‘It's very simple. In Soviet Union, we don't believe our propaganda. In America, you actually believe yours!’
Brief: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies in the West. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever vigilant overlords in the media, financial and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914. Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further as to the main reason why. In this wide ranging ‘safari’ into the disinformation, myth-making, fake news wilderness—aka The Big Shill—Greg Maybury concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”
Controlling the
Proles
The following
yarn may be apocryphal, but either way the ‘moral of the fable’ should serve
our narrative well. The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the
Cold War a group of American journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of
some of their Soviet counterparts. After allowing their visitors some time to
soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of the Americans expected their
guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties they enjoyed in
the Land of the Free Press.
One of the
Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed ‘admiration’ to
his hosts...in particular, for the "far superior quality" of American
"propaganda". Now it's fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what
was at best a backhanded compliment. After some collegial ‘piss-taking’ about
the stereotypes associated with Western "press freedom" versus those
of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called on
their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he
replied with the following:
‘It's very
simple. In Soviet Union, we don't believe our propaganda. In America, you
actually believe yours!’
As highly
amusing as this anecdote is, it masks a disturbing reality—the Russian journo’s
jibe doesn’t simply remain true now; that ‘belief’ has become even more
delusional, farcical, and above all, dangerous. One suspects that Russian
journos today would think much the same.
And in few
cases has the “delusional”, “farcical”, and “dangerous” nature of this
conviction been more evident than with the West’s continued provocations of
Russia, with “Skripalgate” in Old Blighty (see here, and here), and “Russia-Gate”
stateside (see here, here, and here) being prime,
though far from the only, exemplars we might point to.
Of course just
recently we were all subjected to the ludicrous dog n’ pony show that was the
much touted London "media freedom” conference, organised
under the auspices of the so-called Media Freedom Coalition (MFC), a
UK/Canadian ‘initiative’. As the name suggested, this was the
establishment’s lip-service effort to be seen to be supporting or ‘defending’ media
freedom, and initiating strategies and frameworks for the ‘protection’ of
journalists. Lofty stuff to be sure. For my part I can’t recall another recent
event that so perfectly embraced the Orwellian playbook, absent any hint of
irony or embarrassment from the parties involved.
To illustrate,
after noting that ‘the world is becoming a more hostile place’ for journalists,
the MFC website then righteously intones:....’[they face dangers beyond
warzones and extremism, including increasing intolerance to independent
reporting, populism, rampant corruption, crime, and the breakdown of law and
order….’. The cynic might be tempted to add: ‘And that’s just in our Western
democracies!’
And who can
forget the fatuous “integrity initiative” that
preceded it, whose lofty ambitions aimed to ‘defend
democracy against disinformation’? This is elite code for limiting free speech,
already happening at a rate of knots, with the powers that be ‘setting up new
perimeters’ online and offline. The prevailing efforts by a range of people to
make it a crime to criticise Israel or
boycott the country is arguably the most insidious, egregious example. As well,
the attempts by the MSM to designate genuine, independent analysis by
alternative media as “fake news” is another one.
Such is the
sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used
today—afforded increasingly by ‘computational propaganda’ via automated
scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the
like, along with the barely veiled censorship and information gatekeeping
practised by Google and Facebook and
other tech behemoths—it’s become one of the most troubling aspects of the
technological/social media revolution. (See also here, here, here, and here.)
Notably, the
MFC conference came and went after organisers saw fit to excludelegitimate
Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik, an ideological ‘fashion statement’ thoroughly
at odds with the purported premise upon which it was instigated. Moreover,
there was little mention of
the ‘elephant in the room’ Julian Assange—the person who embodies foremost the
disconnect between the practice and the preaching of Western media freedom, to
say little of underscoring the irony, self-serving opportunism, and double
standards that frequently attend any mainstream debate about what it actually
means.
Put bluntly, “media
freedom” in the West is increasingly ‘more honoured in the breach than in the
observance', with the London confab all about keeping up appearances to the
contrary. This was an event conceived of by soulless, demented, establishment
shills, ‘...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. The surreal spectacle
though must have induced cognitive dissonance even amongst the pundits, and
many head-shaking moments for Assange supporters and genuine truth-seekers
alike.
As for
Wikileaks and Assange himself, it’s worth noting the
attitude of the national security state toward him. After accusing Assange of
being a “narcissist”, “fraud”, and “a coward”, and labelling WikiLeaks a “hostile
intelligence service”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared he
[Assange] was ‘eager to do the bidding of Russia and other American
adversaries.’ Either way, his comments can be taken as more or less
representative of Beltway and broader Western opinion, including in my own countryAustralia.
Along with noting that official Washington’s hatred of Assange ‘borders on
rabid’, Ted Carpenter offered the following:
‘[Assange]
symbolizes a crucial fight over freedom of the press and the ability of
journalists to expose government misconduct without fear of prosecution.
