A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Tagged: propaganda

International / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Putin’s Use and Abuse of History as a Political Weapon

The Invitation of the Varangians: Rurik and his brothers arrive in Staraya Ladoga. Painting by the Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a guest post by Professor Cynthia R Nielsen (University of Dallas), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

To draw upon different strands of history for the purpose of creating, strengthening, or re-imagining a national narrative is not in itself problematic and, in fact, is common to most, if not all, states. Yet when one’s historically informed (or de-formed) narrative is transformed into a History that cannot be contested or challenged and is used to colonize, exploit, and justify waging aggressive and unjust wars on other sovereign states—or as Vladimir Putin did with Chechnya, autonomous territories within one’s own borders—one’s Historical narrative becomes a propagandistic weapon.

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Democracy / General

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Propagandists, Degrees of Reliability, and Epistemic Nihilism

Reliability is a quality that comes in degrees. For example, a bus that always arrives exactly on time is highly reliable. A bus that often but not always arrives on time is somewhat reliable. A bus that rarely arrives on time is unreliable. People living in areas with public transit commonly discuss which among the less-than-perfectly-reliable modes of transport available are more or less reliable. In doing so, these people show they understand that reliability comes in degrees. They readily acknowledge that some imperfect modes of transport are more reliable than others.

Propagandists prefer their audiences ignore this level of nuance when assessing sources of information. A propagandist prefers that you perceive the propagandist as totally reliable while perceiving all other sources of information as totally unreliable. If this cannot be achieved, the propagandist would prefer that you view all sources as completely unreliable. At least then your decisions about whose claims to trust will rest on grounds other than the reliability of the source.  (more…)