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Reason in the Post Truth Era

 

How to Negotiate

 

The 12 Rules for Life: Jordan Peterson

 

How to Know If You're Ready to Marry Someone - Jordan B Peterson

 

Electoral Bonds Made Simple

 

'Stop Making Us Pretend' Bill Maher

 

Jordan Peterson on the Israel-Hamas war

 

Is the LSE Student Union Hinduphobic?

 

The Difference between Bullshit and Lying

We have suffered both. Some never speak the truth because they don’t know or care about it. Others know the truth but lie anyway wrires Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

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llustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian 

 
Sometimes it falls to an old book to tell us what’s new, to a white-bearded philosopher based far from Westminster or Washington to clarify the shifts in our sharp-suited politics. So spare yourself the annual round-ups in the newspapers or the boy-scout enthusiasm of podcasters. To understand the great political shift of this year, the work you need is a piece of philosophy called ­– what else? – On Bullshit.

I offer it to you this Christmas because surely no reader of mine can resist an essay that begins: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” Statements like that made it a bestseller upon re-publication in 2005 and turned its then-75-year-old author, Harry Frankfurt, from a distinguished moral philosopher at Yale and Princeton into a chatshow guest.

But to open the book now is to get a blast of something quite different, in a climate that just didn’t exist two decades ago. Read today, On Bullshit taxonomises an entire style of government. It foretells the age of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

The task Frankfurt sets himself is to define bullshit. What it is not, he argues, is lying. Both misrepresent the truth, but with entirely different intentions. The liar is “someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood”. He or she knows the truth or could lay hands on it – but they certainly aren’t giving it to you. The bullshitter, on the other hand, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshitters couldn’t give two hoots about the truth. They just want a story.

In that distinction lies an explanation for this era of politics. Commentators have struggled for years to coin the phrase for now. “Populist” doesn’t work. Too often, it merely denotes what the author and their friends dislike, throwing together clowns such as Beppe Grillo with social democrats such as Jeremy Corbyn. A similar problem bedevils “strongman”, a label stuck on Xi Jinping and Jair Bolsonaro alike. But “bullshitter” – that sums up just how different Trump and Johnson are from their predecessors.

‘Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Some enterprising future editor of a dictionary of political terms will carry the word “bullshit” and cite as examples: writing two opposing columns on Brexit, claiming the NHS will be £350m a week better off and affecting a hurt expression when asked the whereabouts of your promised 40 new hospitals. Come on! Those little-doggy eyes beseech the hard-faced TV interviewer. Didn’t everyone know that was bullshit?

Socially, there is little to distinguish Johnson from David Cameron: both are Bullingdon boys manufactured at Eton. In policy, too, there is a fair carryover between George Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” and Johnson’s “levelling up”, or between Cameron’s vow to get net immigration down to the tens of thousands and the pledges made by Johnson’s home secretary, Priti Patel. The great divide is in rhetoric: how Johnson talked to voters and the promises he made us. They were never meant to be taken at face value.

Among the media class’s artisanal industries of the past few years has been trying to find a thread that runs through Johnson the journalist, the globalist mayor of London and the Brexit prime minister. Frankfurt furnishes that link: it is bullshit.

Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames meet promises of an “oven-ready” Brexit deal. They are electioneering fables rather than manifesto commitments, grand gestures over small print, cheerful dishonesty in place of lawyered mendacity. In other words, they are all just careerist bullshit.

Much the same goes for Liz Truss, although she was clearly not as good at it. Looking back, this summer’s Tory leadership contest can be seen as a final hurrah for the “anything goes” era. And it certainly applies to Trump. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” Bullshit. “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest.” Bullshit. A “sea of love” at his inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Frankfurt’s book offers a theory of a generation of politicians who now appear to be leaving the stage.

‘A ‘sea of love’ at Donald Trump’s inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/EPA

Lies can be shown up: Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But there is no point factchecking bullshit, as parts of the British media still do over Brexit or the New York Times did with Trump. For a bullshitter, facts are beside the point – the real aim is to produce a story that erases the line between truth and falsehood. It’s why the philosopher concludes: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

We all lie sometimes, and around millions of tables there will be much bullshit spoken over the Christmas turkey. In British politics, the era of bullshit followed on naturally from a long spell of lies. Before Johnson, the most effective Tory of the post-Thatcher era was Osborne.

