Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one
understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is
not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and
values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the
concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
In a recent post,
I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the
true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs
are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or
on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future
generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for
the wealth elite in the here and now.
Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries
ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies
abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence”
industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal
costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to
pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.
Divine right to rule
In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those
externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become
impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the
media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate
responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After
all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too,
as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies,
their billionaire owners and their advertisers.
Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through
the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to
exploitation. Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that
capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth
by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order
of things, that this is the best economic system imaginable.
Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely
imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to
imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to
Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling.
Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might
be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to
imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.
Lifeblood of empire
There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the
cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of
sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war
grows. Wars are the lifeblood of the corporate empire headquartered in
the United States.
US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims
or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely
concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement.
Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented
degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed.
Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s
appeal is not diminished.
As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil
fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable
kind.
Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously
expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from
fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public
resources into private hands.
The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every
incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to
justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities,
and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need
replenishing.
Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake
poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and
Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be
expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.
War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.
Fog of war
For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic.
In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of
jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new,
ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to
the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.
The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing
what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear,
generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal
thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a
phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed,
shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their
political cronies at home.
The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of
control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and
rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power
and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence
provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become
normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national
responsibility and patriotism.
Permanent austerity
All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged an
extra £16.5 billion in “defence” spending at a time when the UK is
struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a
new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic
crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released this
week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.
If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to
permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist,
knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further
embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran
and China.
To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the
threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such
expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is
sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help
Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via
their media arms.
New salesman needed
The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA
memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist
Glenn Greenwald reminded us this week. The CIA memo addressed
the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little
appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in
turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US
as it exercised its divine right to wage war.
The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had
chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept
largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But
with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this
might change. There was an urgent need to futher manipulate public
opinion more decisively in favour of war.
The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George
W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So
the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which
they believed would play better with European publics.
Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women
to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as
the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for
peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this
same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for
existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded
that Obama backed these wars.
As Greenwald observes:
Obama’s most important value was in prettifying,
marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what
U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image
about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both
the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and
specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really
humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext
used to justify every war by every country in history.
Obama-style facelift
Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power
– and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world
becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being
colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and
plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence”, or peace – are still
the core western mission.
That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them,
might have been shocked to learn this week that the UK still operates
145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the
second largest network of such bases after the US.
Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media,
of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site,
Declassified UK.
In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless
about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told
further belt-tightening is essential.
The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to
the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special
relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK –
whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that
Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in
2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only
a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial
war economy.
Ideological alchemy
Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias – becomes clearer.
Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand
dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has
served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting
grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise,
the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news
pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is
today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and
people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely
unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to
the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role
for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.
Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that
serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the
military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising
these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy
makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to
Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian
gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by
extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies
of all Jews.
Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western
discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the
moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against
the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi
Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the
Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.
During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi
Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced
within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely
sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with
Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and
the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair
of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
Israel’s likely reward is contained in a new bill
in Congress for even more military aid than the record $3.8 billion
Israel currently receives annually from the US – at a time when the US
economy, like the UK one, is in dire straits.
The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies
than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the
inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we
kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry
out, or support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is
an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more
bombs.
But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and
China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of
itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and
Boris Johnson’s £16 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries
only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not
just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a
sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to
steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way
of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.
Crushed or tamed
Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that
rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and
legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors
pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into
subservience.
Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The
CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition
to Trump – helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate “scandal” – not
because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies,
but for two more specific reasons.
First, Trump’s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of
his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US
empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from most of the media,
he was criticised more often for failing to prosecute wars
enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second,
even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016
election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump
proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W
Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than
packaging it as “intervention” intended to help women and people of
colour.
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But Trump’s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far
bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One
was the danger – in our newly interconnected, digital world – of
information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy,
of the “shining city on the hill”, to reveal the tawdry reality
underneath.
Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger.
The most memorable leak – at least as far as the general public was
concerned – occurred in 2010, with publication of a classified video,
titled Collateral Murder, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating
as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a
small taste of why western “humanitarianism” might prove so unpopular
with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing “democracy”.
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The threat posed by Assange’s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials.
Exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, the political and media
establishments have sought to uncouple the fact that Assange has spent
most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently
locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the
US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure
his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US
empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of “journalism” and
“espionage”, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the
rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
Dress rehearsal for a coup
An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence
of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain’s Labour party. Corbyn
presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.
Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK’s
dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back
in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic
politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that
Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of
failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was
therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.
