One of the biggest problems in understanding the world today is our over reliance on data, divorced from context. Data only tells part of the story. Understanding data requires real world expertise. It requires a narrative – be it fictitious or not. Western civilization requires it to maintain stability, autocracies understand it to stay in power.
But in the end it depends on the will of the cogs in the machine – the “people”.
9 December 2024 (Paris, France) — As I flicked through the channels on my TV over the weekend — the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and the Pew Research reports on the trepidations concerning the coming Trump administration given a *functionally illiterate* American electorate — I was initially struck by the disparate nature of these 3 stories.
But in reality it was a concatenation of events, all built around the idea of *narratives*.
I first learned the art of narrative and storytelling years ago in NYC, at film school. But it was not until I attended sessions at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy that I learned the true technique of how different storytelling approaches can be applied to the same data, and its warped use by governments. Oh, and by journalists, too, if the truth be told.
And today, how practitioners (and audiences) define “multimedia storytelling” — the mix of text, graphics, photographs, videos, etc. — changes the entire complexion of Web-based formats, print media and broadcast venues. Newspapers and magazines have contained multiple story forms for decades in their packaging of text, photos, and information graphics. Television news has too, with video, audio, photos, and graphic animations. Additionally, most print and broadcast organizations also publish Web sites; and some are even publishing mobile media sites and tablet-based applications.
But you also learn the concept of “voice”, where you are instructed that a good verbal storyteller (and writer) should vary her/his pace, pitch, and volume and use pauses to add a dramatic effect.
But for autocracies, the concept of “voice” means something different.
The easiest narrative to understand was at the reopening of Notre Dame here in Paris.
Before the flames of that fire were even extinguished on that horrible day in April 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild the cathedral, “bigger and more beautiful,” calling it “part of France’s destiny”. He promised it would be done in 5 years, and most restoration experts and architectural experts said “impossible”. He did it in 5-1/2 years and the world was stunned.
Over the weekend I watched special presentations on the Arte TV network (the European public service channel dedicated to culture) and on France 2 (the French public national television channel) which explained the restoration and architectural “dream team” Macron assembled, and how Notre Dame was rebuilt.
Macron needed this. He had to change his *narrative*. He is gravely weakened politically (a situation of his own making) and wanted to win a new lease of political life from the weekend’s ceremonial reopening of Notre Dame, and the related events.
In his speech, Macron sought to present the renovated cathedral as a symbol of France’s inner reserves of creative strength. He urged the world “to see beyond the country’s current political crisis” and to admire “the determination, organization and hard graft that have rescued one of France’s most famous buildings in just five years”.
The long-awaited reopening of Notre Dame comes just as France has entered a period of deep uncertainty triggered by the fall of Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government last Wednesday. Macron had planned to make the cathedral’s reopening the optimistic climax of 2024 – a year also marked by the Paris Olympic Games. But while he sought to capitalize on the project’s undoubted success, in contrast was the unavoidable *narrative* that told the depressed state of the country as a whole, a backdrop to the soaring achievement of fixing this magnificent Gothic cathedral.
What may have clouded our judgment, reading the last developments in Syria, could be an expectation, or even a desire, for military wins. We want the world to be free from external intervention and subversion, and we hate the violence those inflict on countries and communities that we love and care deeply about.
This eagerness for military demonstrations of strength could make us forget that power, politics, or geopolitics, are far from just a story of military might. There are economic, diplomatic, and cultural aspects to all of this, and, most importantly, there is the *narrative*, or what people believe is happening, and why.
I can’t properly cover the military or economic importance of Syria’s fall; it’s not my expertise. But we do know with sufficient certainty that Assad’s Syria was not a military or economic powerhouse, but rather a weak, struggling country. So Russia and Iran did not lose a major ally, in this regard; Syria could not be trusted as a pillar of the Axis of Resistance in case of a major war.
But as Hemingway once wrote of bankruptcy, the collapse of autocratic regimes tends to happen gradually and then suddenly — slowly, and then all at once.
This is not just a literary metaphor. A tyrant’s followers remain loyal to him only as long as he can offer them protection from their compatriots’ wrath. In Syria, doubts about President Bashar al-Assad surely grew slowly, after his Russian backers began to transfer men and equipment out of Syria, into Ukraine, starting in 2022. The more recent Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s leadership hampered Iran, Assad’s other ally, from helping him as well.
Then, after a well-organized, highly motivated set of armed opponents took the city of Aleppo on November 29th, many of the regime’s defenders abruptly stopped fighting. Assad vanished. The scenes that followed over the weekend in Damascus — the toppling of statues, the people taking selfies at the dictator’s palace and ransacking the place — are the same ones that would unfold in Caracas, Tehran, or Moscow on the day the soldiers of those regimes ever lose their faith in the leadership, and the public loses their fear of those soldiers too.
Syria was lawless, a simply brutal place. Since 2011 the Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented more than 112,000 disappearances — men, women, and children arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned with no formal or legal justification. The regime has tortured tens of thousands of people in brutal prisons, keeping them in the dark, forbidding them any contact with the outside world. Infamously, Assad used poison gas against his own people and then lied about it, killing thousands. Joint Russian and Syrian-government air strikes deliberately targeted hospitals and practiced “double tap” strikes, bombing a civilian target and then hitting the same location soon afterward to kill rescue workers.
The Russian war against Ukraine has been equally cruel and equally lawless, in many instances copying tactics used in Syria. In occupied Ukraine, thousands of mayors, local leaders, teachers, and cultural figures have also disappeared into invisible custody. The former mayor of Kherson, abducted in June 2022, is reportedly being held in an illegal prison in Crimea; the mayor of Dniprorudne recently died in custody. In the rest of Ukraine, Russia deliberately targets hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, just as Russian and Syrian government planes did in Syria. Double-tap strikes are common in Ukraine too.
This kind of cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty has a logic, a *narrative* to it. Brutality is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism. Random arrests have driven millions of Syrians, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans abroad, creating large, destabilizing waves of refugees and leaving those who remain in despair. The despair, again, is part of the plan. These regimes want to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. “Our leader forever” was the Assad dynasty’s slogan.
But all such “eternal” regimes have one fatal flaw: soldiers and police officers are members of the public, too. They have relatives who suffer, cousins and friends who experience political repression and the effects of economic collapse. They, too, have doubts, and they, too, can become insecure. Over the weekend we saw videos of 1000s of Syrian Army members chucking their military garb and donning civilian clothes to disappear into the crowds.
I will not even hazard a guess on whether the weekend’s events will bring peace and stability to Syria, let alone those ephemeral concepts *freedom* and *democracy*.
Nevertheless, the end of the Assad regime creates something new, and not only in Syria. There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul – destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian – and Iranian-backed – regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The *narrative* will change.
I anticipate 2025 in the U.S. with the greatest trepidation. In a country where guns are as numerous as automobiles and decisions are made on the opinions of people who are unsure which side of the country the Pacific is on, I have very good reasons to fear the worst.
Power has been purchased in a nation that believes that everyone has a price, by a man who discovered a long time ago that he didn’t need the votes of the educated classes. In a democracy any majority will do. It was reported over the weekend that 21% of the adult population of the U.S. are *functionally illiterate*. That’s a lot of votes for free pizza and a baseball cap. Another 30% will never obtain a formal education because of the cost, though most because they’d never pass the admission tests. That group (who are far from illiterate) resent being excluded from the professional world because they don’t have a college degree.
Oh, you run the numbers from all the various post-election analysis sources and you’ll come up with 47% to 51% of an electorate that thinks all their problems are all caused by illegal immigration.
It is a brilliant *narrative* and it has all the key ingredients, the heat for the oven provided by the man who tells them what they want to hear, and the 2% who hold 98% of the nation’s capital controlling their news feeds. Plus the bankers who own the oil industry, the motor industry and aviation industry, placing billions behind anyone who will benefit them.
Trump will control Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive. The only place he *might* discover an educated resistance is in the military. But he plans to remove the generals who will not swear allegiance to him. The military, too, will be on bended knee. Some will feel duty bound to resist, because their oath is to the Constitution. Some will not. But the last time graduates from West Point divided into two factions, the U.S. had a civil war.
We might think that this is not possible. So many thought. In Europe, at least, a return of Trump was deemed “impossible”. But then people thought the rise of Hitler was ridiculous, and the rise of Mao “would never happen”, nor the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the end of the Soviet Union. All these things happened – and millions died.
The rise of Trump means the end of the post-World War II and the empire of the U.S.
Well, it will be a different empire. The *narrative* will change.