He blamed Labour and Gordon Brown for the banking crash, only later admitting that was untrue. He declared Labour’s 2008 package to bail out the banks would spark a run on the pound, before confessing: “Broadly speaking, the government did what was necessary.”

Most of all, he claimed that slashing benefits was essential to bring down borrowing and was being done fairly. Remember “we are all in this together”? Except a study at the end of the coalition by the late John Hills, of the LSE, alongside other leading academics, showed that the coalition’s tax and benefit changes had “a net fiscal cost” – which meant they increased the deficit. Not only that, but “the poorest 30% [of Britons] lost or broke even on average and the top half gained”. Heading the Treasury, Osborne was in charge of a machine that could calculate the effects of his policies. He would have or should have known the truth as he laid out each budget. And yet voters were fed something entirely different.

One might see these as common or garden political lies – falsehoods that could be checked and that aimed at nothing more than establishing a poll lead for Osborne’s team. They were not the alternative reality of Vote Leave. But if the currency of truth is sufficiently debased, voters may eventually choose the altogether more entertaining humbugger. In that lies a warning for both Rishi Sunak, the down-to-earth multimillionaire, and Keir Starmer, the man who said he was Corbyn before revealing himself to be Tony Blair meets Gordon Brittas, the TV sitcom manager whose words never match results or deeds.

One topic Frankfurt doesn’t address is the audience for bullshit. Why do people buy it? To which we might add another question. Why have swathes of the political establishment and the press spent the past few years claiming Brexit is a success or that levelling up is serious or that any alternative to the most venal dishonesty is just impossible? Answers would be welcome but were we to press for any, I suspect we’d be told to drop the bullshit.

The Way to Find High Quality Women

 

War or peace, truth suffers

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.

As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.

Rahul Gandhi has made the grade more frequently than many others. Opponents of nuclear weapons on both sides are easily saddled with the opprobrium of helping the enemy. Occasionally, campaigners for peace between the two become targets of slander. Others run the risk of annoying both sides.

The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.

Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.

The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.

A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.

Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.

Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.

The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.

According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.

The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.

Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.

From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.

“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”

Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.

“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.

“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”

Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.

“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”

Should we have a ‘truth law’?

Today’s politicians mislead with impunity – could we legislate to stop them lying? asks Sam Fowles in The Guardian



 
For months the British government has floated the idea of unilaterally breaking the so-called Northern Ireland protocol, part of the withdrawal treaty it agreed with the European Union. That would undermine the Good Friday agreement, reanimate the prospect of sectarian violence and damage the UK’s international reputation. Such action demands a weighty justification and ministers have one, with the attorney general arguing that “Northern Ireland’s economy is lagging behind the rest of the UK”.

Except it’s not. Statistics show that Northern Ireland is outstripping every part of the UK except London.

In recent years politicians have repeatedly based the case for historic changes on lies. These have ranged from the infamous “Brexit bus”, which promised £350m a week for the NHS, to government framing of recent rail strikes as “selfish” because, as Boris Johnson told one interviewer: “Train drivers are on £59,000 and some are on £70,000.” (The average wage of a striker is below £36,000.) Politicians consistently mislead about issues of national importance. I know this first-hand – I was part of the legal team that proved Johnson’s prorogation of parliament in 2019 was unlawful.

Truth is democracy’s most important moral value. We work out our direction, as a society, through public discourse. Power and wealth confer an advantage in this: the more people you can reach (by virtue of enjoying easy access to the media, or even controlling sections of it), the more likely you are to bring others round to your point of view. The rich and powerful may be able to reach more people but, if their arguments are required to conform to reality, we can at least hold them to account. Truth is a great leveller.

The problem is that our public discourse has become increasingly divorced from reality. The pollster Ipsos Mori conducts regular surveys on what the British public believes about the facts behind frequently discussed issues. In one memorable study it discovered that, in the words of one headline, “the British public is wrong about nearly everything”. Among the concerns was benefit fraud: people surveyed estimated that around £24 of every £100 of benefits was fraudulently claimed, whereas the actual figure was 70p. When asked about immigration, people estimated that 31% of the population were born outside the UK, when in truth it was 13%.

