From an essay I wrote in 2019, in a class on the history of genocide:
In the past, one person hears “Russia” and thinks of godless communists; another hears it and thinks of heroes as compared to capitalism or colonial rule. But is either one concerned with the truth? And haven’t we seen the most bizarre flip recently between which sides of the political aisle want to emphasize Russian corruption? Is it possible that what Paul Hollander said of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who were enamored with communism—Duranty, Wells, Shaw, Sartre, to name a few—is still true today?
“Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels. They were inclined to give every benefit of doubt to these social systems and were successful in screening out qualities that might have detracted from their positive vision. … While manipulations of the visitors’ experiences—or as I call them, the techniques of hospitality—doubtless influenced the judgements…I do not believe that these techniques were decisive. What was decisive was the predisposition of the intellectuals themselves.” (Hollander, 1981, p. 6)
How does Hollander explain the “predisposition” to overlook such corruption and suffering? Ideologies and partisan commitments. I know it is cynical—and I’m not saying that nothing has improved—but it’s hard to see how present-day Ukraine should be struck with much confidence from the west.
John Eskonas, on The Death of the Fact:
Few things feel more immutable or fixed than a ball of cold, solid steel. But if you have a million of them, a strange thing happens: they will behave like a fluid, sloshing this way and that, sliding underfoot, unpredictable. In the same way and for the same reason, having a small number of facts feels like certainty and understanding; having a million feels like uncertainty and befuddlement. The facts don’t lie, but data sure does. […]
But in a world of superabundant, readily recalled facts, generating the umpteenth fact rarely gets you much. More valuable is skill in rapidly re-aligning facts and assimilating new information into ever-changing stories. Professionals create value by generating, defending, and extending compelling pathways through the database of facts: media narratives, scientific theories, financial predictions, tax law interpretations, and so forth. The collapse of any particular narrative due to new information only marginally reshapes the database of all possible narratives.
Hannah Arendt:
And though this continuing instability gives no indication of what the truth might be, it is itself an indication, and a powerful one, of the lying character of all public utterances concerning the factual world. It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
Rebecca West:
There has also been in America a wave of cynicism, entirely mindless, destitute of all content, save “Oh, yeah” and “So what,” which, by a strange twist, results in a bland acceptance of the whole universe that has never been surpassed by Christian Scientists. An automatic scepticism regarding stories of atrocities leads to a rosy belief that every member of an invading army behaves with the courtesy of a cinema theatre usher. The Serbs must have been mistaken in believing that the Germans and the Austrians passed through village after village, wrecking houses, smashing the furniture, emptying corn and pouring wine and oil into the mud, and trampling on the icons. Any peasant in the invaded countries over thirty can tell you that it was so, but innumerable Americans, over and under thirty, can tell you that it was not so. This battlefield was therefore to them an area of pure nonsense, discreditable to the human race.
And so it is to some extent to many English intellectuals. If the Serbs had done something … something … something, they need not have fought. So one feels, when one is young, on hearing that a friend has to have a dangerous operation for cancer. Surely if she had not eaten meat, if she had not eaten salt, she need not have had cancer; and by inference one need not have cancer oneself. Yet cancer exists, and has a thousand ways of establishing itself in the body; and there is no end to the ways one country may make life intolerable for another. But let us not think of it any more, let us pretend that operations are unnecessary, let every battlefield seem a place of prodigious idiocy. Of this battlefield, indeed, we need never think, for it is so far away. What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there?
The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know. This battlefield is deprived of its essence in the minds of men, because of their fears and ignorances; it cannot even establish itself as a fact, because it is crowded out by a plethora of facts.