In any war, the side that controls information gains a huge strategic advantage. During war, both sides would like to spread their own narratives. As a result, the truth often becomes the first casualty. When the war is over, the narrative of the victor may overwhelm the other competing ones.
For the last three hundred years, the world is being ruled by the West. Naturally, in all wars during this period, the narratives floated by the West have dominated those framed by its enemies. The West had set these narratives through multiple channels, formal education being a major one. A carefully-filtered set of elites from the Global South had been fed these narratives all along by the West via classroom teaching, using history books written by Western scholars. Popular newspapers and magazines also helped spread them indirectly. In recent times, control over major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter has helped the West more than its rivals. Besides these, crime thrillers and Hollywood movies, in which the Western hero saves the world from the evil Other, have typically whitewashed the crimes committed by the West and highlighted the moral bankruptcies of the vanquished.
The power of setting narratives is indeed a formidable one. Once this power establishes itself, brute force may not be needed to perpetuate it. This is because incentive structures for individual economic agents often cause them to align themselves with conformity. Also, narratives are aired through a complete ecosystem and there are important scale economies associated with it. For example, the bigger the media or the publishing house, the bigger its reach and, as a result, the bigger the revenue it earns. The network externality and the scale economy together make it difficult for the competitors to dislodge the incumbent from the top. The incumbent power, therefore, can often lock in the market of narratives. Following the basic principle of propaganda, these narratives are repeated ad nauseam till they become established as ‘truths’.
During the last three centuries, the West has always had the advantage of setting narratives over its rivals. For example, Winston Churchill once arrogantly commented that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. True to his prediction, not much attention was thrust on his role in the Great Bengal Famine or on his explicit racist side. The same colonial powers were, however, completely unforgiving towards Joseph Stalin for the Holodomor — the Ukrainian famine — as well as Mao Zedong for his mismanagement of the famine in China. In the same vein, after the Second World War, the world quite rightly condemned Adolf Hitler. However, there were no effective condemnations of Harry Truman’s use of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Interestingly, in the ongoing war in Ukraine, we see a strange event unfolding. The West had made many attempts to impose its own narratives in this conflict too. But these efforts have not been overwhelmingly successful. This time, the Global South has asserted its autonomy by rejecting these Western narratives. Why has the West failed to ‘sell’ to the Global South its own version of the Ukraine war?
At the outset, one should recognise that controlling information unilaterally has become impossible in the modern world. Satellite technology allows us to observe what is happening in every corner of the world. The West does not have a monopoly over this technology. Most emerging market economies have their own domestic media as well. Some of them, like Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen, have become quite popular in other parts of the world. In fact, the media market at the global level is increasingly resembling a competitive sphere in which there are many players, each with its distinct features. Many news channels in the Global South also broadcast news in English. Media houses in Russia and China disseminate news in English too. As a result, manipulation of news can now be detected and challenged by others. In a competitive market, each brand has its own set of loyal followers, but many consumers may not have any brand loyalty at all. Further, a consumer of news can simultaneously enjoy competing products. The most important determinant for viewership in such a situation is the credibility of the source.
The West has suffered in this respect. The credibility of the mainstream Western media was seriously damaged after the Iraq war when no weapons of mass destruction were found despite the Western media’s complicity in disseminating this narrative. The arrogant Western mainstream media did not engage in any serious soul-searching even after the Iraq war. Subsequently, a set of one-sided destructive wars took place that exposed the hypocrisy and the double standard of the Western political establishment and further eroded the credibility of its media due to the latter’s unquestioning acceptance of the narratives set by its politicians. Consequently, the more the mainstream Western media spins ludicrous stories, such as the impending death of Vladimir Putin from a plethora of health conditions, the greater is its loss of credibility.
Interestingly, technological developments in the near future may inflict the final, fatal blow to the comparative advantage of language that Western media houses still enjoy. Effective translator apps may spread content written in vernacular languages to all corners of the world. If the fruits of such technology become available to all, the dominance of the Anglophone ecosystem would vanish. Erudite discussions in non-English languages take place around the world every day. Intelligent search algorithms will have the power to bring these pearls of wisdom to the surface and good translation apps will then make them available for global consumption.
In Akira Kurosawa’s film, Rashomon, we encounter four sets of narratives with four different versions of truth. Rashomon is a phenomenal film simply because it tells us that truth may not be unique and that perspectives matter.
The Ukraine war is likely to lead to the genesis of a multipolar world with a few powerful nation states as its poles. In such a world, multiple truths are likely to coexist.
Kaushik Bhattacharya is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow. Views are personal