Members of parliament have played a prominent role in getting us to this point. They make and vote on laws, help set the political agenda and influence the national conversation. Of course, politicians have always had a tendentious relationship with the truth. From the Zinoviev letter to the Profumo affair, history is littered with scandals that result from lies being exposed. Profumo resigned because he misled parliament once. Today’s ministers regularly do the same with impunity.

Commentators often paint Johnson as uniquely mendacious, but he is merely the latest prime minister to embrace lying for political gain. David Cameron won two elections by misleading the country about the causes of the financial crash and the economic impacts of austerity. Theresa May built her early career in government on dubious anti-immigration rhetoric, notably the lie that one immigrant had been allowed to stay in the country because he had a pet cat.

Democracy cannot function properly in this environment and an existential problem demands a radical solution. So, MPs (and peers in the House of Lords) should be formally required to tell the truth: in the debating chamber, on TV, in print and on social media. To publish a statement that wilfully or negligently misrepresents information should be classed as misconduct in public office (a criminal offence). In other words: we need a truth law.

Ensuring the offence captures both “wilful” and “negligent” misrepresentation will obviate spurious defences such as Johnson’s claim that he thought the Downing Street parties were “work events”. With researchers and civil servants at their disposal, parliamentarians have no excuse for misrepresenting the facts. Even so, I suggest that they should not be prosecuted if they correct the record and apologise in parliament within seven days.

Radical as it may seem, we already have all the tools to make this work within established law. “Publish” has a clear legal meaning (essentially “to make public”). Tests of wilfulness or negligence are frequently applied across civil and criminal law. Determining whether someone has “misrepresented information” (ie, not told the truth) is often the core business of the courts. The penalty for misconduct can go all the way up to life imprisonment. While some may find that rather satisfying, I suggest limiting it, in this class of cases, to a fine. The courts should also have the power to refer an offender to the Standards Committee for further parliamentary sanction. 

I imagine that there will be two main objections to this idea. First, it may have a chilling effect on parliamentarians’ free expression. But parliamentarians are not ordinary citizens. They hold a special position of trust and power, which they assume voluntarily, and for which they are rewarded handsomely. It’s right that that they should be subject to stricter rules. Many professions limit the freedom of expression of their members in the public interest. As a barrister I am subject to “truth telling” rules which, if breached, could end my career (and potentially lead to a prosecution for contempt of court). Politicians’ words have more influence than barristers’, so it’s fair to subject them to more exacting standards.

Second, any truth law would breach “parliamentary privilege”. This guarantees that MPs will not be prosecuted for anything they say in parliament. That rule was developed to stop monarchs persecuting their political opponents. It was never intended to be a licence to lie. We now have an independent prosecution authority and independent courts: it’s time we addressed today’s challenges to democracy, not ones that were last relevant centuries ago.

My proposal won’t eradicate lying in public life. But it’s an important first step. Imagine, for a moment, that we could genuinely trust our elected representatives. That shouldn’t be a utopian ideal – and in the law, we have the means to make it a reality.

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On Fact, Opinion and Belief

 Annie Duke in 'Thinking in Bets'

What exactly is the difference between fact, opinion and belief?” .

Fact: (noun): A piece of information that can be backed up by evidence.

Belief: (noun): A state or habit of mind, in which trust or confidence is placed, in some person or thing. Something accepted or considered to be true.

Opinion: (noun): a view, judgement or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter.

The main difference here is that we can verify facts, but opinions and beliefs are not verifiable. Until relatively recently, most people would call facts things like numbers, dates, photographic accounts that we can all agree upon.

More recently, it has become commonplace to question even the most mundane objective sources of fact, like eyewitness accounts, and credible peer-reviewed science, but that is a topic for another day.

 How we think we form our beliefs:

1. We hear something;

2. We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false; only after that

3. We form our belief

Actually, we form our beliefs:

1. We hear something;

2. We believe it to be true;

3. Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.

Psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, “People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt”. 

