When Imagination Goes to War
Story, propaganda and truth in the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Wars are fought with stories, as well as in flesh and blood.
I’m deeply grieved at the war in Ukraine, and the suffering of the Ukrainian people as they defend themselves against the Russian invasion. It’s also struck me deeply about how much the conflict is driven by a clash of narratives, by how deeply differently Putin sees the stories of Russia, Ukraine and the world, from the stories driving Ukrainian and Western views of the conflict.
We often romanticise imagination – so how does knowing that story and imagination can be used as weapons change the way we think about them?
Nations are built on stories
The story Putin is following is one of a greater Russia, a restored empire, that reunites the historic family of Russian people. It’s a story with a religious dimension to it, one that combines nationalism with Christianity, with Kyev as the birthplace of Russian Orthodox Christianity. But it seems he drastically overestimated how much the people of Ukraine shared that story – instead of Ukrainians welcoming Russians, or at least being unmotivated to fight, they are putting up a spirited resistance.
At the heart of the Ukrainian counter-narrative is the surprising figure of President Volodymyr Zelensky, comedian and actor turned politician. To many, he seemed out of his depth, but faced with the invasion, he has show courage in standing up on behalf of his country to a much stronger force. The power of that story has helped rally the Western response to Russia’s aggression.
Meanwhile, the information war is fought online for hearts and minds, playing out on social media. Within Russia, harsh laws threaten 15 years in prison for anyone who spreads ‘misinformation’ – that is, anyone who challenges the official government narrative.
As Yuvah Noah Harari wrote for The Guardian:
Nations are ultimately built on stories. Each passing day adds more stories that Ukrainians will tell not only in the dark days ahead, but in the decades and generations to come. The president who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “go f*** yourself”; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from. In the long run, these stories count for more than tanks.
Even if Ukraine is crushed militarily in the coming weeks, the idea of Ukraine, the story of Ukraine, will live on to inspire continued resistance and attempts to regain its independence.
Stories are weapons
For all the warm fuzzies that words like “story” and “imagination” tend to give us, these are powerful and dangerous forces. As much as story can be used to foster understanding and empathy, it can also be used for propaganda, dehumanisation and violence. Stories cast goodies and baddies, encouraging us to cheer the heroes and boo the villains.
Stories can be weapons, which can be used for good purposes or bad.
Who we cast as the villains and heroes of the story is immensely powerful. The narrative of Ukraine as the plucky underdog heroes standing up to the imperial might of the Russian villains is an inspiring one, one for which many Ukrainians are laying down their lives.
Particularly if we’re casting ourselves as the heroes and our enemies as the villains, we need to very, very careful of what actions we may be justifying. Think of the deadly results of the narratives of Nazi Germany casting ‘the Jews’ as the villains in their story, or of various European ‘white saviour’ narratives with foreign ‘savages’ as the villains. Or closer to home, think of the various wars and conflicts that the US and UK have waged, justified by the cause of ‘spreading democracy’.
Stories simplify
Stories simplify. They give meaning and coherence to events. We need stories to make sense of the world, but they can seduce us with easy answers and simple binaries, when the realities of the situation are much more complicated. There is an irreducible complexity to people and our histories and contradictions, both as individuals and as nations.
While Putin’s actions in attacking Ukraine are morally reprehensible, simply casting him as a ‘villain’, as a mad dictator, can prevent us from being curious about the story that he sees himself in, from really working to understand his motivations, beliefs and values. It’s far simpler to write someone off as merely mad or bad, than it is to do the hard work of understanding. Understanding doesn’t mean excusing someone’s actions. But we need to understand first to make informed judgments. With greater understanding, comes the increased possibility (as unlikely as it seems now) to perhaps find peaceable solutions, through identifying what might be acceptable face-saving routes to de-escalation of a conflict.
One of the tricky questions that becomes particularly pointed in wartime is ‘what’s an acceptable degree of simplification?’ The image at the top of this email isn’t from the invasion of Ukraine, but from April 2021, though it has been widely used in the context of reporting on the current war. Is that an acceptable shorthand, or does it become ‘fake news’?
Is it all just propaganda?
It’s easy to become cynical of stories, to see all narratives as a form of power-play. One of the driving forces of postmodern theory such as that of Foucault and Derrida has been to trace out the contours of power, and how it shapes the narratives we believe in. Lyotard defined postmodernism as ‘suspicion towards meta-narratives’, to the grand stories that claim universal grounding.
There is a very important place for this deconstructing of narratives, of unpacking the interests and will to power behind them. From a Christian viewpoint, a robust understanding of sin and of the deceitfulness of the human heart should prompt us to critically interrogate the stories we encounter, especially our own, to make sure we aren’t using them as a cover for justifying our own sinful desires and actions. But deconstruction can’t become the final word. As C. S. Lewis said, when you see through everything, you cease to see at all.
Truth over tribe
A recent podcast discussion between Jordan Peterson and documentary-maker Curt Jaimungal explored these issues in relation to the question of ‘What marks out extremism? When do the Left and Right go too far?’ Peterson is a controversial figure, of course, and many see him as dangerously ‘alt-right’. But while I have serious concerns over his very individualistic philosophy and its political outworkings, Peterson engages seriously with issues of truth, political extremism and violence.
