How war and propaganda have been affecting families across Ukraine, Russia and the world.
On February 24th, 2022, Anya, like millions of Ukrainians, was woken up at 5 o’clock in the morning by the sounds and reverberations of missiles striking in and around Kyiv (where she lived) and all over the country. She spent that morning rounding up her very large family, including a 13 year old son who was at a sleepover more 30 minutes from their home. Imagine being separated from one of your children in a situation like that. They did get all of their family (18 people) together, but it was a lot of work and stress. While getting everyone together Anya and her family had to pack up not knowing how long they would be gone.
Then, they joined millions of people on the road who were heading West. It took them 3 days to make a trip that would typically take 7-9 hours.
As Anya sat in the car, she started thinking about her parents.
Anya's mom was in one of the towns that was occupied in the first hours of the war. She tried to call her, but the call wouldn’t go through. She tried again and again in those first hours, and then for almost two months, to contact her mom. She was constantly scrounging for any morsel of information regarding what was happening in her town. She was scared for her mom. And the stories that were coming out were terrifying. Anya had friends who snuck into Bucha, in the same region, while it was occupied by Russian forces, to rescue a family that had been locked in a basement by Russian soldiers. They had corralled them into the basement with with no food or water. This group had a mother and newborn with them, and they were locked down there for weeks.
The Russian forces were starving, shooting, torturing, looting and raping. I have friends in the same town, and their house was hit by two Russian missiles while the whole family, including three children was home. The family escaped, but the house was destroyed. Most people have heard and seen these things in the news, but it affects you differently when it is your family, your mom, that may be starved, shot, raped or looted. (During this time, in the same city, Anya’s brother was shot at multiple times for no other reason than that he stepped outside. He was trying to get food for his teenage son and himself). Everyone was rationing the little food that they had.
Anya was hearing these stories before the news organizations could verify these stories.
Anya’s dad is Russian; he left the family when Anya was a child. Anya’s dad has made an effort in the past decade to have a nominal, if not close, relationship with his daughter. In recent years he moved to Crimea, a part of Ukraine that was taken over by Russian forces in 2014. In their conversations, he has said that he doesn’t think that Putin is a good guy, but he also thinks that sometimes it’s good to have a bad guy for your president because he is willing to do what is needed for his country.
When the war started, and Safe Haven was fleeing west, Anya wrote him and asked if he still thought Putin was such a good president. It frustrated her when he said that nothing was happening in Ukraine. When she told him that they were fleeing to the west because they were woken by missiles exploding, his response was, “No, you are wrong. Don’t be crazy. Go back home.” As she tried to convince him that she had heard and felt the missiles, that her husband, Bogdon, had seen them flying overhead, that everyone they knew had heard or seen them, and they were all over the news, the evidence was everywhere; he shifted to a conviction that Russian forces were coming into Ukraine strictly to protect Russian speakers. The Russians were the good guys. She kept trying to patiently convince him until he suggested that maybe it was Ukraine’s own government that was firing on their own cities (a theory that was spun out by Russian networks from the first hours of the war). At that, Anya had enough. She told him that he could “Go follow the Russian warship!” and stopped communicating with him. (This is a reference to a famous quip by a Ukrainian soldier stationed on Snake Island who was told to surrender by a Russian warship.)
If you know any number of Ukrainians, you know similar stories to this one. There have been ruptures in relationships going all the way back to 2013 when Ukraine started its Revolution of Dignity.
In 2014, our Ukrainian language teacher told us of her family members in Russia who called her up after Viktor Yanukovich fled the country. They asked her how she was planning on fleeing the country to get away from the Nazis that had taken over. When she said that she wasn’t planning on leaving and that Nazis hadn’t taken over the country (she knew this because she was actually there), they put it in more stark terms: she either needed to leave Ukraine and renounce it, or their relationship was over. She held firm that there was no Nazi takeover and she was not fleeing. To them, this sweet, intelligent Ukrainian woman in her late 50s now became the Nazi for no reason other than she didn’t agree with their perception of what was happening.
