our shores than before. It is ironic that the most hawkish party on Ukraine is the German Green Party, which is supposed to support the environment, but now embracing nuclear power and rearming Germany, even though defense spending will be very carbon intensive and consumes lots of irreplaceable natural resources.
War is a basic human activity. However, whether we decide to go to war or not relates fundamentally to information. Without information, we could still be blissfully unaware of the seriousness of war. Pacific Islanders cut off from world information would not be able to join the debate on the Ukraine war, even though they are affected by the carbon emission, inflation, and possible nuclear fallout.
Having been educated mostly in the West, I came to realize that I was blind to my own blindness until the US-China rivalry showed how the power of media and propaganda has distorted any objective evaluation on what is really going on. The West rose on the basis of science, which verifies objective truth through empirical facts tested against reality. There is no objective scientific truth when everything is being looked at from the lens of emotion, anger, and fear.
Inevitably, the Ukraine war is both a factual reality as well as a media fest. Writing in 1938 on “Homage to Catalonia” (Spanish Civil War 1936-1939), the British writer George Orwell noted, “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from the people who are not fighting… “Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”
The physical reality is that the war will consume material resources and human lives until one side capitulates or both sides become so exhausted that they negotiate for peace. The media issue is that war will continue so long as the global media, owned and controlled by the dominant West, sometimes called the “white man’s media,” continues to stir war fears to contain challengers to Western hegemony. Having the most powerful military or media is useless if you don’t flex those muscles every now and again to show who is boss.
In short, the war is being obfuscated by misinformation and disinformation, so much so that none but a few understand the real situation or its possible outcome.
Ukraine is the living example of the opaque nature of human self-destruction. We have a real war going on, but there is no independent, authoritative, unbiased view of casualties, devastation, and trauma that is occurring there. All we know is that Ukraine is being flattened and, without any Nato support, the war would have ended with negotiations. The rest of the world literally does not know who to believe anymore, since the BBC, The New York Times, and RT seem to be voices for their own respective deep security states.
Admittedly, no media channel is free of vested interests. But all media channels today, including the internet, are either voices of power (the state) or money (finance and the rich). The top Western media are owned by mostly white Western tycoons, ranging from the Murdoch family (News Corp), Jeff Bezos (Washington Post), or Elon Musk (Twitter). For them, a lot of war news are opinion pieces backed by flimsy facts, asking for a victory that is not defined realistically. What does victory mean in a possible nuclear outcome? When war occurred in non-white areas, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the like, the white man’s media has tended to treat the casualties of war as arising from defects or sins of the victim countries. Are we surprised that the rest of the world remains largely neutral or silent over Ukraine, because Ukraine is seen as a white man’s war?
We should note that the role of information and systems thinking was a recent Western discovery as a result of World War II. Computers and communication theory were invented to improve weapon accuracy and deciphering enemy information. Allied scientists from different disciplines brought together to think about the nuclear bomb and other war efforts discovered that thinking in systems is very different from thinking in parts. The collective has properties very different from that of its parts. Classical scientific thinking until then was linear and mechanical, from cause to effect, assuming that the environment does not change (other things being equal). The big discovery was that the whole system changes dynamically on the basis of the interaction between parts, called feedback loops.
Feedback loops mean that for every action, there are consequences that are not immediately obvious. Incidents create accidents and vice versa. Thus, media propaganda for good or evil have consequences we have no way of predicting. The deep state assumes that we can fool most of the people most of the time, but it cannot be done forever.
Electoral democracy is a media game whereby different parties try to persuade voters to back them. But the real game is to fool enough voters to keep the status quo for the powerful, especially those who control the media. The media cannot be held accountable unless they also bear the consequences of their misinformation or disinformation.
Herein lies the lies that feed a never-ending war. Humanity will not rest till war destroys everything that is worth fighting for. But before then, let’s enjoy the metaverse of digital fantasy of a beautiful life. Asia News Network
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Andrew Sheng is former chair of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.
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The Philippine Daily Inquirer is a member of the Asia News Network, an alliance of 22 media titles in the region.
