The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley
They say the first casualty of war is the truth. The problem I have with this hoary old chestnut is that it makes it sound like an accident. It never is.
The first news we heard of the Hamas massacre of 7th October was that forty babies had been beheaded in the attack. At least one other baby had apparently been roasted alive in an oven.
Joe Biden was advised by his staff not to mention the beheaded babies in his statement of 10th October because they were still unverified. As of 2nd December they remain unverified.
He went ahead anyway.
Why?
Why mention them at all when the verifiable realities of the horror and cruelty of the Hamas massacre had been documented on camera for all the world to see and sicken?
Then we were told that Israel had been “surprised” by the attack. Several sources, including the BBC, have now confirmed the Israelis knew every detail of Hamas’s massacre plan many months in advance of 7th October.
This is from the New York Times of two days ago, on 30th November:
Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html#:~:text=Israeli%20officials%20obtained%20Hamas's%20battle,for%20Hamas%20to%20carry%20out.
Why didn’t they react if they saw it coming?
Why?
Because they thought it was aspirational?
The reason I haven’t written a new post for several weeks is that I’m as lost as most people are, listening in disbelief to everything I hear, questioning the veracity of everything I read on every platform — authoritative, speculative and downright fabulous.
I am constantly reminded of what Gary Kasparov said in 2009:
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
How to have a balanced view when the globe is tilting on this axis of hate? How to be reasonable when reason has suffocated to death from a lack of truth’s oxygen? How to be fair when fairness is measured in disproportions of cruelty seen and unseen, felt and unfelt, imagined and unimaginable; in estimated body counts of women and children; in how many Palestinian deaths it takes to pay for a single Israeli one? Or vice-versa?
You would have a very suspicious mind to believe they invented the baby story. You would have to be a pathologically disturbed anti-Zionist to believe they allowed the attack to happen in an unimaginably cynical attempt to turn back the tide of anti-Netanyahu sentiment that only a month ago was crowding the streets of Tel Aviv with the same demographic of Israelis who were massacred at the music festival near kibbutz Re'im.
And you would have to be even more troubled to imagine that the film Golda was made long in advance to excuse Netanyahu for not heeding the warnings — to assure us, in other words, that it was an intelligence failure rather than an intelligent failure.
These reckless speculations aren’t squirming out of the septic tanks of the Dark Web. They’re being exchanged in everyday conversations with quite normal people who, like me, are simply seeing what the whole world is seeing.
But it’s the kind of thinking, with all its dreadful implications, that will pretty soon lead you down rabbit holes you’ll never find your way back out of.
Yes, it’s dangerous ground, with rabbit holes whichever way you step.
So let me be clear up front: I have no national, religious, political or ethnic stake in this. I know only what everyone knows; I see only what everyone sees; I hear only what everyone hears. My thoughts and feelings are conditioned only by my life-long experience in propaganda, by growing up in apartheid South Africa, and by my geek-like fascination with behavioral economics.
All I knew about Israel came from my Jewish South African friends and my Jewish father-in-law, my friendship with whom had the single most influential and enduring effect on opening my mind to the possibility of living a rich and gratifying adult life without betraying the tenets of common decency and a respect for the heartfelt opinions of others no matter how profoundly we disagreed with them.
But that’s another story, for another chapter.
What I did learn about Israel from him and them was that the pat comparison often made between South Africa’s apartheid system and Israel’s governance of its home and neighboring territories didn’t stand up to scrutiny. It was much more complicated than that. Of the two, if one was obliged to compare, Israel’s treatment of its non-Jewish fellow citizens and its neighbours was a shining light of inclusiveness compared with what we had been doing since 1948.
For the sake of complete transparency I must also confess that my understanding of Netanyahu’s Israel today is more than somewhat influenced by Joshua Cohen’s brilliant little book, The Netanyahus, which paints a simultaneously hilarious, bizarre and insightful picture of the young Benjamin’s deeply troubled soul.
So I was well down that rabbit-hole, almost at the point of no-return, when I stumbled into the light of three revelations and one shocking realization.
The first explained the baby. The baby explained the second. The third explained the glitch in our empathy systems. And the fourth came to me this morning.
1.
The devil, it turned out, wasn’t in the detail. It was in behavioral economics.