Dima is one of the many people living in Ukraine who spent his whole life speaking Russian, but switched to Ukrainian when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. There wasn’t any great pressure on him to do this; I still hear Ukrainians all the time who speak Russian. For Dima, however, it was principle and protest. Dima also called his dad, who lives in Russia, on the first day of the war to let him know that his family was OK, but were fleeing the advancing Russian troops. Dima’s Dad had the same initial confused reaction as Anya’s Dad. He said, “Don’t go anywhere. Our guys are the good guys. They are coming in to clean out the Nazi’s. Give it a few days, and they will do their job and everything will be better for you.” After failing to convince his dad of what he was seeing with his own eyes, Dima decided to press his dad about what a Nazi was in Ukraine. The answer was fairly incoherent, but Dima got enough from it to push back on his father. “By your definition, Dad, I’m a Nazi, because I speak Ukrainian, love Ukraine and don’t want the Russian government to dictate life to us in Ukraine.” That conversation was over at that point as well.
Our friend Viktor is from a part of Ukraine that almost exclusively speaks Russian. When Viktor’s cousin from Russia talked to him after the start of the war, he used one of Putin’s justifications for the “special military operation,” that Ukrainians were killing Russian speakers. Viktor called him out on this. Viktor pointed out that his own family spoke Russian. Viktor’s wife literally can’t speak Ukrainian. His Russian cousin, himself, had recently visited them in Ukraine, and none of them were ever in danger because they were speaking Russian. In spite of this, Viktor’s cousin chose to believe what he heard on Russian news over and above the experiences of his friends and even his own experiences.
There are two sisters that we have known for years. They shared with us that they have family members in Russia who accused them of eating babies “with all the other Ukrainians.” I had heard that this type of story had gotten airtime on Russian programs, but this was the first time that I had heard it bleed into actual interactions with our friends in Ukraine. Again, there was nothing that our friends could do to convince their own family members that what they were hearing wasn’t true.
In spite of these and so many other stories, I still experience a small shock when I hear of family members in Russia who simply will not believe family members first hand experiences in Ukraine over what they are hearing on the news.
These are the effects of Russian propaganda. Believing what one news organization or one voice on social media says over the personal experiences in the areas that are being talked about. It is most common when these stories are being told about some person or group of people that are located in another area, that way you can’t easily go verify for yourself. These lies, this manipulation destroys society and tears families apart. This is very serious business.
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For the past few decades, Russia has been actively exporting their forms of propaganda. They have been investing over a 300 million dollars a year in RT, an English language news organization, that frames the world from a Russian point of view, and RT material has been very prolific.
Back in 2014, when Ukrainian citizens rose up in the Revolution of Dignity, Janna’s brother forwarded us a news piece that he had come across online about the Maidan Revolution. The report said that the protestors on Maidan were training for a military uprising and that they were too well armed to just be a grassroots movement of civilians. Most of the footage was of protestors with homemade body shields running drills on how to defend if the president’s private military unit moved in on them again. (I had personally seen these body shields when I had been on Maidan myself. They may have looked pretty serious on a news piece but I had seen how many of them were made of two pieces of thin roof metal, with a 4 inch layer of spray foam providing the structure.) There was also a clip of a few guys dressed in camouflage in the halls of some hotel and one of them was tapping what looked like a fishing knife against his leg. As I watched the news piece, I noted that this hallway could have been anywhere, and the guys were just standing there with their backs to the camera. They could have been anyone. The commentary and musical score was meant to evoke fear and doubt about the intentions and origins of the protestors. But the footage didn’t match up with the commentary. There was no evidence of a well armed group on display. The only thing that could be classified as an offensive weapon was a fishing knife and it wasn’t even held in a menacing way. The piece only worked because it was professionally produced. If you paid attention to the details, it didn’t pass the sniff test.
At the bottom of the newspiece was the logo: RT. This probably didn’t mean anything to my brother-in-law, but I was starting to understand its implications at that time.
I had been on Maidan during the protests, and at one point got an amazing behind the scenes tour, even going into the corners of the Right Sector groups, the most radical group amongst the protestors. We didn’t see anything that made us afraid. But more than that, we saw how the protestors were armed: homemade defensive shields and a table leg. During the whole tour I saw one antique hunting rifle. Against the authorities brutal suppressions, protestors had pulled bricks off the streets and thrown them because they weren’t armed.
