How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda Current Affairs

How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda ❧ Current Affairs 1/11/20, 10:49
How To
Avoid
Swallowing
War
Propaganda
Cutting through bad arguments,
distractions, and euphemisms to see
murder for what it is.
Nathan J. Robinson
filed 05 January 2020 in
INTERNATIONAL
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/how-to-avoid-swallowing…IwAR2kiTyFaE9Q0IUUEd5tQmxqQ8jeqPkuEguwOtG8GOj1GHCzFLZmZJK8HwQ Page 2 of 33
T
he Trump administration has
assassinated Iran’s top military leader, Qassim
Suleimani, and with the possibility of a serious
escalation in violent conflict, it’s a good time to
think about how propaganda works and train
ourselves to avoid accidentally swallowing it.
The Iraq War, the bloodiest and costliest
U.S. foreign policy calamity of the 21st century, happened in part because
the population of the United States was insufficiently cynical about its
government and got caught up in a wave of nationalistic fervor. The same
thing happened with World War I and the Vietnam War. Since a
U.S./Iran war would be a disaster, it is vital that everyone make sure they
do not accidentally end up repeating the kinds of talking points that
make war more likely.
Let us bear in mind, then, some of the basic lessons about war
propaganda.
Things are not true because a

government official says them.
I do not mean to treat you as stupid by making such a basic point, but
plenty of journalists and opposition party politicians do not understand

this point’s implications, so it needs to be said over and over. What
happens in the leadup to war is that government officials make claims
about the enemy, and then those claims appear in newspapers (“U.S.
officials say Saddam poses an imminent threat”) and then in the public
consciousness, the “U.S. officials say” part disappears, so that the claim is
taken for reality without ever really being scrutinized. This happens
because newspapers are incredibly irresponsible and believe that so long
as you attach “Experts say” or “President says” to a claim, you are off the
hook when people end up believing it, because all you did was relay the
fact that a person said a thing, you didn’t say it was true. This is the
approach the New York Times took to Bush administration allegations in
the leadup to the Iraq War, and it meant that false claims could become
headline news just because a high-ranking U.S. official said them.
[UPDATE: here’s an example from Vox, today, of a questionable
government claim being magically transformed into a certain fact.]
In the context of Iran, let us consider some things Mike Pence
tweeted about Qassim Suleimani:
“[Suleimani] assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of

the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in
the United States… Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on
American diplomats and military personnel. The world is a safer
place today because Soleimani is gone.”
It is possible, given these tweets, to publish the headline:

“Suleimani plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats, says
Pence.” That headline is technically true. But you should not publish that
headline unless Pence provides some supporting evidence, because what
will happen in the discourse is that people will link to your news story to
prove that Suleimani was plotting imminent attacks.
To see how unsubstantiated claims get spread, let’s think about the
Afghanistan hijackers bit. David Harsanyi of the National Review
defends Pence’s claim about Suleimani helping the hijackers. Harsanyi
cites the 9/11 Commission report, saying that the 9/11 commission
report concluded Iran aided the hijackers. The report does indeed say
that Iran allowed free travel to some of the men who went on to carry out
the 9/11 attacks. (The sentence cut off at the bottom of Harsanyi’s
screenshot, however, rather crucially says: “We have no evidence that Iran
or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11
attack.”) Harsanyi admits that the report says absolutely nothing about
Suleimani. But he argues that Pence was “mostly right,” pointing out that
Pence did not say Iran knew these men would be the hijackers, merely
that it allowed them passage.
Let’s think about what is going on here. Pence is trying to
convince us that Suleimani deserved to die, that it was necessary for the
U.S. to kill him, which will also mean that if Iran retaliates violently, that
violence will be because Iran is an aggressive power rather than because
the U.S. just committed an unprovoked atrocity against one of its leaders,
dropping a bomb on a popular Iranian leader. So Pence wants to link
Suleimani in your mind with 9/11, in order to get you blood boiling the
same way you might have felt in 2001 as you watched the Twin Towers
fall.
There is no evidence that either Iran or Suleimani tried to help
these men do 9/11. Harsanyi says that Pence does not technically allege
this. But he doesn’t have to! What impression are people going to get
from helped the hijackers? Pence hopes you’ll conflate Suleimani and Iran
as one entity, then assume that if Iran ever aided these men in any way, it
basically did 9/11 even if it didn’t have any clue that was what they were
going to do.
This brings us to #2:
Do not be bullied into accepting

