Believing your own propaganda
‘The sins of group bias may be secret and almost unconscious,’ Jesuit wrote
Marina Ovsyannikova made a global splash when she interrupted a newscast of Russia’s Channel 1 to protest the war on Ukraine. Ovsyannikova held up her sign – “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” – for viewers across Russia to see. It was an act of courage which netted her a $280 fine and who knows what else.
Ovsyannikova later said she was “deeply ashamed” with her role in spreading “Kremlin propaganda” on Channel 1. For her, the war was the breaking point, leading her to civil disobedience. No more would she be one who propped up the Russian totalitarian system.
A recent New York Times article, “Fed Up With Deadly Propaganda, Some Russian Journalists Quit,” contained comments from a handful of other journalists who exited the propaganda machine more quietly.
Zhanna Agalakova, a former Channel 1 correspondent, said people working for the station were clinically depressed because of the lies their jobs forced them to spin. “Many thinking people are sensing their own guilt,” she said. Even so, some former colleagues cut off communication with her when she resigned her post.
Liliya Gildeyeva, an anchor with another state-run TV channel, also quit her job, saying she had made compromise after compromise. The war made her realize the extent to which she had sold her soul. “When you gradually give into yourself, you do not notice the depth of the fall.”
Nevertheless, those journalists willing to resign their jobs were a tiny minority. Many are concerned with the need to look after their families. Others most likely believed their own propaganda. It never occurred to them to question Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia had to defeat Ukraine’s so-called Nazis.
Those who stayed the course may not be guilty of a simple moral failure. We might ask, “How could they not see?” But in most cases, they simply didn’t.
Russian journalists are not alone in failing to see the structural evil which they breathe daily. We in the West are often also blind to the ways our patterns of consumption and production support structures of exploitation. We too are part of a system of economic and ecological violence over which we have little control.
Our way of life, for example, is built around the automobile. People in both urban and rural areas cannot live without motorized transport. Yet, we treat our vehicles as expressions of personal identity, let them idle without qualms and ignore the ways they befoul the environment.
Likewise, metals are extracted for use in computers and mobile phones, causing harm to the environment and giving rise to wars in the regions where they are mined.
In democratic countries, we can at least name these evils even if we are powerless to end them. Still, many turn a deaf ear to injustices, perhaps feeling their own impotence or simply being indifferent to evil. We fail to hear or refuse to hear because of systems of advertising and propaganda, systems more subtle yet as all-encompassing as those of totalitarian countries.
The Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan asked, “How, indeed, is a mind to become conscious of its own bias when that bias springs from a communal flight from understanding and is supported by the whole texture of a civilization?”
How indeed? “The sins of group bias may be secret and almost unconscious,” Lonergan wrote in his landmark book, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, published in 1957. “The group is prone to have a blind spot for the insights that reveal its well-being to be excessive or its usefulness at an end.”
One can go radical and live off the grid. But structural evil remains untouched.
Individual acts of resistance are important, both here and in Russia. Their value lies in showing that alternatives exist. They also hint that if we – whoever we are – formed a mass movement which lived out alternative solutions, those solutions could begin to erode current systems of exploitation.
The “we” is the Christian Church. In its first centuries, the Church was self-consciously the alternative to empire. She proclaimed that because Jesus is king, the emperor is not. Believers eschewed worldly power, shared their possessions and, when they prayed, “the place in which they gathered together was shaken” (Acts. 4.31). Today’s Church has far to go to again shake the foundations. But this is our call – to worship the one true God and to usher in a new order of peace, justice and truth.
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