War in Dreamland

Against mythology, reality itself contends in vain.

There are some bad ideas that just won’t lie down. They range from urban legends to political myths, from scabrous stories about individuals that should be true but aren’t, to historical events that shouldn’t be true, but are. Often, they are just nuisances, but sometimes they are much worse than that. The most serious current example, and the subject for this week, is dreams and nightmares of total war. I devoted an entire essay to this subject a few weeks ago, and I hoped not to have to come back to it, but the beating of war-drums continues on all parts of the political spectrum, so I suppose it may be worth another go.

Last time, I was essentially dealing with pragmatic facts (and I was accused by some commenters of being too rational.) This time, I’m going to take a plunge into popular culture, historical myth and even psychology, because how people think about war these days comes not from experience or even from study, but from half-forgotten books and TV programmes, media pundits who generally have no clue what they are talking about, and things they remember hearing someone say, somewhere, sometime. And whether we agree with what we see and hear depends primarily on whether it confirms our prejudices and meets our psychological needs. Indeed, most people feel that the world is complicated enough already, without having to take mundane facts into account. (Humankind, as TS Eliot remarked, cannot bear much reality.) So this is, in part, an essay about myths that affect our understanding of war.

Popular culture (or even high culture in the case of intellectually influential books) has always had a massive influence on how the world is seen. A relevant historical example here is the terror inspired by the development of the manned bomber aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s. There was very little actual information about the effects of air bombardment to go on, so western elite opinion took its points of reference partly from excitable popular books written by airpower enthusiasts, but partly also from novels and films which portrayed the effects of aerial bombardment. These effects were presented much as we might present the results of a nuclear war today. At the beginning of a war, it was thought, German “bomber fleets” would appear over London and Paris, and rain down bombs and poison gas on the inhabitants. The cities would be completely destroyed, and millions would die. It was against this explicit assumption that European politics of the late 1930s was conducted: on reflection, the idea of a peaceful settlement to the security problems of Europe in the late 1930s didn’t seem too bad, if this was the alternative.

Needless to say, this never happened. The gas bombers and the nuclear-level devastation turned out to be figments of the imagination of novelists such as Olaf Stapledon and films such as Alexander Korda’s Things to Come (1936), which accurately reflected the intellectual consensus about the nature of the next war. (As well, of course as tapping into venerable myths of the Fire from Heaven.) Ordinary people, including my mother, travelled to work for months carrying gas masks against a threat which never came, but which everybody up to the highest reaches of governments was somehow persuaded existed.

This was a myth that had a short shelf-life and was comprehensively dispelled by events: only historians remember it now. But it lived on vicariously in attempts to imagine what a nuclear war might be like and how it might start. Because, once more, there is no relevant experience to go on, what most people think they know about nuclear war, even today, is an amalgam of popular cultural tropes, in which memories of once having read or watched On the Beach jostle with vague recollections of Dr Strangelove and The War Game, and historic newspaper accounts of the after-effects of the destruction of Hiroshima.

If the apocalyptic, almost Biblical, destruction of major cities by bombers never quite happened, historical myths equally cluster around things that did, or sort of did. The importance of understanding political myths and their structure and purpose, of studying them almost as an anthropologist would, was pointed out first some forty years ago by Raoul Girardet. Essentially, political myths act as an ordering and classifying system, making the complex easier to understand, and enabling incidents and personalities from different ages to be compared. (An extremely old example —mentioned by Girardet—is the Providential Leader who arrives at a time of crisis to save the nation.) They also function as a way of facilitating and justifying value-judgements, sorting the sheep from the goats and identifying moral lessons. One result of this is that actual historical events are greatly simplified, and often distorted, so that they fit into the overall pattern of the myth. And once an episode has been assimilated into a myth, we feel we understand it. If you think for a moment about the western presentation of the war in Ukraine (and to a degree the Russian one as well) you will see what I mean. We’ll look in more detail at this in a moment.

