From Kyle Orton at It Can Always Get Worse:
Over the last century, the nefarious geopolitical actor that
most effectively exploited human psychology to further its cause was the
Soviet Union and the current Russian government that is its successor.
HAMAS benefits directly from this inheritance: it is a component of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution that seized Iran in 1979, which had assistance from the KGB
in constructing the security and intelligence services that keep it in
power, and draws on the Soviet model of worldwide Revolution.
In
this context, it is less surprising that the information operation
HAMAS has run with the Gaza casualty figures resembles a classic of
Moscow’s anchoring propaganda: the claim twenty-million Soviet citizens
were killed fighting the Nazis.
A caveat to be added here is that while the Soviets/Russia have been
particularly successful in sacralising the figure of twenty-seven
million Soviet martyrs in the Anti-Nazi War, the success is a matter of
degree not kind. For the reasons mentioned above, interested parties
developing false casualty figures that persist is not in itself unusual.
The open secret is that war death tolls generally originate from one of the combatants and their supporters,
either to try to sway the course of the war and/or to serve a political
purpose in the aftermath, and these numbers are frequently invented
wholesale.
Human psychology being what it is, and the widespread equation of
numbers with Science, propagandists can short-circuit policy debates by
presenting the right number in the right way. More importantly, whether the tactic works or not for its narrow purposes, such propaganda-generated numbers “tend to be sticky and to take on lives of their own”.
A
major reason for the endurance of politically-derived casualty numbers
is that they, and the emotive narratives they undergird, become
important, materially and ideologically, to various constituencies, in the war-torn countries and abroad, from activists, academics, and journalists—fluid categories where a single individual often plays multiple roles—all the way up to governments, and repetition of the numbers by these opinion-forming authorities embeds them as conventional wisdom.
Challengers to the numbers are fiercely resisted, often with vicious
reputational attacks, which deter other doubters from going public,
explaining the otherwise-baffling paucity of efforts to investigate the
origins and veracity of totemic body counts. Even were there is a public effort at refutation, it often unintentionally reinforces the number by focusing on it.
The overall result is that casualty counts “everyone knows”, even for wars that have been studied for decades, are often mythical.
An obvious corollary is that, when it comes to ongoing wars, honest people should be operating on the assumption that death tolls cannot be known,
and that anybody making a claim to the contrary is at best lying to
themselves and probably consciously trying to advance an untruth. A
moment’s thought about the practicalities of carrying out a body count
in a warzone is enough to realise that such a thing cannot be done in
any meaningful sense, thus when a number is proffered—whether in Syria,
Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Yemen—scepticism is in order about exactly where it
has come from. The answer in most cases is an extrapolations that is
indistinguishable from guesswork given the small sample size it is based
on, or it is just outright made up.
The strangely precise fatality figures proffered with even stranger
levels of confidence for these conflicts should be a red flag, not a
guide for policy, let alone people’s moral judgments. Gaza is special in this matrix only because we actually do know where the fatality count comes from.Read more.)
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Miss Janice explains the etiquette of wearing hats, gloves and corsages.