Unfortunately, a disturbing number of “establishment” journalists in the United
States seem willing—indeed, eager—to throw him to the government wolves.’
Lapdogs for the
Government
Here was of
course another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State’s
most dangerous, reviled, and divisive figures, a notable protagonist in the
Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America’s most senior diplomat no less. Not only is
it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he
is saying, well might we ask, “Who can believe Mike Pompeo?”
And here’s also
someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the
much derided scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.
We have Pompeo on record recently in
a rare moment of honesty admitting—whilst laughing his ample ass, as if he was
recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a
bunch of his mates down at the local pub—that under his watch as CIA Director, ‘...We
lied, cheated, we stole...we had entire training courses.’ It may have been one
of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn’t speak with a
forked tongue.
At all events,
his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal,
Christian Zionist ‘end-timer’ passed all the Company’s “training courses” with
flying colours. According to Matthew Rosenberg of
the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking
Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back in 2016 at the height of the
election campaign, he had ‘no compunction...about pointing people toward emails
stolen* by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and then
posted by WikiLeaks.’
[*Author Note:
Rosenberg’s omission of the word “allegedly”—as in “emails allegedly stolen”—is
a dead giveaway of bias on his and the part of his employer the NYT, one of
those MSM marques leading the charge with the “Russian Collusion” ‘story’. For
a more insightful view of the source of these emails and the skullduggery and
thuggery that came with Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to check this out.]
And this is of
course The Company we’re talking about, whose past and present relationship
with the media might be summed up in two words: Operation Mockingbird(OpMock).
Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was
OpMock, arguably the CIA’s most enduring, insidious, and successful psy-opsgambit, will know
what we’re talking about. (See here, here, here, and here.) At its most
basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually
operating in tandem to ensure all the bases are covered.
After opining
that the MSM is ‘totally infiltrated’ by the CIA and various other agencies,
for his part former NSA whistleblower William Binney recently added,
‘When it comes to national security, the media only talk about what the
administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other statements
about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The
media is basically the lapdogs for the government.’ Even the redoubtable William Casey, Ronald
Reagan’s CIA Director back in the day was reported to have said something along the following
lines: ‘We know our disinformation program is complete when
almost everything the American public believes is false.’
In order to
provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a
few others on the subjects at hand, along with some history. In a 2013 piece
musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John
Pilger ecalled a time when
he met Leni Riefenstahl back
in 70s and asked her about her films that ‘glorified the Nazis’. Using
groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a
documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will ‘cast Adolf Hitler's
spell’. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her
films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive
void" of the public.
All in all,
Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling
historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and
existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone’s totalitarian nightmare.
That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West
on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers,
industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose
support Hitler might’ve at best ended up a footnote in the historical record
after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here, and here.)
“Triumph” apparently
still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact
of the film—as casually revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom
documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes—it
elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most
influential propagandist of recent times. [Readers might wish to check out
Russell Crowe’s recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan’s mini-series The Loudest Voice, in my
view one the best performances of the man’s career.]
In a recent
piece unambiguously titled “Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems”, my
other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also had a few things to say about
the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about “controlling the
narrative”. Though I’d suggest the greater “root” problem is our easy
propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn’t or won’t affect us, or
reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this of course she’s correct. As she
cogently observes,
‘I write about
this stuff for a living, and even I don’t have the time or energy to
write...about every single narrative control tool that the US-centralized
empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them
emerging too damn fast, because they’re just that damn crucial for maintaining
existing power structures.’
The Discreet
Use of Censorship and Uniformed Men
‘It is hardly
surprising that those who hold power should seek to control the words and
language people use’ said Canadian author John Ralston Saul in his 1993 book Voltaire’s Bastards–the
Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Fittingly, in a discussion
encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he
opined, ‘Determining how individuals communicate is’...an objective which
represents for the power elites ‘the best chance’ [they] have to control what
people think. This translates as: The more control ‘we’ have over what the
proles think, the more ‘we’ can reduce the inherent risk for elites in
democracy.
‘Clumsy men’,
Saul went on to say, ‘try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men
running heavy-handed systems attempt the same thing through police-enforced
censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on
creating intellectual systems which control expression through the
communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of
censorship and uniformed men.’ In other words, along with assuming it is their
right to take it in the first place, ‘those who take power will always try to
change the established language’, presumably to better facilitate their hold on
it and/or legitimise their claim to it.
For Oliver
Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications
infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas.’ Yet for
the author of the recently published RussiaGate and Propaganda:
Disinformation in the Age of Social Media, ‘No such infrastructure
exists.’
