Western Propaganda — The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Played …

Good propaganda doesn’t make you think, it makes you feel

A Russian is on a flight heading to the US when an American in the seat next to him enquires:

‘So what brings you to the US?’

‘I’m studying the American approach to propaganda’, the Russian replies.

‘What propaganda?’, the American exclaims.

‘That’s what I mean.’

Robert Wright makes note of this joke in a recent article and it really gets to the heart of the difference between Western propaganda and Russian propaganda: Russians know they swim in a sea of lies even when they buy into some of those lies; Westerners see themselves as swimming by and large in free seas with pockets of lies that can be avoided if you’re smart enough.

Russian propaganda is low theatre. It’s easy to see and pick apart because the play isn’t split into a thousand seemingly separate talking heads; it’s mostly just the state speaking in one form or another. Some Russians believe some of what they are told, particularly those that use television as their sole source of information, but most have learned to be acutely aware that the truth is an extremely malleable substance and they are forever surrounded by lies and legerdemain.

Nevertheless, we look at a country like Russia and think of it as drowning in propaganda and ideology. We look at our own part of the globe and see a world that has evolved beyond ideology, with relatively free oceans where strong swimmers can avoid the flotsam and jetsam of deceit and duplicity to negotiate the waters of society — safe, informed and enlightened.

We do not live in such a world. Our feelings are being heavily manipulated and the ‘autonomy’ or ‘agency’ we experience is just one more twist in the knot.

Western propaganda and ideology are just like the Devil: the greatest trick they ever played was to make us think they don’t exist. The very moment you believe they’re not there is the very moment you’re in the eye of the storm.

Repeat until it becomes real

Propaganda takes many forms. One of them is to supersaturate the public space with certain repeating phrases ad infinitum. When you stand back and take a broad view of news media, you will easily spot these phrases and will from then on not be able to unsee them. That being said, this is an amazingly effective technique for planting notions and connections in people’s minds and generally herding them towards the sort of vantage points you want them to view events from.

The ’unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine’ mantra, which Noam Chomsky draws attention to, is a good example of this sort of practice and it has metastasised across the internet.

There are two interesting features of this sort of device.

The first is that even if the invasion were 100% irrefutably unprovoked, this still would be beside the point. There is 0% attempt to weigh up the evidence and engage in an open and honest appraisal. In fact, the exact opposite is the goal — to say something so many times that no piece of evidence nor sound argument will ever neutralise the feeling that it was genuinely unprovoked and unjustified.

Once the phrase is said enough, it becomes self-propelling and self-propagating.

The second interesting feature is that many, but most certainly not all, of the people repeating the phrase are not propagandists as such. Once the phrase is said enough, it becomes self-propelling and self-propagating.

Journalists and commentators pick up on it and simply keep the ball rolling. For this, all that is required is the right people in the right places repeating the phrase enough times for it to embed itself.

Many journalists work at papers and news channels where they know what they need to say to get ahead or are even directed to include one or two obligatory phrases. Humans are also norm following and go along with the status quo far more than they don’t and seek status, success and recognition. This adds a socio-psychological component to the perpetuation of propaganda.

The eyes and ears of society

Western nations are awash with think tanks, special interest groups, advisory committees, PACs, NGOs of one kind or another and generally a whole welter of organisations floating about the public sphere doing; some doing eminently good work and some doing anything but. This helps to engender a diverse ecosystem for ideas, which is a good thing. It also makes it seem like there is far more diversity of thought than there actually is, which is bad thing.

One such organisation swimming about doing anything but noble work is the think tank and research group the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The ISW was founded in 2007 and has received funding from 2 of the world’s 5 biggest military contractors, General Dynamics and Raytheon, and even companies like General Motors. The institute was founded by Kimberly Kagan who is married to Frederick Kagan. Both are prominent American hawks, who have been accused of being far too close to former General Petraeus and exerting a notable and dangerous influence on US strategy in Afghanistan.

