PATRICE GREANVILLE
It's been said that popular culture, mass media, and international news agencies, which control the image of specific countries (and fool their own populations)—ultimately determine a nation’s soft power. A Harvard guy working for the national security state, Joseph Nye, put "soft power" on the political radar about 20 years ago:
In politics (and particularly in international politics), soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power). It involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change.
Sounds nice and even harmless, compared to the alternative, but, as you know, appearances can be deceiving. In most cases, at least in international politics, soft power is like an adjuvant to "hard power", a form of hydra of seduction grounded in falsehoods that allows for the weaponising of pop culture, including a given society's most admired and loudly proclaimed values—from democracy to human rights, etc. In practice, however, we know from hard experience that in the US the ruling elites never honor what they preach, realpolitk and hypocrisy being their modus operandi. The logical conclusion, then, is that soft power is inherently devious, and that it's rarely benign.
The guys who run the American Ministry of Truth, especially at the CIA and other national security branches, like to think the US has much more soft power than its rivals, in fact, more soft power than the rest of the world combined. They may be right. Taylor Swift, all six stunning feet of her, is instantly recognised in Chile, Vietnam, and Uganda, and so is Beyonce, but no one can name her Italian or French equivalent, assuming there's one. That's soft power you can take to the bank, so to speak, because it is a type of currency, influence currency. These women exemplify immensely well packaged animal appeal.
Soft Power Race
China and Russia are trying to catch up in the soft power department as no superpower, by definition an international entity, can be without such assets. History seems to be helping them. Things have been changing pretty fast across the world since Russia began its SMO in Ukraine in February 2022, and matters accelerated even further since Hamas' audacious assault on Israel on Oct. 7 last, an assault that has galvanised the Arab and Moslem world, and put a visible dent on the machinery of narrative control that Western ruling cliques have long taken as their birthright. Right now the damage is only a gash, a bad laceration, but tomorrow, as reality continues to inflict itself on people's consciousness, it could easily become an unstoppable hemorrhage. US mind managers and their accomplices in the collective West, while nervous about these developments, are not yet in a panic mode. Complacency, they say, is the luxury of the powerful.
American imperial soft power is still huge today because it's been around for far longer than its ideological competitors and is rooted in enormous transnational platforms with considerable resources dedicated to the manufacturing of political reality, not to mention a pop culture that has yet to lose its seductiveness to countless immature souls around the world. Anyone doubting this statement need only look at Asia, Japan or South Korea, for example, where the "American look" is regarded as cool. It's undeniable that the success of K-pop, and the BTS group, even in the US and much of Europe, prove a high degree of Americanisation, with the counterfeit band being seen as legit by mass publics. It's clear the BTS boys see no shame in aping the culture of an essentially predatory occupying power. US pop culture's cosmopolitanism has convinced many Asian youths influenced by US/Western esthetics that striking a Western pose is akin to embracing universal values. Incidentally, this is not new. Both Valentino in the 1920s and James Dean in the 1950s created tidal waves of imitators in practically every corner of the globe.
Western imperialism's soft power capability was demonstrated in numerous instances in recent memory, from Russiagate, to the cynical and depraved shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (for which the Donbass people and Russia were immediately blamed), to the Skripals affair (a sinister British psyop), to the obsessive demonisation of Vladimir Putin and all things Russian, culminating now with the tidal wave of censorship and disinformation engulfing the Ukraine War narrative. But the hybrid war on Russia did not deplete the Anglo alliance's capacity for mischief in other sensitive world areas. China has long been the target of subversion by the West. People forget (or have misclassified) that the "Tiananmen Massacre" was part of a failed US color revolution against the CCP.
