Open Thread

a good-looking, smooth-talking former democrat has a new book out – in an interview with cbn she says some very sensible things, and also expresses sentiments that will appeal to those she hopes will see her as a leader

https://www2.cbn.com/news/politics/love-country-tulsi-gabbard-free-democrat-party-she-no-longer-recognizes

could she be the liberatory political figure people yearn for?

words that rhyme with hope: cope rope dope soap nope

see also John Lennon song titled “just gimme some truth”

ISW: “ISW continues to assess that the threat of nuclear escalation is a core aspect of Russia’s ability to manipulate foreign decision-makers and is highly unlikely to result in actual nuclear escalation due to nuclear and conventional deterrence.”

The continued contest of narratives over the Ukraine War continues to fascinate me, rather like watching a train wreck unfolding: the locomotive sounding its horns as it hurtles down the track toward the bus stalled athwart the road crossing.

I admit my attention is focused on the meta-issues regarding narrative itself. If narrative drives politics, what drives narrative? And, what control do humans have over narrative? Which is to say, what control do we humans have over ourselves?

ISW, for those asleep under a rock, is the Uber-Neocon Kagan family’s enterprise, funded by the Military-Industrial Complex to promote and continue the U.S. policy of perpetual war, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. Victoria Nuland, a Kagan by marriage, shepherded U.S. Ukraine policy as a career State Department official.

In a way, narrative frosts the policy cake we, the people, are fed and to which we uncomprehendingly consent, our consent manufactured by institutions like ISW and the State Department, Yale University, the Brookings Institution (all of which Nuland has infected during her long, malevolent career), but I digress.

My topic is, what control do we humans, individually or collectively, have over Narrative. Political debate and discourse, I submit, are contests over narrative, that is, over which narrative will prevail in giving a meaning to behavior or events.

In a trial at law, a jury may vote on whether a homicide was murder and whether a specific individual is guilty (a meaning) of that murder, after lawyers and a judge have fought over what facts in evidence the jury may consider and what the jury may be taught are prevailing legal principles applying to such a case. I give this example to remind you that in some circumstances we expect structured thinking to allow groups of people to deliberate together and choose to adopt a narrative as, in some sense, “true” or “just” or “wise”. Choosing or endorsing a narrative is a judgment of facts, applying principles of discrimination regarding what is credible and what is moral or prudent.

The apparent free-for-all of broadcast public discourse over national or international issues can also be considered as a contest over narrative and therefore meaning. It is not structured formally in the way litigation is. But narrative is used in professionally crafted propaganda to motivate and guide collective “thinking” and obtain consent to state policy in matters of war and peace. Crafting such propaganda is what ISW does — quite successfully, as a large portion of western news reports on the progress of the Ukraine War are based on and sourced from ISW’s assessments.

The deeper puzzlement to me in this process of endless talk and argument is, when do we humans choose the policy we will justify with a narrative story. Is it “turtles all the way down”? That is, an endless regress of stories? That is what I mean by looking for the social or intellectual controls on narrative. Where are the brakes on that on-rushing locomotive? Are there any?

With regard to the Ukraine War, a common refrain has turned on the expectation that the contest of arms would somehow settle the issue. Or some issue at least. The Russophiles at the beginning of the February 2022 invasion thought Russian arms would prevail in short order, the abundant evidence of shortcomings in Russian numbers, logistics and capabilities notwithstanding. Many still think Russia is moving slowly but inexorably toward an endgame where it will dictate terms. The Europeans were quick to turn on the cultural Russia-hate, and imposing sanctions in the expectation that Russia’s economy — the proverbial gas station with nukes — would collapse.

It troubles me that there seems to have been so little concern among the quick-take artists and professional tellers of tales with establishing facts and letting facts constrain the choice of narratives.

Narratives unconstrained by fact are apparently a result desired by most state actors. Few wars have gone forward without extensive censorship, but the Ukraine War is an information black hole, lit only by obscure Telegram channels and daily reports from the opposing Ministries of Defense, neither of which usually acknowledge anything they could possibly know from their own sources, such as their own losses or casualties. And, of course, the ISW can claim a role for itself, compiling reports from Telegram to give the illusion of integrity to their activity fomenting war as a source of business opportunity.

We do not know — that is, we are not allowed to know for certain — that the U.S. sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines connecting Russia to Germany. That supposedly not-knowing is a hugely important constraint on the contest of narratives. Think about how it protects the flank of those contending that NATO is not threatening Russia.

I am old enough to remember both Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. Both of those political events, momentous really, turned on calling “bullshit” on narratives pushed hard by powerful actors. Not everyone was entirely happy about having to change their minds and resentment would figure subsequently in politics. I do not remember anyone paying a political price for lying about WMD in Iraq. Iran-Contra was a scandal in the Reagan Administration because people generally could recognize how stupid the secret policy pursued illegally was, but it was a near-thing, that recognition of stupid — I remember open discussions in University forums where many students just could not grasp the fundamental stupidity at the core of a scheme to make enemies overpay for weapons in order to finance a gang of murderous thugs.

Trump, bless his black heart, took out Jeb Bush by pointing out that brother Georgie didn’t exactly “keep us safe”. Trump was also guilty of pointing out that U.S. policy was largely responsible for “creating” ISIS and its brief reign of terror in Iraq that Obama took so much credit for extinguishing. Trump has also claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours” by negotiating with Putin seriously. (OK, I substituted “seriously” for something more blustery and Trumpy). I mention Trump not to endorse him, but to illustrate how bizarrely marginalized rational, fact-based dissent from the prevailing narratives of U.S. foreign policy have become.

