The strategy of constructing a narrative of lies to justify going to war is certainly nothing new. There is a long history in the U.S. that appeared to reach its apogee with the lie that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. That false narrative was reused with various faces with chemical weapons in Syria and, currently, with nuclear weapons in Iran.
“T]ruth is invariably the first casualty of war, but,” as Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent and this generation’s most distinguished specialist on Russia, says in his soon to be published book, The Culture of the Second Cold War, “propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is exceptionally intense.” Sakwa argues that “[a]t its heart” the Second Cold War, “is the struggle to control narratives, to shape popular perceptions of reality. This is an age-old endeavour,” he says, “but in Cold War 2 the misrepresentation of situations is exacerbated by the decline of high modernist ideals of fact-based journalism and impartial scholarship.”
Sakwa cites Jacques Baud, a Swiss army colonel who served in NATO and the UN, who argues that the false narratives that result from the refusal to conduct impartial investigations into important events has shaped the foreign policy of Western countries. Sakwa adds that this has been especially so with Russia, who has become the target of a “whole ‘anti-disinformation’ industry,” leading to especially “damaging consequences on international politics.”
The art of heresthetics, or the structuring of political reality to advantageously fit your narrative, seemed to reach its perfection in the Downing Street Memo, during the Iraq war, which reported that American “intelligence and facts were being fixed” around the policy. But the art of heresthetics seems to have burgeoned during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Several lies have been told to justify and sustain the war. And several of those lies told by the West have been revealed and refuted by the West’s own words.
Hellbound and Down 