The destabilisation effort continues to this day via global and internal propaganda focused on Taiwan, along with highhanded attempts at staining the image of China via human rights smears relating to the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the constant fostering of unrest in Hong Kong, the target of a failed full-on color revolt in 2019. These criminal propaganda acts enabled by US soft power, usually supported by false flags, are fortunately becoming less frequent, and certainly less successful. The strengthening of the strategic Beijing-Moscow axis, the ascendancy of BRICS and other Russo-Chinese sponsored economic platforms, and finally the example of victory by Russia in her war in Ukraine against the collective West—an epochal turning point—have given hope to enslaved nations in the Global South, effectively beginning the process of decoupling them from US hegemony.
Origins of the monster
It's helpful to remember that US soft power arose in an Anglo culture marinated in hyper individualism and its foundation, unquestioned free-market capitalism. The natural dynamics of this system, requiring the cultivation of ever larger markets, organically nurtured the massification of persuasion, something that, again, the US, as the first industrial nation with a unified, single-language market comprising more than 150 million people, was optimally poised to achieve. It's no accident at all that public relations, a dishonorable profession, and marketing (along with its offshoot, advertising), matured quickly in this environment. Indeed, it can be said that Hollywood, radio, and television arose organically in this environment to meet the mass communications needs of a rapidly expanding capitalism.
Hollywood attained industrial might and effective internationalisation way ahead of the scores of national cinemas that emerged in the 20th century. The British, French, Mexicans (yes, Mexicans), the Argentine, Japanese, Swedish, and Italians developed fairly sophisticated film industries, with numerous masterpieces to their credit, but, despite enormously talented performers, writers and directors, failed to conquer a stable place in the global marketplace, mostly as a result of America's far bigger capitalization and the conquest of global distribution networks. The Russia/Soviet film story is one punctuated by impressive accomplishments and high originality in techniques and conceptualisation. It's a fascinating story, but it deserves separate treatment. Just think of Sergei Eisenstein and his haunting images in Battleship Potemkin or the epic Alexander Nevsky. Not for nothing did the editors of Cahiers du Cinema give their highest praise to Eisenstein. His film syntax has been imitated many times but never surpassed.
Decline sets in
As Western imperialism declines, turning more and more fascistoid and incapable of responding to its captive populations' human needs, so do its cultural manifestations, so it should not surprise us to detect a pronounced degeneracy among its media and entertainment elites. Many books, shows, films and even music are now often derivative. More than ever before, risk-averse Wall Street values dominate, forcing Broadway to "play it safe". The New York stage lives now on mediocre nonsense and shameless remakes designed for tourists. Its golden age is long past. It hasn't had a genuine hit with memorable tunes since it peaked in the 1950s-70s. Rodgers and Hammerstein launched the Golden Age with their trailblazing Oklahoma! in 1943. The team followed with other colossal hits like Carousel, South Pacific, and other unique masterpieces. But US culture—clearly desiccated when it comes to the arts— doesn't have today Rodgers and Hammerstein, nor Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Lowe, Frank Loesser, Meredith Wilson, or Leonard Bernstein. Nor can it produce again geniuses like Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, who rose to fame when the empire was young, almost naively optimistic, and in clear ascendancy. Today, the ruling elites and their hired technicians, with a far longer past studded with ghastly, epochal crimes, are far more somber and cynical. They also face intractable issues with a capitalism that, immersed in the digital age, cannot appease its lethal contradictions with Keynesian cosmetics or quick fixes. This phenomenon is most acute in Britain and the US, which, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons, are naturally drifting toward closer integration, as their own vaunted "democratic cultures" disintegrate. Meantime, as the imperial culture dries up and history comes knocking to present its unavoidable bill, the whole collective West is led by pathetic and utterly corrupt mediocrities that cannot rescue their countries from the penalties of cowardice and vassalage.
Decadent celebrities
Given their clear intellectual and educational mediocrity, most celebrities in the West today hardly deserve the attention they get when strutting around mouthing the talking points urged by the State Dept., MI6, or the liberaloid cultural inquisition. These are the people who militated in the Russiagate, #metoo and cancel culture crusades. Most of them still do. Most of them are happy to participate in highly lucrative vehicles fostering naked escapism and infantilisation. It's an apt comment on the idiotisation of US culture that Disney now reigns supreme and Marvel Comics heroes monopolise the movie landscape.