This really is only the tip of the iceberg as Frederick’s older brother is Robert Kagan, one of the two co-founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was another think tank heavily connected with the Bush administration and inextricably linked to the Iraq War.

Have a guess who Robert Kagan’s wife is? Victoria Nuland, who is the current under secretary of state for political affairs in the Biden administration. She was also heavily connected with the 2014 overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and famous for saying, ‘fuck the EU’, in leaked phone conversations.

And I use the word overthrow for the reason that there are stacks of evidence that this wasn’t simply the apogee of an organic popular movement, and this view is shared by such figures as Chomsky, Kissinger and Mearsheimer.

The mind boggles at just how so many of these groups end up being linked and at just how deeply in the annals of power they are ensconced in a ostensibly heterogenous system.

Getting back to the ISW, one of their activities is to compile daily battlefield reports on the war in Ukraine in which information is cropped and manicured to spin the war according to the views and values of the think tank. These reports are then used by such papers as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post as their ears and eyes on the ground in Ukraine.

I emphasise that this is just one of these hawkish organisations and it provides analysis and information which is used with zero vetting by three of America’s most prominent papers to give the public a running picture of a war in a distant country. Imagine how slanted the picture becomes when we look at the cumulative influence that all of these rather numerous propaganda groups exert?

Whipping up a storm

In fact, US ideologues and propagandists have been too successful at whipping up the sort of blind, bilious hate that anti-imperialist journalist John Pilger called ‘a tsunami of jingoism’, of a like that, even after covering up to ten wars, he has never seen.

This is evidenced by the never-ending stream of vilification across the Western World: all roads lead to Russia, whether any evidence exists or not.

Let’s look at three examples to demonstrate the sort of rabid hysteria that the USA has whipped up to fever pitch.

Bucha

The first is Bucha, which is a town in Ukraine located 25km west of the capital Kiev. It was the site of the horrendous Bucha massacre which took place some time in March of 2022 during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014 and not in 2022, as many people seem to believe.

In total, somewhere in the region 400–500 bodies were found in Bucha, following its occupation by Russian forces. A UN report of December 2022 states that 73 of these have been documented as summary executions of civilians and 105 more are still under investigation. Some bodies were found with hands bound behind their back and shot at point-blank range, and there are numerous stories of rape, torture and unimaginable horror.

This was an extermination of civilians and an unconscionable barbarism carried out against everyday people.

The Russian Government denies responsibility, as you can probably guess, and suggested there was evidence of video fakes.

Scott Ritter claims the Bucha massacre was carried out by Ukrainian death squads. Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal claim much the same.

It has also been claimed that Azov Battalion, the fascist paramilitary group which has been incorporated into the official armed forces of Ukraine, may be responsible for the massacre; many of the deceased bodies found wore white armbands signalling their non-hostility to the Russian forces.

Zelenskiy called it a genocide. Biden called it a war crime. Amnesty International called for an investigation of this ‘apparent’ war crime. And basically all and every western paper called it a horror of heinous proportions which was incontrovertibly carried out by the Russian armed forces.

So, the world’s most prominent organisations can neither confirm nor verify what exactly happened, yet most of the Western World is telling the public without any shred of doubt what definitely DID happen.

At the same time as all these outlets were telling the world in no uncertain terms what happened in Bucha and who was responsible, both the Pentagon and Reuters, the world’s foremost military organisation and the world’s foremost news-gathering agency, said they could not ‘independently confirm Ukrainian accounts of atrocities by Russian forces against civilians’ nor ‘verify who was responsible for the killings’.

So, the world’s most prominent organisations can neither confirm nor verify what exactly happened, yet most of the Western World is telling the public without any shred of doubt what definitely DID happen. Where the hell are you getting your information from to be able to speak with such conviction on such serious matters?

Considering what I know about both sides, I could just as easily imagine Russia being responsible for the massacre as Ukraine. Russia has doubtless committed multiple atrocities and war crimes in Ukraine, but don’t forget that Ukraine itself has been accused of war crimes and serious violations, by Amnesty International and others, and also has a deeply troubling kill list of enemies of the state.

