The Lies of the West Come to Haunt Europe | Prof. Manuel J. Ramos

## The Eclipse of Bucha The sudden disappearance of Bucha from mainstream discussion—despite its former prominence in shaping Western narratives about the war in Ukraine—reveals less about forgetfulness than about how collective meaning is manufactured. The conversation makes clear that attention shifts are not random; they are the result of competing narrative demands. When a new dramatic event arrives on the stage of international politics, existing “facts” can be sidelined not because they were disproven but because they are inconvenient for the emerging story that elites, media, and epistemic communities are trying to tell. In mid‑March, the fourth anniversary of Bucha was eclipsed by events in the Gulf. That eclipse is instructive: it shows how fragile consensus facts can be when confronted by fresh events that generate new partial facts and require a reconfiguration of interpretive frameworks. The point here is not simply that the news cycle moves on. Rather, the dynamics of attention reveal the mechanics of narrative power: which incidents become enduring “facts,” which are allowed to fade, and which are subsumed into fresh storylines. As the participants in the discussion note, the replacement of one narrative by another often depends less on empirical closure than on the capacity of a new narrative to enlist crucial institutional voices—politicians, international bodies, influential media—and thereby redraw the map of what counts as an accepted fact. ## Events, Facts, and the Social Construction of Reality One of the clearest intellectual moves in the exchange is the distinction between events and facts. Events are occurrences in the world; facts are the outcomes of social agreement. A fallen leaf is an event; the leaf’s status as a fact exists only insofar as a community of observers treats it as such. This relational understanding of facts pushes us away from naive empiricism and toward a sociology of knowledge: facts are achieved, not discovered. That insight matters politically. If facts are ultimately sustained by communities of belief, then the politics of fact-making becomes the politics of community formation and maintenance. Different groups—journalists, diplomats, scholars, activists, state communicators—choose which elements of an event to amplify, which testimonies to trust, and which interpretations to institutionalize. Over time these choices congeal into a partial fact, and partial facts become the building blocks of durable narratives. The result is a world in which multiple, incompatible “facts” can co-exist, each supported by its own epistemic infrastructure. ## The Five Narratives Around Bucha Applied to Bucha, the conversation identifies roughly five epistemic communities: the official Ukrainian narrative, the official Russian narrative, a Western narrative that overlaps with but is not identical to Ukraine’s account, a non‑official pro‑Russian community, and an alternative or multilateral community that resists both official lines. Each community selects different pieces of the same event, weaving them into distinct moral and causal stories about responsibility and meaning. This fragmentation explains much of the indignation and incomprehension that mark contemporary disputes. When smart, educated people inhabit different epistemic universes, their disagreement is less about intelligence and more about the cognitive economies that sustain their narratives: what evidence they prioritize, what authorities they trust, and which premises they consider non‑negotiable. Crucially, these communities rarely self‑reflect; rather than interrogating the foundations of their own narratives, they incorporate rival narratives selectively to shore up their existing convictions. The consequence is not a marketplace of ideas where truth emerges from contestation but a set of parallel truth regimes that talk past each other, reinforcing social polarization and reducing the possibility of shared factual ground. ## Structuralist Methods, Big Data, and the “Opposite Algorithm” The conversation also ventures into methodological innovation, proposing a marriage of anthropology’s structuralist insights and the analytic power of algorithms. Structuralist narratology—once associated with Lévi‑Strauss—treated myths as systems of variation whose full meaning emerges only when all versions are compared. Resurrected in the age of big data, that approach becomes a promising way to model how narratives evolve across massive information spaces. The “opposite algorithm” mentioned in the discussion is a provocative heuristic: if perfect neutrality is unattainable, one can design processes intended to mitigate bias by actively mapping countervailing narratives and forcing analytic systems to confront contradictory evidence. In practice, this means building tools that do not merely confirm the dominant interpretation encoded in training data but surface minority narratives and structural contradictions. Such tools might expose the contours of competing epistemic communities and help analysts understand where narratives intersect, diverge, and are vulnerable to change. The goal is not a neutral god’s‑eye view but a pluralist analytic posture that recognizes how partial facts are produced and sustained. ## Voices from the Margins and the Kaleidoscope of Memory A striking historical example raised in the exchange is the Jesuit encounter with Orthodox Ethiopia in the 16th and 17th centuries. That episode underscores a perennial lesson: written authorities—missionaries, courts, churches—often dominate the archival record, but oral traditions and subaltern memories create parallel, sometimes conflicting, narratives that survive in vernacular forms. In Ethiopia, Jesuit letters and royal decrees have their legacy, but so do the oral histories (afatarik) of communities whose experiences were not captured in print. Those oral traditions do not merely repeat official accounts; they reinterpret, resist, and rework imposed meanings. Transposing that lesson to contemporary conflicts helps explain why certain narratives stick while others do not. Powerful actors have institutional capacities to write, fund, and disseminate official stories. Yet communities outside those institutional gates—refugees, local witnesses, diasporas—produce counter‑memories that complicate the official archive. The interplay between written and oral, formal and informal, elite and subaltern recollection produces a kaleidoscopic historical record. Any adequate analysis must attend to those margins, because