A crucified child and a mobile crematorium. Could any two images more powerfully signify atrocity? Both have surfaced during recent Russian incursions into Ukraine. Both have been debunked as fake news. Yet, those same fakes can be traced to another watershed conflict in Europe more than a century ago: World War I. Their persistence suggests how people seek meaning during periods of wrenching global upheaval. We want symbols, images, simplicity, and faith, not complex historical and political realities.
As a teacher of history and current events, I鈥檝e got a stake in separating truth from myth. For some time now, it has seemed that I鈥檓 losing a pedagogical war for truth. My students鈥� default for accessing news and understanding the world is social media. They prefer images to written analyses of historical and contemporary issues, TikTok over The New York Times.
While I was debunking one of those images momentarily popular with them鈥攁 spurious video purporting to show a Ukrainian ace fighter pilot, 鈥渢he ghost of Kyiv,鈥� in combat鈥攊t occurred to me that Ukraine offered an opportunity for deeper study of the iconography of catastrophe and misinformation.
Nearly a half-century ago, literary scholar Paul Fussell wrote The Great War and Modern Memory, a penetrating analysis of the legacy of World War I. Looking back more than another half-century, Fussell showed how participants in the First World War quickly lost the veneer of rationalism that was prized by 鈥淲estern civilization.鈥� Trench warfare on the Western front prompted soldiers and civilians to embrace superstition, religion, and myth to explain this bizarre new reality.
One of those early 20th-century myths involved a captured Canadian soldier allegedly crucified by the Germans. Most versions of this story had bloodthirsty 鈥淗uns鈥� using bayonets to affix an innocent POW to a cross in full view of his comrades across the trench line.
The story鈥檚 origins are hazy, but it was quickly exploited for propaganda. In Dalton Trumbo鈥檚 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun, the protagonist remarks on an account of it in the Los Angeles newspapers: 鈥淭hat made the Germans nothing better than animals, and naturally you got interested and wanted Germany to get the tar kicked out of her.鈥�
A century later, Russian propagandists riffed on the imagery by inventing a 3-year-old Russian child allegedly crucified by Ukrainian troops in the Donbas. The hoax was part of a misinformation campaign aimed to justify Russia鈥檚 2014 incursion into eastern Ukraine and 鈥減rove鈥� that Ukraine was dominated by 鈥淣azis.鈥� An account of the crucifixion was broadcast on Russia鈥檚 Channel One despite flimsy evidence surrounding the 鈥渆yewitness鈥� testimony on which it was based. The .
Combining innocence, suffering, redemption, and salvation, crucifixion as propaganda evokes passion and faith while enlisting those emotions into the war effort.
Perhaps the most potent symbol for state-inflicted cruelty is the crematorium. Late last month, The New York Post ran a headline charging: 鈥淩ussia has mobile crematoriums that 鈥榚vaporate dead soldiers.鈥欌�� The story asserted that the crematoria might be deployed in Ukraine to incinerate the bodies of soldiers killed in action and cover up evidence of mass casualties. It cited 鈥淯.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace鈥� as the source for the allegation and included video images from 2013 as 鈥減roof.鈥� But there isn鈥檛 any evidence that such crematoria are in Ukraine. Fact checkers .
The genesis for this was 鈥渞educer鈥� or 鈥渄estructor鈥� machines supposedly deployed behind trench lines in World War I to incinerate corpses, hide evidence of military executions, or render the fat from bodies to make munitions. Fussell鈥檚 research uncovered versions of this myth attributing 鈥渄estructors鈥� both to the British and the Germans. The WWI crematorium archetype was so creative that it predated the Nazi regime with which it is usually associated.
We are seeing a revival of false images fabricated more than a century ago as explanatory crutches for a generation caught up in unthinkable circumstances.
The crematorium trope has recently been deployed in another crisis. Just weeks before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, a Chinese billionaire with links to the Trump administration posted a false claim and video on Facebook charging that Chinese COVID-19 victims were 鈥渂eing cremated alive鈥� by their government in Wuhan. PolitiFact .
We are seeing a revival of false images fabricated more than a century ago as explanatory crutches for a generation caught up in unthinkable circumstances. At both moments, the images were co-opted as propaganda tools. In both cases, they contributed to what Fussell called 鈥渁n approximation of the popular psychological atmosphere of the Middle Ages,鈥� pervaded by faith, myth, and rumor.
During WWI, French officer and historian Marc Bloch said, 鈥淭he prevailing opinion in the trenches was that anything might be true, except what was printed.鈥� Today鈥檚 efforts by some politicians to denigrate serious media as 鈥渇ake news鈥� coupled with an enduring fascination with images over the written word has caused a similar skepticism for print journalism.
None of this is good for truth or democracy, which requires a certain factual civic consensus in order to work.
Neither is it good for truth in my classroom, which I鈥檝e concluded will not emerge triumphant merely as a result of creative teaching on my part. It鈥檚 not primarily about pedagogy. Rather, I鈥檓 up against an epistemology鈥攖he methods and tools my students use to understand the world and their place in it.
One of them, confronted with evidence that the 鈥済host of Kyiv鈥� video he shared derived from computer-generated imagery, retorted, 鈥淵eah, but it鈥檚 so cool to believe it happened.鈥� The myth of an ace pilot beats the reality of a fabricated video, almost always.
