Vikram Sood’s take on how nations frame synthetic narratives

Sandeep Dikshit

A former spy chief writing on the framing of synthetic narratives to cover up sinister endgames might not have had a similar resonance a decade back. Fake news and post-truth were then not part of everyday lexicon. In a sense, this is an Alt-Check to all the talk about the joys of free market capitalism, freedom of expression, working class solidarity, and the various ‘isms’ while they cover sins of a deeper nature.

The sparkle in what might have been a dreary monotone on the various narrative factories of the world is due to the collation of evidence, peppered with references to some must-read books. The section on Europe seems too right-wing, but as events in France have shown, who knows Vikram Sood might be right; Muslim immigration from some parts of the world can never be successful.

The Cold War, where Moscow is to be blamed, did not actually kick off with Churchill’s famous “iron curtain has descended’’ speech. It began a year earlier, on August 6, 1945, when the US dropped the atom bomb on Japan. The message to Stalin was clear — the US was not finishing a job. It was starting a new race in which it alone would be the paramount power. And that was not acceptable to the Soviet Union. The truth, as Sood brings out, is never supreme in matters of state. Accounts such as this, with folks like Sood presumably at the heart of it, vary from subject to subject.

Take the undercurrent of racial superiority, 50 lakh troops from British colonies fought in WW II. But in victory parades, not a single brown or black trooper gets represented. Islamists have been used, thrown, used again and discarded. With each shift of statecraft, the story is made to change. Then there are the ‘useful idiots’, from the left to the right, who parrot a thought process not because they are driven by racial or mercantilist motives, but because they genuinely believe in it.

We know for sure that Russia and China do not tolerate oddballs. The Western narratives have ensured that. But a fog remains behind several rather-too-neat closures such as the John F Kennedy murder case. Nixon on becoming President ensured the war in Vietnam did not just go on, but expanded, to the delight of the military-industrial complex. It has since had several reasons to be beholden to a different portrayal about freedom and openness while its bombs and equipment, paid for by the taxpayer, pounded hapless nations in pursuit of a pot of gold at the end of it for its corporate allies.

Scripts are routinely altered. From James Bond franchises to Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA looms in the shadows. The Pentagon makes available its material, and even men, at a fraction of the actual cost. But the script must serve the state. Some leeway is given. Operational mistakes or promoting a rogue agent narrative are allowed to make the end product more believable than the Russian or Chinese versions.

Through life histories of defectors and dissidents, Sood paints a compelling picture of the forces at work to rake in the moolah while justifying the process in films, media and documentaries in grandiloquent terms. The 1953 coup against an elected government in Iran to the killing of Gaddafi was all because they wanted to revise oil concessions given to corporates financing politics in the US and Europe.

Now there is the emerging stranglehold of the corporate sector, actively pushed by US and British Cabinet ministers who turn businessmen when out of office to profit vastly from the policies they have framed. All this while, nations keep a close eye on cinema and media to ensure they follow self-serving history.

Like a life-long operative of the external intelligence agency, Sood keeps his gaze firmly outward, except for a brief chapter where he fixates on changing the impression of the Indian state never being in control of the situation. But the bottomline is that dissidence always has a red line and the mainstream will always be made to believe in the righteousness of its nation’s foreign policies.