First, though, what about some more examples that might be relevant to Ukraine today? One obvious one is the consistent misrepresentation of the Allied conduct of the First World War. Now the Allies made, to put it mildly, some massive mistakes in 1914, and the quality of the senior commanders was not great at the beginning. (The Germans had their own problems, too.) But the Allies adapted quickly, got rid of much of the dead wood, and developed new tactics even as the major battles were still in progress. There’s a whole library of books about this now, but even a century later the image that has endured is the one established by popular culture in the 1920s, of bloodthirsty incompetent Generals sacrificing millions of lives in endless futile attacks. Unusually, this mythical interpretation of the war has a particular source. It was the first and last one where educated middle-class men fought in the front lines as ordinary soldiers and junior officers. They felt the traditional, class-based and often deserved contempt for the “Staff” back behind the front lines, and wrote, often in a deliberately exaggerated and satirical fashion, about their ghastly experiences. So the poetry of Owen and Sassoon, the novels of Graves, Barbusse and Remarque, films like All Quiet on the Western Front and an uncountable number of letters, journals and reminiscences, created a mythologised war with a life of its own, which, among other things, had a demonstrable effect on the politics of the 1930s. But as a myth it was satisfying, in that it provided both an easy interpretation of events, and a set of villains to hate. Above all, it made the pragmatic study of why and how the war turned into an attritional bloodbath happily superfluous.

You could write a book (maybe I should) about the myths surrounding the years before, during and after World War 2. But what’s important is that these myths provide us with simple answers to complex questions, and a coherent narrative instead of chaos. You can see how attractive it would be to believe that Hitler was “elected” in 1932, supported by greedy financiers, rather than a bankrupt Nazi Party losing electoral support making a final desperate gamble for power, and a German political establishment out of options, believing that Hitler could be easily manipulated. It’s just so much more satisfying. It’s tempting to believe that Britain and France were weaker than Germany and so forced into concessions at Munich in 1938, rather than that they were stronger, as Hitler well knew, and that he returned from Munich furious at having been outplayed.

But such mythologising of history serves several purposes. It enables above all events as they happen to be absorbed into a mythical pattern without the need for explanation. After all, if you really believe that Hitler was “elected” in 1932, then you have a ready-made template for demonising right-wing “populist” leaders today, and insisting that nobody vote for them, or else terrible things will happen. And the myth of Anglo-French “weakness” has spawned a disastrous set of foreign policy blunders ever since, as western governments have tried to “stand up to dictators”, from Nasser and Castro to Ho Chi Minh to Patrice Lumumba, to the FLN in Algeria to the Argentinian Junta in 1982, to Slobodan Milosevic to Saddam Hussein, to Colonel Gadaffi to that nice Mr Putin to …well, you get the picture. Hard as it may seem today to believe that the British really saw Nasser as a new Hitler planning to put the whole of North Africa to fire and sword, or that the French saw an FLN victory in Algeria as providing a secure base for the Soviet Union to attack the soft underbelly of Europe, it’s unambiguously the case, as demonstrated by documents and memoirs of the time, that this is what they did think. But then, as the review of the book from 2124 by Professor Chen that I reproduced last week noted, the Past is another country, and his readers will have difficulty in believing that western policy towards Ukraine was quite as insane as it evidently is.

In turn, these various myths have been grouped together in cycles, as was historically always the case. Our modern age which scorns such things, has largely forgotten this (and of course most of the great preserved myth cycles of history have huge gaps in them) but many of the typical patterns of myth cycles still survive in attenuated and incoherent form in the story arcs of popular culture, and in interpretations of the past by historians. Most people with an interest in the Second World War will have vaguely perceived that the Nazis made deliberate use of Teutonic mythology and occult lore, and indeed the whole of the Third Reich can plausibly be conceived as a popular bourgeois adaptation of the Nibelungenlied complete with tragic ending. Likewise, when Ian Kershaw entitled the two volumes of his biography of Hitler Hubris and Nemesis he was no doubt trying to order and shape his material for the reader by reference to an understood myth-cycle model.

