Watching War Behind a Screen

With Gaza in flames, Robert discusses the dynamics of social media, profit, and war.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
As media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, Welcome to It
could happen here, as I'm sure you're aware, at this
point over the weekend, somewhere between five hundred and one
thousand Hamas fighters. Those numbers have a lot of flex
in them. It's really unclear at this moment that just
kind of my guess, based on what I've seen so far,

(00:23):
carried out a successful infiltration and sneak attack across a
wide swath of the Israeli border. Their methods were varied
from motorized hang gliders and boats to mobile columns of
technicals and bulldozers, which they used to breach fence lines.
Surprise seems to have been nearly total. In their worst
intelligence failure since the nineteen seventies, many IDF troops were

(00:44):
caught literally in their underwear. Casualties seem to have been
highest among the police, who were unprepared for militants armed
with conventional military weapons. Casualty accounts remain heavily in flux,
so I will not labor over them here. Suffice to
say that the best information at the time that I'm
writing this suggests at least a thousand dead in the
first day or so of fighting. It appears at the

(01:07):
moment to be fairly evenly split between Israeli soldiers, police
and civilians, as well as Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians.
We can expect the death toll among Palestinians to rise
steadily in the near future as the bombing of Gaza escalates.
It is very clear though, that the Hamas did not
strike only military targets, and Israelis and Palestinians are not

(01:29):
the only people killed right now. There are reports coming
in that a music festival, it was some sort of
sytrance psychedelia festival in southern Israel on land that was
possibly illegally occupied, was attacked by Hamas militants. Something like
two hundred and sixty people are confirmed to have been killed.
There's pretty hideous video of a young German woman in

(01:51):
her twenties, her corpse stripped, being paraded around by fighters.
It's very ugly stuff. There's also unclear videos of other killing.
I've seen one video of a man beating another man's
head in it's claimed to be a Hummas militant and
civilian clothes beating a Filipino guest worker in Israel to death.
There's no actual evidence that I've seen as to who

(02:13):
either person in the video is, and a lot of
the videos of horrible things that are spreading right now
are just that, videos that definitely show violence, but that
are extremely unclear as to who is perpetrating the violence
and why. We do, of course, know that Hummas targeted
a number of civilians. A significant number were killed, including
people in their homes, and unknown numbers of people were

(02:36):
kidnapped and taken back across the border to be ransomed
later for imprisoned fighters and Palestinian civilians. This has happened
before in previous escalations of conflict in the area. It's
not a new tactic. In The videos of it are,
of course horrifying. The capturing and killing of civilians is
by any definition of the term, a war crime. Israel's

(02:57):
response has been horrifying as well, and writ on a
larger scale. Significant chunks of Gaza have already been leveled
in airstrikes. At least one hospital has been targeted, killing
a nurse. Israel has cut off power to Gasam, an
active collective punishment that also qualifies as a war crime.
That term has less weight than it used to these days.
Many of US in the West grew up with illusions

(03:19):
about a rules based international order. The crimes occurring now
will continue to erode the idea that war might ever
have limits. Like white water cutting a path through stone.
I try to stay plugged into such things, and I
become aware of this most recent eruption as it happened.
I spent several hours trying to understand the early open
source intelligence, watching people that I trusted in the region

(03:41):
post videos that they could verify, and then I went
to sleep. When I woke up, I saw the expected
river of bloodthirst on social media. This is also nothing new.
The Internet has not created this behavior. You may have
read when you were in high school that early in
the US Civil War, picnicking civilians would show up to
awe the Battle of Manassas. Certain aspects of online culture have, however,

(04:04):
lent a deeper ugliness to the affair. I noticed this
for the first time during the fighting against ISIS. I
reported from Moses several times and kept up with various
Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, and Twitter accounts that shared footage
and updates from the field. A subculture developed around this,
fueled by a mix of professional seeking intel and amateurs,

(04:25):
some of whom later became experts, and others of whom
simply liked watching the violence. All of us experienced a
degree of desensitization, and Gallo's humor was common. Researchers would
share their favorite Isis nasheeds effectively Jihati theme music, and
throw Arabic phrases that they'd read in issues of Debique
Isis's magazine into daily conversation. Lines of dialogue from different

(04:48):
videos of combat became catchphrases. The best known of these
was probably a video released in April of twenty sixteen,
which showed a group of four ISIS fighters battling Kurdish
troops north of Mosl. These guys were not overly familiar
with their weaponry, much of which had recently been looted
from Iraqi army stores. One of the fighters in the video,
Abu Hajar, fucks up constantly, at one point roasting his

(05:11):
own men with the back blast of a rocket launcher.
The timing on it is pretty perfect, and it's basically
impossible not to laugh a little at this. His comrade
shouts a now infamous line at him, what is wrong
with you? Abu Hajar? The man who filmed the video dies,
of course, and so did a bunch of other people
that day. Now, these guys are ices fighters, so it

(05:32):
wasn't hard to laugh at the footage and move on.
I did, and so did many other people. I still
chuckle sometimes at it. Of late, though I've come to
find the laughter more unsettling. This started after the expanded
Russian invasion of Ukraine. I began to see videos of wounded, dying,
and dead Russian conscripts. These were often close in gory shots,