simple-minded sloganeering
Let’s say that, long before Ted Kaczynski began sending bombs through
the mail, you once rented him an apartment. This was pure coincidence.
Back then he was just a Berkeley professor, you did not know he would
turn out to be the Unabomber. It is, however, possible, for me to say, and
claim I am not technically lying, that you “housed and materially aided
the Unabomber.” (A friend of mine once sold his house to the guy who
turned out to be the Green River Killer, so this kind of situation does
happen.)
Of course, it is incredibly dishonest of me to characterize what you
did that way. You rented an apartment to a stranger, yet I’m implying that
you intentionally helped the Unabomber knowing he was the
Unabomber. In sane times, people would see me as the duplicitous one.
But the leadup to war is often not a sane time, and these distinctions can
get lost. In the Pence claim about Afghanistan, for it to have any
relevance to Suleimani, it would be critical to know (assuming the 9/11
commission report is accurate) whether Iran actually could have known
what the men it allowed to pass would ultimately do, and whether
Suleimani was involved. But that would involve thinking, and War Fever
thrives on emotion rather than thought.
There are all kinds of ways in which you can bully people into
accepting idiocy. Consider, for example, the statement “Nathan
Robinson thinks it’s good to help terrorists who murder civilians.” There
is a way in which this is actually sort of true: I think lawyers who aid
those accused of terrible crimes do important work. If we are simple-
minded and manipulative, we can call that “thinking it’s good to help
terrorists,” and during periods of War Fever, that’s exactly what it will be
called. There is a kind of cheap sophistry that becomes ubiquitous:
I don’t think Osama bin Laden should have been killed without an
attempt to apprehend him. —> So you think it’s good that Osama
bin Laden was alive?
I think Iraqis were justified in resisting the U.S. invasion with force.
—> So you’re saying it’s good when U.S. soldiers die?
I do not believe killing other countries’ generals during peacetime is
acceptable. —> So you believe terrorists should be allowed to operate

with impunity.
I remember all this bullshit from my high school years. Opposing

the invasion of Iraq meant loving Saddam Hussein and hating America.
Thinking 9/11 was the predictable consequence of U.S. actions meant
believing 9/11 was justified. Of course, rational discussion can expose
these as completely unfair mischaracterizations, but every time war fever
whips up, rational discussion becomes almost impossible. In World War
I, if you opposed the draft you were undermining your country in a time
of war. During Vietnam, if you believed the North Vietnamese had the
more just case, you were a Communist traitor who endorsed every
atrocity committed in the name of Ho Chi Minh, and if you thought
John McCain shouldn’t have been bombing civilians in the first place
then clearly you believed he should have been tortured and you hated
America.
“If you oppose assassinating Suleimani you must love terrorists”
will be repeated on Fox News (and probably even on MSNBC).
Nationalism advocate Yoram Hazony says there is something wrong with
those who do not “feel shame when our country is shamed”—presumably
those who do not feel wounded pride when America is emasculated by
our enemies are weak and pitiful. We should refuse to put up with these
kinds of cheap slurs, or even to let those who deploy them place the
burden of proof on us to refute them. (In 2004, Democrats worried that
they did appear unpatriotic, and so they ran a decorated war veteran,
John Kerry, for president. That didn’t work.)
Scrutinize the arguments
Here’s Mike Pence again:
“[Suleimani] provided advanced deadly explosively formed

