At the height of the Cold War, a fictional exchange between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev on whose country accords the most freedom to its citizens did the rounds. President Nixon says “I’ll let you know that anyone can walk up the White House and call me an ass”. “So what?”, Secretary Brezhnev dead-pans, “even in my country, anyone can walk up the Kremlin and call you an ass”.
The American popular perception, and to a large extent, Western Europe’s and even our own, of the erstwhile Soviet Union (and now Russia, though less so) as a secretive, sinister empire was nourished and publicised by material like this, churned out by talk show hosts and stand-up comedians who interwove, for the purpose of entertainment, facts with fiction and truth with fantasy, unaware, that in the process, they were inadvertently contributing to a grand narrative devised by motivated governments that served larger political agendas.
These are half-truth narratives, and they are potent weapons in political propaganda. The ‘Red’ narrative, scripted by the end of the First World War, was quick to capture public imagination, by way of an overheated media, resulting in the First Red Scare of the 1920s, the Second Red Scare in the ‘40s, the disquiet during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis; all reinforcing the idea of the Soviet Union as an evil empire, with iron-fisted leaders and oppressive ideology, set on world domination.
This narrative, which portrayed Communism as a degenerate dogma, was the mainstay in the strategy of Global Containment that justified the US involvement in the Greek civil war, the Korean War and the Vietnam war; interventions in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and more than a dozen governments in Latin America, and the formation of NATO. It bought public support for Mccarthyism in the ‘50s, and kindled the Sinophobia of today, and continues as a leitmotif in the US foreign policy.
Half-truth narratives work by presenting one aspect of the narrative with a verifiable truth, so that it’s believable. That aspect is then used as a justifiable reason to believe other aspects of the narrative, and then, the whole narrative itself. The terrorist nature of Al Qaeda or Al Shabab is the truth, subsumed in the larger political narrative on Islam, that justifies the false belief that all Muslim organisations are innately militant, and that Islam as a religion advocates violence. This implies that all Muslims are potential threats, provoking Islamophobia, resulting in public support for ethnic profiling, draconian legislations and pre-emptive strikes.
Apart from being highly deceptive and misleading in themselves, half-truth narratives have another serious consequence. By masquerading as the whole truth, they convert conjecture and speculation into knowledge, leading entire societies to false inferences and invalid conclusions. The ‘Red’ narrative led the west to regard the whole of East Europe as primitive, and their populations boorish, unsocial and philistine, thus breeding racial and ethnic stereotypes in movies and TV shows. In an episode of the popular ‘90s sitcom ‘Seinfeld’, two shady guys who sell illegal cable are characterised as Russians -- bear-like, scruffy and aggressive; no English, no manners, and culturally out of place.
There’s a Mexican narrative that Trump is benefitting from, scripted by the establishment with generous help from the entertainment fraternity. Anyone who have grown up with Huckleberry Hound and Magilla Gorilla would remember that the bandits were always grubby, stout men from across the border, sporting huge moustaches and sombreros -- a stereotype spaghetti westerns gladly adopted and continued for years. This aspect is what’s playing in public imagination, along with the political one that portrays South American nations as banana republics, their leaders as despots, and the people as desperate outlaws. So when Trump brands Mexicans as criminals and rapists, people cheer.
The ‘fascism’ narrative, made credible and convenient by the rise of Mussolini and Franco in the 30s, embellished again by public imagination, was marketed to explain the ascendence of the Nazis, until William Shirer in his book ‘The Rise and Fall of the third Reich’, asserted that it was the expression of German nationalism, and not the ideology of totalitarianism, that put Hitler in power.
The narrative of the Second Word War in popular culture -- mostly shaped by Wilbur Smith and Colin Forbes novels, Alistair MacLean and Jack Higgins movies, and Marvel and DC comics -- remained an absolute distortion of reality and an obfuscation of truth for decades, that undervalued the capabilities of the Axis forces, trivialised their victories, and de-emphasised the strategic brilliance of their commanders.
Half-truth narratives proliferate, through memes. The only truth about them is that they are products of human nature. Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist and poet who observed that “an aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half” is perhaps implying that human proclivity for deceit is inborn; which explains why in a court of law, they insist on “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.