The mainstream
media he says, is ‘owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media
and multi-industrial conglomerates’ that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly
capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from
other conglomerates:
‘The inability
of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass
histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US
plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.’ Of course the word “inability”
suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining
such an egalitarian news and information environment. They don’t of course, and
in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be “unwilling”, or
even “refusal”. The corporate media all but epitomise the “plutocratic
self-regard” that is characteristic of “oligopoly capitalism”. Indeed, the MSM
collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for
Big Corp, in addition to acting as its Praetorian bodyguard, protecting their
secrets, crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are
beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people), most of whom
it can safely be assumed are no strangers to “self-regard”, and could care less
about “histories, perspectives and vocabularies” that run counter to their own
interests.
It was Aussie
social scientist Alex Carey who pioneered the study
of nationalism, corporatism, and moreso for our purposes
herein, the management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three
have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the following
conclusion was inescapable: ‘It is arguable that the success of business
propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is
one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.’ This
former farmer from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged
experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.
Prior to
embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep grazier. By all accounts, he was a first-class
judge of the animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder
if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area of research! In
any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study
psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From the late fifties until his
death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations
at the Sydney-based University of New South Wales, with his research being lauded
by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a
thing or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his
admiration, Pilger described him as "a
second Orwell”, which in anyone's lingo is a big call.
Carey
unfortunately died in 1988, interestingly the year that his more famous
contemporaries Edward Herman and
Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media was published, the authors notably dedicating their book
to him. Though much of his work remained unpublished at the time of his death,
a book of Carey’s essays—Taking the Risk Out of Democracy:
Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty—was published
posthumously in 1997.
It remains a
seminal work. In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is
moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose interests
they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work
of other more famous names. This tome came complete with a foreword by Chomsky,
so enamoured was the latter of Carey’s work.
For Carey, the
three “most significant developments” in the political economy of the twentieth
century were:
a) the growth
of democracy;
b) the growth
of corporate power; and
c) the growth
of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Carey’s main
focus was on the following:
a) advertising
and publicity devoted to the creation of artificial wants;
b) the public
relations and propaganda industry whose principal goal is the diversion to
meaningless pursuits and control of the public mind; and
For Carey, it
is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of
social and ideological control is ‘distinctive’ of totalitarian regimes. Yet as
he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a
different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part
in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege
is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian
societies (where it is not).’ In this context, ‘conventional wisdom” becomes
conventional ignorance; as for “common sense”, maybe not so much.
The purpose of
this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted,
has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests
to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and ‘forego
their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result
the political agenda is now...confined to policies aimed at furthering business
interests.’
An extreme
example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was
the cruel fiction of the “trickle down effect” (TDE)—aka
the ‘rising tide that would lift all yachts’—of Reaganomics. One of several mantras that
defined Reagan’s overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure,
decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said “torrent” was going up not
down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan’s glossy economic brochure
to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper confused his prepositions
and verbs.
Yet as the GFC
of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog,
anything goes, everyman for himself form of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism—an updated,
much improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much
reminiscent of the Gilded Age and
the Robber Barons who ‘infested’
it, only one that doesn’t just eat its young, it eats itself!
Making the
World Safe for Plutocracy
In the
increasingly dysfunctional political economy we inhabit then, whether it’s
widgets or wars or anything in between, few people realise the degree to which
our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by
propaganda (and its similarly ‘evil twin’ censorship,) its most adept
practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate
entities that seek out their expertise.
It is now just
over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap
forward, then in the service of persuading palpably reluctant Americans that
the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well. This was at a time
when Americans had just voted their then president Woodrow Wilson back into office for a
second term, a victory largely achieved on the back of the promise he’d “keep us out of the War.”Americans
were very much in what was one of their most isolationist phases, and
so Wilson’s promise resonated with them.
But over time
they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different
appeal to their political sensibilities. This “appeal” also dampened the
isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the
political, banking, and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose
big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting
from the business of war.
For a president
who “kept us out of the war”, this wasn’t going to be an easy ‘pitch’. In order
to sell the war the president established the Committee on Public Information(aka
the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war
and from there, garnering support for it from the general public. Enter Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud,
who’s generally considered to be the father of modern public relations. In his
film Rule from the Shadows: The
Psychology of Power, Aaron Hawkins says Bernays was influenced by
people such as Gustave le Bon, Walter Lippman, and Wilfred Trotter, as much, if not moreso, than
his famous uncle. Either way, Bernays ‘combined their perspectives and
synthesised them into an applied science’, which he then ‘branded’ “public
relations”.
For its part
the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with
them to persuade Americans their involvement in the war was justified—indeed
necessary—and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan, “making the world safe for
democracy”. Thus was born arguably the first great propaganda catch-phrases of
the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up
Bernays’s unabashed mindset:
‘The conscious,
intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is
an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true
ruling power of our country.’
