Seen from the Kremlin, the invasion of Ukraine is a “denazification”, and the war a “liberation front”. In defiance of reality, Russian propaganda even reaches our Western democracies. For L’Express, the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, professor at the University of Turin and author of Post-truth and other enigmas (PUF, 2019), paints the portrait of an era in which accuracy and truth find it difficult to make their way between social networks and television sets.
Before Vladimir Putin, the United States had also disguised the truth to justify the second war in Iraq. Can a war only be fought by twisting reality?
Maurizio Ferraris I think so. Globalization, education and the growing interconnectedness between peoples have meant that the arguments to justify war no longer include the idea that the enemies are barbarians. Even if they often come close, but with ideological connotations – “communists” in the past, “Nazis” in the Ukrainian case. So you need a casus belli, like a vial “proving” the existence of weapons of mass destruction or the persecution of Russian minorities today…
Is this war symptomatic of our anchoring in the era of post-truth, that is to say a period where personal opinion, ideology, emotion, belief prevail over reality facts ?
The first victim of war has always been the truth. The conflict in Ukraine is no exception: when Hitler invaded Poland, he said it was to react to a Polish provocation. As for the use of emotion to justify war, it is not new, since war mobilizes the oldest and most emotional part of our brain. Think of Goebbels’ famous speech at the Berlin Sports Palace in February 1943, after the Battle of Stalingrad. Goebbels asked the crowd: “Do you want total war? A war more terrible than all the others?”, and the enthusiastic crowd shouted “Yes! Yes!” In the evening, Goebbels noted in his diary that it was pure delirium on the part of the crowd, and that if he had asked the spectators to jump from a skyscraper, they would have done so. .
Nevertheless, the post-truth effect is particularly felt in this war because of a surplus of conspiracy, as during the Covid pandemic. Yesterday’s anti-vaccines are today’s pro-Putins. It is the paradoxical and negative effect of a process of progressive empowerment of humanity, which is in itself very positive. There was a time when a humanity much less educated and critical than today would have obeyed medical and political authority by saying “they know, I don’t know”. Now, everyone is convinced that they know better, better than the others, and above all better than the authorities, who anyway have every interest in hiding the truth…
“An intellectual will try to make distinctions and will immediately be classified as ‘for’ or ‘against'”
Has choosing a side become more important than accuracy?
In war, as in any conflict – a quarrel, a divorce – the taking of a position is the only thing that matters; understanding will come later, if it ever comes, in historical reconstruction. That’s why I don’t think it’s a good idea for an intellectual to go on television: he will try to make distinctions and will immediately be classified as “for” or “against”. After all, the position of Bertrand Russell – a pacifist during the First World War who had been imprisoned – was much more comfortable. He accepted it and spent a few months studying and writing in peace. He was able to express his pacifist ideas, and his personal conviction, without anyone being able to reproach him for seeking media exposure.
Many experts have expressed reservations about the mental health of Vladimir Putin – as for bin Laden or Gaddafi – in an attempt to explain his decisions. By “psychiatrizing” Vladimir Putin, aren’t we participating in analyzing his project from the angle of emotion and not of reason?
Sartre said “hell is other people”. I would say “the madman is the other”. It’s always the other: the one we don’t understand. I have no idea of Putin’s intentions and motives, and I think I am acting in good faith. Of course, before social media, the bars were full of people ready to say that Hitler, Churchill, or Stalin were crazy, but it didn’t come out of the bars and the next day everyone had forgotten about it. Now, however, those discussions are making the rounds on social media and ending up on prime-time television.
On the tails side, social networks are full of “alternative truths” about this conflict. However, false information circulates faster on the Web than the truth according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But on the face side, hackers like Anonymous hack Russian television and broadcast images of the war in Ukraine to restore the “truth”. Would you say that social networks are a tool or an enemy of the truth in times of war?
It amazes me that scientists need to do research to find out that lies are more popular than the truth. I also suggest that they do some research on whether it’s better to be happy or unhappy. Social networks are neutral, in the sense that they amplify the rumours, noises, falsehoods that are present in every war. Cyberweapons in this war, and their novelty, is something else. The fact that soldiers often use mobile phones, thus exposing themselves more easily to enemy fire; the fact that other soldiers take the mobile phones of civilians to call home… When it is possible to analyze the big data resulting from the geolocation of combatants during the war in Ukraine, we will for the first time have a truthful description of what happened on the battlefield – something we didn’t have in Waterloo or Kuwait where we had to rely on what was reported to us. But keep in mind that this represents thousands of pieces of information at any given time. This will undoubtedly be useful for a future historian, but not for the witness or the journalist of today for whom it greatly complicates things.
Does this mean that the truth can only emerge a posteriori, through the work of historians for example? Would we be doomed to always lag behind in our appreciation of war…
Absolutely. When Pierre Bézoukhov, the hero of War and peace [NDLR : roman de Léon Tolstoï] finds himself in the heart of the battle of Borodino, he does not understand what is really happening. This is not surprising: it is from a delimited observation site, with observation conditions that are not optimal since it is a battlefield. Moreover, at the moment, one is more interested in the idea of saving one’s life than in knowing the truth. Believing that one is better placed to know the truth by the simple fact of one’s presence on the spot is illusory. It is this illusion that gives the impression that a live televised war is better known than a war depicted in the 19th century.
To prevent the proliferation of false information and Russian propaganda, the European Commission has decided to ban certain media, including Russia Today and Sputnik. Is this, in your opinion, the right way to fight against fake news and post-truth?
It would probably be better to leave the information completely free, precisely to remove the arguments from the conspirators. The conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, will continue to complain about the imposition of a single-mindedness and define themselves as outcasts, while their presence on television shows that there is no single-mindedness at all. And probably not even a thought.
Is this ban a sign that our democracies no longer have the means to fight against post-truth with arguments?
A war is not the domain of arguments, and this is also true for democracies. But in times of war, it is true that democracy is structurally weaker than autocracies – since democracy has to be measured with public opinion, elections, and protests when soldiers die.
On the other hand, even autocracies are no longer what they used to be: Vladimir Putin’s regime is also experiencing difficulties that Stalin never experienced. He could lose thousands of men in a battle without any public opinion reproaching him. Where Russian losses are already a problem for Putin, just as American losses had been in Vietnam.