projectiles, advanced weaponry, training, and guidance to Iraqi
insurgents used to conduct attacks on U.S. and coalition forces;
directly responsible for the death of 603 U.S. service members, along
with thousands of wounded.”
I am going to say something that is going to sound controversial if

you buy into the kind of simple-minded logic we just discussed: Saying
that someone was “responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members”
does not, in and of itself, tell us anything about whether what they did
was right or wrong. In order to believe it did, we would have to believe
that the United States is automatically right, and that countries opposing
the United States are automatically wrong. That is indeed the logic that
many nationalists in this country follow; remember that when the U.S.
shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, causing hundreds of deaths,
George H.W. Bush said that he would never apologize for America, no
matter what the facts were. What if America did something wrong? That
was irrelevant, or rather impossible, because to Bush, a thing was right
because America did it, even if that thing was the mass murder of Iranian
civilians.
One of the major justifications for murdering Suleimani is that he
“caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers.” He was thus an aggressor, and
could/should have been killed. That is where people like Pence want you
to end your inquiry. But let us remember where those soldiers were. Were
they in Miami? No. They were in Iraq. Why were they in Iraq? Because
we illegally invaded and seized a country. Now, we can debate whether (1)
there is actually sufficient evidence of Suleimani’s direct involvement and
(2) whether these acts of violence can be justified, but to say that
Suleimani has “American blood on his hands” is to say nothing at all
without an examination of whether the United States was in the right.
We have to think clearly in examining the arguments that are
being made. Here’s the Atlantic‘s George Packer on the execution:
“There was a case for killing Major General Qassem Soleimani. For
two decades, as the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds
Force, he executed Iran’s long game of strategic depth in the Middle
East—arming and guiding proxy militias in Lebanon and Iraq that
became stronger than either state, giving Bashar al-Assad essential
support to win the Syrian civil war at the cost of half a million lives,
waging a proxy war in Yemen against the hated Saudis, and
repeatedly testing America and its allies with military actions around
the region for which Iran never seemed to pay a military price.”
The article goes on to discuss whether this case is outweighed by

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the pragmatic case against killing him. But wait. Let’s dwell on this. Does
this constitute a case for killing him? He assisted Bashar al-Assad. Okay,
but presumably then killing Assad would have been justified too? Is the
rule here that our government is allowed unilaterally to execute the
officials of other governments who are responsible for many deaths? Are
we the only ones who can do this? Can any government claim the right?
He assisted Yemen in its fight against “the hated Saudis.” But is
Saudi Arabia being hated for good reason? It is not enough to say that
someone committed violence without analyzing the underlying justice of
the parties’ relative claims.
Moreover, assumptions are made that if you can prove somebody
committed a heinous act, what Trump did is justified. But that doesn’t
follow: Unless we throw all law out the window, and extrajudicial
punishment is suddenly acceptable, showing that Suleimani was a war
criminal doesn’t prove that you can unilaterally kill him with a drone.
Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. So is George W. Bush. But they should
be captured and tried in a court, not bombed from the sky. The argument
that Suleimani was planning imminent attacks is relevant to whether you
can stop him with violence (and requires persuasive proof ), but mere
allegations of murderous past acts do not show that extrajudicial killings
are legitimate.
It’s very easy to come up with superficially persuasive arguments
that can justify just about anything. The job of an intelligent populace is
to see whether those arguments can actually withstand scrutiny.
Keep the focus on what matters
“The main question about the strike isn’t moral or even legal—it’s
strategic.” — The Atlantic
“The real question to ask about the American drone attack that killed
Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was not whether it was justified, but
whether it was wise” — The New York Times
“I think that the question that we ought to focus on is why now? Why
not a month ago and why not a month from now?” — Elizabeth Warren
They’re going to try to define the debate for you. Leaving aside the
moral questions, is this good strategy? And then you find yourself arguing
on those terms: No, it was bad strategy, it will put “our personnel” in
harms way, without noticing that you are implicitly accepting the
sociopathic logic that says “America’s interests” are the only ones in the
world that matters. This is how debates about Vietnam went: They were
rarely about whether our actions were good for Vietnamese people, but
about whether they were good or bad for us, whether we were
squandering U.S. resources and troops in a “fruitless” “mistake.” The
people of this country still do not understand the kind of carnage we
inflicted on Vietnam because our debates tend to be about whether
things we do are “strategically prudent” rather than whether they are just.
The Atlantic calls the strike a “blunder,” shifting the discussion to be
about the wisdom of the killing rather than whether it is a choice our
country is even permitted to make. “Blunder” essentially assumes that we