(05:53):
devoid of broader information, and shot purely for entertainments. One
thing to watch combat videos in which people die, if
it gives you an understanding of the nature of combat
in that theater of war, the kinds of weapons used,
the efficacy of certain tactics. It's another to just look
at a bleeding teenager as he slowly dies and joke
about it. Now, some of the folks who were laughing

(06:15):
are people I knew Ukrainian civilians and volunteers, and I
cannot blame them, and do not blame them for taking
satisfaction or even mirth in the death of an invader.
That is how war works. That is how war has
always worked. It is foolish and cruel to ask for
decorum from people under siege. I'm sure many Gazans feel
the same about footage now flooding the Internet from this

(06:37):
most recent attack. But many of the people cheering at
dead Russian conscripts were not soldiers and not civilians who
were being shelled by that state, but were random Americans,
middle class, suburban war aficionados far from the danger, who
spent time, who took a moment from their day to
joke about suffering soldiers in a foreign country. A mirror

(06:57):
of that behavior now proliferates as well. It curdled my
gut then, and it still does. But my feelings here
are immaterial. I have come to believe that this behavior
is impossible to avoid or even mitigate. To a very
substantial degree. It also appears to be nearly universal. Social
media has made barbarism easier than ever to monetize. As

(07:29):
the years have gone on, every new eruption of violence
around the world brings with it more footage faster ocent
open source intelligence accounts have gone from a niche obsession
among reporters and conflict nerds to mainstream entertainment. Because views
equal money, especially on Twitter, where Elon Musk pays people
based on the engagement they get. There is now a

(07:49):
financial incentive to post videos that will be shared widely,
and as always, the stuff that is shared most widely
is the stuff that makes people angry. Videos need not
be truthful to spread. In some cases, this means reposting
old footage as if it is new. This is particularly
easy with the conflict in Gaza, since Israel has launched
so many strikes against it over the years. One video

(08:12):
of a building crumbling into rubble left or a missile
strike is as good as another to the rats scrambling
for Elon Musk's pocket change. Many viral disinformation videos are
just clips from the check video game Arma two. For
roughly a decade, footage of in game combat has gone viral,
netting followers and sometimes money for all manner of shady figures.
If you see video that's claimed to be an Israeli

(08:34):
helicopter or a Russian helicopter or an American helicopter being
shot down in some erupting field, you should really double
check that, because there's always a very good chance that
it's a clip from this video game of a chopper
going down, or of some other kind of military vehicle
being taken out. In real warfare, it's quite rare to
get footage at a good angle and close to that
sort of thing. So anytime you see footage that seems

(08:56):
like it might be too good to be real, it
probably is. Such disinformation is of course unsightly, but that's
not all it is. It can provoke violence as well.
A recent New York Times article on social media disinformation
makes this clear quote. The Times found several pieces of
misinformation that spread out across Israelian Palestinian neighborhood and activist

(09:18):
WhatsApp groups this week. One which appeared as a block
of Hebrew text or an audio file, contained a warning
that Palestinian mobs were preparing to descend on Israeli civilians.
Palestinians are coming. Parents, Protect your children, read the message,
which pointed specifically to several suburban areas north of Tel Aviv.
Thousands of people were in one of the telegram groups
where the post was shared. The post then appeared in

(09:39):
several WhatsApp groups, which had dozens to hundreds of members. Now,
there were no reports of violence in the areas mentioned
in this post. This kind of thing happens all over
the world and has been happening for years, and the
fact that it's untrue does not stop similar viral lies
from inspiring and justifying mass violence in places like India
and Meanmar. In both those countries, much of this targeted

(10:01):
disinformation was posted at the direct behest of state security
agencies to further their efforts at genocide. None of this
is new. It all just works much faster thanks to
social media. The one truly significant change in recent months
has been the addition of a direct profit motive to
sharing lies. The best recent example of this is a
fellow named Mario Naffall. He's a con artist and a

(10:24):
crypto scammer who embezzled from his own company and has
built a massive following retweeting out of context videos starting
with the Wagner rebellion in Russia. Earlier this year. Elon Musk,
whose ignorance of that conflict is unsurpassed, called Naffall's messages
the best coverage I've seen so far. More recently, marion
Na Fall has been responsible for spreading fake news about

(10:46):
the potential capture of Nimrod Alone, who is the commander
of Israel's Southern forces in the region. The video that
he claimed was Nimrod alone being taken into captivity was
in fact a completely different persons, actually unclear who. Mario
does not know anything about anything, and I think was
just lying because that would be the most salacious thing possible.

