WAR & HOW WE VIEW IT IN THE WEST

Ever wonder how our enemies see things? Is it even possible to stand in their shoes after so many decades of being told there's no in-between, only us V. GOOD guys here & those V. BAD guys over there?

In the affluent West we see things very differently from those living in certain parts of the rest of the world. That is not to say that we are all Little Lord Fontloroys, far from it. Most, if not all of us, have faced some, perhaps even many, hardships in life. Our general environment however, no matter how far you go back in living memory, can at least be said to be relatively forgiving of failure and for an increasing number over the years quite comfortable. This is of course especially true of the more elite spheres and what could be called the middle classes to which the majority of us now belong.

In a world where expectations have risen over the years within an ambiance of relatively high stability attitudes change. These attitudes are not those of the aristocrats of previous eras or of those who lived in grand houses who had certain high expectations and arguably little in common with those that worked for them and catered to their wishes. However, I believe a case can be made that our attitudes to how others far away conduct themselves have been molded in a somewhat similar direction.

The world of television and the way its fictional output has been constantly delivered to us has honed a certain subtle, growing focus on our ‘being the norm’, rather ‘exceptional’ and almost invariably ‘good’. If you think back through all your years since childhood, will you find a televisual or cinematic piece of fiction that didn’t contain two essential ingredients; bad elements and good elements and of course with the good elements (usually people of course) triumphing in the end. It was entirely predictable that the good guys would win and the bad guys would lose but the make believe regarding the possibility the bad guys were winning suspended your disbelief enough to keep you entertained and perhaps even in some degree of suspense.

Though the scenarios above are not entirely unknown elsewhere they are certainly predominant in the West. The idea of having a mix of good and bad in fictional characters in any media shown or published in the West is a very new innovation. Elsewhere there has generally been a more complex picture where tragedy and many less comfortable features than appear in western fiction feature and at times, strongly. The ancient Greeks were of course particularly interested in stories that had a tragic storyline. In more modern times Russian literature at its best portrayed life in terms that were broadly realistic and designed to be as such by their authors.

Fed on a constant diet of the unequivocally good and bad guys, the saintly heroes and utterly unredeemable villains, with the constant emotional dynamic created within us to see good done and bad defeated it can’t help but strongly influence our world view. In fact we can quite easily due to this long and deep history that was welcomed into our subconscious minds to be groomed by those who would manipulate us to their purposes into seeing the world and all within it in precisely these terms. To avoid seeing the world and its actors in this way takes real effort. Requiring no effort at all, how much easier is it to accept and go with what we are being told… that we are in the good guys, they are the bad guys? This requires almost no thought and no confusion at all.

Though we may not contemplate the idea at all, let alone realize its effects on us, our subconscious minds here in the West have had no resistance to this unintended conditioning. Depending on how old you are you will not harbor any suspicion that any of those TV or movie scripts were intended to condition you. It was what simply constituted the natural order of things. Who would want to read a book with an unhappy ending where the bad guys won out and escaped justice, or a film with a similar ending? It wouldn’t feel right at all. No one is going to reflect reality, real life with an unhappy ending and expect to make money. Such texts can be found only in the avant garde films or those made by Scandinavian directors such as Ingmar Bergman, that only relatively few enjoy.

When we compare the ratio of those who enjoy the regular reading or viewing experience where ultimately good always wins and bad always loses and those who enjoy an artistic/creative attempt to portray something more akin to often hard, nuanced and confusing  reality one thing is clear. The majority of us prefer the simple to the complex, the clear as crystal goodness of one against the equally clear as crystal badness of the other. World War Two has also played its part in the transference from fiction to a particular reality. Hitler and the Nazis who acted in his name were so clearly on the evil side of the equation that our knowledge of that was can be quite easily be manipulated. How many times have the West’s enemies been compared to Hitler. Milosovitch, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and now Putin?

The majority of us are suckers for a good story, whether in book form or on screen. The vast majority of us are not of the highbrow type who like to read ‘difficult’, ‘confusing’ stories where good and evil are rather difficult to discern at times. In general the majority of us hold sway in terms of the way media of all types approaches us, delivering to our expectations. For the politicians we are the group it is most important to influence. Therefore, the focus required to be addressed is not hard to fathom, there must be the good guys and there must be the bad guys, in reality just as in fiction. Zelensky becomes the good guy required now to suit western elite narratives and agendas. Putin and all those who respect, or work for him in any way, must be the bad.

Might it just possibly be that by believing so implicitly in the concepts of good and evil with all the fervor of our beings through media that we open ourselves to being rather easily manipulated and in fact duped into facilitating evil ourselves?

So it goes as Kurt Vonnegut III wrote 106 times throughout his book based around the carpet bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Airforce during World War Two, Slaughterhouse 5’. 

‘And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. 

So it goes.