The Propagandists' Dictionary: Atrocity Propaganda

Atrocity propaganda is deliberately fabricated or exaggerated claims about enemies in conflict. Israel has proved proficient in this area, particularly in the gendered propaganda against Palestinian men, weaponising of sexual violence, and the manipulating of Islamophobic stereotypes. However, I am not going to discuss Israel in this instance. This is a very brief look at how a specific piece of atrocity propaganda was recently recycled by Pramilla Patten, the United Nations and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. While I generally have good faith in UN reporting, Patten is unreliable, and not an actual investigator.

In 2011 the US ambassador to the UN made lurid claims that Muammar Gaddafi supplied his troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape. Neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch were able to find evidence of this claim, but this didn’t stop Hilary Clinton from claiming ‘rape, physical intimidation, sexual harassment, and even so-called 'virginity tests' have taken place in countries throughout the region’ evoking anti-Muslim stereotypes.

In 2022 Patten utilised this piece of atrocity propaganda, telling the AFP ‘When women are held for days and raped, when you start to rape little boys and men, when you see a series of genital mutilations, when you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy. And when the victims report what was said during the rapes, it is clearly a deliberate tactic to dehumanise the victims.’ Pop-philosopher Slavoj Žižek repeated the claims in an article sensationally entitled ‘The Orgy at the End of the World’.

Patten, in the video above, later admitted she had no evidence of the Viagra allegations. She claims this was information she was given to her when she was in Kiev on the 3rd of May (2022) from survivors and service providers in the presence of government officials, specifically in regards to Mariupol. Patten said the survivors and service providers did not provide any proof, stating that ‘It's not my role to go and investigate.... I'm sitting in New York, in a New York office and I have an advocacy mandate... my role is not to investigate. The investigation is being done by the Human Rights Monitoring Team and by the International Commission of Inquiry... In their reports so far there is nothing about Viagra.’

Patten has been more even-handed in her remarks on the UN mission report findings on sexual violence on October 7th and was careful to mention that her findings did not legitimise further hostilities.

Read about how Israel is weaponising sexual violence and atrocity propaganda here.