We can see the process at work in recent history. The Providential Leader only appears, after all, because there is a need, and the hour is desperate. So the fiction of Britain and France not being “prepared for war” in 1939, and of this lack of preparation, political disunity, “defensive” mentality and “wasted” expenditure on the Maginot Line leading to the catastrophic defeat of 1940, leads logically to the appearance of the Providential Leader who restores the independence and pride of the country, before himself succumbing to treachery and defeat. Charles de Gaulle was a highly intelligent man and a student of French history with its competing mythologies, and he knew that the only way to keep France together after World War 2 was to contrive a healing myth, complete with villains (the politicians and the Generals who left France “unprepared”), the heroes, (ordinary French soldiers, who fought well, the Resistance and of course the Free French) and the Providential Leader (himself.) Not only did he return from symbolic death to save the nation a second time in 1958, but in 1969, his plans for a reform of the French political system after the “events” of 1968 voted down, he broke his sword and abandoned his throne, to die a year later.

This was an outstanding example of the adaptation and use of ancient myth for practical political purposes and, towards the end, the myth itself seems to have taken over. So the first deployment of independent French nuclear weapons in the 1960s was perceived as the Magic Sword that would defend France from a repetition of 1940. And De Gaulle himself was increasingly referred to as Le Grand Charles, “Charles the Great.” Now in Latin that is Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne, so De Gaulle had been, as it were, assimilated into a deep and powerful existing historical myth. It need hardly be said that today’s politicians, with their MBAs, are scarcely capable of understanding, much less manipulating, such myths, although it is possible that Mr Trump, recently spared from death, may be groping his way towards some limited comprehension.

I would contend that it is impossible to understand today’s world without recognising the influence of myth-cycle patterns from the distant past, albeit distorted, partial and sometimes overlapping. This is true, for example, of the sick tragedy of the Ukraine episode, but of others as well. What has definitely changed, though, is the explosion in the influence of popular culture over the last century, first through cinema and television, more recently through the Internet. The sheer volume and intensity of popular culture, and its cannibalisation of traditional history and myth, has created a kind of Dreamland, where very limited personal knowledge and limited hard information is overwhelmed by a mass of popular culture stereotypes, distortions and contradictions. Now this isn’t another complaint about “disinformation:” the issue is much more fundamental than that. Our culture, including our political culture, no longer knows how to distinguish between (at least approximate) fact on one hand, and sheer invention on the other, because the two have become inextricably linked and confused, and each feeds off the other. As I’ve pointed out, a lot of the western approach to the Ukraine war is based around half-remembered versions of World War 2 films celebrating the daring exploits of small forces, and in turn that type of operation has itself created a new mythology. So the 1955 film The Dam Busters and the attempted destruction of the Crimean Bridge have become essentially one concept, and no doubt The Bridge Busters is already in development somewhere.

Popular culture has always fed off and reproduced historical myth cycles. The West is sufficiently divorced now from its own culture and history, though, that even quite educated people don’t realise this, and art of any kind that overtly references myth and symbol tends to be misunderstood. How difficult was it, for example, to understand that Sam Mendes’s film 1917 was an allegory of suffering and redemption, with references to Blake and Bunyan, and guest appearances by the Virgin Mary and the River Jordan? Apparently too difficult for most critics. But the fact that myths and myth cycles are now not properly understood, and exist primarily in Hollywood versions, does not make them any less powerful, even if those influenced by them are not consciously aware of it.

The ultimate origin of myth is generally taken to be an attempt to rationalise natural events, such as night and day, the stars and planets and the progression of the seasons. Myths traditionally ordered events into some kind of a coherent relationship, established cause and effect, and reduced somewhat the otherwise frightening randomness of the world. Modern myths work in fundamentally the same way, and serve fundamentally the same purpose. Myths are not the same as conspiracy theories, although they may incorporate them, but rather all-embracing and (theoretically) coherent ideological constructs that serve to give meaning to our existence and to what happens in our lives. Myths have to be all-embracing if they are to be coherent: there are no loose ends allowed, and anything that doesn’t fit has to be either suppressed, or modified. Likewise, myths draw their strength from the need for them in the first place. No-one is convinced of the validity of a myth by patient investigation. Rather, the validity of the myth is taken for granted, and events are fitted into it, with more or less difficulty, as they occur.

