News from Nowhere: Truth and Reconciliation

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Relativism dictates that truth is subjective. Empirical science supports this counterintuitive view. Psychologists and criminologists tell us that witnesses can give radically differing accounts of the same event. Something as simple as a conversation between two people will often result in divergent – and sometimes irreconcilable – recollections from the two parties involved.

This phenomenon is extraordinarily impactful when written large upon the geopolitical stage. It is further intensified by what the nineteenth-century military analyst Carl von Clausewitz famously depicted as the fog of war. (Famously but apocryphally. As in the cases of many well-known quotations, our cultural memory has diverged somewhat from his actual words.) 

We experienced this phenomenon in reports and perceptions of the invasions of Afghanistan and the Iraq War; we have seen it repeated for decades across the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East; and we are seeing it again today in our representations of, and responses to, the ongoing conflict in eastern Europe.

Even the most responsible news organisations are inevitably caught up in an ideological view of the world. This is not necessarily a conscious process. It takes place at the level of discourse itself.

Governments that we don’t like, for example, get called ‘regimes’. Political movements which employ violent force are, when we oppose their objectives, labelled ‘terrorists’. Back home, members of a disruptive socioeconomic underclass may be dubbed ‘yobs’ or ‘louts’ or simply ‘trash’.

Our discourses apply negative terms to those elements disapproved by the dominant structures of power. Even the most leftist newspaper may, for instance, report that striking unions have rejected a management pay offer and demanded a more generous settlement, rather than – for example – that, in an industrial dispute, workers have offered to return to work in return for a particular pay increase but that their bosses have rejected that offer and demanded they go back for less. The conventions of reporting require that managers offer, while labour activists strike, demand and reject. 

Every language is, in itself, ideologically loaded. English, like many languages, emphasizes and underpins white male hegemony. The word ‘black’, for example, literally denigrates its subjects: it blackmails, blacklists and blackens their names. It is also only recently that the word ‘man’ stopped being used in common parlance as the generic term for a human being. Men’s experience and status was thus prioritized as standard and normative. Our discourse affects the ways in which we see everything.

So, how might this affect how we perceive the biggest news stories of the day? 

Please permit me, for a moment, to lapse into a purely and overtly subjective perspective. Speaking personally, I’d say I do not generally condone armed conflict of any kind. I guess many people would say the same. And yet I find that I invariably tend to favour the forces of resistance against what I see as the oppressors, instigators, or aggressors in such conflicts. Advocates of progressive politics tend to side with the weaker party, the so-called underdog, although shifting perceptions, representations and alliances mean that it is not always as easy as it might seem to identify who this might be.

My positions on these things are clearly influenced by the public and media discourses in which I am immersed. Yet I also find that these perspectives can change, and that new information and arguments can flip my moral compass.

There were, for example, in 2003 those in Europe and North America who sincerely believed that the invasion of Iraq was a justifiable, defensive, and righteous action. Most of those now just as sincerely believe the opposite. 

The fact that I may profoundly disagree with your views in relation to a host of conflicts, disputes, tensions, and controversies across the world should not mean that I have closed my mind to the possibility that I may be wrong and that you may be right (or vice versa) nor to the more likely scenario that the truth – by which I mean the potential for resolution – lies somewhere in between our differing positions. 

Reconciliation is only possible when we recognise that, though we must always strive to identify concrete and objective facts, there may in the end be no such thing on this earth as absolute truth. It requires an understanding that there is not a single truth but there are ranges and shades of truths. It relies upon compromise. 

Few would deny that, when a tiger is wounded and cornered, it is rarely a good idea to surround it and gang up on it, or to throw taunts, threats, demands and insults at it. Yet the actions of the major players in the arenas of geopolitics rarely demonstrate so much common sense. 

There is an adage, often applied to disputes taking place on social media, called Godwin’s Law, named after the American author Mike Godwin. It states that the longer an online discussion continues, the higher the probability grows that a comparison to Nazism will occur. In these circumstances, invocations of Adolf Hitler tend to represent the last-ditch flourishes of frustrated arguments. Mutual name-calling merely exacerbates online tensions. If your enemy claims that you’re a Fascist, it rarely helps if you retaliate in similar terms. To accuse each other of staging reconstructions of the Third Reich will seldom de-escalate tensions. It is especially unwise when it turns out there may be zealots with extreme right-wing sympathies on one’s own side.

It does not promote the processes of conflict resolution to declare that those who take the opposing side are traitors who will eventually be punished, either in this world or in the next. Suggesting that future relations with one’s opponents have become impossible, that one’s opponents are making fools of themselves, that they are monstrous cowards, that they lead illegitimate or criminal administrations, or that their grips on power and reality have grown rather tenuous, may similarly play well to home audiences, but these tactics are hardly designed to bolster the progress of diplomatic solutions. 

(We columnists may sometimes have fun experimenting with such hyperbolic rabble-rousing sentiments – I fear I do – but we should perhaps set better examples of reasonable and civil conduct to those we expect to act as the stateswomen and statesmen of the world.)

Humiliation and demonisation do not offer the enemy ways to graciously exit the fray. There is nothing attractive in being offered only the prospect of total defeat with no possibility of the kind of negotiated settlement that might underpin a sustainable exit strategy. Such bullish interventions can, as BBC diplomatic correspondent James Landale recently observed, prove counterproductive, serving only to make long-term political agreements even harder to achieve.

Third-party diplomatic intrusions can prove particularly disastrous if they fail to take the higher ground and seek instead to play to their home crowds. Headstrong nationalistic and confrontational approaches may succeed at the polling stations and on the parade grounds. They may distract electorates and parliaments from local political controversies and economic crises. But they do nothing to make the world a safer place.

Think back to 2017, when the planet was once more on the brink of war. Donald Trump’s childish jibes did not, despite his claims, eventually force North Korea to the negotiating table. Kim Jong-un simply took advantage of the American President’s vanity to secure the domestic and international PR prizes of a pair of high-profile summits, media spectacles which brought the two nations no closer to the possibility of an enduring peace. The president’s hostile posturing had only made the situation worse.

Earlier this month, the multi-billionaire Elon Musk announced that, if he is successful in his aggressive bid to buy and restructure Twitter, he will reverse Mr. Trump’s indefinite ban from the platform. That move would hardly be calculated to lower geopolitical tensions in a world whose inflammatory rhetoric has pretty much hit fever pitch. Violence begets violence, and history’s heroes are not those who perpetuate its vicious cycles but are those rare and outstanding individuals who somehow manage to transcend and overturn them.

Yet, as we continue to struggle against each other, we find ourselves sleepwalking into even greater existential catastrophes – the threat of climate change, of course, and the more immediate danger of a calamitous resurgence in Covid-19. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization raised its estimate of the pandemic’s death toll to nearly 15 million souls. The former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown – who serves as a WHO ambassador for health finance – warned that the complacency of western nations (and specifically their failure to fund global vaccination campaigns) was paving the way for further devastating waves and strains of coronavirus.

The urgency of the need for the resolution of international conflicts has never been greater. Our world has bigger battles to fight. Yet progress towards peace is only possible when one side takes the moral high ground and admits that the price of the alternative path is too appalling to continue to countenance. 

It is well past time that all parties come together to build sufficient mutual respect, empathy and understanding to sweep aside our cataclysmic antagonisms. This is the one necessary truth which we might all usefully acknowledge.

In this context, it is, of course, essential that, if we believe that these precepts, principles, and responsibilities apply only to our enemies, then we must recognise that they also apply to us. And, although this is hard and painful to accept, I must concede that I am not qualified to judge, and that my judgment would not, in the end, do any lasting good.