The rest is
history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the
war effort but encouraged to view the Germans and their allies as evil brutes
threatening democracy and freedom and the ‘American way of life’, however that
might’ve been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it
was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary example of
how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that
was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement in the war and turned that mindset
completely on its head. ‘[S]aving the world for democracy’ (or some ‘cover
version’ thereof) has since become America’s positioning statement, ‘patriotic’
rallying cry, and the “Get-out-of-Jail Free” card for both its war and its
white collar criminal clique.
At all events
it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays’s part; by appealing to
people’s basic fears and desires, he could engineer consent on a mass scale. It
goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one.
That the U.S. is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify
its “foreign entanglements” is
testament to both its utility and durability. The reality as we now know was
markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire,
control, hegemony, resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession,
keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing
dissent and opposition.
The Bewildered
Herd
It is
instructive to note that the template for ‘manufacturing consent’ for war had
already been forged by the British. And the Europeans did not ‘sleepwalk’ like
some “bewildered herd’ into
this conflagration. For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914,
the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing the
ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire
the Germans.
To begin with,
contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later,
it was not the much touted German aggression and militarism, nor their
undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak.
The stewards of
the British Empire were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on
their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively
crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial
domain in competition with the Empire upon which Ol’ Sol never set.
The “Great War”
is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and
Gerry Docherty in their two books covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn
much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular
its power to distort reality en
masse in enduring and subversive ways. In reality, the only thing “great” about
World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were
conned via propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and
the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for posterity via the
very same means. “Great” maybe, but not in a good way!
In these seminal
tomes—World War One Hidden History: The
Secret Origins of the First World War and its follow-up Prolonging the Agony: How the
Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-And-A-Half
Years—Macgregor and Docherty provide a masterclass for us all of the
power of propaganda in the service of firstly inciting, then deliberately
sustaining a major war. The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted
from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on now
well over one hundred years later.
Such was
the enduring power of
the propaganda that today most people would have great difficulty in accepting
the following; this is a short summary of historical realities revealed by
Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative,
the political discourse, and the school textbooks:
1.
It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not
Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that let to
the outbreak of war;
2.
The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as
its most dangerous economic and imperial rival, and fully anticipated that a
war was inevitable;
3.
In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to
ensure the war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking
efforts from the off;
4.
key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical
conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the
official record will change;
5.
very powerful forces (incl. a future US president) amongst U.S.
political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an
otherwise unwilling populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was
necessary;
6.
those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe
engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war
records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and direct
efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock
folks to their very core.
But peace was
not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing
and costly, some key players in the British government were willing to talk
about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be
thrown under the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They
would fight Germany until she was crushed.
Prolonging the
Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of
government without a single vote being cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime
minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in
France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite
leader, Lord Alfred Milner into
power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics.
Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The
men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men
were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and
America.
Propaganda
Always Wins
But just as the
pioneering adherents back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated
and all encompassing the practice of propaganda would become, nor would the
citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has
facilitated an entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity,
our financial security, our physical, social and cultural environment, and
increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.
We now live in
the Age of the Big Shill—cocooned in a submissive void no less—an era where
nothing can be taken on face value yet where time and attention constraints (to
name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be
taken at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality;
where ‘open-book’ history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable, upon pain of
imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and
conformity, all in the service of imposed neo-liberal ideologies embracing then
prioritising individual—albeit dubious—freedoms.
More broadly, it’s
the “Roger Ailes” of this world—acting on behalf of the power elites who after
all are their paymasters—who create the intellectual systems which control
expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring...these
systems require only ‘the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.’ They
are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted
lingua franca of the increasingly globalised, interconnected, corporatised
political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they ‘will always try
to change the established language.’
And we can no
longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our
interests. Whether this decision making is taking place inside or outside the
legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the
banks and financial institutions and transnational organisations. In whose
interests are they going to be more concerned with? We saw this all just after
the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)
when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the
dodge for their banks and millions for themselves, bankrupted hundreds of
thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix
up the mess, and to all intents given a blank cheque to so do. That the U.S. is
at even greater risk now of economic
implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to
the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans regarding the
causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going
forward.
In most cases,
one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are
the rule rather than the exception, hence the multi-billion foundation—and
global reach and impact—of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key
indicator as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of
managing their affairs. At the very least, once corporations saw how the
psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and
politicians saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the
growth of the industry was assured.
As Riefenstahl
noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the “submissive
void” included the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she
said.
By way of
underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: ‘Propaganda always wins...if
you allow it’.
Greg
Maybury is a freelance writer and blogger based in Perth, Australia.
His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a
special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical
affairs, and US domestic and foreign policy issues. For 5 years he has
regularly contributed to numerous news and opinion sites,
including The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion
Salad, OpEd News, Global Research, Russia Insider, Information Clearing House,
Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, and others. See his blog on poxamerikana.com