As we were shown the inner workings that day I was struck by the protestors determination to do things right. Drunkenness and unruliness weren’t allowed on the grounds that the protestors occupied, and I personally saw people being turned away because they were intoxicated. This was a disciplined, but ground up movement.
The way that the Maidan protests played out supported this. When armed security forces and snipers were killing protestors, the protestors didn’t fire back, they just kept lighting tires on fire to make it harder for the shooters to see and if the security forces got close enough, they would throw bricks or if they used assault vehicles, Molotov cocktails.
Those facts never mattered to the Russian propaganda machine that was determined to cast the Ukrainian protestors as dangerous, evil anarchists that were simply puppets of the West. When we took that behind the scenes tour of Maidan, there was a visitor from the US with us. I told him that some people believed that the US had fomented and paid for the whole revolution to the tune of 5 billion dollars. Our guest wondered out loud if this might be true. I pointed at the overturned table that was serving as a choke point at the entrance of Kyiv’s City Hall and the table leg that sat next to the guard who was standing in front of Kyiv City Hall. This table leg was the only weapon that the guard had at hand to defend the protestors’ main building. All throughout our tour, we had seen the structure of a grassroots movement that was carried on the sacrificial giving of people all over Ukraine. There was simply no sign of an enormous foreign instigator of the protests.
The idea that the US had spent 5 billion on the Revolution came from a speech that the then Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, had given, saying that the US had invested 5 billion in Ukrainian democracy. Taken out of context, people took this to mean that the US had spend that money funding the revolution. But in context, it sounded to me like she meant that the US had invested 5 billion in institutions in Ukraine that strengthened democracy over the more than 20 years of Ukraine’s independence. But that didn’t keep our guest from doubting the intentions of the US government, and he is far from the only person.
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The fact that a government would sponsor news programs isn’t inherently bad. Back in the 1940s, after the proliferation of the ideologies of the Nazis and in the face of the propaganda of communist, the US funded Voice of America (VOA) in Europe to provide a counterpoint to those ideologies. But VOA was committed to providing facts and was very much motivated by the Fairness Doctrine which held sway in the US until the Reagan administration (Even after it was done away with, VOA still aspires to the fairness doctrine). RT is similar in mission to VOA, but not in execution. Reporting facts hasn’t been a priority, as those who track RT have shown time and again.
Even if you have never heard of RT, there is still every chance that you have been exposed to it. Especially if you view news pieces on any social media platform. There are people who are unknowingly exposed to RT materials and there are those who willingly seek it out. There are many people in the US and Europe right now who think, “I don’t know if I can trust the media in my country, but at least RT will tell me the truth.”
The unintentional and intentional interaction with this type of propaganda has huge ramifications.
One French journalist traveled to Bucha after the Russian forces retreated. She saw the atrocities, and she’s a journalist. She’s trained to discern and follow the evidence, and not simply accept what a government official might tell her. When she returned to France she would meet people who denied that Russia was carrying out a war in Ukraine at all. They denied the war crimes that are happening and are well documented. And when she would reply that she had been there and she only reported on what she could confirm, the reply would be dismissive, “Maybe you are right; we’ll probably never know for sure.”
When historian, Timothy Snyder, explains how propaganda works, he says that it simultaneously works to convince you that there is no truth (or at least no one is telling the truth) and they convince you that they, the propagandists, are the only ones who will tell you the truth.
Those are pretty scary effects in the abstract. It has horrendous results in the concrete. At the end of WWII, when the Red Army pushed back on German forces and marched to Berlin, they committed horrible war crimes. The stories of rape … and the frequency … and the fact that it was not only tolerated, but encouraged by the military brass … and the fact that it happened not only in Germany but in every territory that had been occupied by the Germans; that push was horrific to learn about, once the truth started coming out decades later. But the thing is, those atrocities occurred 6 years into the war, and they occurred after the Soviet Union had already suffered more than 20 million deaths. This doesn’t excuse those crimes, but it at least creates some context. Over time, wars always desensitize.
