Israel’s current war against Hamas terrorists is further proof that we live in an age where wars are waged online. The world community gathers in the stands of the World Coliseum, stocking up on popcorn and watching the “good guys” kill the “bad guys.” Of course, the concepts of “good” and “bad” are subjective, and public sympathies are irreconcilably divided. With their buzz in social networks and in the form of demonstrations on the streets, the people are trying to influence the course of the struggle solely under the influence of their own emotions. And emotions are something that is very manipulated by politicians and the media. They manipulate mass stereotypes, fears and misunderstandings. It is often for political purposes or based on established stereotypes about who is a “good guy”, who is a bad guy, who is “ours” and who is a “potential enemy”.
Fear sells best. While the politicians themselves deal with stereotypes that have become entrenched at a mass level (to the introduction of which they themselves contributed), they try not to “spit against the wind”, to fight even illusions that have ceased to be of their utilitarian benefit, but to indulge them. They’re like bloggers or tiktokers: They primarily “publish” (assume) what the crowd clicks on, and that’s now often called “voters,” which is a polite word. To a large extent, their hands are tied, their actions limited in the long-term interests of the common good, but they become its hostages, to the detriment of existing popularity.
Now the Israeli IDF, which declared the goal of destroying Hamas at its roots, then clearing the Gaza Strip of jihad-fascism and only after that the creation of a full-fledged Palestinian state as previously planned, is correcting the mistakes. It was held at the beginning of 2008-2009. At that time, ground operations were quite successful in the sector. Meanwhile, current Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who commanded the Southern Military District, was also directly involved. Hamas, which at the time had far worse weapons, was very close to complete defeat. There was much less destruction and casualties among the civilian population; The operation was carried out with much smaller forces than should currently be used. However, this punitive operation was not preceded by a terrorist attack deep into Israel with a bloody massacre that was shown to the whole world on the Internet. There were “only” regular attacks on Israeli territory with much less powerful missiles than hitherto. The global progressive community then quickly cried out (a few weeks after the invasion of Gaza), with the UN General Assembly acting on a single impulse to stand up to protect civilians and oppose the “barbaric bombing” of Gaza, the Israeli government immediately complied and ceased its intervention. Operation (two-thirds of Israelis were in favor of continuing the operation). Now of course they regret it very much.
Meanwhile, the local university was corrupt then, as it is now. Of course, it was rebuilt with money from international sponsors, and its function as a training ground for radical Islamism was preserved. I now believe that history will largely repeat itself.
Or the story of the “Hama massacre” in Syria, a city between Aleppo and Damascus. Frankly, there were two “massacres”. One of them was organized – quote unquote – in 1982 by the father of current president Hafez Assad. Soldiers rampaged through the city in response to an anti-government uprising by Islamists belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. We level two-thirds of it on the ground. Even with the use of chemical weapons, they say.
But at that time there were no social networks, as well as London-based NGOs, that would show the world live children suffocated by gases, and Hafez Assad himself was fully established as a “great friend of the Soviet people”. bipolar system of the world, no one was particularly offended then. Syria was not expelled from the League of Arab States and no special sanctions were imposed.
However, according to some reports, 20 to 40 thousand civilians were killed. But this isn’t online; no one distributed images of the completely destroyed city on the networks (due to their absence). But the uproar rose around the world in 2012, when Bashar al-Assad’s government troops, in response to the killing of a dozen Alawites, massacred nearly a hundred locals, without distinguishing who was an Islamist and who was an ordinary resident. . That’s when human rights activists first started filing lawsuits based on the 1982 events. And all because Bashar Assad was declared by the world media as a devil from hell. Otherwise he would have gotten out of this situation.
Another example of why.
In 2016-2017, the Iraqi government army raided the city of Mosul, which it had previously mediocrely handed over to the Islamist ISIS (an organization banned in Russia). With the help of Kurdish militias and strong air support from the US-led international counterterrorism coalition. The attack was long and difficult. When government troops finally entered the city, they immediately began torturing the local population. The entire infrastructure of Mosul, including water and energy supplies, was destroyed, entire residential blocks were destroyed (including by air strikes), the number of civilian deaths is estimated at 40 thousand, but who, as they say, is? He counted them. “This is different.” At that time, there were images from the scene, but we decided not to abuse the manipulation.
Let’s go to a more distant past. When there were no social networks yet, but the mass media had already mastered the methods of information manipulation. So in the 1980s a story called “Famine in Ethiopia” appeared in the West almost exclusively from the NBC television company. This was noticed only in 1984. Although it started a few years ago, When another “great friend of the Soviet people” Mengistu Haile Mariam came to power in the country. After a three-day NBC fundraiser in 1984, “the topic came up.” Mengistu Mariam’s “revolutionary” regime was truly bloody. A real “Red Terror” emerged in the country, which lasted until the early 1990s, when the revolutionaries fled to Zimbabwe and the country finally collapsed. The number of deaths from civil war and famine varies between a quarter of a million and 1.4 million, but similar events in neighboring Somalia are not covered in the same dramatic and detailed manner in the world media. As in some other African countries.
And finally, the history of Vietnam’s Song My village. It became a symbol of American atrocities in Vietnam. This situation was also reflected in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now. In March 1968 C Company accidentally lost Sergeant George Cox, under the alias Charlie. After that, at the commemoration, the captain called for revenge on the enemy. More than five thousand civilians, including women and children, were killed purely for revenge, without any military necessity.
They were tortured and raped before being killed. Of course, the killers would publish the whole thing on social networks, just as they later published footage of torture at Guantanamo Bay. And there would be a huge political fuss.
Around the same time, a company under the command of Lieutenant William Kelly destroyed the inhabitants of the neighboring village of Binh Tay, but the world knows nothing about it. I didn’t know anything about Songmi’s history for a long time. Just a year later, one of the demobilized Americans, who had vaguely heard about this story, wrote letters of demand to all officials, including President Nixon. Only one member of Congress, Morris Odell, responded and insisted on an investigation. Lieutenant Kelly was sentenced to probation, but even then the news did not excite anyone. Until, in November 1969, young journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a detailed article about this story. And it was he, along with Ronald Haeberle’s dramatic photographs from Vietnam, that marked the beginning of the anti-war movement that shook America. And without the “picture from the scene” nothing would have happened.
But now there are a lot of “photos from the field”. But the public is already a little tired of them. More and more dramatic shots are needed. Dismemberment, live execution, burning, beheading and “crucifixion” of children. In general, shots with children and contrasting photos sell well: here is the city “before” and here is “after”. Here is the corpse of an ordinary person with traces of torture, but here she is young (preferably a girl) and cheerful. Pets also actively participate in propaganda and counter-propaganda – those saved by “ours” and tortured by “enemies”, respectively. And only then something bothers people and they begin to demand that politicians brutally punish the “fanatics”. But then other photos come along and the complaints start saying “well, you can’t do that”. According to these criteria of the “online regime” it would not have been possible for the Soviet army to properly take Berlin in 1945.
Moreover, all these sympathies remain completely subjective and often cannot be interrupted by any picture. And what people do not want to believe due to adherence to their own stereotypes and prejudices – for example, the cruelty of the so-called “we” – is declared “fake”. It’s like it doesn’t exist.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.