The most influential myth in modern history is that of the Cabal (the word comes from the Hebrew Kabbalah), a hidden but all-powerful group of individuals in one country or several, secretly directing the affairs of the world. This is not necessarily the same as a nation directing the affairs of the world, since often the ostensible government of the nation concerned is only a figurehead, being manipulated by the Cabal. Thus, the hopeless ineffectiveness of the formal American government’s response to Covid would be explained as a clever deception operation, designed to divert attention from the chilling efficiency of the nation’s secret masters. This myth has a very long history, probably going back as far as medieval fantasies of a secret Jewish world government in Muslim Spain. After which, the Templars, the Jesuits, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Rosicrucians were all tried on for size. But it was in the eighteenth century, when there really were secret organisations such as the Freemasons, that the concept began to be useful in explaining otherwise incomprehensible events such as the French Revolution. How, after all, could the natural order of things be overturned so violently, and an anointed King murdered, except as a result of a long-term, carefully prepared conspiracy?

Since then of course, the myth has been wheeled out endlessly, to account for every unexpected political development in modern history. I first encountered it personally after the death of Princess Diana in 1997, when some foreign (government) contacts explained to me that it was “obvious” that she had been murdered by “British Intelligence MI6” to stop her marrying an Egyptian and so giving birth to a Muslim heir to the throne. Since then, I have become resigned to being told, in person and in print, that events I was personally involved in actually had quite different causes and quite different results from what I remembered, and that if I didn’t accept that, I must have been part of the conspiracy itself, or just too unimportant to know the truth. As a reasonably distinguished Arab academic said to me a decade ago, trying to convince me that the Arab Spring had been planned in detail for a decade by western intelligence services, “if even people like you don’t understand these things, it just shows how well hidden and devious the plot must be.”

The identity and components of the Cabal naturally vary over time and with context. A (very) short list, would include the Freemasons (of course) the Jews (of course) but also the CIA, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the European Union (or bits of it), the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the KGB, the SVR, the Military-Industrial Complex, “MI6,”the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the “Deep State,”the City of London, Goldman Sachs and Wall Street generally, all of these singly or in combination. Apparent inconsistencies between these organisations can be explained by positing even deeper conspiracies that the ostensible leaders themselves don’t know about: this reflects the popular understanding of intelligence agencies and similar organisations having successively more restricted circles of information, and its main literary antecedent is, of course, the Inner Party in 1984, which lied even to the Outer Party about what its real objectives were. Likewise, any links at all between these organisations or their personnel simply serve to increase the presumed size and influence of the Cabal. After all, a US diplomat who was previously accredited to the United Nations in New York is now, on retirement, working for a think-tank which is alleged to be receiving funds from USAID, which is allegedly a front organisation for the CIA. So obviously the CIA controls the United Nations. Once more, evidence, or even rationality is a secondary issue. Information only serves to nourish the myth, not to put it in question.

It is assumed that the Cabal is capable of managing the affairs of the entire world in detail, with a degree of competence and a range of resources that anyone I have ever met from any of the above Cabalists would love to have. And whereas such theories have limited practical effect on politics in the West even with the coming of the Internet, elsewhere they are the default interpretative framework for everything that happens. Not a sparrow falls, in other words, without the CIA having poisoned it. In an earlier essay, I cited the great Egyptian/Lebanese writer Amin Malouf deploring the effects of this kind of thinking in former countries of the Ottoman Empire, and its disempowering and destructive effect on the policies of Arab states. No point in trying to work out an independent policy in the interests of the country, the West already has everything planned in detail, and will kill or overthrow anyone who opposes them. Arab governments may pretend to behave as independent states, but they “know” that in practice everything is decided by others. So there has been no President of Lebanon for the last two years, because the Lebanese Parliament, rather than make a decision, is waiting to be told what to do by the western powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who decide everything that happens in the country anyway. You find much the same thing in parts of Africa, where intellectuals and journalists will bemoan the total western economic and political dominance over every aspect of their country, before admitting, after a couple of beers, that at least some of this is rhetoric to distract attention from the corruption and incompetence of their own ruling classes.

Of course, such myths have to be absolute in nature. You can’t have a myth of a fairly powerful Cabal: by definition, an all-powerful Cabal has to control everything or it’s not all-powerful. So if it, or they, regularly assassinates all opponents, that has to be all opponents. hence the ironic spectacle of people who have drunk deeply from the Cabal myth publicly wrestling with their conscience over the failed assassination effort against Donald Trump. Either it was a real assassination plot that went wrong, which seems vanishingly unlikely to the intellectually honest, or it was a deliberate set-up (ditto) or it wasn’t the Cabal at all, which means the Cabal is not all-powerful , and other assassinations attributed to it might have been somebody else as well, or not even assassinations. Oh dear.