Our default is to believe that what we hear and read is true. Even when that information is clearly presented as being false, we are still likely to process it as true.

For example, some people believe that we use only 10% of our brains. If you hold that belief, did you ever research it for yourself?

People usually say it is something they heard but they have no idea where or from whom. Yet they are confident that this is true. That should be proof enough that the way we form beliefs is foolish. And, we actually use all parts of our brain.

Our beliefs drive the way we process information. We form beliefs without vetting/testing most of them and we even maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information.

Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge it from our thinking. It takes a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief. We rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief.  This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning.

Truth Seeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information.

Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.

Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence. The potency of fake news is that it entrenches beliefs its intended audience already has, and then amplifies them. Social media is a playground for motivated reasoning. It provides the promise of access to a greater diversity of information sources and opinions than we’ve ever had available. Yet, we gravitate towards sources that confirm our beliefs, that agree with us. Every flavour is out there, but we tend to stick with our favourite. 

Even when directly confronted with facts that disconfirm our beliefs, we don’t let facts get in the way of our opinions.

Being Smart Makes It Worse

The popular wisdom is that the smarter you are, the less susceptible you are to fake news or disinformation. After all, smart people are more likely to analyze and effectively evaluate where the information is coming from, right? Part of being ‘smart’ is being good at processing information, parsing the quality of an argument and the credibility of the source.

Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. The smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalising and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

Unfortunately, this is just the way evolution built us. We are wired to protect our beliefs even when our goal is to truthseek. This is one of the instances where being smart and aware of our capacity for irrationality alone doesn’t help us refrain from biased reasoning. As with visual illusions, we can’t make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can’t unsee an illusion, intellect or will power alone can’t make us resist motivated reasoning.

Wanna Bet?

Imagine taking part in a conversation with a friend about the movie Citizen Kane. BEst film of all time, introduced a bunch of new techniques by which directors could contribute to storytelling. “Obviously, it won the best picture Oscar,” you gush, as part of a list of superlatives the film unquestionably deserves.

Then your friend says,”Wanna bet?”

Suddenly, you’re not so sure. That challenge puts you on your heels, causing you to back off your declaration and question the belief that you just declared with such assurance.

When someone challenges us to bet on a belief, signalling their confidence that our belief is inaccurate in some way, ideally it triggers us to vet the belief, taking an inventory of the evidence that informed us.

• How do I know this?

• Where did I get this information?

• Who did I get it from?

• What is the quality of my sources?

• How much do I trust them?

• How up to date is my information?

• How much information do I have that is relevant to the belief?

• What other things like this have I been confident about that turned out not to be true?

• What are the other plausible alternatives?

• What do I know about the person challenging my belief?

• What is their view of how credible my opinion is?

• What do they know that I don’t know?

• What is their level of expertise?

• What am I missing?

Remember the order in which we form our beliefs:

1. We hear something;

2. We believe it to be true;

3. Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.

“Wanna bet?” triggers us to engage in that third step that we only sometimes get to. Being asked if we are willing to bet money on it makes it much more likely that we will examine our information in a less biased way, be more honest with ourselves about how sure we are of our beliefs, and be more open to updating and calibrating our beliefs.

A lot of good can result from someone saying, “Wanna bet?” Offering a wager brings the risk out in the open, making explicit what is implicit (and frequently overlooked). The more we recognise that we are betting on our beliefs (with our happiness, attention, health, money time or some other limited resource), the more we are likely to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk inherent in what we believe.

Once we start doing this (at the risk of losing friends), we are more likely to recognise that there is always a degree of uncertainty, that we are generally less sure than we thought we were, that practically nothing is black and white 0% or 100%. And that's a pretty good philosophy for living.

Satyameva Jayate

 

A requiem for fine journalism

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

RONALD L. Haeberle was a combat photographer with the US army whose pictures exposed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, at peril to his life, leaked the papers revealing the cover-up of US perfidies in Vietnam. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli scientist who shared his country’s nuclear secrets with a British newspaper. Israel kidnapped him and put him in jail. US soldier Chelsea Manning handed over 750,000 secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was court martialled for it. She went to prison.