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As a BBC dramatised documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced
the very real prospect of enforced “regime change”, coordinated by the
military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It
culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over
Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson’s
government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a “dress
rehearsal” for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards,
apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.
‘Mutiny’ by the army
Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson
lesson: never, ever take on the “defence” establishment. The chief role
of the UK is to serve as the US war machine’s attack dog. Defying that
allotted role would be political suicide.
By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British
establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a
real danger to the militaristic status quo.
He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged
specifically to challenge the premises of the “war on terror”. He
explicitly demanded an end to Israel’s role as a forward base of the
imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own
party – and claims he was undermining “national security” – Corbyn urged
a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the “defence”
establishment for the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine programme,
effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn’s socialist
agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many
billions spent in maintaining the UK’s 145 military bases around the
globe back into domestic social programmes.
In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely
unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the
power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour
leader, Corbyn’s own MPs – still loyal to Blairism – sought to oust him
with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the
power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the
Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform
to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.
Weeks after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the general warned
that the army would take “direct action” using “whatever means
possible, fair or foul” to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would
be “mutiny”, he said. “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.”
Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of
the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with
American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary
of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to
“run the gauntlet” as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime
minister. The military metaphor was telling.
In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added:
“You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to
push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important
and too hard once it’s already happened.”
This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: “We lied,
we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training
courses.”
Smears and Brexit
After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn
threat was decisively neutralised in the follow-up election two years
later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of antisemitism
slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe.
Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a
surge of antisemitism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the
smears – amplified in the media – quickly gained a life of their own.
The allegations often bled into broader – and more transparently
weaponised – suggestions that Corbyn’s socialist platform and criticisms
of capitalism were also antisemitic. (See here, here and here.)
But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the
sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn on to the national stage.
By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a
deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to
keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a
semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But
Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped
by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centred that debate
on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the
UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was
very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate
Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war
machine.
Which is one reason that Johnson’s cash-strapped Britain is now
promising an extra £16bn on “defence”. The Tory government’s priorities
are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and
its ability to continue using war – as well as the unique circumstances
of the pandemic – to channel billions from public coffers into the
pockets of the establishment.
A Biden makeover
After four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately
needs a makeover. Wikileaks, its youthful confidence eroded by
relentless attacks, is less able to peek behind the curtain and listen
in to the power establishment’s plans for a new administration under Joe
Biden.
We can be sure nonetheless that its priorities are no different from
those set out in the CIA memo of 2010. Biden’s cabinet, the media has
been excitedly trumpeting, is the most “diverse” ever, with women especially prominent in the incoming foreign policy establishment.
There has been a huge investment by Pentagon officials and Congressional war hawks in pushing
for Michèle Flournoy to be appointed as the first female defence
secretary. Flournoy, like Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Tony
Blinken, has played a central role in prosecuting every US war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.
The other main contender for the spot is Jeh Johnson, who would
become the first black defence secretary. As Biden dithers, his
advisers’ assessment will focus on who will be best positioned to sell
yet more war to a war-weary public.
[UPDATE: Nearly two months later, Biden picked Lloyd Austin as his defence secretary, a former army general trumpeted
as the “first African American to lead the Pentagon”. A prohibition on
recently retired officers serving as defence secretary, supposedly to
ensure civilian control of the military, had to be overriden to make his
appointment possible. At the same confirmation hearings, Avril Haines
was appointed the first female director of national intelligence.]
The role of the imperial project is to use violence as a tool to
capture and funnel ever greater wealth – whether it be resources seized
in foreign lands or the communal wealth of domestic western populations –
into the pockets of the power establishment, and to exercise that power
covertly enough, or at a great enough distance, that no meaningful
resistance is provoked.
A strong dose of identity politics may buy a little more time. But
the war economy is as unsustainable as everything else our societies are
currently founded on. Sooner or later the war machine is going to run
out of fuel.
The musical realm has been hard to enter for some time now. Several years in fact. I’m familiar with the pattern. When my soul most needs to escape into playing music the most, is when I’m least able to enter that magical realm because the weight of the world is simply too heavy, too present to be simply ignored or cloistered to be faced another day. It can feel as if to play music is to deny reality somehow. Not consciously, but at some energetic cosmic level. And so most days, most weeks, the guitar sits in the corner.
Behind my joy in basking in my young grandson’s smiles and laughter is always the undeniable awareness that we are being led by madmen deeper and deeper into a collective madness that has no sane or humane endpoint. There is only more madness. It is the utter irrational madness of the Holy Inquisition combined with nuclear weapons. What could go wrong?