Why would Ukrainians massacre their own people? Well, ultranationalists under the all-obliviating cloak of war are hardly going to be sympathetic to anyone who sympathises with Russia, and why not stir up even more hatred for Russia? Why would withdrawing Russian troops commit such atrocities and not even try to cover them up? Pure brute visceral hate and aggression with no thought for the consequences.

According to the latest (that I can find) reports by Amnesty International and the UN, Russia is to blame for 22 unlawful killings or 73 killings of civilians in Bucha, respectively.

This is a horror beyond belief — monstrous, merciless, diabolical, abominable — and should be condemned with as much force as can be mustered and punished accordingly.

But let’s not forget that the vast majority of those doing the accusing didn’t really know what happened. It’s still very murky, but they seem to have got it right this time, probably.

Let’s see what happens when they don’t.

Strikes on Poland

And this was the case when a missile struck the town of Przewodów inside Polish territory. There were two casualties.

Zelenskiy straight away and without even a shred of proof blamed Russia for the attack and called it ‘a significant escalation’. He also maintained his country’s innocence.

Russia denied it, calling it a ‘deliberate provocation’, and stated that the rocket had been launched by an Ukrainian anti-aircraft system. Dmytro Kuleba labelled this notion, ‘a conspiracy theory’.

AP News initially claimed that the missiles that entered Polish territory had been launched by Russia, following a supposed tip-off from a senior US intelligence official. Subsequently, AP fired the reporter who wrote the article and was forced to issue an apology for their ‘egregious error’.

Here is a snapshot of the front pages of Britain’s most prominent papers and the sort of rabid insanity that now guides their journalistic practices — Russian missiles, Russian barrage, Russian bombs, Putin’s war spills into Poland.

Other outlets were more ambiguous. And some correctly aired on the side of caution.

Biden and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg soon confirmed that intelligence had corroborated what the Russians had been saying all along — Ukraine was in fact responsible.

This is what happens when ethical and integrous journalism are thrown out the window and replaced with mad blind rage and unrelenting fanaticism. This sort of mania that US propaganda and the careful manipulation of the known and the unknown have helped to sow is both very powerful and very unpredictable: to continue on this path when we are so close to World War III is the apotheosis of insanity.

The sabotage of Nord Stream 2

The last item is the sabotage of Nord Stream 2, which I will only touch on.

What happened and who was responsible is still as of yet unknown despite three separate investigations.

At the beginning, there was only one possible culprit and hundreds of outlets lambasted Russia with their accusations despite having nothing approaching compelling evidence. There could be no explanation other than Russia blew up its own pipeline. The whys and hows could be filled in later; the who was beyond doubt.

However, as more and more comes out, the likelihood that it may have been someone else, is becoming stronger and stronger.

Some of the accusations being made against Russia are likely true. Some are likely not. But the point is that when you decide that evidence and responsible journalism no longer matter, you are into extremely dangerous territory. US propaganda has created a monster that it doesn’t fully control.

The crawl space

Good propaganda gets into a place in our minds where logic, evidence and sound argument cannot penetrate — I call this the crawl space.

When I talk to many folks about Russia and Ukraine, it doesn’t seem to matter that I back up what I say with a great deal of evidence and knowledge. And it doesn’t seem to matter that many are otherwise reasonable human beings. Someone has got to them first.

Propaganda and ideology have infiltrated the collective crawl space of the Western mind. The process never stops and any number of devils can be raised from the depths for us to project the full force of our subconscious against them — Russia enemy, Russia other, Russia evil. We may think of ourselves as predominantly rational, but we are mostly helpless to resist the feelings and deep-seated associations which reside in our limbic systems. When this crawl space is hijacked, we will feel what the hijacker wants us to feel regardless of what we may actually think in the cold daylight of the consciousness.

The first step to taking back some ownership of our heads is accepting that we are in the eye of the storm and the Devil very much does exist.