All the world loved the White Helmets, it seemed, for what succour they were able to bring to the desperate civilians of Aleppo.
While the forces of Bashar Al Assad and Vladimir Putin were dropping barrel bombs on the ancient city’s besieged eastern quarter, the 3,000 volunteers of Syrian Civil Defence, as the organisation is formally known, laboured doggedly to dig survivors, and bodies, from the rubble.
Outsiders, powerless against the carnage, responded generously. Western governments provided the White Helmets' main funding. Celebrities offered endorsements. Reporters, always hungry for good-news stories, jumped aboard. ("As the war worsens, rescue workers risk their lives on the front lines" said Time magazine. The Guardian praised "Syria's extraordinary band of volunteer lifesavers". And so on.) Netflix made a documentary. British MP Jo Cox had proposed the White Helmets for the Nobel Peace Prize; after she was murdered the memorial fund set up in her name sent the group money. And in December came what may be western society's ultimate accolade – George Clooney announced plans for a big-screen drama about the group.
Today the dust of bombing has subsided in eastern Aleppo. But even before we lost sight of the men and women of the White Helmets, the fog of war had already started to obscure the group’s reputation.
For months, certain pundits and “alternative news” websites have been portraying the White Helmets as stooges of western imperialism. We were also told that the group had connections to the terrorist jihadis that western media called “the rebels”. We heard that the White Helmets faked their videos – even using images of one bomb-wounded girl over and over, supposedly in different places – in an effort to depict themselves as heroic and the government as brutal. We were also told that Aleppo’s non-combatants love the Al Assad government and craved “liberation”.
“In war,” says a dictum often attributed to the classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus, “the first casualty is truth”.
Many of the critical claims about the White Helmets have been debunked by Britain's public service Channel 4 and the respected fact checking website snopes.com, among others. Yet some of these assertions seem to have gained considerable traction on social media.
In the era of “post-truth” politics, the struggle for supremacy is not conducted solely on the battlefield. In the fight for public opinion, the new theatre of war is the internet, especially social media.
A defaced poster of Bashar Al Assad is pictured along side a rebel praying in the city. Narciso Contreras / AP Photo
This battle is international, but goes on within Syria as well, and that is one fight the Al Assad government is losing, says The National's columnist Hassan Hassan, author (with Michael Weiss) of the authoritative 2015 study ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.
“Citizen journalism has its flaws,” Hassan says, “but it’s usually far more credible than the regime’s media, which was known to lie even before there was an uprising.
“Because of the nature of citizen journalism,” Hassan adds, “there will be some who serve the agenda of some factions, but such cases are the exception, not the rule. Some local reporting has been first rate.”
The phrase “fog of war” is generally credited to the 19th-century Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz. He was referring to the inherent confusion of the battlefield, in an era when armies were expanding. (Von Clausewitz was taken prisoner by the French during the 1806 battle of Jena-Auerstedt, where 180,000 men fought on two fronts several miles apart, directed largely by handwritten orders delivered on horseback.) Simply keeping up with developments was a major challenge for that era’s generals.
In our age of battlefield drones and laser-guided munitions, however, the meaning of the phrase has changed. “Fog of war” still sometimes signifies command-level confusion, but now often refers to competing media narratives. In Syria, for example, there is blame enough to go around, but selling your version to the world can strengthen or weaken the resolve of foreign governments – stakes worth playing for.
Eva K Bartlett, a Canadian writer and rights activist, has considerable experience in Gaza and Syria. One outlet for her work is RT, the Russian-government-backed multilingual television and online network.
In mid-December, after her most recent visit to Aleppo under the protection of Mr Al Assad's Syrian Arab Army, she took the podium at a press conference organised by the Syrian Arab Republic's United Nations delegation. She spoke of the "liberation" of Aleppo from "terrorist factions"; called humanitarian ceasefires "useless"; said that "the people (of Aleppo) support the government … whatever you hear in the corporate media … I will name them – BBC; The Guardian; The New York Times etc … on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality".
While Bartlett did not respond to an interview request for this story, when she replied to email questions from Buzzfeed, she stood by her claims and pointed out that she applied for and paid for her own visa, travel expenses and accommodation, and she interviewed local people in Arabic, which she speaks, or through an interpreter not provided by the government.
Bartlett went on to say that White Helmet reports of Syrian/Russian attacks on hospitals were fiction, and internally inconsistent. She noted that the group has had western funding, and accused them of co-operating with jihadist combatants and also of “recycling” injured-child images to discredit the government.
Idrees Ahmad, a digital-propaganda expert at Scotland’s University of Stirling, noted recently that claims such as Bartlett’s not only fly in the face of the mainstream media she denounces, but also contradict the findings of “Physicians for Human Rights, Medicins Sans Frontiers, Amnesty International … Human Rights Watch and international agencies like the UN” and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Meanwhile, The Economist noted in October that Russia "has launched cyber attacks, spread disinformation and interfered in the domestic affairs of both neighbouring and faraway countries" in recent years. The Atlantic magazine adds that most Russian news reports about the assassination of Moscow's ambassador to Turkey did not mention the killer's shout, "Don't forget Aleppo."
The Russians have a long history of propaganda, from Stalin’s time right up to the “frozen conflict” in Ukraine. Western powers may be fully as guilty, but are rarely so blatant.
Manipulation of the news is, to be sure, no novelty. History is full of courageous, dedicated war correspondents and strategic analysts, but is also studded with credulous or cowardly political reporters who have been fooled, cowed, or corrupted by mendacious governments.
Consider Walter Duranty of the 1930s New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize – America's top journalistic honour – for his reporting on the Soviet Union, stories now widely condemned as a shameless cover-up of Stalin's crimes. Consider the uncritical response of much western media to the 2002 and 2003 drumbeat about "weapons of mass destruction" coming from George W Bush's government and allies, before the second Iraq war. Consider the words of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's minister of propaganda: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
But there’s a new factor now. The internet-induced decline of traditional news sources – respected wire services and radio networks, competitive newspapers, prestigious television news divisions – has lowered the credibility of all media. Clickbait can lure the unwary to any preposterous claim, solemnly presented as fact.
Last year’s U S presidential election introduced the phrase “post-truth politics” but for decades now, dishonest “attack ads” in U S and other election campaigns have been setting the stage for the “fake news” epidemic that generated so much reporting during – and after – Donald Trump’s candidacy. Fake news is not merely an American phenomenon – it’s a global epidemic, and the internet is its main vehicle.
Even without malicious dishonest reporting, understanding events and connections in the modern world can be a daunting challenge, for ordinary citizens and highly placed policymakers alike. In 2003, film director Errol Morris made a documentary called The Fog of War, about Robert McNamara, the sleekly-coiffed secretary of defence to John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson. Kennedy's elite cabinet was known as "the best and the brightest", and yet McNamara and others led the U S straight into the quagmire of Vietnam.
If even the best, and best-informed, officials don’t really understand the dynamics unleashed by military action, how can anyone hope to know the truth – before, during, or after a conflict? Especially when liars work to obscure it?
As the era of Donald Trump begins, we all have too much data and too little understanding. Finding the important needles in that haystack is tricky; when some of the needles are fakes, reality begins to slip right out of our grasp.
artslife@thenational.ae
