Earlier on in the course of the war in Ukraine, we heard a lot of braying in the Western media about Russian war crimes, which would come packaged with the rallying cry to stand up to Putin by urging the global community to sanction Russia and put an end to all of this madness, among other things.
And sure, war crimes are bad wherever they crop up. Ideally we don't want those. It is good to do something about them.
But then the braying quieted down, especially as the Israeli war crimes really started to ramp up. And then the Western media would report some of these crimes - usually with less braying involved - without the complementary packaging of the rallying cry to put an end to the crimes. No, what we must do in fact is stand by Israel no matter what.
This did a couple of things. First you got the "oh a double standard I see, you're just a hypocrite!" And then the mood darkened even more: "oh no, I see you don't actually care about war crimes, other than making rhetorical instruments out of them."
This sort of thing has been going on for quite a long time of course. In the United States for example, there was always an underlying tension between its instantiation as a new delimited "nation" and its revolutionary universalist and democratic conceits. Competing and conflicting beliefs could be selectively emphasized and sculpted to harmonize with the underlying realities as they shifted: the nation could go isolationist and protectionist and nurse its domestic industry as it gained strength, yammering about protecting the weak and the vulnerable while shitting on those very demographics, and then it would eventually burst out onto the international scene, taking an increasingly dominant role in shaping international law and trade, yammering all the while about the sanctity of international law, free trade, and democratic freedom, while endangering all of those things as it swiped what it could with both hands open. And in each moment, each distinct conception - whether global community or nation - could be pointed at to naturalize the direction that the ruling class wanted to go.
And this is the nature of cognitive dissonance besides. A certain amount of low level cognitive dissonance can be tolerated for quite a long time. Partly because it has to be tolerated, because that is how reality works. Realities change, and then beliefs have to change in response, and then you have somewhat of a reverse, in which beliefs change, which can alter the realities in turn.
Why not mix and match? In music you throw in a little dissonance and add some slight discomfort, and then it makes the consonant movement even sweeter, and so on.
But oftentimes there is a reason that the dissonance is continually growing without relief. Beliefs can be mixed and matched, and purposefully counterpoised against reality to achieve certain effects, and then that particular trick can get stuck. How long can an increasingly loud and obnoxious dissonance go on? How long can it be tolerated before things need to start shifting again?
The US is rapidly wearing out its current "sanctity of international law and free trade" outfit. Or maybe it has torn straight through and is wearing the tattered shreds. It is going to have to get mean and provincial, explicitly looking out for its own narrow interests in an environment of increasingly muscular rivals. And that's basically where the right wing politics have been going in the global West for decades now. But even that particular pose is going to be more and more difficult to strike given global economic and political conditions, which we'll have to explore in another post.
