Loud and Unclear
Vance's speech and the mental cage of the narratives
People don’t hold opinions. They adopt sets of them. This is not merely shorthand for people aligning themselves with the ideas they grow up with, or for coopting the views of their parents or of their social environment. The explosion of the quantity of information (and the availability thereof) has created a situation in which we all are necessarily underinformed. In view of the fact that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is considered one of the last persons to have been a live vessel for all (scientific) knowledge available in his days, this is not a novel development. It is clear as well that the information age has pushed this process to an extreme. While the sheer quantity of information has rendered the outsourcing of the selection of information inevitable, the breach of trust between the selecting class and the class expected to swallow their product by the chunk have brought us to a political crisis which has only just started.
News organizations, public institutions, and a wide swath of politicians have responded to this crisis by seeking to strengthen their control over narratives. While it is attractive to depict this reaction as the willful introduction of authoritarian control in supposedly free countries, the truth might be harder to handle. Because such narratives (in the old days we would have simply called them ‘ideology’) perform a vital role in the selection of information. No one can hold endless streams of facts and factlets before their mind’s eye without any organizing principle. But ultimately, the framework used to make sense of the whole set will decide what is further perceived and absorbed. This came to mind more strongly, not upon hearing J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference, but when the reactions from the European officials and pundits started rolling in - after they were chastised by the American Vice President.
Yes: this is about ‘Russia, Russia’. And no: this is not a partisan piece, as both Left and Right are proving themselves incapable of looking at reality through any other perspective than the one doctored by Obama and Hillary, trying to defuse the Trump bomb before any possible arrival at the White House in 2016 by basically describing the Donald as Putin’s stealth buddy. The damage done by this abuse of office by part of the DNC and the intelligence community is so massive that the results - if not the intent - of their actions should be described as treason. In the American political arena, the effects are still rather simple to describe: Biden’s half-hearted approach to the war in Ukraine (let’s make sure they don’t win, as long as they don’t lose) for a faction on the Right has become confirmation of the hoax more than of anything else. Surely, Biden’s surviving loser son having engaged in shady deals in Ukraine has not helped, either. But the fact that ownership of the much-discussed Burysma actually is tied to Russia, and not Ukraine, has done nothing to disabuse these - presumably patriotic - Americans of the notion that, indeed, Trump and Putin were buddies all along, sharing one and the same interest.
But it is exactly in the European context that we can see what confusion the hoax of the century has led to, and what damage to any reasonable foreign policy objectives it has entailed. During his first term, Trump urged NATO members to spend more on defense and warned Germany specifically for the dependency on Russian energy that the Nordstream II project would lead to. Both warnings have gone largely ignored. Is Europe better off for having done so? And is Ukraine? Still, it is the first messaging by representatives of the current Trump administration that is characterized as a gift to Putin.
Similar confusion is prevalent on the topic of migration. Russian channels try to magnify the unease - and even fear - felt by Europeans because of the arrival of millions of (in Vance’s words) unvetted migrants. What is ignored, is that this is part of the Kremlin’s strategy to weaken Europe. By the millions people were driven out of Syria by Putin’s ally Assad, and subsequently helped, accompanied by many others seeing the opportunity, across the borders into European countries (and yes, since 2022, many Ukrainians have fled as well). This policy of using migrants to destabilize foreign countries is still pursued (take a look at the migrants flown into Belarus and sent, on foot, to the border of Poland). It is all very nice to claim your humanity card by letting supposedly destitute people in. But this does not annul your responsibility to acknowledge the fact that those people are used as a weapon of war. The absurdity the situation has led to among the political parties opposing this status quo is that the Russia hoax has led these people to believe that the country having sent the migrants there in the first place somehow is their ally.
The narrative that perhaps has shackled free thinking the most is the eschatological climate scare. If I must go out on a limb, I would venture that these trite and disproven Club-of-Rome theories could only have made a grand return because certain companies and especially Communist China make piles of money, while European institutions willingly and fanatically break down life-giving economies. If those in power continue to use the taboo of the far-right to keep partisan such as the AfD in check, they may want to imagine what is going to happen five years from now. When the disassembly of the German economy has proceeded, and the same jolly old migrants continue to contribute to the society that saved them by taking innocent people’s lives. What will happen then is going to be a lot worse than AfD, which is the product of their unwillingness to listen to their citizens in the first place. Which brings me back to Vance’s speech.
A point often lost in discussions on the freedom of speech is the fact that the role of the mouth is complemented by the function of the ears. What Vance did is give a friendly warning that people disagreed with must be listened to. The refusal to listen could be understood as the inability to provide answers, let alone a winning argument. In Europe, where the (supra-)national state plays such a big role in the redistribution of wealth, it is logical that resistance against reforms is strong. There always are vested interests unwilling to forfeit their flow of subsidies. With state-owned TV channels and other media which, indeed, have also received funds from USAID, it has been fairly easy to keep those dissenting voices out. But if Europe wants to prepare to fight Russia and salvage what is left of Ukraine, it is high time to consider what type of society can muster the strength required to do so. Can it afford to commit economic suicide? Can it afford to ignore the presence of scores of death worshippers who have no interest in leading productive lives? And can it afford to institutionalize cancel culture, declaring a sizable part of the population unworthy of consideration? If, indeed, we are living at a pivotal moment, a world that wants freedom needs all the resources it can find, and citizens convinced of the moral rectitude of their cause. Otherwise, Brussels can tell us right now that it was them, and Hillary, who delivered the continent to Russia.