The foundation of the Ukraine War was a blindly determined effort by the U.S. and its allies in the E.U. and NATO to aggressively press Russia economically and geopolitically past the point of provoking war. But, the politics of it now is stuck in the mud of narrative tropes of Chamberlain at Munich and defending a “rules-based international order” that is anything but. We are on a runaway freight train headed to nuclear war with no way to get off this narrative track.

Why?

A good first step in guiding more people to thinking about the role of “narrative” in individual, little group, big group and overall collective thinking is to introduce them to the word “narrative”. And then introduce them to what the word “narrative” means in this context.

And then maybe even introduce them to concepts like “controlling the narrative”, ” narrative design engineering”, “battle of the network narratives”, etc.

Then maybe some of those people will be ready to “hack their own narratives” etc.

But they can’t do any of that till they know what a “narrative” is. And to know that, they firstest of allest need to know that the word “narrative” itself actually exists as a word.

Why?

Well, some of the things this writer has to say in this post suggest answers to that question.

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-evils-of-professionalism

“Our present rulers are psychologically unfitted to deal with difficult and intractable problems, because nothing in their life has prepared them for doing so. … it’s that they have never really had to struggle for anything.”

“And then … They find that somebody is telling [them] they can’t have something they want, like Ukraine. The result is an epic temper tantrum, the anger and revolt of the privileged who have never been denied anything before”

There’s much more in the post, which is nuanced and thoughtful.

I worked a long, nauseatingly unpleasant decade in local government. The things the blogger in this post lays out line up with my own dreadful experience working for the state. The offensive nonsense I see and hear from our rulers at the national level make me surmise that the astonishing dysfunction I reluctantly witnessed in state government goes all the way to the top at the federal level.

bruce wilder, what do you mean by “aggressively pressing Russia economically… past the point of provoking war”? There were the sanctions, but escalating the conflict in Ukraine could never have done anything to fix that, nor surely was it expected to. Or do you mean the particular pressure on Crimea?

Also, while I’d agree the US block did a lot to provoke war generally, I’m not sure that we had to take the bait. Ultimately that was the Russian government’s call. One might argue that it was a necessary preemptive attack; honestly, I don’t know either way. I don’t think some unbearable pressure forced it, though. The simple possibility of Ukraine attacking the People’s Republics first, in February 2022 or at some other point, seems like the likeliest reason to me. But that, in my view, has less to do with geopolitics and more with prestige (letting the enemy take out a sympathetic ally would not have been unendurable, but would’ve cost the government a lot nonetheless).

politico.com reports:

Farage was challenged on a social media post he sent as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which said the conflict “was a consequence of EU and NATO expansion.”
Asked whether he stood by those views Friday, Farage said he had been warning for decades about the increasing scope of both the military alliance and the EU.
“We have provoked this war,” Farage said. “Of course, it’s his [Putin’s] fault. He’s used what we’ve done.”
His comments have sparked a wave of criticism aside from Sunak and Starmer, including from Labour defense spokesman John Healey, who said the comments “reveal the true face of Nigel Farage: a Putin apologist who should never be trusted with our nation’s security.”

I do not know that I can add anything by highlighting any of the curiosities in this political news report: that this is Farage, the political gadfly of the UK right, who is being challenged by the unanimity of Sunak and Starmer is remarkable enough on its face.

@ Daniil Adamov

From Putin’s point of view, it must have felt like a desperate gamble taken as a last resort, because he had lost every previous round of struggle since at least 2007, when he made plain his concerns about European security at Munich. The “middle-income trap” in which Russia had been kept would have been a big part of his frustration, since he has focused his 24 years in power on rebuilding the Russian economy. Nordstream is not a sideshow for either side, but right at the core of what is being fought over.

Again from Putin’s point of view, his regime *is* the Russian state and the threat to overthrow or undermine his regime is an existential threat to Russia on a par with the situation in the 1930’s.

It does not get much attention in the West, but Russia’s de-militarization and creating the domestic conditions for reversing that course had to play a part in Putin’s calculations. Putin had tried to focus his very limited allocation of resources to the military to the development of wonder weapons and to leverage Wagner and Chechnya and Cossack militia and the like, but he knew first-hand the parlous state of the Navy and the limited capabilities applied in Syria.

Political sentiments in Russia have been a factor as well. The steady exodus of young professionals to the West was a political problem as well as an economic one that he calculated that he could not stem without a galvanizing event.

The extreme hostility shown all things Russian since 2022 must have shifted opinion inside Russia more decisively than he could have hoped. It would be interesting to know more about the new exile communities abroad.

@dc:

A good first step in guiding more people to thinking about the role of “narrative” in individual, little group, big group and overall collective thinking is to introduce them to the word “narrative”.

In the early days of the blogosphere, when so much of the emergent conversation was about “narratives” in one form or another, there were a number of writers with great insight. The early Digby at Hullabaloo was great on the deep psychology driven by subliminal language and meme choices. Atrios of Eschaton had a cutting cynicism that cut thru a lot of nonsense. Somerby of the Daily Howler and his critiques of mainstream media “scripts”. Billmon, the immortal barfly! Even DailyKos had things to say about campaign messaging and the role of political consultants that were interesting.

It all went flat as so many people signed up for Red v Blue team sports and gaslighting. No one seemed to care about Blair and Cheney’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. When Obama greenlit Russiagate, it was very hard to get many people to exercise any skepticism. Red v Blue team sports include having very long laundry lists of what the Other Side believes that simply isn’t factually true.

Censorship and lying and bullying and propaganda are tried and true tools of power with the volume on the propaganda knob turned past 11 by the communication revolution. But, I don’t have much faith in Caitlin Johnstone’s campaign to free us from the Matrix.

It occurs to me that a lot of people actually know what “narrative” is. But they use the word “storyline” for it.

So maybe intellectual narrative-analysts should change their word to storyline and become intellectual storyline-analysts.