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Mark R. Stoneman

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (German to English). Longtime resident of Washington, DC, now in Conway, NH, as a caregiver (he/him).

  Information Disorder

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    The ink of political fiction is blood.

    – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap. 2.

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    In a conversation about the information disorder we’re all grappling with, I found myself saying that the constant barrage of existentially bad news from Washington these past few months has been wearing me down, making me dumber.

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    Timothy Snyder and the Existential Significance of History

    Timothy Snyder posits an important nexus between our current political moment and how we as a society understand history.1 When communist states proved unable to achieve their Marxist-Leninist ambitions, we did not feel the need to look too closely for an explanation in the histories of these states and their peoples. The communist project didn’t succeed because it was wrongheaded. Its failure lay in its problematic view of human development, that is, in its false, teleological philosophy of history.2

    We didn’t see a problem with teleological thinking as such, despite historians' emphasis on provable historical causality over imagined directions that history is somehow destined to take. Instead, we assumed that the failure of their philosophy of history proved that our own was right. The world was on an inexorable path toward mutually reinforcing free trade and free societies. Why sweat the details?

    Writing at the beginning of the first Trump administration, Snyder argued the need for a genuine historicization of our world.

    The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.…

    The acceptance of inevitability stilted the way we talked about politics in the twenty-first century. It stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, while the other proposed total negation. We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things…3

    Our tunnel vision, our focus on everything supposedly going the way it was supposed to, left us complacent. Trump’s 2016 election blindsided us, and the contingency of history continues to punch us in the face.

    The enemies of democracy are guided by an equally ahistorical or “antihistorical” notion of human development. Snyder uses “eternity” to describe their image of history and politics.

    Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.…4

    Of course, this view includes enemies and grievances, which can make nostalgia and an antihistorical worldview of unending merit dangerously aggressive. Consider the Lost Cause interpretation of the American Civil War, the poisonous stab-in-the-back myth in Weimar Germany, or the giant chip on Putin’s shoulder left by the USSR’s dissolution.

    In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate?

    The stakes of such a worldview for our culture and our development are existential.

    If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.5

    What we need, argues Snyder, is to be better grounded in history so that we can understand what was and what is. In resisting the coma and the trance, we might imagine other futures and look for opportunities to shape the way history develops.

    Historicizing our world includes applying historical analysis to our immediate past. Snyder’s 2018 The Road to Unfreedom considers a period less than a decade old at the time.

    As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair.…6

    The project of this contemporary historian is as urgent as it is ambitious.

    1. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (Tim Duggan Books, 2017), chap. 20; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), prologue. ↩︎

    2. Marxism is nothing if not a philosophy of history itself, a scientific description of how and why human societies develop as they do. It also propagates worker consciousness, worker knowledge of their historical role. See, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Lenin, impatient to move things along, developed the notion of a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Revolution and communism wouldn’t just happen. They had to be wrought from above. See V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902). ↩︎

    3. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    4. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    5. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    6. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, prologue. ↩︎

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    When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 18.

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    You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.

    – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), chap. 10.

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    Institute for the Study of War: “US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff uncritically amplified a number of Russian demands, claims, and justifications regarding the war in Ukraine during an interview on March 21.…” www.understandingwar.org…
    #RussiaIsATerroristState #Disinformation #СлаваУкраїні

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    I heard the term deadcatting for the first time today.1 It means employing a shocking distraction to pull peoples' eyes away from what matters. Why a dead cat? Imagine throwing one on a table at which people are engaged in a heated discussion. Their focus will be pulled to the cat instead of lingering on whatever difficulty is before them. This dead cat strategy can overlap with scapegoating and the politics of division, as when Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors' cats and dogs.2

    1. Jason Pack uses it on the Disorder podcast, late in ep. 107, March 18, 2025. ↩︎

    2. See Heather Digby Parton, “Donald Trump’s Dead Cat Strategy Puts the Pressure on JD Vance,” Salon, September 16, 2024. ↩︎

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    It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose—blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

    – Masha Gessen, quoted in Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality, (Workman Publishing, 2017), chap. 3.

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    Trump’s supporters, who felt increasingly anxious or displaced in the prevailing consensus reality, could see what was happening. But those of us who were relatively at ease—our field of vision was obstructed. So we scoffed and mocked as Trump put a half nelson choke hold on reality.

    – Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman Publishing, 2017).

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    More animated satire by @Freeonis: “Oval Deception” (3 min.) at youtu.be…. Use the closed caption button (cc) for subtitles.🇺🇦

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    An explainer for journalists that the rest of us can benefit from: “Understanding Information Disorder” by Claire Wardle, September 22, 2020, First Draft, firstdraftnews.org….

    At First Draft, we advocate using the terms that are most appropriate for the type of content — propaganda, lies, conspiracies, rumors, hoaxes, hyper-partisan content, falsehoods or manipulated media. We also prefer to use the terms disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. Collectively, we call it information disorder.

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    Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat offers valuable, but concerning insights into the current disordered information spaces we live in: conversation with Chris York, Kyiv Independent, youtu.be….

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    If you pretend this isn’t real, it’s very exciting.

    – Laurie Kilmartin on “Have I Got New for You” (U.S.), s. 2, ep. 4, March 8, 2025.

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    Sometimes you got to Ukrainesplain shit to people.

    – Roy Wood Jr., “Have I Got News for You,” season 2, episode 3, youtu.be….

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    The Kyiv Independent’s Anna Belokur packs a lot into one of the best comments I’ve seen about the Trump-Vance debacle during Zelensky’s visit this past Friday (Feb. 28). See the first eight minutes of “Ukraine this Week,” youtu.be…. 🇺🇦🇺🇸

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    Operator Starsky takes time out to fact-check the recent stupefying utterances on Ukraine by the U.S. president because friends don’t let friends drown in bullshit. youtu.be… 🇺🇦  #RussiaIsATerroristState

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    Translations from MAGA to English:

    • merit – good-for-nothing
    • meritocracy – mediocracy
    • patriot – sucker
    • taxpayer – sucker
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    Finished reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020). Highly recommended. Good antidote to feelings of confusion and helplessness in these troubled times.📚

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    I watched the Ukrainian movie “Sniper: The White Raven,” dir. Maryan Bushan (Ukraine, 2022), which was filmed before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The protagonist comes to this work after Putin’s little green men invade his country and murder his family. The film offers a moving counterpoint to the dark comedy, “Donbass,” dir. Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine, 2018). The latter presents glimpses of life in territory controlled by Russia, mixing local politics, disinformation, and violence in ways that blur the boundary between reality and alternative factuality. 🇺🇦

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    Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

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    At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

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    Did the [Ukrainians'] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.

    – Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.

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