In 2022, Russian forces were committing those same atrocities from the first days of the full scale invasion.
Why?
The only answer that makes sense to me is that they believe that this is what Ukrainians deserve. And to believe that they have to believe that Ukrainians are less than human. To believe that, they have to believe what they hear on the news over what their own relatives in Ukraine tell them is happening to them directly. The soldiers have to ignore the humanity of people risking their lives to save women and children. The soldiers had to ignore the evidence in front of them as they sought out the almost non-existent Nazis inside of Ukraine.
As Russian forces have withdrawn from areas around the country, they have left mines and booby traps. Now, all across Ukraine there are billboards warning kids not to touch their toys if they return to their homes in an area that was occupied because, among other things, there have been toys - teddy bears and cars and dolls - that have been rigged with explosives.
What do you have to believe about a people group to be willing to put an explosive devise in a teddy bear?
These crimes are happening because Russian propaganda has worked.
I want to be fair; I see a similar type of radicalization happening in Ukraine, and it concerns me. In the years leading up to 2022, most Ukrainians I knew could differentiate between the Russian government and army that was carrying out a war on Ukrainian territory and Russians who Ukrainians knew were being lied to about this. They were frustrated by their friends and family who believed the lies they were being told about Ukraine, but they tried to understand. They could see that the fascist movement in Russia was actually growing without making the leap to calling all Russians fascists.
Since the war has started though, there is a lot more hate. Anya wrote us recently, when she was driving from Ukraine to the Czech Republic after saying goodbye to half of her family so that she could go spend a month with the other half of her family. She said couldn’t not hate the Russians for the split life they were forcing her to live. And she could no longer see a difference between the gullible masses and the administrators of this war.
I have friends who call all of the Russian soldiers orcs.
More and more, Ukrainians are dehumanizing Russians the same way that the Russians dehumanize the Ukrainians. I understand why Ukrainians are doing it. Every new atrocity that they see or learn about makes you question the humanity of the people who are carrying them out. Every night when people hear sirens going off, wondering if this is the time that a missile will fall on them, it affects them. This is how terror works. We know from studying wars that if you want to create radicals; you do what the Russians are doing.
I dearly hope that when this war is over, my Ukrainian friends will be able to let go of that and not radicalize. They can ignore the Russians, they can demand justice and reparations, but I hope that the hate doesn’t steal their humanity.
I believe that they can do that hard work.
As I have listened to people’s stories, I keep waiting for a story of some Russian changing their minds. I would love it if a family member stumbled across the abundant number of stories all over the place and then called up their family members in Ukraine and simply said, “I’m sorry. I should have listened.”
There are plenty of people in Russia who don’t believe the propaganda. Some of them remain quiet and just try to get along with their lives. But there are people who are resisting. There are people who are in prison for simply saying that they don’t support this war. There are people who are imprisoned just for calling what is happening in Ukraine a war because the Russian government has passed laws making this simple act of honesty illegal. I am so grateful for those people who engage in even simple acts of resistance in Russia. It can easily cost them a lot.
But I’m not hearing stories of people changing their mind.
Anya’s dad hasn’t written her and said, “Man, I was a jerk.” Dima’s dad hasn’t written and asked, “I get it now. Is there anything I can do?”
Parents, brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends since childhood; they aren’t talking anymore because the news channel that they watch is telling them to hate people who are from a different group.
I have heard social scientists say that we won’t hear many stories of changed minds and reconciliation. The more that they see and hear that tells them that they made a mistake, the more likely they are to ignore that information and double down on being wrong because they can’t admit that they were wrong.
I understand this. This is a very human tendency. I know that for myself, I have to build up a lot of courage to admit little mistakes. Admitting to the big mistakes creates such anxiety in me that I am convinced that I am going to die if I go through with it. However, I have found that for my own personal growth I have to intentionally make it one of my goals to admit my mistakes, faults and mistaken beliefs and this needs to take priority over “being right.”
It is still not easy.