In 2019 Faisal Ahmed and I published an entertaining and, in our opinion, an illuminating and eminently useful little book called Skip Ad in 5. The innovative thinking came from Faisal, one of the most awarded and applauded digital strategists in the UK. I simply endorsed his instincts by finding examples from behavioral economics that proved they were right.
The bottom line of BE is that we don’t think straight. We use handy short-cuts to make most of our decisions. These are called heuristics, the off-the-shelf mental tools we default to unthinkingly when time or other pressures require us to act, to choose and to believe one thing or another on the spur of the moment.
The familiarity heuristic, for example, leaps to the fore of our rational decision-making when we’re standing in front of a shelf of a hundred brands of tomato soup. We choose the one we’ve seen before. There’s no knowing whether it’s the best possible choice. If it’s more or less okay in the eating, it doesn’t matter. You’ve saved yourself some valuable thinking time and effort.
Most heuristics work as efficiently and accurately as this one does — most of the time. Unfortunately, since we’re far from being the logical and rational creatures we like to think we are, our brains conspire with our bodies to compensate for our inherent stupidity by making us feel, imagine or believe that we’re making mostly the right decisions at more or less the right moments.
At the bottom of the rabbit hole I found myself in this forest of mental short-cuts. One emerged from the shadows with a look that said, “Duh…”
The anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic. When we are setting plans or making estimates about something, we interpret newer information from the reference point of our anchor instead of seeing it objectively. This can skew our judgement and prevent us from updating our plans or predictions as much as we should.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/anchoring-bias - (My italics)
Which could explain why Biden mentioned the babies. It was the first thing we heard. Now, whether we like it or not, we’re constantly comparing every other horror in Gaza to the horror of that. It was and is our reference point for making less of the abominable cruelties that followed. Nothing, by comparison, could be quite as cruel.
Now the American planes that carry bombs to Israel are the same planes that bring humanitarian aid to the people who survive them. Thank you, Joe.
I am tempted to get ChatGBT to write these chapters on my behalf in the hope it will be less inflamed by confusion and despair than I am.
Then I remind myself that, as clever as it is, AI can’t think like a person. It may inherit the other cognitive biases simply by virtue of them having been programmed by humans. But it won’t share the affect heuristic with us. The Decision Lab describes it thus:
…the affect heuristic occurs because our affective state (in other words, our current emotions) alters our perception of the risks and benefits of a particular outcome.
They go on to offer this example:
If someone in a leadership position has an important decision to make, they may come to a conclusion solely based on their emotions. This is more likely if they are tired or under time pressure, as we rely on heuristics more when we do not have sufficient mental resources to make an effortful, well-reasoned decision. In this scenario, one person’s emotions can negatively impact the lives of many.
Yes, but the babies…
Look up the stories on the paranoia platform of your choice. There are a thousand reasons to believe them and not to believe them. You’ll end up, like I did, choosing the ones that chime most comfortably with your affect settings. And they will still be only a handful of the 188 available reasons to believe what you already believe.
Mine are suspicious.
2.
While we’re looking somewhere else, history repeats itself.
GT, Here We Go Again, MET passim.
The second came back to me later. Now, finally, through the paranoia, the fog of war and in the sweltering heat of this epistemic desert, I have begun to see a recognizable shape in the dirty bathwater that irrigates it. Rosemary’s baby.
When the British government of the late 19th century needed to recruit 350,000 men to fight in the Boer War, the first story they led the British people to believe was that the Boers threw babies in the air and skewered them on their bayonets.
George Orwell wrote about it in Coming Up For Air, a memoir of his childhood published in 1939:
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High Street, and also did some cobbling. He was a fine-looking old chap, rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw—white as thistledown…
He was a real old nineteenth-century Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ’78 but could tell you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff’. I can hear him now, having one of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for me. He-he-he!’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice, coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms. They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on their bayonets, even if they were only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me—I must have been about five—to illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might throw this youngster here!’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a bayonet.
Babies and bayonets went on to justify the death of some 25,000 Afrikaner civilians, most of them in concentration camps. Eighty percent of them were children. Some 20,000 black South Africans died in British concentration camps neatly segregated from the white ones. The British lost some 22,000 men.
Back at home, the numbers felt about right.