are allowed to do these things and the only question is whether it’s good
for us.
There will be plenty of attempts to distract you with irrelevant
issues. We will spend more time talking about whether Trump followed
the right process for war, whether he handled the rollout correctly, and
less about whether the underlying action itself is correct. People like Ben
Shapiro will say things like:
“Barack Obama routinely droned terrorists abroad—including

American citizens—who presented far less of a threat to Americans
and American interests than Soleimani. So spare me the hysterics
about ‘assassination.”
In order for this to have any bearing on anything, you have to be

someone who defends what Obama did. If you are, on the other hand,
someone who belives that Obama, too, assassinated people without due
process (which he did), then Shapiro has proved exactly nothing about
whether Trump’s actions were legitimate. (Note, too, the presumption
that threatening “America’s interests” can get you killed, a standard we
would not want any other country using but are happy to use ourselves.)
Emphasis matters
Consider three statements:
“The top priority of a Commander-in-Chief must be to protect

Americans and our national security interests. There is no question
that Qassim Suleimani was a threat to that safety and security, and
that he masterminded threats and attacks on Americans and our
allies, leading to hundreds of deaths. But there are serious questions
about how this decision was made and whether we are prepared for
the consequences.”
“Suleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands,

including hundreds of Americans. But this reckless move escalates the
situation with Iran and increases the likelihood of more deaths and
new Middle East conflict. Our priority must be to avoid another
costly war.”
“When I voted against the war in Iraq in 2002, I feared it would lead
to greater destabilization of the country and the region. Today, 17
years later, that fear has unfortunately turned out to be true. The
United States has lost approximately 4,500 brave troops, tens of
thousands have been wounded, and we’ve spent trillions on this war.
Trump’s dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous
war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions
more dollars. Trump promised to end endless wars, but this action
puts us on the path to another one.”
These are statements made by Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren,

and Bernie Sanders, respectively. Note that each of them is consistent with
believing Trump’s decision was the wrong one, but their emphasis is
different. Buttigieg says Suleimani was a “threat” but that there are
“questions,” Warren says Suleimani was a “murderer” but that this was
“reckless,” and Sanders says this was a “dangerous escalation.” It could be
that none of these three would have done the same thing themselves, but
the emphasis is vastly different. Buttigieg and Warren lead with
condemnation of the dead man, in ways that imply that there was
nothing that unjust about what happened. Sanders does not dwell on
Suleimani but instead talks about the dangers of new wars.
We have to be clear and emphatic in our messaging, because so
much effort is made to make what should be clear issues appear murky. If,
for example, you gave a speech in 2002 opposing the Iraq War, but the
first half was simply a discussion of what a bad and threatening person
Saddam Hussein was, people might actually get the opposite of the
impression you want them to get. Buttigieg and Warren, while they
appear to question the president, have the effect of making his action
seem reasonable. After all, they admit that he got rid of a threatening
murderer! Sanders admits nothing of the kind: The only thing he says is
that Trump has made the world worse. He puts the emphasis where it
matters.
I do not fully like Sanders’ statement, because it still talks a bit
more about what war means for our people, but it does mention
destabilization and the total number of lives that can be lost. It is a far
more morally clear and powerful antiwar statement. Buttigieg’s is exactly
what you’d expect of a Consultant President and it should give us
absolutely no confidence that he would be a powerful voice against a war,
should one happen. Warren confirms that she is not an effective advocate
for peace. In a time when there will be pressure for a violent conflict, we
need to make sure that our statements are not watery and do not make
needless concessions to the hawks’ propaganda.
Imagine how everything would

