Set narratives could be tough to shift. As soon as a important mass follows the identical line, particularly when generated or strengthened by repetitive communication, rhetoric can quickly appear absolute. Propaganda is very expert at twisting any oppositional view to bolster reasonably than expound myths. So learn how to buck the pattern when it actually issues?
Eurozine authors suggest a number of efficient approaches: questioning the unquestionable; pitting one narrative system towards one other; and debunking the dominant type.
Mock parade of Russian tanks at Khreschatyk Road on Independence Day of Ukraine, Kyiv. Picture by Denys Glushko through Gwara Media
Deconstructing myths
In #DialoguesOnWar, a brand new collaboration with PEN Ukraine, Mykola Riabchuk and Serhy Yekelchyk communicate of unsettling acquired opinion: ‘Russian imperial data’, says Riabchuk, ‘because the eighteenth century … has been produced, disseminated, powerfully institutionalised, exported, and established within the West as tutorial, goal, scientific data, which remained unquestioned till lately.’ Postmodern tutorial instruments are his chosen arsenal to show energy relations: ‘I need to deconstruct this imperial data. It’s excessive time to problem it … This warfare is decolonial, it’s a nationwide liberation warfare,’ continues Riabchuk.
Yekelchyk offers a concrete instance: ‘the removing of colonial statues is basically the identical factor Ukrainians began doing a number of years earlier … Lenin in Ukraine doesn’t stand for Communism, however for the Russian colonial previous, for closeness to Russia. Within the West, when you label a coloniser as such, there isn’t any going again.’
Mock parade of Russian tanks at Khreschatyk Road on Independence Day of Ukraine, Kyiv. Picture by Denys Glushko through Gwara Media
Humour’s triumph
When confronting the identical must redress Russia’s ‘swamp’, Natalija Jakubova’s touch upon her dwelling nation identifies what she calls ‘a warfare within the age of relativism and postmodernism’. Jakubova describes a skewed actuality the place ‘Russian troopers in Ukraine are in an “various Russia”. All the pieces appears prefer it does in “Russia-1” … however is taken into account faux, a simulacrum, and should be destroyed … You think about that your fellow Slavs in “deformed Russia”, in “Russia-2” … are real fascists. Within the meantime, you solely look like doing issues which had been executed by “fascists within the films”.’
An equally decided ‘sleight of hand’ is required to counter such a closely pressured scenario, the place propaganda manages to disguise the Russian army ‘attacking one other nation’s civilian inhabitants’ as ‘the responsibility to guard their nation’. Some Ukrainians have turned to humour as a type of defence. The joke goes: (soldier) ‘Hello, mum, it’s your son, I’ve been taken prisoner in Ukraine.’ (mom) ‘Hold up, younger man. The TV stated I’ve a daughter.’
Jakubova acknowledges that ‘Ukrainians perceive very effectively how the rhetoric of Putin’s “warfare of liberation” works, winding it as much as the boundaries of absurdity.’ And, whereas ‘the severity of warfare shouldn’t be performed down’, she acknowledges: ‘that such humour can flourish’ is ‘an ethical victory’.
Mock parade of Russian tanks at Khreschatyk Road on Independence Day of Ukraine, Kyiv. Picture by Denys Glushko through Gwara Media
Calculated hoax
The very chance {that a} societal improper could be convincingly dressed up for granted, in Alan Sokal’s opinion, exists as a result of we reside in a state of ‘reified postmodernism’. In dialog with Péter Krekó, the scientist describes how ‘sarcastically … relativist concepts come to be employed within the service of dogmatic absolutism when points equivalent to social oppression, and learn how to fight it, are addressed.’
Sokal, who printed a hoax paper on quantum gravity in a philosophical journal, questions utilized postmodernism’s maintain over agreed reality. Derrida’s notion that ‘there isn’t any such factor as goal data of pure and social actuality’ blended with the political precept that ‘any declare to goal data is not more than an assertion of energy’ is, in Sokal’s view, open to manipulation: ‘essentially the most vital hazard is that anybody can play the sport, together with the pseudo-populist excessive proper,’ he says.
Mock parade of Russian tanks at Khreschatyk Road on Independence Day of Ukraine, Kyiv. Picture by Denys Glushko through Gwara Media
Mixed transfer
Sokal proposes that ‘social justice is best served by an epistemology based on proof and purpose.’ His name for a renewed sense of objectivity is echoed in Jakubova’s assertion of reality: ‘Proof for crimes is straightforward to search out however ignored … This can be a crime towards humanity, a elementary rejection of the truth that takes account of human life.’ And Yekelchyk underlines the all too actual dangers of stonewalling: ‘It’s unhappy that it takes warfare crimes, crimes towards humanity, and genocide to get up some western observers and statespersons’. From distinctive positions, every referencing utilized postmodernism, all three contributions counsel the time for sure mythologizing is over.
Due to Eurozine accomplice Gwara Media for the permission to reuse a number of photographs from their Independence Day of Ukraine picture story.