(11:08):
It's also worth noting that Elon Musk recently made a
post highlighting a couple of ocent accounts that were his recommendations,
his picks for credible people to report on the conflict,
and you should follow these folks. He then deleted part
of that tweet and self censored himself when one of
the sources he had picked referred to dead Hamas fighters
as martyrs, which Elon had an issue with. Clearly, what

(11:30):
he's doing is attempting to pick and set his own
propaganda dispensers, you know, the people that, for whatever reason
he thinks, are providing the most convenient narrative about what's happening.
None of this should be mistaken for actual news. It
is likely that much, perhaps most, of the footage on
your timeline from the fighting in Gaza and Israel is

(11:51):
reposted video that is not current. Obviously, there is a
lot of current footage going out right now too, But
a significant amount of it is not. I find this exastspirating,
even as I wonder how much that really matters. Is
sharing old footage of civilian homes being leveled by Israeli
missiles really an issue when similar homes are being bombed
at the same time. I do still think so, but

(12:13):
I'm no longer sure that my feelings on the matter
are quite rational. The most commonly accepted definition of intelligence
of intellect that you'll find is the ability to adapt
to change and select environments, or the ability to deal
with change in your environment. If that is truly the
best measure of intelligence, then my discussed at disinformation makes

(12:35):
me kind of stupid. Its purveyors have had blinding success
in using it to push their own narratives and to
shape reality. I use the word barbarism earlier to describe this,
and it's a loaded word, but not nearly so loaded
as its synonym, savagery. Savagery is a word that inspires
powerful emotions for good reason. It was often used by

(12:56):
white supremacist colonizers to paint whole peoples as bad, backwards
and less human, especially when they engaged in acts of
resistance that were in reality no bloodier or more violent
than the acts being perpetrated against them. The word predates
European colonialism, though it seems to date back to around
thirteen hundred, and it entered French salvage like the Cologne

(13:18):
Johnny depphawks from the Latin salvaticus, which literally means of
the woods. Why this digression because in two thousand and four,
an Islamist strategist named Abu Baker Naji published a book
on the Internet titled Management of Savagery. In Naj's conception,
savagery was defined as terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure and

(13:38):
stuff like tourist facilities, which were meant to provoke violent
escalations from superpowers. That violence would radicalize more people against
the West and lead to a progressive degradation of social
order and operational capacity in the nation's nase saw as enemies.
The management of savagery was a key text for the
men who wound up creating the Islamic State. Some will

(13:59):
use this to our argue that the tactics failed, since
Isis is not exactly thriving at present. To do so
would be to ignore the six trillion dollars the United
States lit on fire fighting, a disastrous war on terror
which supercharged much of the underlying instability in our country
and may yet lead to a collapse in domestic order.
I will admit that I have found the framework of

(14:20):
managing savagery useful in my interpretation and understanding of conflict,
both domestic and international. In twenty twenty, I got to
watch the process up close over the course of dozens
of protests. The basic strategy of most Portland protests that year.
When like this you got a bunch of people to
march up to a police building, they would chant and
yell until the police got angry and then gassed and

(14:41):
or beat up everybody. After a while, this dynamic was
widely understood and accepted by protesters. They saw their suffering
and the risk that they engaged in as an acceptable
trade off because it revealed the violence and savagery inherent
in policing as an institution. This they hoped, would radicalize
others again against it, people who watched clips of videos

(15:02):
from the protest or who attended themselves, and for a
time this strategy worked quite well. Many people who had
been apolitical on the matter grew utterly hardened against the
cops after a few hours in the gas clouds. People
cannot endure violence, however, without being changed by it. So
as the week's war on, participants grew more and more
comfortable with not just property destruction, but with the use

(15:23):
of things like molotov cocktails. One may consider a molotov
to be necessary sometimes, and throughout history they often have been,
But savage is as good a term to describe firebombs
as any. No one was killed by any molotov that
I ever saw used in Portland, but of course no
protests come close to the savagery of warfare. The emotional
dynamics at play are shades of each other, though, and

(15:45):
I thought it might be useful to mention perhaps a
more illustrative example would be my own experiences in Mosel
in the early summer of twenty seventeen. My team and
I were embedded with an Iraqi federal police unit in
the Old City, where the fighting was intense and hideous.
I'm under fire from a sniper. Some of the shots
were so close that chipped concrete hit my helmet. The
mortar team with us responded with the help of a spotter.

(16:07):
They dropped explosive shells on homes and shops until they
hit and killed the sniper. In that moment, I felt
elation I've seldom felt since. After we found better cover,
I began composing the scene in my head, laying out
how I would write it. Then my fixer, Sangar said
something that interrupted my train of thought and has remained
with me ever since. Did you count how many rounds
they fired before they hit him? I told him I

(16:29):
thought it was six or seven. Maybe where do you
think the others landed?

Speaker 2 (16:33):
From?

Speaker 1 (16:34):
His tone was clear what he meant. The old city
was crowded. Many civilians had not yet been able to
escape the Isis lines. Their homes were often next door
to fighting positions, and the density of the city meant
that any honest hit still had a good chance of
hitting someone. Later, I met a man whose house had
been hit twenty times by mortar rounds and rockets before
he had a chance to escape with his family. So

(16:57):
the glee of the moment faded. My writing about that
scene was more sober, more careful, and much better. As
a result, Saygur's words have helped me shape both my
coverage of war and my reactions to it ever since.
This shouldn't matter to people being bombed out of their
homes and losing loved ones right now. It might be helpful, though,
to those of us watching bloodshed from behind a screen,

(17:17):
at least until we're the ones filming.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
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