I have come across news pieces where reporters are talking to ordinary people inside of Russia. I have found these very enlightening, if not, typically, encouraging. So many of the people interviewed have said that they have really big questions about why and how Russia was carrying out this war, but a common thread that ran thought most of those interviews was that people 1) believed that they morally have to support their government, especially during the hard times and 2) they believe that the people who are running things must know more than everyone else and they must be making the right choices. Contrast this with the consensus of every Western intelligence agency and every reputable news organization that Putin has created a government that is designed to tell him what he wants to hear and is likely not getting realistic reports on how the war is going, or on Russia’s realistic chances of achieving their goals.
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In the summer of 2022, our family spent three months in the US while we waited for visas so that we could continue to live in the Czech Republic with Anya and our other friends who fled Ukraine. While in the States, we presented regularly about Ukraine, trying to raise funds. One night, I got to present to a youth group at a church, and when I was finished, I opened the floor for questions. One of the young ladies who was there knew that when we first got married, my wife’s dream had been to move to Russia and work with some type of orphan ministry. Ultimately, we decided that Russia wasn’t an option for us, and we ended up in Ukraine. This young lady asked if I thought we would also believe the propaganda if things had ended up differently and 12 years ago we had moved to Russia and not Ukraine.
This is the super power of youth.
That is such an important question. And I forced myself to take a pause before giving into my first impulse and dismissively proclaim that I would never be as stupid as all those Russians.
I do not think that I would have fallen victim to Russian propaganda because I am a pretty skeptical person. Also, I would still be getting the majority of my news from outside Russia or even English language sources in Russia which have more freedom in their reporting. Even when we are in Ukraine, I’m getting news from different sources across three or four different countries. When I’m in Ukraine, I hear a lot of things from a lot of people. If they throw up red flags for me, I either log it away to dig into more later, or make a mental note simply not to pass it along. I can vouch that on the Ukrainian side, there is plenty of bad information, gossip, and tons of pure conjecture as well as gobs of wishful thinking floating all over the place.
Am I the kind of person who could be misled by propaganda? I wish I knew some way to get everyone to sit with that question. I do not believe that Russians are more susceptible to disinformation than other groups of people. I do, however, believe that the media sphere inside of Russia is intentionally well-crafted to manipulate people because those in charge of creating the media sphere understand how humans work. But, fundamentally, we all have the same susceptibilities.
In our interactions with Americans, we have come across a lot of disinformation regarding this war (and plenty of other topics). There was one night when I shared with a group in the States, and after I was done presenting, the people in this group took turns asking me about the crazy things that they had heard on various platforms. I spent so much energy trying to maintain my cool as they demonstrated how completely undiscerning they were in their media consumption.
When it comes to dealing with disinformation, I have learned a few things. First, confronting someone's media sources directly is rarely effective. Just like those Russians who cannot be convinced that they are wrong, direct confrontation only makes people get defensive and double down on their positions.
This fact is frustrating, because I’ve learned the way that propaganda twists the way that people see the world.
The propagandists convince you that there is no truth and that the propagandists are the only ones who will tell you the truth.
Recently, I was talking with a group about my experiences in Ukraine, and when I finished one person thanked me for sharing what I had seen. “It’s good to hear the perspective of someone who has been there, because I haven’t been sure what I should believe. I know the only news that I can trust is ___, and most of the time I’m not sure if I can trust ___.” In recent years, I have heard probably a dozen people say that same sentence about that same news organization. When we were in the States for the summer last year, it seemed at least twice a week, we had someone come up to us asking, “What is really happening in Ukraine?” And everyone who asked that said, “I never know if we can trust our media.” Almost word for word, everywhere we went.
But I know that turning around and criticizing ____ will only alienate the person I am talking with. Even though they are uwittingly saying the definition of propaganda, “___ has convinced me that there is no truth, and they have convinced me that they are the only ones who will tell me the truth.”
It is, however, beneficial to instruct people on the way that propaganda works, and who is most likely to be susceptible. Anyone who is involved in communities where ideas of “us” vs “them” are common is primed to believe the worst of the “them,” and is less likely to question anyone who is speaking for “us.”