the stories that persist in everyday speech and memory often foreshadow longer‑term historiographical shifts. ## The Political Economy of Research and the Responsibility of Scholars The conversation does not romanticize scholarly neutrality. Research agendas are funded, steered, and constrained by political priorities. Grants favor certain questions over others; institutions reward lines of inquiry that align with policy interests. The European Union, for example, will underwrite conflict studies that help policymakers manage crises but is less inclined to fund long‑term oral history projects. These incentives shape the intellectual terrain and, by extension, the narratives that gain institutional legitimacy. That insight places responsibility on scholars. If facts are socially produced and scholarship is entangled with policy, then researchers must reflect on whether they want to be militants of a particular narrative or careful analysts who expose the plurality of perspectives. The conversation's participant—Prof. Manuel J. Ramos—signals a preference for the latter: to study, model, and make visible the dynamics by which communities form facts without rushing to impose one normative interpretation. This posture is not neutrality by omission; it is an active commitment to methods that reveal how narratives are produced and to practices that resist the instrumentalization of s

This is why the West can't Face Itself | Prof. Manuel J. Ramos The political West has killed countless millions over the decades, yet pretends to be a force for good. What will happen once it's forced to face its own inhumanity? Today, I discuss the many narrative interpretations of our common global reality with Prof. Manuel Ramos. Manuel's Article on Bucha: https://manueljoaoramos.substack.com/p/the-bucha-affair-marchapril-2022 Manuel on Substack: https://manueljoaoramos.substack.com Pascal on Subsack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Shop & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #Pascal Welcome back, everybody. This is Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies. Today I’m joined again by Dr. Manuel Ramos, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon. Manuel, welcome back. Good morning. Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here again. Glad to have you here, because you alerted me to some research you’re doing about epistemic communities and how things are framed—basically, about narratives. Maybe let’s start with this. You just told me a very interesting observation before we started talking, which is that it’s the beginning of March—well, mid-March by now, March 12th—and we are not… we are not talking about Bucha. This is, of course, the fourth anniversary of Bucha, something that used to be a very important narrative talking point for the Western understanding of the war in Ukraine. And now we’ re not talking about it. Can you maybe give me a little bit of your interpretation? Why is that? #Manuel J. Ramos Okay. Of course, we’re not talking about Bucha because we’re, rather embarrassingly, talking about Minab—what happened on the 28th of February, which was the start of the Third Gulf War. That reminds me, or should remind us, that the Romans also had three wars, the three Punic Wars. I don’ t know if there’s any real analogy there, but let’s see. Anyway, we are in the Third Gulf War, and Minab was the opening scene of that war, in a way, at least in narrative terms. So, because it more or less coincided with the fourth anniversary of Bucha, suddenly Bucha disappeared from the media. There was no Zelensky talking about Bucha. There was no Ursula, in a heartfelt way, reminding us of the barbarity of the Russians in Bucha. Because we—the media, the politicians, and the various epistemic communities, as you mentioned—were busy, and still are, trying to make sense of events and create a new narrative. The Western media had been forging and developing another narrative on Bucha, which, in a way, clashed with the values and framings of this new interpretation of events. That meant Bucha had to be erased from the conversation. -- 1 of 16 -- And I think that's quite interesting, because what I'm now researching, in a way, with colleagues from the mathematics department at my institute, is a way to bring social sciences together with computing and algorithmic science. We’ve been developing this—well, I called it for fun the “opposite algorithm.” The idea is to try to—well, it’s impossible to be neutral, of course. I mean, to find the null point of neutrality is a myth. Complete objectivity, like a 100% objective approach, is impossible. It’s totally impossible. But what I find interesting is the process of mitigating bias. Of course, this is something anthropology has been trying to do, even though I know very well that anthropology is a Western construct. But at least, over the years, there’s been an attempt to mitigate our Western ideological bias, our semantic bias. And so, working with the IT guys, we came up with a way to analyze that. #Manuel J. Ramos How narratives develop from events. Because, you know, one thing is events—as historians remind us—one thing is events, and another, completely different thing, is facts. And of course, a fact is an event that became consensual. And of course, facts are never, you know, it’s very difficult to find consensus in events. #Pascal So, can you talk about this a little bit more? Because most people probably equate events with facts. Can you just explain that a bit more for everyone? #Manuel J. Ramos Yeah, events are things that happen—you know, things happen in the world. But to reach from events to facts—because, as Michael Stanford, I think, mentioned—you can’t, sorry, you cannot touch a fact. Is it in the order of imagination or in the order of the world? You don’t find facts in the world. A fact is a consensus. You have to agree that something happened. And once everyone agrees that something happened, then you have a fact. But if you don’t agree that something has happened, or that parts of that event have happened, then you don’t have a fact. So you create narratives from bits of events that turn into partial facts, because there’s an epistemic community—a community of belief—that believes that that event led to the creation of a fact. But other communities, from the same set of events, pick certain parts of those events to create different facts. And once you start this process of creating narratives from events that turn into partial facts, you create communities of belief. They talk with each other; they have dialogue. That’s