Linked to the myth of the Cabal is the myth of the Victim People, trampled underfoot by history and always betrayed by others. It’s hard for westerners (and especially Anglo-Saxons) to appreciate, but there are cultures which cling masochistically to their defeats. Wherever the Ottoman boot trod, there are memorials to patriots who engaged in hopeless struggles for independence and brought down terrible retribution. Martyr’s Square in Beirut, for example, commemorates all those Lebanese who died fighting for independence against the Turks, up to the execution of a multiethnic group of patriots in 1916. And the unwary who get into a discussion about Balkan politics when in the region can lose an entire evening to loving, detailed descriptions of nations and peoples betrayed, massacred, expelled and repressed, usually beginning some time in the Middle Ages. For some countries, as here, victim status is an important part of their national identity even up to the present day: the Irish Republican Army, for example, seems to have a special necrophilic affection for its own “martyrs.” This can and does have effects on actual politics: one of the many things western politicians failed to understand at the time of the Kosovo crisis in 1999 was that they were playing precisely into the Serbs traditional view of their own history and victim status.

Likewise related, is the myth of the Source of All Evil. This is typically a country which is held responsible for all the problems of the world, or at least (as with Iran) of a region. For much of the twentieth century, it was the Soviet Union, which was the source of all the world’s problems, and the “hand of Moscow” was detected behind crises all over the world. Inevitably, this produced a reaction, and from the sixties onwards critics began to search and replace “Soviet Union” with “United States” in an attempt to produce a counter-narrative. That narrative, whilst a minority one, is still influential in some quarters. In real life, of course, international crises and conflicts are generally very complex in their origins and outcomes, and any Source of All Evil myth has to suppress or re-write much of the evidence of the time to maintain its purity. After all, the Source of Quite a Lot of Evil is not a very attractive Myth: thus the frantic attempts by both supporters and opponents of western action in Ukraine to shoehorn the complex events since 2014 into a recognisable mythical pattern.

Closely related, is the myth of the Evil Mastermind, plotting the overthrow of countries from a secret lair somewhere. This is almost entirely a popular culture construct, probably deriving ultimately from the corpus of Faust legends, and best exemplified in modern popular culture by the figure of Blofeld in the James Bond books and films. Yet, imaginary as it is, the myth has been applied to many real cases, from Patrice Lumumba to Vladimir Putin, because it helpfully simplifies things: if only a single individual needs to be got rid of to save the world, then the threat is much easier to understand, and the world is much easier to save.

Finally, from a very long list, there is the myth of the Prophet. Closely related to the Providential Leader, this is the person or persons who see the truth that others wish to conceal, or the danger than nobody wants to see. Both Churchill and de Gaulle utilised this myth after World War 2, presenting themselves as the prophets of the dangers of Nazism ignored by the governments of the day. This was at best a massive exaggeration, but it was effective politics. Indeed, whilst the myth of the Prophet is very old (going back thousands years at least) it is especially popular in our modern Liberal era, where everybody wants to be an individualist and a rebel. I must receive a dozen email requests a week to contribute financially to sites that tell the truth that others refuse to accept, or tear the veil away from secrets the world wants hidden. Needless to say, the content and the opinions of such sites are all very similar.

In essence therefore, these are Myths that everybody knows, albeit often in slightly different forms, which have no defined origin, and draw heavily from cultural stereotypes and distortions of history of all kinds. They are, if you like, free-floating signifiers in search of a signified, or memes: itinerant cultural ideas spread by imitation and repetition. Esotericists, meanwhile, have their concept of Egregores, or collective thought-forms arising from the thoughts and emotions of groups. (Can it be a coincidence, I wonder, that Goldfinger, one of James Bond’s enemies is a symbolic alchemist who wants to turn everything into gold, or that the organisation he battles is called SPECTRE? There’s a PhD thesis in that, surely?)

