A Strange Conversation on Social Media
An internet debate with an "anarchist" who defended a murderous dictator stuck in my mind for years
"365 arlophotochallenge 103 / 365 - Conversation" by Arlo Bates is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Regular readers of Sharpen Your Axe will know that I recommend avoiding getting drawn into fierce internet debates. Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance means that nobody will ever change their minds, which makes internet debate club a giant waste of time. I feel so strongly about the subject that I published an e-book on the futility of this hobby in 2022.
Unfortunately, it took me a long time to come to this position. After joining Facebook in 2007, followed by Twitter in 2012, I spent my first decade on social media arguing furiously with friends, family members, colleagues, random acquaintances and strangers. It took me a long time to get the habit fully under control. Even now, I still have an argumentative streak, although I do try to use annoying posts from other people as inspiration for my blog instead of an excuse to re-open the old debate club, with the odd lapse now and then.
Although I felt strongly about all the debates I was involved with at the time, most of them weren’t very memorable. They would often involve a socialist and an institutionalist liberal failing to agree on the fundamental importance of markets; or an institutionalist liberal and a right-wing populist disagreeing on the acceptability of bigotry. Meanwhile, lots of nationalists and populists would crash around generalising wildly about large groups of people while accusing fact-checkers and institutionalists of being fascists. Of course, critics of nationalism are the real nationalists. It was mostly thin gruel.
Despite this, one debate does stick in my mind years later. It was with an internet friend of mine who is a dogmatic contrarian. You probably know the type. He supports bitcoin with an almost-religious fervour; refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19; and has flirted with a bleach-drinking cult. We used to spar with each other on Facebook, without ever convincing the other.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember how this particular debate started, but at one point one of my acquaintance’s friends joined in the fun. He described himself as an anarchist (a surprisingly common position among disaffected people in Spain). We were speaking at the height of the Syrian Civil War, maybe around 2016 or 2017. At some point, the supposed anarchist said that he was jealous of the Syrian people because their dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was so enlightened and so much better than Spain’s right-of-centre leaders at the time. Wait, what? I had to cut the debate short. How can you argue against such a frankly weird worldview?
Estimates of the death toll in the Syrian war are currently more than 600,000, which is in the same ballpark as the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Al-Assad has been so brutal that he has been nicknamed “the butcher of Syria.” He is directly responsible for mass murder and ethnic cleansing. There is a strong case to be made that he is guilty of war crimes and awful human rights violations.
At the same time, Spain is one of only a couple of dozen full democracies in the whole world. It has been at peace for generations, with the exception of Basque terrorism and some rather lukewarm support from the government of the time for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why would someone, let alone an anarchist, think that a murderous warlord was a better leader than the elected officials of his own mild and pleasant land? I think most people would take a little too much structural unemployment in an otherwise prosperous country over being gunned down in the street by a violent militia any day of the week.
The fake anarchist was obviously a dogmatic contrarian, just like his friend. This position involves a knee-jerk reaction to any "official” advice from parents, teachers, doctors, scientists or mainstream politicians. If a dogmatic contrarian sees information in the newspaper or on the television, he will just automatically assume it is wrong. Taken to an extreme, this can lead to crank magnetism, or believing in multiple crank ideologies, even if the different pieces contradict each other.
It is now time to zoom out to look at the big picture. During the first phase of globalisation, many elected officials in the West decided to turn a blind eye to the quality of the institutions in their potential trading parties. This led to the strange decision to allow Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to freely offer his RT propaganda channel in democratic countries without worrying about his nefarious intentions to undermine our institutions.*
Luckily, free access to this toxic source of misinformation and disinformation became harder to justify after the brutal invasion of Ukraine, when democratic leaders realised that they had been played. Before then, though, it was easy enough to find Putin’s disinformation on social media. His propagandists were particularly keen on promoting nonsense to dogmatic contrarians, like the supposed anarchist. Contradictions be damned!
So, as Russian forces supported al-Assad’s slaughter in Syria, its propaganda arm spread nonsense in the West, from conspiracy theories about heroes who dragged wounded people out of burning buildings to implausible hagiographies of the dictator and his wife. The anarchist - who presumably watched Russian-funded YouTube videos while high as a kite - fell for it all, hook, line and sinker.
The end result was a stoned neo-fascist, who was a long way from being a true anarchist. Although I cut the conversation short, for the sake of my own sanity, it stuck in my mind. What can you possibly say to bring people with such an extreme lack of self-awareness back into the light? The comments are open. See you next week!
Further Reading
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
Donate
International Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) Safety Fund
*Some of the more thoughtful people who consume Russian propaganda defend it on free-speech grounds. I think this argument is utterly wrong: free speech belongs to the citizens of free societies, not dictators who deny their own subjects free speech and want to destroy it in the West.
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the second anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
Opinions expressed on Substack, Twitter, Mastodon and Post are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.