Systems and groups that actively discourage questions or doubting also breed susceptibility to being deceived. Religious groups often fall into this category. I have a pastor friend who regularly repeats a mantra with his congregation, “Obedience is the key that unlocks the door to God’s blessing.” I am in favor of obedience in the general sense. One of the reasons that Ukraine is resisting Russia in this war is that they long for the stability and predictability of a society that is governed not by whim, but by the rule of law. However, history can definitely show that blind obedience is key to creating groups that can easily be misled by unscrupulous leaders.
There are some very standard tools that propagandist use :
Scapegoating - the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment. This is a very effective distraction technique. As long as you keep people thinking the enemy is out there, they are more likely to circle the wagons and not take a critical look at those in their own camp, and that is the point. When I first moved to Eastern Europe and started studying the history of the region, one of the things that stood out to me was a general consensus that the Soviets were not very good at governing. They never had a solid base of support. The reason that they maintained power for almost 70 years, though, was that they were very good at creating enemies. Often these enemies were completely fabricated but that didn’t matter in the Soviet Union any more than it matters anywhere else. As long as people were keeping their guard up against “them,” they didn’t turn on those who claiming to be the only ones protecting “us” against “them”, no matter how bad things were.
Fear-mongering and catastrophizing - the action of deliberately arousing public fear or alarm about a particular issue. If _____ happens, it will be the end of ______ as we know it. Growing up in conservative evangelical circles, I can’t think of an election where I did hear, “If the person we don’t like wins this election, it will be the end of the US as we know it.” And yet, somehow, the US is still the US (it just keeps growing and changing as all nations and cultures do).
The lone truth teller - “I’m the only one who has the courage to tell you this.” Telling the truth can be difficult at times. But the idea of a lone truth teller allows the person in this role to say anything, because by definition, they make themselves above reproach. Quality journalists have to overcome fear to tell the truth, but they make sure they can verify what they are saying, and typically avoid speaking in absolutes.
One of the things that I’ve seen more in recent years is people claiming that “they hate our country.” “They all hate our country.” “Every thing they do is because they hate our country.” I seem to hear something along these lines, spoken by people in positions of authority or media personalities, constantly. People have a different view on how to deal with immigration, or inflation, or regulations and on and on … because they HATE our country? This is clear strategy to stop conversation and keep those who listen to you from even considering opinions that they disagree with.
All sides are guilty of using these tactics, though some are more proficient. Each of these tactics is designed to keep you from listening to the other side. Anytime you hear someone talk about a certain group of people in a derisive and totalistic way, be on guard. Immigrants, liberals, conservatives, white people, colored people, Democrats, Republicans, Americans, Russians, Europeans, Jews, Arabs and on and on. Propaganda doesn’t allow for nuance. But if we can be alert to its methods, we can be better prepared to see past it.
One of the best ways to inoculate yourself from propaganda is to simply, but intentionally, diversify your media sources. It is best to do your homework first. If you are taking in far left wing media and simply start listening to far right wing media, you may become very confused, but you probably won’t be able to discern quality news reporting from overly biased. There are a number of independent groups who have analyzed the political biases and factually accuracy of major news groups. Check out a number of them and pick some news groups that seem reputable. A diversity of perspectives has been shown time and again to help make people more discerning.
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Historian, Timothy Snyder, has said that most Russian people are being indoctrinated in the myth of an “Innocent Russia.” This includes the widely propagated idea that Russia has only ever fought wars of defense, never offense. This idea is demonstrably false, both in the long history of Muscovite Russia, the Soviet Union, and in the much shorter history of the Russian Federation. But that idea: “we are the innocent ones,” is very alluring and pervasive.
Recently, I heard Molly McKew point out that in 2008, Russia claimed that the country of Georgia was going to invade Russia as a pretext for Russia’s invasion Georgia. That claim was factually inaccurate. More than that, the idea that tiny, poor Georgia was planning to invade Russia was simply crazy, but these lies never need to be plausible. For the past 9 years, Russia has been claiming that Ukraine wanted to invade Russia. In all that time, it hasn’t happened, all while Russia has been actively invading Ukraine and paying for mercenaries to carry on fighting there.