MSM talking heads look straight into the camera and speak a babbling idiocy, a madness so disconnected from reality that for any reasonably sane and informed human being their behavior is rather shocking. And yet when NPR repeats the madness, and Fox News repeats the madness, and MSNBC repeats the madness, over and over and over, it somehow simply magically transforms into – “the official truth.” And there it is I suppose. A nation that can believe in the “official truth” of a “magic bullet” – a bullet that can defy the very laws of physics – can I suppose readily embrace any and all forms of irrationality and madness.
I can’t help but think that the global oligarchy has over-played it’s hand, causing a loss of faith and trust even among many who until covid wouldn’t have thought to question the moral integrity of the Fauci’s and WHO’s of the world. I can’t help but think that this means global oligarchy’s future efforts to subjugate humanity to its mad dictates will thus become ever more violent, totalitarian and irrational. When a cultural myth system dies the ensuing madness and chaos must somehow be “normalized” because there is nothing sane or whole or real to replace it with.
The 500+ year rule of Western imperialism and militarism now combined with rapacious ecocidal neoliberal capitalism is crumbling. Those Uber-wealthy at the top of the smoking pile of rubble are attempting to throw themselves a desperate “Hail Mary” pass that will somehow insure their wealth and power in a future which promises the rest of us that we will “own nothing” while we will be “happy” to be serfs on the new neofeudal trans-humanist plantation. Good luck with that guys. It sounds rather barking-mad to me I must say.
I loved your essay Ed. It certainly hit home. Your work always makes me think and often helps me express what feels much of the time simply “inexpressible.” Thank you for that. "
....
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/30/oh-god-its-going-to-get-so-much-worse/
Oh God It’s Going To Get SO Much Worse
Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are doing in America, and for once it’s for a pretty good reason. The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board“, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established.
The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth“, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border. We may be certain that the emphasis in the board’s establishment has been on the Russia angle, however.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in her patented “You’re such a crazy idiot for questioning me about the White House” manner, dismissed alarmed questions about what specific functions this strange new DHS entity was going to be performing and what its authority will look like.
“It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” Psaki said. “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”
The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course “anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.
I mean, is anyone honestly more afraid of Russian disinformation than they are of their own government appointing itself the authority to decide what counts as disinformation?
This important point has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle due to the utterly hypnotic ridiculousness of the person who has been appointed to run the Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, a carefully groomed swamp creature who has worked in Kyiv as a communications advisor to the Ukrainian government as part of a Fulbright fellowship, is being widely criticized by pundits and social media users for her virulent Russiagating and whatever the hell this is:
https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1362153807879303171?s=20&t=Sv3Vo374vBefPoDzV2IosA
Because of this person’s embarrassing cartoonishness, a lot more commentary lately has been going into discussing the fact that the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is run by a kooky liberal than the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a fucking Ministry of Truth.
Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.
The real issue at hand is the fact that this new institution will almost certainly play a role in bridging the ever-narrowing gap between government censorship and Silicon Valley censorship. The creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation, which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct government censorship from what had previously been considered normal.
We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign government as well.
Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).
We should probably talk more about this. We should probably talk more about how insane it is that all mainstream western institutions immediately accepted it as a given that World War II levels of censorship and propaganda must be implemented over a faraway war that our governments are not even officially a part of.
It started as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, without any public discussion whatsoever. Like the groundwork had already been laid and everyone had already agreed that that’s what would happen. The public had no say in whether we want to be propagandized and censored to help the US win some kind of weird infowar to ensure its continued unipolar domination of the planet. It just happened.
No reason was given to the public as to why this must occur, and there was no public debate as to whether it should. This was by design, because propaganda only works when you don’t know it’s happening to you.
The choice was made for us that information is too important to be left in the hands of the people. It became set in stone that we are to be a propaganda-based society rather than a truth-based society. No discussion was offered, and no debate was allowed.
And as bad as it is, it’s on track to get much, much worse. They’re already setting up “disinformation” regulation in the government which presides over Silicon Valley, the proxy war between the US and Ukraine is escalating by the day, and aggressions are ramping up against China over both the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think imperial narrative management is intense now, wait until the US empire’s struggle to secure global hegemony really gets going.
Do you consent to this? Do you? It’s something you kind of have to take a position on, because its implications have a direct effect on our lives as individuals and on our trajectory as a society. How much are we willing to sacrifice to help the US win an infowar against Russia?
The question of whether we should abandon all hope of ever becoming a truth-based society and committing instead to winning propaganda wars for a globe-spanning empire is perhaps the most consequential decision we’ve ever had to make as a species. Which is why we weren’t given a choice. It’s just been foisted upon us.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. By taking our control of information out of our hands without asking our permission and determining for us that we are to be a propaganda-based civilization for the foreseeable future, they have stolen something sacred from us. Something they had no right to take.
Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly the wrong direction.