sound if the other side said it.
If you’re going to understand the world clearly, you have to kill your
nationalistic emotions. An excellent way to do this is to try to imagine if
all the facts were reversed. If Iraq had invaded the United States, and U.S.
militias violently resisted, would it constitute “aggression” for those
militias to kill Iraqi soldiers? If Britain funded those U.S. militias, and
Iraq killed the head of the British military with a drone strike, would this
constitute “stopping a terrorist”? Of course, in that situation, the Iraqi
government would certainly spin it that way, because governments call
everyone who opposes them terrorists. But rationality requires us not just
to examine whether violence has been committed (e.g., whether
Suleimani ordered attacks) but what the full historical context of that
violence is, and who truly deserves the “terrorist” label.
Is there anything Suleimani did that hasn’t also been done by the
CIA? Remember that we actually engineered the overthrow of the
Iranian government, within living people’s lifetimes. Would an Iranian
have been justified in assassinating the head of the CIA? I doubt there are
many Americans who think they would. I think most Americans would
consider this terrorism. But this is because terrorism is a word that, by
definition, cannot apply to things we do, and only applies to the things
others do. When you start to actually reverse the situations in your mind,
and see how things look from the other side, you start to fully grasp just
how crude and irrational so much propaganda is.
How To Dissect Pro-War Propaganda
Watch out for euphemisms
“It was not an assassination.” — Noah Rothman, conservative

commentator
“That’s an outrageous thing to say. Nobody that I know of would

think that we did something wrong in getting the general.” —
Michael Bloomberg, on Bernie Sanders’ claim that this was an
“assassination”
Our access to much of the world is through language alone. We

only see our tiny sliver of the world with our own eyes, much of the rest
of it has to be described in words or shown to us through images. That
means it’s very easy to manipulate our perceptions. If you control the
flow of information, you can completely alter someone’s understanding
of the things that they can’t see firsthand.
Euphemistic language is always used to cover atrocities. Even the
Nazis did not say they were “mass murdering innocent civilians.” They
said they were defending themselves from subversive elements,
guaranteeing sufficient living space for their people, purifying their
culture, etc. When the United States commits murder, it does not say it is
committing murder. It says it is engaging in a stabilization program and
restoring democratic rule. We saw during the recent Bolivian coup how
easy it is to portray the seizure of power as “democracy” and democracy
as tyranny. Euphemistic language has been one of the key tools of
murderous regimes. In fact, many of them probably believe their own
language; their specialized vocabulary allows them to inhabit a world of
their own invention where they are good people punishing evil.
Assassination sounds bad. It sounds like something illegitimate,
something that would call into question the goodness of the United
States, even if the person being assassinated can be argued to have
“deserved it.” Thus Rothman and Bloomberg will not even admit that
what the U.S. did here was an assassination, even though we literally
targeted a high official from a sovereign country and dropped a bomb on
him. Instead, this is “neutralization.” (Read this fascinatingly feeble
attempt by the Associated Press to explain why it isn’t calling an obvious
assassination an assassination, just as the media declined to call torture
torture when Bush did it.)
Those of us who want to resist marches to war need to insist on
calling things exactly what they are and refuse to allow the country to
slide into the use of language that conceals the reality of our actions.
Remember what people were

