{"id":104378,"date":"2022-12-14T21:56:36","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T21:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=104378"},"modified":"2022-12-14T21:56:36","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T21:56:36","slug":"silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works-mint-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works-mint-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Silencing the lambs: How Propaganda Works \u2013 Mint Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler\u2019s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She told me that the \u2018patriotic messages<\/em>\u2019 of her films were dependent not on \u2018orders from above\u2019 but on what she called the \u2018submissive void<\/em>\u2019 of the German public.<\/p>\n

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. \u2018Yes, especially them<\/em>,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.<\/p>\n

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.<\/p>\n

Are we? Or do we live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?<\/p>\n

The United States dominates the Western world\u2019s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media \u2013 Google, Twitter, Facebook \u2013 are mostly American owned and controlled.<\/p>\n

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.<\/p>\n

The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognized; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.<\/p>\n

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2018US foreign policy<\/em>,\u2019 he said, is \u2018best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I\u2019ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it\u2019s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It\u2019s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage \u2013 that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the \u2018hypnosis\u2019<\/em> he referred to was the \u2018submissive void<\/em>\u2019 described by Leni Riefenstahl.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s the same<\/em>,\u2019 he replied. \u2018It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don\u2019t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That\u2019s the submissive void<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9\/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.<\/p>\n

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called \u2018forever wars<\/em>\u2019: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.<\/p>\n

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Colin Powell presenting his false evidence on weapons of mass destruction to the UN<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NATO\u2019s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn\u2019t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9\/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are \u2013 not that Joe Biden\u2019s theft of $7billion of the country\u2019s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio<\/em> in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan \u2013 and 30 seconds to its starving people.<\/p>\n

At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes \u2018multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor<\/em>\u2019. In other words, nuclear war.<\/p>\n

It says: \u2018Nato\u2019s enlargement has been an historic success<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

I read that in disbelief.<\/p>\n

A measure of this \u2018historic success<\/em>\u2019 is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.<\/p>\n

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.<\/p>\n

In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.<\/p>\n

In recent years, American \u2018defender\u2019 missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker\u2019s \u2018promise\u2019 to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.<\/p>\n

Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler\u2019s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the same day, Russia invaded \u2013 according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.<\/p>\n

On 25 April, the US Defence Secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America\u2019s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation \u2013 the word he used was \u2018weaken\u2019. America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.<\/p>\n

Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no \u2018buts\u2019 \u2013 except one.<\/p>\n

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime\u2019s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n

Watch an ITV<\/em> news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine\u2019s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.<\/p>\n

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times <\/em>called the thugs \u2018nationalists\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2018The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment<\/em>,\u2019 said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, \u2018is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed \u2018news monitors<\/em>\u2019 (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine\u2019s neo-Nazis don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin\u2019s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.<\/p>\n

In less than a decade, a \u2018good\u2019 China has been airbrushed and a \u2018bad\u2019 China has replaced it: from the world\u2019s workshop to a budding new Satan.<\/p>\n

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and \u2018think-tanks\u2019, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as \u2018rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows<\/em>\u2019 and called for these \u2018pests<\/em>\u2019 to be \u2018eradicated<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a \u2018noose\u2019.<\/p>\n

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC<\/em>, there is the \u2018conflict<\/em>\u2019 of \u2018two narratives<\/em>\u2019. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.<\/p>\n

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian<\/em>, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: \u2018If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don\u2019t know and can\u2019t know<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which \u2018we\u2019 are moral and benign and \u2018they\u2019 are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.<\/p>\n

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.<\/p>\n

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.<\/p>\n

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. \u2018Defenestrated\u2019 is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.<\/p>\n

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks<\/em> could win readers and prizes for the Guardian<\/em>, the New York Times<\/em> and other self-important \u2018papers of record\u2019, he was celebrated.<\/p>\n

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian\u2019s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Biden called him a \u2018hi-tech terrorist<\/em>\u2019. Hillary Clinton asked, \u2018Can\u2019t we just drone this guy?<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange \u2013 the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it \u2018mobbing<\/em>\u2019 \u2014 brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.<\/p>\n

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News<\/em>, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal\u2019s Grayzone<\/em>, MintPress News<\/em>, Media Lens<\/em>, Declassified UK<\/em>, Alborada<\/em>, Electronic Intifada<\/em>, WSWS<\/em>, ZNet<\/em>, ICH<\/em>, Counter Punch<\/em>, Independent Australia<\/em>, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.<\/p>\n

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?<\/p>\n

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn\u2019t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.<\/p>\n

Author: John Pilger <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nDecember 14, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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