Are you a “Nicodemite”?

 
If you are familiar with reading the Bible, you will know Nicodemus well.
Indeed, this member of the Great Sanhedrin of Jerusalem appears several times in the New Testament.
He is a Pharisee, secretly a disciple of Jesus.
He listens to his teaching (John 3, 1-21), defends him (John 7, 45-51) and attends the descent from the cross (John 19, 39-42). But he meets Christ by night, and one can easily understand that this is for fear of compromising himself (he holds official functions), and so as not to be recognised.
“Nicodemism”, in its broader sense, today covers an attitude of concealment, a fear of stating one’s opinions so as not to get into trouble.
The current war between NATO and Russia has given me the opportunity to discover many “Nicodemites”. Those who do not subscribe to the binary official theory are indeed as numerous as they are discreet. Two irreducibly antithetical worlds are supposedly clashing: on one side the open and virtuous democracies, on the other a despotic empire populated by masses used to obeying under the “knout”. Us against them. The good against the bad.
In this climate, how can one have the courage to say that our “communication” is just as manipulative as their “propaganda”? We know little about the latter since democratic censorship, banned, in order to protect us, the French-language channel “Russia Today”, whose programme Interdit d’interdire was nonetheless a journalistic model, and closed the “Spoutnik” agency.
We are therefore condemned to ignore the point of view of the Other, while on our side all the oldest tricks are used to stir up emotion and mobilise us in favour of war.

Always the same old refrains

On the occasion of the fourth French edition of my little book Principes élémentaires de propagande de guerre^[1] I reviewed these principles to see whether they were being mobilised in the conflict between NATO and Russia, and the result is very clear.
The first principles (We do not want war – the enemy alone is responsible for the conflict) must be developed if a war is to be popular.
Public opinion must be persuaded that we are acting in self-defence and that it was the “other” who started it. It was his expansionist aims that dictated his attack. So it is obviously Russia that is presented as solely responsible for the war in Ukraine. Yet Machiavelli^[2] (1469-1527) had already warned that the one who draws his sword first should not necessarily be considered responsible for the conflict. He may indeed have been put in such a situation that there is no other option left to him than to enter into open war. Westerners thus speak of Russia’s “attack” on Ukraine in February 2022, without taking into account the fact that NATO’s advance eastwards is, from the Russian point of view, a concrete threat to its territory to which – with its back to the wall – it must eventually “respond”.
NATO asserts that its advances eastwards are intended to “protect” Europe. It is a matter of taking retaliatory measures in response to the Russian attack, and the USA say they are ready to use nuclear weapons in retaliation.

Another elementary principle of propaganda requires the leader of the opposing camp to be presented as a diabolical madman.
During the First World War, it was “Kaiser” Wilhelm II who took on this role.
Then, in turn, Saddam Hussein, Miloseviç and Gaddafi.
The current Western narrative does not fail to apply this simple and effective principle. We are not waging war on the Russians but on a paranoid Putin. La Libre Belgique spoke of the Soviet tsar^[3]. Le Vif, in a 2014 article entitled “Comment arrêter Poutine”, was already denouncing his “malignity” and his bellicose diplomacy, and calling him a “thug”^[4].
In the binary system of propaganda (“them” and “us”), it is always the leaders of the other camp who are dangerous madmen. “Our” leaders, for their part, are sane and full of humanity.

To mobilise public opinion in favour of war, it must also be persuaded that, unlike our enemies, we are waging this war for noble causes.
So there will be no talk of our expansionist plans or of the economic motives behind our warlike undertakings. Warmongering single-mindedness will not say a word about US shale gas, which can replace Russian gas – at a higher price. There will be no elaboration on the European project that sees in tomorrow’s Ukraine, integrated into NATO and the European Union, a fine opportunity for cheap “nearshoring”.
What the Western media will talk about, on the other hand, is our noble propensity to rush to the aid of our enemies’ enemies. We defend the right of peoples to self-determination for Kosovo breaking away from Yugoslavia, but not for Crimea or Donetsk if they want to break away from Ukraine.

Propaganda must point out only the atrocities committed by the enemy camp, and never our own.

Thus, in the war in Ukraine, only Russian violence is reported. When Human Right Watch and then Amnesty international express concern about torture and executions committed by Ukrainians on Russians, notably prisoners, the echo here is faint and does not make the front pages. Empathy is reserved solely for the victims of the enemy and not for the victims of Ukraine and its allies. Refugees are moving and worthy of solidarity only when they are presented as witnesses to enemy barbarity. Yet since 2014 the war in Ukraine has also forced inhabitants of Donetsk to leave their town or village, but who has cared about them?
The words used in this area are heavy with meaning. Mass graves and mercenaries are the work of the “Other”, while makeshift cemeteries and foreign volunteers are on our side.
I will not review all the principles of war propaganda, but ALL of them can be found in the communication used to sell the war between NATO and Russia to public opinion.
I will, however, dwell on one point directly linked to “Nicodemism”.

Critical minds are enemy agents

The tenth and last principle of war propaganda holds that those who do not fully support the policy of their camp, those who doubt what propaganda puts forward, are immediately stigmatised as enemy agents.
Recent conflicts are no exception to the rule. Pope Bergoglio is treading carefully between the two camps in the war in Ukraine. He was therefore immediately branded a “Putinist”. Concerts and university courses are cancelled, artists and sportspeople boycotted because they have not clearly declared themselves in favour of our camp^[5]. Pacifists are kept out of the media.
Warmongering single-mindedness is so omnipresent that it is very difficult and risky to challenge it, even if one begins every intervention with “I am not for Putin”.
However, I was able to see during recent appearances I made on the radio^[6] or on television^[7] that alongside the cheerleaders of war, there are also critical voices, far more numerous than one might imagine, who do not subscribe to the official media narrative on the war in Ukraine and on the usefulness of sanctions. They advocate dialogue and diplomatic action, and suggest solutions other than a confrontation that could be fatal to our planet. But these voices, which were heard collectively in particular at the demonstration on Sunday 26 February for peace and against the war, mostly want to remain discreet, because it seems risky to them to question a narrative supported by all the ruling and media circles.
When they are asked individually for their opinion in public, many lower their heads and hasten to change the subject.
They want to avoid insults and are waiting for the storm to pass.
They consider it prudent to conceal their opinion, even though in our country it is difficult, but not deadly as in others, to defend a “dissident” conviction.
They act like Nicodemus….

Anne MORELLI
Historian, honorary professor at the Université de Bruxelles (ULB)

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BAM!

Standfirst and illustration by BAM!

Photo source:
Image cropped from the photo of the painting by Crijn Hendricksz Volmarijn on Wikipedia.

[1] Aden 2023. The first edition dates from 2001. The book has been published in 7 languages, including Japanese.
[2] Nicolò Macchiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, libro settimo, cap. XVI.
[3] La Libre, 4 June 2022.
[4] Le Vif, 5 September 2014, article by Gérald Papy.
[5] See my article on the prevailing Russophobia, published on the website of Le Soir under the title “Romain Rolland était-il poutiniste ?”, Carta academica, 28 May 2022. One could add the case of Emir Kusturica, whose film On the milky Road was excluded from the 2022 Cannes Festival: the director had maintained cultural relations with Russia.
[6] RTBF, programme Ouï dire of 8 February 2023
[7] LN24, 10 and 21 February 2023