Warfare Bullshit: A Great Scourge

Bullshit and lies pervade warfare history. At baseline, winners, losers, and their allies write their own warfare versions. Oftentimes, they rewrite their narratives, thereby creating cascading bullshit and lies (buffoonery).

Modern writers of warfare narratives thus set about their task from such cascading buffoonery. They can be divided into three tribes. The smallest tribe, by no small margin, know bullshit when they see it, and excel at calling it. They work from multinational archives, typically in multiple languages. They particularly reject ‘official histories’, well-known sources of pseudo-profound and insidious bullshit. Their warfare narratives tend not to be well-received, however, precisely because they call bullshit. Another tribe, writers of popular warfare narratives, excel at purveying established bullshit and lies, oftentimes with added pseudo-profound bullshit swirls and sprinkles, which might also be described as armchair general bullshit. The other tribe writes from that great bullshit blind spot point of origin, ideology, which has five marked strains, political, sociopolitical, sociocultural, nationalist, and religious. Some writers interweave more than one strain, which creates cascading insidious warfare bullshit. Yep, as you have likely surmised, ideology-based (cascading buffoonery) warfare bullshit grinds my gears.

References:

Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., Baer, J., & Shackel, M. (2023). Does higher H mean less BS? Relations of a misleading communication style with the HEXACO personality factors. Current Psychology, 42(26), 23040–23044.

Littrell, S., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2024). Bullshit blind spots: the roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection. Thinking & Reasoning, 30(1), 49–78.

Littrell, S., Risko, E. F., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2021). The Bullshitting Frequency Scale: Development and psychometric properties. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60(1), 248–270.