So to come back to where we started, most of what people think they “know” about the Ukraine crisis isn’t knowledge at all, it’s simply the reflexive organisation of real or apocryphal information they encounter into one or more mythical frameworks. This isn’t surprising, given the enormous complexity of the situation, and the fact that even the combatants themselves are still discovering what this kind of modern warfare is like. So for most commentators and pundits, it would be wise to adopt as a motto the final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: when you have nothing useful to say, STFU.

But economic and career pressures all push in the other direction of course. Pity the poor blogger or think-tanker, dependent on subscriptions for his livelihood, writing about “strategic affairs.” Last week it was cost-overruns on the F35 programme, before that it was a Trump foreign policy and before that it was attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. But now it’s the NATO Summit and the war in Ukraine, and you can’t avoid writing about it. But you know nothing of the inner workings of NATO, nothing much about weapon performance, nothing about the planning and conduct of military operations at any level, nothing about modern tactics, you don’t speak Russian, have never visited the region and you can’t even read a military map (what are those funny symbols?) So you do some perfunctory research and structure your article around a series of myths constructed from banalised history and popular entertainment, seasoned with the political flavour (either pro or anti-Russian) that your subscribers want. And much of the current saturation coverage of Ukraine basically conforms to this model.

This also helps to explain some of the lunatic ideas circulating about “war” with China, for example. No-one has ever been able to explain to me what such a war would even be about. After all, the Chinese could easily blockade the island. Is the US going to risk the incineration of Washington to prevent that? The answer, I think, is that these people are victims of one of the oldest mythical structures, that of foreordained and predestined conflict between tribes, nations and civilisations, sometimes dignified as the “Thucydides trap,” where rising powers violently confront established ones. (Indeed the curious characterisation of the US as an “Empire” shows the continuing power and influence of this myth.)

But there’s one extra factor at work. The myths we’ve briefly touched on have their ultimate origins in the mists of time, in societies with an essentially tragic and pessimistic view of life. (Not many laughs in the Icelandic Sagas or the Iliad.) What developed with the advent of monotheistic religions, of course, was an eschatological, teleological view of history. The myths of Christianity and Islam are of final conflict and final judgement. (Paradise Lost would have been meaningless a thousand years earlier, and still is, I suspect, for Buddhists.) Not only does history have an end, but unlike the Norse Sagas, the good guys win, because that is the nature of creation. We aren’t really conscious of this in our superficially secular societies, which is why we can’t understand the Islamic State for example, preferring almost any other explanation to the idea that its fighters actually believe what they say. Still, the secularised idea that the good guys win is now entrenched in popular culture in a way that would have been unthinkable in earlier times.

Since the Enlightenment, we have seen the growth of secularised, Liberal versions of these various myths. I’ve discussed at some length elsewhere the teleological fervour that underpins European antagonism towards Russia, and why it will be more difficult for the Europeans than for the US to admit the war has been lost. In these myths, the modernising force of Liberalism carries all before it, dispelling superstition, religion, nationalism, culture and history, and replacing them with enlightened rational self-interest. The Earth shall be full of the glory of Liberalism as the waters cover the sea: except for the inconvenient fact that two massive powers, Russia and China, refuse to play along. They must therefore be destroyed and, in the teleological, eschatological myth that Liberalism has constructed from monotheistic religion, they will be destroyed. Victory is certain because it is certain, just as in the ideology of the Islamic State.

Somewhere in the confused unconscious mind of Ursula von der Leyen, these ideas jostle with myths of popular culture where the hero always arrives on time, where the Millennium Falcon appears at the last moment, where the Evil Mastermind in the country of the Source of all Evil dies in the last ten minutes. After all, in Hollywood, you know that victory is just around the corner just when defeat seems certain. Look, there is the ring-bearer, arrived in Mordor at last! So what will obviously happen is that a brave German Special Forces soldier will penetrate the Kremlin with a thermonuclear bomb disguised as a fountain pen, and the Dark Lord will be vanquished, and the Earth will be full of etc. etc. Then on to China. In the end, I cannot think of any other explanation, however torturous, which would impel obviously intelligent people to say such stupid things, with every sign of sincerity.

Well, “against stupidity” wrote Schiller “the gods themselves contend in vain.” He was right, and there’s plenty of stupidity around, but it’s not only that. There’s nothing worse than being lost in an intellectual construct you can’t understand and don’t even realise you are living in. And that’s where a lot of the West is now.