saying five minutes ago
Five minutes ago, hardly anybody was talking about Suleimani. Now they
all speak as if he was Public Enemy #1. Remember how much you hated
that guy? Remember how much damage he did? No, I do not remember,
because people like Ben Shapiro only just discovered their hatred for
Suleimani once they had to justify his murder.
During the buildup to a war there is a constant effort to make you
forget what things were like a few minutes ago. Before World War I,
Americans lived relatively harmoniously with Germans in their midst.
The same thing with Japanese people before World War II. Then,
immediately, they began to hate and fear people who had recently been
their neighbors.
Let us say Iran responds to this extrajudicial murder with a
colossal act of violent reprisal, after the killing unifies the country around
a demand for vengeance. They kill a high-ranking American official, or
wage an attack that kills our civilians. Perhaps it will attack some of the
soldiers that are now being moved into the Middle East. The Trump
administration will then want you to forget that it promised this
assassination was to “stop a war.” It will then want you to focus solely on
Iran’s most recent act, to see that as the initial aggression. If the attack is
particularly bad, with family members of victims crying on TV and
begging for vengeance, you will be told to look into the face of Iranian
evil, and those of us who are anti-war will be branded as not caring about
the victims. Nobody wants you to remember the history of U.S./Iran
relations, the civilians we killed of theirs or the time we destabilized their
whole country and got rid of its democracy. They want you to have a
two-second memory, to become a blind and unthinking patriot whose
sole thought is the avenging of American blood. Resisting propaganda
requires having a memory, looking back on how things were before and
not accepting war as the “new normal.”
Listen to the Chomsky on your

shoulder.
“It is perfectly insane to suggest the U.S. was the aggressor here.” — Ben
Shapiro
They are going to try to convince you that you are insane for
asking questions, or for not accepting what the government tells you.
They will put you in topsy-turvy land, where thinking that assassinating
foreign officials is “aggression” is not just wrong, but sheer madness. You
will have to try your best to remember what things are, because it is not
easy, when everyone says the emperor has clothes, or that Line A is longer
than Line B, or that shocking people to death is fine, to have confidence
in your independent judgment.
This is why I keep a little imaginary Noam Chomsky sitting on my
shoulder at all times. Chomsky helps keep me sane, by cutting through
lies and euphemisms and showing things as they really are. I recommend
reading his books, especially during times of war. He never swallowed
Johnson’s nonsense about Vietnam or Bush’s nonsense about Iraq. And of
course they called him insane, anti-American, terrorist-loving, anti-
Semitic, blah blah blah.
What I really mean here though is: Listen to the dissidents. They
will not appear on television. They will be smeared and treated as
lunatics. But you need them if you are going to be able to resist the
absolute barrage of misinformation, or to hear yourself think over the
pounding war drums. Times of War Fever can be wearying, because there
is just so much aggression against dissent that your resistance wears
down. This is why a community is so necessary. You may watch people
who previously seemed reasonable develop a pathological bloodlust
(mild-mannered moderate types like Thomas Friedman and Brian
Williams going suck on our missiles). Find the people who see clearly and
stick close to them.
Someday peace will prevail.
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Nathan J. Robinson
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How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda ❧ Current Affairs 1/11/20, 10:49

Things are not true because a

plenty of journalists and opposition party politicians do not understand

“[Suleimani] assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of

It is possible, given these tweets, to publish the headline:

Do not be bullied into accepting

I do not believe killing other countries’ generals during peacetime is

acceptable. —> So you believe terrorists should be allowed to operate

I remember all this bullshit from my high school years. Opposing

Scrutinize the arguments

Here’s Mike Pence again:

“[Suleimani] provided advanced deadly explosively formed

I am going to say something that is going to sound controversial if

The article goes on to discuss whether this case is outweighed by

Keep the focus on what matters

country is even permitted to make. “Blunder” essentially assumes that we

“Barack Obama routinely droned terrorists abroad—including

In order for this to have any bearing on anything, you have to be

Consider three statements:

“The top priority of a Commander-in-Chief must be to protect

“Suleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands,

These are statements made by Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren,

Imagine how everything would

How To Dissect Pro-War Propaganda

Watch out for euphemisms

“It was not an assassination.” — Noah Rothman, conservative

“That’s an outrageous thing to say. Nobody that I know of would

Our access to much of the world is through language alone. We

Remember what people were

Listen to the Chomsky on your

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to our magnificent

MORE FROM NATHAN J. ROBINSON

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