People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine

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https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/people-overestimate-the-us-war-machine?s=w

People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US
Propaganda Machine


Caitlin Johnstone



If you use Twitter and engage with the subject of the war in Ukraine,
you've probably noticed a verified account called The Kyiv Independent
pop up while you're scrolling through your feed which puts out highly
biased content in favor of the Zelensky regime and the western powers
which support it.

If you're using a desktop browser, it will usually look like this:

Do you see the gray text in the top left-hand corner of the image which
says "War in Ukraine"? That's a Twitter "Topic" that the page's
algorithm has recommended to me without my having subscribed to it,
where posts from The Kyiv Independent feature prominently. This Topic is
being aggressively pushed on Twitter users around the world, showing up
over and over again in their feed until they adjust their settings to
remove it.

As Pedro Gonzales recently documented in Human Events, The Kyiv
"Independent" was slapped together a few months ago with what the
Committee to Protect Journalists called "an emergency grant from the
European Endowment for Democracy.”

The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US
government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which
according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA
used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to
advance US interests. A page on an NED website says that "All EU member
states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of
the European Parliament and civil society experts."

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being
forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major
Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting
information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates
government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government
propaganda by proxy.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian government also put
$200,000 toward Kyiv Independent's funding. The outlet is being so
loudly amplified by Twitter that not only has its Twitter account
secured nearly two million followers since its creation in November, but
one of its reporters (who calls the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his
"brothers in arms") has gained a million followers since the start of
the Russian invasion.

Do you see how sophisticated just that one tiny component of the
US-centralized empire's propaganda campaign is? How many seemingly
disparate and unrelated elements it has? Multiple countries, NGOs, an
ostensibly independent social media platform, an ostensibly independent
news outlet. It's very difficult to see how any of it connects at all if
you don't know where to look. And almost nobody knows where to look.

This highly advanced perception management operation is happening all
around the world about any issue the empire has a vested interest in. As
anti-imperialist author and podcaster Justin Podur recently put it, "The
US Empire is based on the mastery of storytelling. Making reality
through propaganda."

Truly, one of the most under-appreciated and overwhelmingly powerful
forces on this earth is the US imperial propaganda machine. The ability
to manipulate public thought, not just within the United States but
across vast swaths of nations, has allowed it to manufacture
international consensus for whatever agendas it wishes to advance in a
way that eclipses the collective organizing power of official
international bodies like the United Nations.

We're seeing it today in the way unprecedented acts of economic warfare
are being used to attack the economy of Russia with the goal of
fomenting unrest and toppling Moscow. There was nothing inherent in
Russia's invasion of Ukraine which called for this specific response
from all the specific nations who have chosen to participate in it, but
that's what ended up happening, and because of the power of the imperial
propaganda machine the public has gone right along with it, even as it
sends their fuel and grocery bills through the roof.

A big fuss gets made about the power of the US war machine, despite the
fact that it tends to fail at the rather important task of winning wars.
This is partly because the empire often doesn't benefit from those wars
ending quickly and partly because it's hard to win wars when your entire
military juggernaut is built entirely around generating the maximum
amount of profit possible.

Where the real fuss ought to be made is the truly jaw-dropping power of
the US propaganda machine. So subtle and sophisticated that even
relatively intelligent and well-informed people fail to see the strings
that are pulling at their minds, but so powerful it shapes the world.

In the book Inventing Reality, published all the way back in 1986,
Michael Parenti makes the following observation:

For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the
news media. How we view issues, indeed, what we even define as an issue
or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are
greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it
labor unions, peace protesters, the Soviet Union, uprisings in Latin
America, elections, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know
of things except as they are depicted in the news.

Even when we don't believe what the media say, we are still hearing
or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They are still
setting the agenda, defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve,
accept or reject. The media exert a subtle, persistent influence in
defining the scope of respectable political discourse, channeling public
attention in directions that are essentially supportive of the existing
politico-economic system.

This was long before Twitter, before Google, before Mark Zuckerberg,
before Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act allowing for news
media to be bought up and consolidated under just a few oligarchic
megacorporations. And yet the exact same dynamic we see before us today
was already in play, even back then. It's just gotten a lot more complex.

You know what's funny about this mad push to censor speech in the name
of fighting "Russian propaganda" is that the people who are pushing it
are indirectly admitting to a very important truth that they normally
try not to draw too much attention to: the fact that it's very possible
to use media to manipulate the way people think, act, and vote at mass
scale. The part that they don't admit is that they themselves are far
and away the very worst offenders in that area.

The status quo worldview requires two entirely contradictory positions
to be held simultaneously: that Russian propaganda has a corrupting
influence on public thought, but that orders of magnitude more wealthy
and powerful oligarchic media institutions do not.

This is not sustainable. People are already struggling to keep their
heads above water with the constant white-noise torrent of psychological
abuse they're being subjected to day after day. We're on our way to
finding out just how much mass-scale psychological manipulation the
human brain can tolerate before it snaps if we don't find some way to
change our collective relationship with mental narrative first.

Or who knows? Maybe a healthy relationship with mental narrative lies on
the other side of that snap.