You can get away with this when you perpetuate a myth of innocence. Polls show that most Russians support the war in Ukraine. When any contradictions to their worldview appear, they simply tell themselves that their leaders must know things that they don’t.
After all, Russia is alway innocent.
A Myth of Innocence can be very appealing because you don’t need to engage with it critically. In fact, critical thinking is anathema to the myth. I’m convinced that this is at the root of how you train an army that decides to mine children’s toys.
While talking to people in the States, Janna and I have talked to a lot of people who would say things that dehumanized other groups based on their nationality (or lack of American citizenship), geographical location or political leanings. There was an alarming amount of war language, even if the people who would use that language would occasionally say that the language was rhetorical, not literal. Because of what we have seen in Ukraine, and in Russian propaganda, we are sensitive to this.
I had a conversation with a pastor, and I mentioned some of my concerns in broad strokes because of the rhetoric that I was hearing primarily in churches, and had even heard him espouse. I was concerned that this rhetoric was leading to a place where those espousing it would be the ones carrying out violence and possibly. He brushed aside my concerns because we were talking about Christians. He was convinced that our faith and God himself would keep us on the right side. That also set off my alarm bells because it sounded a lot like a Myth of Innocence. I pushed back on him, noting that Hitler came to power and executed Germany’s part of WWII in a country that was 90% Christian (I was wrong, it was actually 94%). Many of the German churches actively supported Hitler, and others chose not to speak out because he convinced them that he was trying to defend their values. I have heard that in Russia today, a majority of Christians support Putin because he has convinced them that he is defending their values. I find plenty of historical examples of Christians justifying atrocities.
History dies not convince me that Christians always did the right thing.
After I laid out this case, this pastor simply responded, “Those weren’t real Christians.”
Let that sink in.
This response floored me, even if it didn’t exactly surprise me. And I thought this is what doubling down looks like. When confronted with information that challenges your view of the world:
Never admit that you might be wrong.
Rationalize away uncomfortable information.
Reaffirm that you are absolutely right.
Just like Russian’s who have Ukrainian family and friends.
Recently, I listened to Mike Walrund share about another group of Christians. Within the past 100 years, most white protestant Christians in the South saw no contradiction in dressing in their Sunday best and going to church at 11:00 Sunday morning. Then they could turn around and go to a lynching of a black person at 1:00. They would usually line up to take a picture to commemorate the lynching.
I personally would like to distance myself from those who participated in lynchings, unjust wars and genocides, whether actively or passively. I would like to believe that I would never be someone who would engage in anything so despicable myself. I wish that I could count on my “Christian faith” to preserve me from doing something like that. But those who participated in the lynching of thousands of black people all across the country were convinced that they were Christians as much as I am. Many of them came from my own denomination and lived in states that I have lived in. I grew up Southern Baptist, and the only reason that there is a Southern Baptist is that Southern white Christians demanded that slave holding white people be allowed to be missionaries, and be supported by the denomination.
When you dismiss your connection to others, and are convinced of your own infallibility, that is a scary combination. It means that you can dismiss history. It makes room for a world where you are convinced that no one is telling the truth, except for maybe the people you are listening to. It excuses inexcusable behavior.
Part of the reason that atrocities have been committed by Christians all across the world over the past 1800 years, is that so many groups have been guilty of these very same mental gymnastics. They believe that they are God’s chosen people. They believe that they are superior. And then when history shows them examples of past failures by people similar groups, they simply distance themselves from those who have come before, reassert their innocence and march forward with determination.
This arrogance, that seems very common in the US and in Russia, is scary.
And it is nothing new.
In the lead up to WWII, many of the ideas around race and eugenics that led to the rise of the Nazi’s were commonly held in the US and other Western countries. Seeing the actions of the Nazi’s held a mirror up to many around the world, and many of those ideas fell out of vogue because people were able to see the natural consequences.
Right now, Russia’s war in Ukraine is giving the world a unique opportunity to see the consequences of sustained propaganda efforts, dehumanizing rhetoric, and failure to honestly examine the past. My fear, though, is that there are significant portions of my own population who are not learning in this moment because they are allowing their own propaganda to convince them that they are the innocent ones.
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