As any cop will tell you (that’s me talking, not Bloch) the answer is, not very often. Bloch laments, or at least faux-laments, the blow this deals to histories that depend on picturesque detail. The more we learn about eyewitnesses, the less reliable we find they are.
How can we now take seriously the descriptive pieces of history—the colored costumes, the gestures, the ceremonies, the incidents of war, all these odds and ends the romantics love so much—when all around us not a single witness is able to retain correctly the scenes we devour so greedily when we find them in the romantic chronicles? Here the psychologists give us a lesson in skepticism: but it should be added that this skepticism barely scrapes the outer surface of things: legal, or economic, or religious history is untouched; it could be that what is deeper in history is also surer.
It’s a quote from a book written in the 1920s, en francais, never published in English. I was honestly just going to skip the long, boring history lesson post but found it was actually pretty fascinating. Bloch goes on to say:
“The error is not only an influence he tries to expunge in making his measurements precise: it is also an object of study in itself, part of understanding the course of human events.”
This is a very very good point. Look at the errors made during the past 8 years for a very good example of acting on bad information. I wonder if it’s worse now, with our instantaneous communication with the battlefield front lines, or was worse then, when it took weeks or months for correspondence to reach a war front and rumors propagated like intestinal worms in the trenches.
An error is not propagated, does not develop, and does not live except under one condition: if it finds a society where it can spread in the medium of a congenial culture. Through this error, men can unconsciously find expression for their hatreds, their fears, and all their strong emotions. And only—I will have occasion to return to this further—only a great shared experience of hte heart has the capacity to turn a misperception into a legend.
I wish I could have said it that good myself. I can’t recommend this article enough, written by a history professor (Eric Rauchway, UC Davis), but it’s long, so make sure you have 10-20 to spare.
Expecting to be greeted—well, not perhaps as liberators, but not prepared for the Belgian resistance, the German soldier is further disrupted: “the hostility of the Belgian population deeply astonish[es] the average German…. his surprise changes easily to indignation; he believes the people who dare to stand up to the chosen nation capable of anything”. Plus he has racketing around in his head legends of the 1870 war, and legends deeper even than that: “stories of treason, poisoning,
mutilation; of women tearing out the eyes of wounded warriors, that formerly troubadours sang and which today populate the cinema and the pulp serial.”
That’s a quote by Block of Fernand van Langenhove’s work on Belgian-German relations during the German occupation of Belgium during dub-dub-once.
I mean, replace the names with Iraqi and Americans and change the last line to “stories of terrorism, bombing,
9/11; of women blowing up market places, that formerly Toby Keith sang and which today populate the TV with shows like 24 and the popular news media,” and you have a statement about our last 8 years.
So, like we did in Iraq, the Germans invented crimes and bad guys and killed and tortured innocent civilians because they were so terrified of the situation they found themselves in and so crazy with homesickness for being ripped out of their formerly comfortable worlds. Bloch says “the moment an error becomes the cause of bloodshed it is irrevocably established as truth.”
People still believe that Saddam and Iraq are connected to al Qaeda and the trade center attack, a link which has been proven thoroughly false.
A false news item is always born from collective representations that predate its birth; it only seems fortuitous, or (more precisely) the only fortuitous thing in it is the initial incident, which can be absolutely any old thing that starts imaginations going — but this setting in motion only works because imaginations are already prepared and secretly percolating. An event, a misperception that did not tend in the direction all minds were already leaning could at most form the origin of an individual error, but not a popular, widespread bit of false news. If I may make my own use of a term to which sociologists give a definition too metaphysical for me, but which is convenient and after all rich in meaning, the false news is the mirror where “the collective conscience” contemplates its own features.
Sounds like the Republican party’s tactics.
Tags: history, no it's not propaganda