Media Misdirection at Heart of Imperial Strategy

The cycle of conquest requires a clever disguise

In the Chinese compendium of wisdom called the Analects, the philosopher Confucius argued that any reconstruction of the state should begin with an effort to “rectify names,” or educate people to call things what they are. Good advice, studiously ignored for twenty-five centuries in our beloved hemisphere. In fact, the West has pioneered precisely the opposite of the rectification of names, beginning, at least nominally, with the Propaganda Fide of the Catholic Church in 1622 at the height of the Counter-Reformation. The idea was to evangelize the ‘truth’ of the gospels rather than the scurrilous piffle being spread by the likes of Martin Luther and John Calvin.

Of course, the recognition of the value of nuanced language in propagating a particular narrative is nothing new, as the biddable sophists of the Golden Age surely knew. But it has been pursued in the West with renewed vigor in the last century, as America embraced its new faith of exceptionalism, entered world wars and aggressively expanded its global footprint, the important tasks of genocide and slave-driven nation building having been largely completed.  Which leads us to the present moment. A cursory glance at the media landscape should be enough to induce fear and trembling in the congregatio. The signs of linguistic apocalypse are all around us. There is little in the mainstream media that is not a euphemism for something darker, deadlier, or simply antithetical. And not only is this state of affairs chronic, but it is being elevated into a more central function in the corporate state, which in its democratic guise must to some degree rely on the manufacture of consent rather than coercion to have its way. So much so now that the production of propaganda appears to be a core competency of the ruling class and the professional classes that serve them.

While many voices worthy of being heard remain in limbo, career disinformers for the empire like WaPo's David Ignatius are given august lecterns and media platforms to bloviate on themes agreeable to their comfortable sponsors.

The web and print are rife with examples of this. For instance, President Trump finally does something good on the foreign policy front--ends CIA support for terrorists in Syria--and the Democrats and their media fronts accuse him of ‘surrendering’ to Vladimir Putin, implying that since he did something the Russians approve of, it is further evidence of collusion between the mighty Kremlin and the effete White House. This should, by the way, convince whatever Doubting Thomases that remain of the complete and total moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Those that have been led astray by a party that deliberately took on corporate vassal status but kept churning out the ‘feel your pain’ bombast that plays so well on the campaign trail.

It should also convince those that continue to cling to the sinking ideological raft of tepid reforms that dismantling the entire two-party system, and the capitalist system behind it, is the only way to transform this country. A country, by the way, that has nothing to fear from Russia, whose economy is a tenth of the United States’, and which has not, on the face of the evidence, hacked our democracy. A democracy, to be sure, that exists in name only.

WaPo Misinformation

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f course, these facts have long been consigned to the fact-shredding machine that sits inside the esteemed offices of The Washington Post, owned by junk-shipping mogul and CIA contractor Jeff Bezos. And so, as The Donald did his deed, the Post clocks in with an article entitled, “Trump’s breathtaking surrender to Russia.” Another promotes the lie, “Obama stood up to Russian interference. Now Trump must follow through.” (How much unpacking will it take to explain that Obama’s own party manufactured the fiction of Kremlin hacking and itself attacked Russia in every capacity but militarily?) Nor could the Post resist undermining the president’s actions in its initial reporting with, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” One hears a cigarette-wielding David Niven adding that final phrase under his breath.

Thiessen: Sociopathically faithful to his master's voice.

Its engines of imposture now firing on all cylinders, the Post then shotgunned a grossly confused op-ed into the ether, sure to be uncritically absorbed by our lapdog public. The article counterintuitively asked, “Why is the Trump administration empowering al-Qaeda in Syria?” Writer Marc Thiessen makes an impressively convoluted argument that amounts to a vote to reactivate the program to arm al-Qaeda fighters that the president just ended. Thiessen continues the ruse that those fighting Assad are significantly different from al-Qaeda and ISIS and are not de facto terrorists. Thiessen also criticizes U.S. support for the YPG--the foreign arm of the Kurdish PKK in Turkey--in carving up Syrian borders, which he blames on Trump, even though this policy emerged under Obama.

But most cleverly, Thiessen ignores the global context of the war, which would preempt any and all of his bootless whining. The global context always includes a look at international law, which is what mainstream journalists perpetually ignore--which is the chief method by which they build alternative narratives. For instance, according to Thiessen, we are in Syria to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda. This view is drawn from Barack Obama’s numberless press conferences in which he perpetuated the lie that we were solely concerned with the disease of ISIS. He never once mentioned the historical imperial objective of overthrowing a secular Arab nationalist government--a goal that supersedes all others. Thiessen ignores this, as his job description insists, and courageously rails against what he sees as mistaken strategy, sidestepping the overriding fact that the West invaded a sovereign state for imperial aims. Note how Thiessen assumes the right to do what we want in Syria; all imperialists maintain the assumption of the empire’s global sovereignty at the expense of national sovereignty.