When the British needed to recruit an army of 700,000 soldiers to go to war against the Germans in 1914, the first stories published by Wellington House, the propaganda centre of UK military operations, were excruciatingly graphic accounts of how the Germans systematically killed Belgian babies by stabbing them to death with bayonets while still in the wombs of their Belgian mothers.
The Bryce Report, hurriedly published in 1915, substantiated the truth of these claims.
But seventy-seven years later an independent researcher and historian, Gary S. Messinger, forensically investigated the claims of the report along with parallel historical documentation from Belgium and Germany, summarizing his conclusion thus:
The Bryce Report, subsidised and circulated worldwide by the British government, was an irresponsible misuse of judicial procedure that moved Britain more deeply into official involvement in the most morally questionable kinds of propaganda.
Bayonets and babies went on to justify 1.7 million German military deaths and 430,000 German civilian deaths at the cost of some 880,000 British military and civilian casualties.
For the British, at least, the two-to-one ratio felt about right.
3.
It didn’t need the babies to make Hamas appear inhuman. They were patently inhuman. It needed the babies to make them, and all Palestinians by implication, appear less than human.
So that now, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we have Rosemary’s baby justifying a moral equivalency of approximately twelve Palestinian lives for every one Israeli life.
There turns out to be a name for this twisted kind of thinking:
In a phenomenon that has been referred to as psycho-physical numbing (PN), Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, and Friedrich (1997) found that participants rated an intervention saving a fixed number of lives to be less worth investing in when more total lives were at risk (i.e., when saved lives represented a smaller proportion of the total threat or problem).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1057740899703542
The bottom line of PN is simply this: the bigger the numbers, the less they matter —or the more people there are getting killed, the less we care.
So much for every life is precious.
At the time of writing, with hostages being exchanged for the release of jailed Palestinians, the same calculation of twelve-to-one apparently doesn’t apply. Eighty of the former have so far been released in exchange for 180 of the latter, a ratio of some 2.2-to-one.
For any number of disinterested parties watching the tragedy unfold on TV, the effect of psycho-physical numbing makes it feel about right.
4.
I was listening to Israeli government spokespeople on TV and kept having this weird déjà vu every time they opened their mouths. Especially that Regev guy. It took me a while to figure out that I was being reminded of the way South African government ministers spoke to us on TV in those dark days after we finally got it in the mid-seventies.
They had the same look, the same manner and the same tone of voice - the same patronizing “if you know what’s good for you” attitude and implications. They were smarmily polite, and spring-loaded with unspoken threats. The feeling wouldn’t go away.
So I looked up P.W. Botha’s infamous Rubicon speech of 1985, the one that had tens of thousands of South Africans scrambling for their passports and seeking safe passages to Toronto and Perth. Just to contrast and compare.
I was shocked. Not by how frightening it was in the context of those days. No. I was shocked by how reasonable it seems now in the context of these.
The same revelation must have occurred to Benjamin Pogrund, the South African-born Israeli journalist and author. Because less than twenty minutes later I found this:
We deny Palestinians any hope of freedom and normal lives. We believe our own propaganda that a few million people will meekly accept perpetual inferiority and oppression. The government is driving Israel deeper and deeper into inhuman, cruel behavior beyond any defense. I don’t have to be religious to know that this is a shameful betrayal of Jewish morality and history. I have argued with all my might against the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state: in lectures, newspaper articles, on TV and in a book. However, the accusation is becoming fact.
Benjamin Pogrund, from an article published in Haaretz, Israel’s longest-running newspaper.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-10/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/for-decades-i-defended-israel-from-claims-of-apartheid-i-no-longer-can/00000189-d4ac-d821-afdd-dfacb4060000
The first cut is the deepest
Baby, I know, the first cut is the deepest
When it come to being lucky, she's cursed
When it come to loving me, she's worst
Performed by P.P. Arnold; written by Cat Stevens; 1967
This is where we’ve ended up, drowning in the dirty bathwater of disinformation, speculation and yesterday’s lies; believing the unbelievable and imagining the unimaginable. Words become images and images become words. Certainty sinks in the muddy suds.
The new technologies of propaganda such as deep-fake aren’t the problem. When my truth becomes an acceptable substitute for the truth, all we can do is look in our hearts for the reason they’re beating like this.
Occasionally it’s empathy.
Switch off the TV and make it stop.