A rule of thumb for recognising ‘extremism’ that Peterson and Jaimungal discuss is when lying is seen as being justified for the greater good. They observe that the True and Good are interwoven, so you can’t achieve truly good ends through means of lies. One of Peterson’s (in)famous 12 Rules for Life is ‘Tell the truth, or at least do not lie’, and the importance of truth-telling as part of integrity and meaning-seeking is a driving concern for Peterson. Part of the danger of lies, Peterson warns, is that they erode our own ability to distinguish true from false, reality from delusion. We can’t lie to others without lying to ourselves.
Peterson is right, and in line with what our wisest saints and sages have taught for centuries: Truth is essential. Yes, stories are unavoidable, and we need them in wartime as much as ever if not more. But we need to make sure that they are rooted in truth, as far as we are able to tell. The end of winning a war doesn’t justify lies and propaganda. We must beware the overly convenient narrative, the selective editing of the facts, in service of some supposed ‘greater good’.
Of course, sometimes there are genuine good guys and bad guys – there’s no real question that Russia is the aggressor invading Ukraine, despite the attempts of the Russian media to frame it as a ‘special operation of liberation’. But that mustn’t short-circuit our curiosity and desire for truth. David Heinemeier Hannson recently wrote about Weak principles, strong tribes, and the importance of people who will apply the same moral standards consistently to all sides in a conflict, rather than selectively in favour of our ‘own team’. As one podcast is eloquently titled, we need to choose Truth over Tribe.
Truth-telling in wartime?
An obvious objection to this is that there’s a necessity of lying to our enemies. Would you lie to the Nazi who came looking for the Jews hiding in your attic? (My Dutch grandmother was actually involved in helping Jews under the Nazi occupation).
Or think of the elaborate mechanisms by which British intelligence in World War Two concocted a whole network of fake German agents to feed misinformation to the Nazi war machine. Such deceptions may have saved thousands of lives by persuading the Nazis to put their defences in the wrong place.
I think there’s a crucial distinction between deceiving those you are at war with, versus telling lies to yourself or your own side to stir people up to fight. Lies are always an act of epistemic violence, and need to be recognised as such. But if a war is justified (and I believe that there is such a thing as ‘just war’ in self-defence, as the Ukrainians are now fighting), then such violence is sadly necessary, but should always be kept as minimal and proportional as possible. But as with killing, it always comes with a cost to our own souls and integrity, and needs to be lamented.
Even so, I feel nervous about espousing a ‘just lying’ theory on analogy with ‘just war’. As with Just War theory, in practice it’s likely to be used to justify unjust conflicts, to be a fig leaf of respectability. The appeal of pacifism or of total truthfulness is that it avoids the wriggle room that lets back in all the violence and deception that Just War theory is trying to restrain. If we think that lying to our enemies in wartime can be justified, we’re prone to expand our list of enemies and broaden our definition of wartime. One of the perils of the rhetoric of ‘culture wars’ is that the wartime metaphor is used to justify violence and deception, deepening polarisation and conflict.
There aren’t easy answers here. But I believe the more tightly we can hold onto truth-telling, no matter the cost, the better it is for our souls and for the state of the world.
Swords into ploughshares
In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah looks forward to when God will bring peace to the nations:
He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation
Stories can be swords. Sometimes it’s even right to use them that way in defence against evil stories, stories that marginalise and oppress. Human rights, justice and freedom can be served through stories that inspire and move us, that give us courage to stand.
But stories can also be ploughshares. They can be tools that cultivate empathy and understanding, that plant seeds of beauty and community. We need better stories. We need stories of peace and reconciliation, ones that can bring together a divided world rather than fragment it further.
In a world of brokenness and conflict, we sometimes need to use stories as swords. But our longing must be for a day when we can beat those swords into ploughshares, where the better stories of love and reconciliation have won out. As a Christian, I believe that is indeed a reality that God will one day bring about – but also one we must work towards in faith and hope.
In the meantime, we need to cling to truth and wisdom, so that our stories can fight well in pursuit of peace.
Other notes…
Last month saw the publication of Powerful Leaders? by Marcus Honeysett, an IVP book that I edited, which tackles important issues of church leadership and power.
This is another context where narrative is important – leaders lead through nurturing their community’s sense of shared story, which can shape that community in healthy or unhealthy ways.
Order it now from IVP, Amazon or your local bookshop:
What I’ve been reading and watching…
I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings, partly in preparation for commenting on the new Amazon prequel series coming in September, The Rings of Power. I’d been planning on doing a deep-dive into the trailer and the appendices from the book to try to read the runes on whether the show might be any good, but I felt compelled to write about the situation in Ukraine as a matter of urgency. Maybe next time!
Severance on Apple TV+ is really good in a creepy, Black Mirror meets David Fincher way. It’s a thriller about workers who have their brains altered so that their memories of work life and home life are completely separate - while at work, they have no memory of the outside world, and vice versa. It’s a biting satire on corporate culture and the idea of ‘work-life balance’.
After being burned by the broken content machine of The Book of Boba Fett, the trailer for Obi-Wan Kenobi looks promising enough that it might suck me back in to Disney’s Star Wars treadmill, sucker that I am for lightsabers and space battles!