what we did with Bucha. We verified that there were about five epistemic communities, and they all firmly believe that something has happened—but they differ on who is responsible for what happened. So the construction of the narrative is not totally isolated; it’s a dialogue, or rather a “five‑a‑logue,” between communities. The beliefs of one community impact the beliefs of another, but that doesn’t mean each community questions itself—which is amazing. -- 2 of 16 -- You don’t question yourself. You adapt the new narratives of others to fortify your facts. And so you have diverging epistemic communities. This is not always the case. In the case of Bucha, suddenly you don’t have communities because everyone forgot about it. But that doesn’t mean there was a convergence of beliefs. The beliefs are still totally divergent, but because they’re not feeding on each other, you forget them. There are many cases where epistemic communities can reach convergence. It’s not an easy convergence, and it’s not one that’s free of hegemonic pressure. We did a very interesting analysis of the biblical construction of Jesus in rabbinic and in various early Christian communities. And you can see that there is a convergence, because you created a canon from the non‑canon. Christianity was able to create a canon, so there was convergence in that case. In the case of Bucha—which is, of course, very different from the first coming of Jesus—there was no convergence during those four years. And suddenly there’s an eclipse of the narrative, because a new set of events is creating new partial facts. This new narrative, this new creation of narrative, is to some extent superimposed on the previous community. They find it very difficult—the different communities find it very difficult—to incorporate the Bucha network, or the Bucha mesh, into this new mesh, because this new mesh totally contradicts the narrative of the previous one. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here but also to my mailing list on Substack—that’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link’s going to be in the description below. And now, back to the video. I find this very, very important and fascinating because, until today, we do not have a common narrative about the Ukraine war—and even within the Ukraine war, about individual occurrences or events, as you said. The interesting thing you’re bringing out is that you have a relational understanding of the term “fact,” or a sociological understanding. I mean, we could go into the philosophical realm and ask whether there can be facts without humans, but let’ s not go there. Let’s just say, okay, the definition that you’re bringing here… #Manuel J. Ramos Yes, the reason is that, well, as you know, if a leaf falls from a tree and no one sees it, did the leaf really fall from the tree? Of course not. #Pascal We don't need to go that far. But if we just accept this idea—the sociological understanding of a fact as something a group of people agrees upon—then that means we need to understand the groups. And this is what you mean by these epistemic communities. Could you maybe give me the five epistemic communities you identified for the Bucha event? -- 3 of 16 -- #Manuel J. Ramos Let me think—because I don't have the study with me right now—but of course, there's the Ukrainian, the pro-Ukraine community, which is the pro-official Ukrainian narrative. Then there's the pro-Russian, the official Russian narrative. You have the Western narrative, which more or less correlates with the Ukrainian community, but it's not the same. Then you have the pro-Russian, but not the official Russian community. And finally, you have what you could call the alternative community, which sometimes leans more or less pro-Russian, but it's in a difficult position. You could also call it the multilateral or alternative community—it confronts the official narratives but differs from both official ones, whether pro-Russian, pro-Western, or pro-Ukrainian. So, there are more or less these five communities of belief. They each create their own set of narratives. #Pascal These narratives are in contestation. The interesting thing is that it doesn't depend on a person's level of education. From one end to the very smartest people at universities, we find people in all camps who accept one narrative or another because they believe the facts on the ground, or the evidence we find, support their interpretation. And then we end up with this problem of having to explain why other intelligent or respectable people in society are not in our camp. And that's where people usually start getting really angry at each other. I had a fellow historian in Kyoto once throw a beer away in front of me, saying he wasn’t going to listen to my BS when I told him, “Look, what NATO did to Serbia back in 1999 was a crime. It was a war of aggression.” And he said, “No, but we defended Srebrenica. Never Srebrenica again, and I’m not going to listen to this.” He got really, really angry—and he’s a very good historian, a smart person. So somehow, this isn’t a question of intelligence. It’s something different. No, no, no. #Manuel J. Ramos Yes, because you can rationalize—you can have different strategies, you know. Most people don't have the time or the patience. If you're a blue-collar worker or a white-collar worker completely engulfed in debt and everyday problems, you don't have time to think. So you accept a sort of basic narrative, and you don't rationalize. But if you have time—if you're an intellectual, an essayist, a historian, or a politician—and it's part of your life to rationalize the narrative, then you embellish it, but you don't question the line. You create the line, you embellish the line, you develop it, you rationalize the line, but you don't fall from it. And that's what happens. So it's like a dialogue between people who don't want to dialogue, basically, on different levels. But that's the way the world has always been. The problem now is that the structure of the media has allowed the development and fortification of this narrative. It’s not a lack of information—people don’t lack information. But they still have to embrace that information in a way that makes sense within the basic premises of the narrative they’ -- 4 of 16 -- ve decided to create. Let me tell you one thing: anthropologists are a weird bunch. Sociologists too. What are these guys doing all the time? I’ve been hearing this for 40 years. In anthropology—and I come from a sort of structuralist school—I mean, nowadays, who remembers Lévi-Strauss? Very few people do. But what I f