There’s no end to ill-informed media chatter about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past. But it took KGB master spy Vasili Mitrokhin to hand over a treasure trove of Kremlin’s secrets to the Western media. Likewise with Edward Snowden, living in exile in Moscow after exposing the US government’s illegal surveillance of its own citizens.

If there were no journalists, it seems, the truth would somehow still come out. That is one’s best bet for Ukraine. Somebody will blow the whistle, almost inevitably, after pattern, as it were, and the world would know a little more than what the media wants us not to know.

It’s a strange war out there in which columns upon columns of enemy tanks were lined up for days without stirring from their highly visible location a short distance from the capital city, and no one took a pot shot at the sitting ducks. Is there something one is missing? It’s a strange war in which the besieged capital of the invaded country should be running low on critical daily resources but its citizens are able to keep their mobile phones charged and these work very efficiently.

An Israeli analyst says the Russians are allowing the phones to work to be able to listen in. It’s tempting to believe that. But then, why couldn’t the Israeli wizard advise his friends in New Delhi to keep the mobile phones running in besieged Kashmir. Not for days or weeks, but for months, till the courts intervened, did Kashmir have no internet. It’s nice to have an Israeli expert talk about phone tapping.

It’s a strange war also, in which leaders and politicians from friendly countries wade into the heart of supposedly besieged cities to cheer on the fighters they are arming to the teeth and return home unscathed. In football matches, the team managers shout out orders from outside the arena. Here you have them walking to the goalkeeper to plan which way to dive to stop the curving ball.

The Ukraine war looks set to reset the world order. It has in the bargain already exposed the overstated claim of objective journalism the West had credited itself with. The claim lay in tatters, of course, for the most part since the US invasion of Iraq. Many in the media covering Ukraine had purveyed brazen lies that provided the fig leaf for the destruction of a robustly secular country like Iraq.

The overwhelming impression being created is that the Russians are being chased out of Ukraine if they are not being drawn into a trap. Frustrated by their failure, the retreating troops are committing war crimes. It would be difficult to regard any army, Western or Eastern, as a saviour of human rights. It could be a great point to start a discussion. Who is going to try whom for the massacres? The US refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court that is reported to have initiated its probe into the Bucha killings. And neither is Russia looking interested in blessing the court with acceptance. The worried world and the ICC can only persuade but not prosecute a non-member.

The basic question many are keen to ask is this: is the West on top of the situation in Ukraine, or is Russia winning the war, as non-Russian, non-journalist analysts are beginning to assert. Any journalist should be interested in both parts of the question, but asking the latter would be deemed tantamount to betrayal. Or are we heading towards a long-drawn stalemate dipped in even more innocent blood? The even-handed, old-fashioned school of journalism with cautionary words like ‘alleged’ and ‘claimed’ and ‘could not be independently verified’ etc is becoming sadly extinct.

As a South Asian journalist, one grew up admiring the probity and diligence of Western journalists. There was a time when the BBC in all the South Asian languages would be way ahead of domestic news services in credibility and speed. Z.A. Bhutto’s execution and Indira Gandhi’s assassination, for example, were first announced on BBC and only later reported by the national media outfits. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob were household names during the Punjab turmoil. Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan told me that he respected Western journalists more because they were honest in describing the injustices of the Hindu caste system. Indian journalists, he said, were mealy-mouthed about caste inequities.

Tully’s dispatches from New Delhi were broadcast in Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Sinhalese etc. They found audiences in remote villages. One day, Mark Fineman of the Financial Times was travelling with me to a village near Mathura where a Jat girl and two Jatav boys were lynched by a kangaroo court in a typical love story that went tragically wrong. Fineman decided to flash his press card at the village octroi to get past the barrier speedily. The village boys took one look at him and said: “Oh! Mark Tully! You may go.” Incensed, Fineman promptly thrust a five-rupee note into the toll collector’s hand — more than twice the octroi fees and shouted: “No, I’m not Mark Tully. I can never be.”

Likewise, there cannot be another Robert Fisk who died in 2020. However, John Pilger and a few others of the old school are still around to give us a sliver of hope about an otherwise fatally stricken profession.

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"A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts! - Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes