Syria’s White Helmets And The War On Truth
A Successful Online Campaign of Slander Exposes Our Vulnerability to Falsehood
To my surprise, one of my old college friends has turned into an Assad apologist of sorts. As we were having dinner a while ago, the conversation turned to Syria and the White Helmets. I was shocked to realize that my friend was completely sold on the conspiratorial views of the organization. Did I not know that the group acted on behalf of Western intelligence agencies? That its British founder, James Le Mesurier, had ties to MI6? That the group fought alongside islamist groups? (To conspiracy theorists out there, the White Helmets somehow manage to be both islamists AND a tool of the West.)
Our conversation left me somewhat demoralized. How could a guy whose daily job centers on international affairs buy into this propaganda? And how could White Helmets volunteers, many of whom perished while attempting to save lives, continue to be so vilified?
There is reason to believe that the global campaign of lies against the White Helmets cost their founder, James Le Mesurier, his life. The organization’s powerlessness in the face of relentless smear was apparently on Le Mesurier’s mind when he committed suicide in November 2019. His smartphone was full of the hateful messages targeting the White Helmets on social media, calling the rescuers “terrorists”, their rescue missions “staged” etc. The device also contained the pictures of people, dead and alive, whom the rescuers had pulled from under the rubble in towns across Syria.
Russia, Syria and their online mercenaries have orchestrated a nauseating campaign against rescuers who do absolute good, show absolute bravery, rewarding them with a relentless stream of slander. So widespread are the lies that anyone with minimal social media exposure is likely to have come across them. By now, almost a quarter of the rescuers have been killed - often by Russian bombs - and are no longer there to defend their reputation and that of their organization. Let’s give it to the master propagandists: it was quite a feat to persuade countless social media users around the world that the true villains were a group of first responders... If this can be done to men who put their lives on the line to save others, no one is safe from having their reputation destroyed.
Russia has obvious reasons to discredit those who bear witness to its crimes in Syria. The White Helmets have seen Russia’s military’s strategy first hand; it consists in demoralizing people in rebel strongholds by relentlessly targeting civilians, bombing schools, marketplaces, hospitals… the same tactics used in Chechnya over 20 years ago. On the first day of Spring this March 21, 2021, Russian forces bombed a makeshift hospital near Aleppo.
Beyond that, the online campaign against the White Helmets is part of Putin’s broader war against the very idea of truth. Consider the downing of flight MH17 by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine: the Russian media produced a dozen competing narratives to explain what had happened. Never mind that these narratives contradicted each other, since the goal was to drown out the truth, making it one version of events among others, indistinguishable from the rest. Twenty-first century propaganda does not promote a specific narrative; it overwhelms people with dubious reports to give them the impression that nothing they hear or read on a topic should be trusted. As French singer Michel Berger put it in his song “Le Paradis Blanc” (“The White Paradise”):
“Y'a tant de vagues et tant d'idées
Qu'on n'arrive plus à distinguer
Le faux du vrai
Et qui aimer ou condamner.”
(“There are so many waves and so many ideas
That we can no longer tell apart
The false from the true
And who to love or condemn.”)
Likewise, online trolls have had no problem attacking the White Helmets as both Western spies and islamist terrorists. What matters is the resulting perception that the organization is not what it claims to be and therefore its video reports should not be trusted. Beyond the White Helmets, Assad, Putin and their Western cheerleaders, such as Vanessa Beeley, spared no effort in misleading Western audiences as to the nature of the war in Syria and the forces at play.
As intended, the resulting confusion has had a paralyzing effect in the West. Given the apparent lack of consensus on the facts, the public response to Syria’s atrocities has been muted. In over a decade of war, Western leaders have not come under considerable domestic pressure to change the course of events.
Reflecting on our collective failure to help the Syrian people, French thinker Nicolas Tenzer laid out five key conditions without which there can be no community:
“We respect the truth and seek it out; we share a broadly similar definition of good and evil; we discriminate between what is important and what is not; we are united by shared emotion; we distinguish between values and interests.”
In light of the above, the ease with which false narratives against the White Helmets found an audience in Western democracies has troubling implications. If we cannot agree on what first responders do, whether to “love or condemn” them, and whether images of children buried under the rubble should prompt indignation or give rise to conspiracy theories; what is the state of our community? What does it say about ourselves?
The successful campaign against the White Helmets’ sheds light on our collective vulnerability to falsehood. It ought not to be so easy to slander heroes and depict them as criminals. Yet this is exactly what has happened, and those lies eventually killed James Le Mesurier. What meaning can there be if the bravest of men pass for fanatics and criminals? Why keep on fighting in such a world, why keep on living at all?