Today, we are witnessing the creation of atrocity propaganda in real-time.
What is atrocity propaganda, and how has it been used to win support for war? A thread:
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2/12: An atrocity tale is designed to shock a mass audience by showing a violation of a fundamental cultural value which authorises force to stop the perpetrator.
They are directed at groups rather than individuals. The ultimate goal is to dehumanise an enemy.
3/12: One of the earliest examples of atrocity propaganda was during the Irish rebellion of 1641.
Reports were sent to England of massacres of the innocent by the rebels, and there were later used to justify Cromwell's slaughter of captured Irish rebels.
4/12: The most graphic accounts were published in the English press. Newspapers fabricated graphic accounts of babies being ripped from pregnant women.
These reports especially incited the English public against the Irish.
5/12 Atrocity propaganda in 1641 vs. 2023
6/12: With the spread of communications technology in the 20th Century, atrocity propaganda became more important for garnering support for war. Some of the worst examples came in WW1.
British propaganda, backed by the press, portrayed the Germans as barbaric aggressors
7/12: British media reported stories of the Germans bayoneting Belgian babies and cutting off their hands.
Reports came from Belgium of giant German "corpse factories", where dead bodies were harvested to be turned into candles, lubricants, and boot wax.
8/12: One of the worst examples of atrocity propaganda is the so-called Nayirah testimony.
In the run up to the Gulf War, A 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl gave testimony to US Congress about the horrors of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, most notably babies being pulled from incubators.
9/12: Nayirah’s testimony was rebroadcast across the country and marked a turning point in public opinion on going to war with Iraq.
President Bush repeatedly cited her claims to justify the necessity of the war.
10/12: It turned out Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US.
Her testimony was organised as part of a 'Citizens for a Free Kuwait' public relations campaign.
This was itself was a front-group, created by an American PR firm hired by the Kuwaiti government.
11/12: You may notice a trend with these atrocity tales: children as the subject of violence.
This makes sense. Regardless of the intricacies of a conflict, if one side is slaughtering children, they are obviously irredeemably evil. Who could defend baby killers?
12/12: Today, we may be seeing the creation of atrocity propaganda in real time, this time through the medium of social media.
History should remind us to not be guided by emotion, and treat all claims which direct us toward demands for war with a good degree of skepticism.
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It has become popular to blame White people for slavery, to the point that many actually believe slavery was invented by or exclusively practiced by Europeans.
But the history of slavery outside the West is far more brutal.
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2/15 The Arab slave trade emerged in the 7th century, 10 centuries before the Atlantic slave trade
Arabs sold Africans to the Middle East for a variety of jobs such as domestic work or harem guards - castrating male slaves was common, causing over half of males to bleed to death
3/15 The Arab slave trade was particularly brutal: it's estimated that 3/4 captured slaves died before they reached the market for sale
Historians estimate that between 10 and 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders, including women and children taken as concubines
2/8 Walsh mentions Magnus Hirschfeld as his example of a Nazi scientist. Hirschfeld was actually Jewish and gay, and fled Germany on the Nazis taking power.
His sex research institute oversaw the first trans surgery, and he created the first ever LGBT advocacy organisations.
3/8 Walsh also mentions the Nazi scientist Erwin Gohrbandt, who helped perform the first transgender surgery.
But for this surgery Gohrbandt was assistant to a more prominent LGBT rights campaigner called Ludwig Levy-Lenz, who Walsh for some reason omits from his list.
Some interesting research came out recently on the relationship between people with left-wing authoritarian politics, narcissism and psycopathy.
Interestingly, it seems to vindicate many earlier thinkers who theorised about the connection between leftism and pathology.
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2/10 The research found a strong correlation between left authoritarianism and dark triad traits. It did not find greater altruism or commitment to social justice.
They conclude that for these people their left-wing views are simply a way for them to express power over others.
3/10 In 1906, a socialist named John Spargo wrote on the pathologies he believed had informed the Bolshevik Revolution.
Spargo had first hand contact with leading Bolsheviks. He was shocked by the ease with which they could hold contradictory views on issues like free speech.
It is difficult to overstate how much everything since 1945 is shaped by the spectre of the Holocaust.
The period since is the story of the religious underpinning of the West shifting from Christianity to a new foundation built on a single commandment: "never again":
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2/25 Take Karl Popper, the intellectual godfather of neoliberalism:
Popper was compelled to write The Open Society and Its Enemies during WW2, motivated by rebuilding Western civilization as an open society to ensure those horrors would not be seen again
Karl Popper | The Philosopher of Modern Liberalism
Probably no political philosopher's vision of things more definitively won out in the latter half of the 20th century than Karl Popper.
Popper, not Marx, is the philosopher of the modern left. Let's find out why.
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2/25 Karl Popper was born into a Viennese Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism.
Fearing his position as a Jew in post-Anschluss Austria, Popper moved to lecture in New Zealand in 1937. In 1946, he moved to the UK to join the London School of Economics
3/25 Popper's greatest contributions were to Philosophy of Science. At first influenced by positivism, he rejected their principle of verification, and popularised the principle of falsifiability - generalisations are only useful for science if they can in principle be falsified.
We have all heard the statement "we're all one race, the human race". Yet just a century ago the existence of distinct biological races was taken for granted. How did our perception of race change so drastically?
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2/20 Racial anthropology emerged as a distinct field of study in the 19th century.
By the late 19th C. and into the early 20th C. more genetic determinist accounts of race had begun to dominate the academy, alongside the rise of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement.
3/20 By the 1920s and 30s, things began to move in a more environmentalist direction, largely due to the influential work of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students.