The false equivalence fallacy

The false equivalence fallacy is a stratagem wherein the speaker finds similarities between two things and tries to build equivalence, moral or other, between them. To say that dogs and cats both have tails, and therefore dogs are equivalent to cats would be a simplistic example of this failed line of reasoning. It might be tempting to dismiss such an argument immediately due to the false analogy. However, dismissing an argument outright without explaining its nuances might have an adverse effect on the audience.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, triggered a propaganda war [1]. The abundance of contradicting information makes it useful to be able to detect logical and moral fallacies. A good example of the moral equivalence fallacy has been provided by Dmitry Suslov from Russia’s Higher School of Economics in his interview with journalist Matt Frei on February 28, 2022. Mr. Suslov repeatedly mentioned the US invasion of Iraq and other countries as a point of equivalence [2]. Such an approach is not unpopular; even a person with lesser ties to Kremlin’s politics could wonder how the attack on Ukraine is different from, say, the invasion of Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. The point deserves an analysis.

While Saddam Hussein’s regime was characterized by numerous crimes, e.g. “Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds”, Ukraine enjoyed a democratically elected government and had no official record of genocide. “The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988” [3] and committed numerous other crimes recorded by Human Rights Watch [4]. In Ukraine, human rights violations were indeed reported by Amnesty International in 2020, though they supposedly happened primarily in the eastern provinces – those within the Russian sphere of influence [5]. In other words, “(…) the Saddam regime could not have gone on forever as an outlaw system within international law, and therefore that (…) the whole society deserved a breathing space (…)” [6]. On the other hand, Ukraine could continue its democratic existence within international law without its regime’s political opponents getting  poisoned [7], jailed [8], or killed [9], as happened in both Russia and Iraq. The equivalence is thus stretched rather thinly and proves to be an attempt to justify actions motivated differently.