Too Little, Too Late

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Post’s resident CIA fluffer, David Ignatius, then weighs in with a torrent of misapprehensions about the shuttered CIA program. He asks what the program of arming terrorists principally accomplished in Syria. Several obvious answers come to mind. It destabilized a sovereign socialist country, violating international law. It slayed 100,000 Syrian soldiers, a war crime in a war of aggression. It created the chaos through which the West could carve out a “Salafist principality” in north Syria, which will likely end up a puppet rump state called Kurdistan. None of these options occur to Ignatius, who frets that the program encouraged Russian intervention (at the behest of Syria, a useful contrast to our unsolicited destabilization, and a contrast Ignatius dutifully evades). Russia’s intervention was probably a predictable response, just as its reintegration of Crimea was a predictable response to the ugly coup d’état in Ukraine that Washington spent more than a decade promoting. Still, Ignatius sees this result as “bizarrely” unpredictable.

Also note that Ignatius happily repeats the now threadbare and ingratiating flummery of ‘good intentions.’ He says such ‘arm-the-terrorist-proxy’ programs began with “the worthy objective of giving presidents policy options short of all-out war.” This is the kind of mind-numbing statement that induces apoplexy in certain leftist circles. It once again elides crucial context. Why should the president of a phenomenally aggressive, supremely armed empire ever be faced with all-out war as his only policy option? Who would ever attack it? Generally speaking, the answer is, no one. The underlying truth here is that Washington frequently launches wars of aggression against defiant states, and when popular support for interminable conflict wanes, covert options are needed. Ending or even pausing the perennial march of empire can never be countenanced as a policy option.

Ignatius says these policies often end up an “untidy mess.” This is what passes for serious criticism in the mainstream, the closest thing to dissidence you will find there. He says the program was “too late, too limited, and too dependent on dubious partners” to succeed and was finally “not strong enough to prevail.” To prevail at what? At destroying the last remnants of Arab socialism in the Middle East. Again, the larger goals are whitewashed out of the picture.

Finally, Ignatius rehabs the myth of the ‘moderate rebel,’ as though we were pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of principled Sunnis desperate to establish democratic institutions in a totalitarian state. In other words, a heroic effort we simply had to support. Instead, we were supporting terrorists that killed gays, brutally suppressed women, slaughtered thousands of takfiri and non-Muslims when the opportunity presented itself, and hoped to subject everyone that fell under their rule to Sharia law. We did this all for the previously stated and single overarching objective of imperial conquest.

New Tools of Media Repression

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he tactical nous of elision and misrepresentation is not likely to change. We shouldn’t forget that the authorities in Washington and Brussels have recently moved to expand the reach of our own Propaganda Fide. In a breathtaking instance of an entire government swallowing its own doctrinal absurdities, the EU Parliament passed a ridiculous “resolution” to combat the nonexistent worldwide Muscovite conspiracy. This parchment ought to be pasted to the tombstone of the European Union (and the corpse itself buried with a pair of Euros over its eyes and a copy of Don Quixote under its arm).

Not to be outdone, the bill that funds the 17 intelligence agencies, called the Intelligence Authorization Act, is now being hotly debated in Congress. The bill includes a domestic propaganda provision, and would create a committee within the executive “to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments.”

This on top of Obama’s revision of the Smith-Mundt Act as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which overturned decades of legal restraint of government propagandizing to domestic audiences. (The NDAA funds the Department of Defense.) But these efforts were simply not enough. Before he left office, Obama signed off on the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act (CDPA), a funded program of domestic activity explicitly created to “counter…” foreign propaganda. This was also added as part of the 2017 NDAA.

Thus we have a mainstream media manufacturing consent on a daily basis, enthralled by power, inured to criticism, and soon to be seconded by government agencies for whom the production of domestic groupthink is now a legitimate aim. So much for the rectification of names. But there is doubtless great insight to be gained from the attempt. From the effort to redefine, reshape, recontextualize, and reveal the soft underbelly of exceptionalism, which lurks beneath the surface story of paternalistic western powers administering tough love to their prodigal sons in dysfunctional backwaters abroad. By paying attention to the names, we can deflate this fairy tale fiction and lay bare the cold lexicon of recolonization, debt bondage, military carnage, investor rights, and petro-imperialism that festers beneath the polished prose of the latest byline. Exposing the imperial shills and discomfiting their complacent profiles as respectable intellectuals is a first step, if not a last resort.