Why, many ask, are celebrities today such empty heads? My bet is that their political idiocy is largely dictated by class. Many celebrities—especially in the 21st century—are grotesquely rich. Some young actors and entertainers today with laughable—or let's say "thin"—resumes, both in terms of topics and performance history, boast bank accounts ten or even 100 times bigger than what Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, or Katherine Hepburn, managed to accumulate in their entire lives. Ditto for performers in the music field, where similar excess reigns supreme. And, folks, those are inflation-adjusted dollars. Unsurprisingly, these people, regardless of their family backgrounds, are almost always alarmingly disconnected from reality. They live in self-pampering, self-reinforcing bubbles, veritable subcultural silos that almost proscribe real knowledge of what most of humanity has to face on a daily basis, a fact that makes them political kin to the nation’s predatory political and ruling elites (the former being only the flunkies for the latter). Curiously or inevitably, depending how we look at it, many die young, by self-inflicted drug excess, suicide due to a sense of aimlessness, depression, or imprudence. In general these people don't cast long shadows. And I doubt that, in time, many will be missed. Scratch away the veneers masking their lives, and what is there really to admire? Theirs is a world of privilege defined by indefensible priorities. Just think for a moment the rivers of dollars Joe Biden, a man many of these people follow and defend, sanctimoniously and self-servingly, intends to send to Ukraine, Israel, and even Taiwan (not even a country and in violation of every international law recognised by the UN or the truly civilised world, not to mention US law itself). This is not only an outrage in terms of wasted dollars and cents; it is a criminal and reckless endangerment of the US population, as these monies are earmarked to pursue “wars of choice” cogitated by depraved Neocons to maintain US hegemony, a disgusting, blood-soaked, and wholly immoral goal that concerns no more than 0.001% of the US population, and that push Americans and humanity in general ever closer to a catastrophic nuclear war.
The imposture is so obvious that one hopes some form of redress may soon arrive. For, if nothing else, these perverse, cynical priorities scream lack of real political representation. Get this and get it good: the best democracy in the world is not a democracy at all. We don’t have democracy in America. Probably never did. What we have is a very cynical simulacrum of democracy, a plutocracy walking around in democratic garments delivering the form but not the substance of the real animal.
In this rotten milieu, are we to be shocked that many of our celebrities are among the most stupid, self-indulgent and confused creatures around? That their concerns are usually shallow and conventional, and that such confusion often bars the road to self-enlightenment, even self-preservation, no matter how many trips they take to India or embrace esoteric forms of worship? That lacking a real moral compass they have weak moral spines? And that, victims of their own megalomania they make easy, terribly easy prey, for the imperial propaganda managers? The examples abound. Sean Penn. George Clooney. Ben Stiller. Oprah Winfrey. George Takei. Meryl Streep. Beyonce & Jay Z. Morgan Freeman. Amy Schumer. Reese Witherspoon...We could go on. And on. It's irritating and it's depressing.
Below, two excellent takes on this phenomenon that, in the society of spectacle, carries far more importance than many people realise. The first one by the formidable Caitlin Johnstone, who needs no introduction to our audience. The second by Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez, who created the Unmasking Imperialism channel on YouTube. But before going there, watch for a few minutes a video that sums up the political bankruptcy of Western celebrities in the heart of the Empire. My guess is that Morgan Freeman was recruited and set up by that scoundrel Rob Reiner, a rabid TDS sufferer and Russophobe. A proud Blue Cultist, like many in Hollywood these days. —PG
The Kremlin says the US actor Morgan Freeman might be suffering from emotional strain after he appeared in a high-profile video accusing Russia of declaring war on the US. The video was produced by a new group called The Committee to Investigate Russia, which aims to inform Americans about alleged Russian attacks on US democracy. However, the video has also drawn criticism from outside the expected official Russian circles. Al Jazeera's Rory Challands reports from Moscow.
NOTE: Freeman remains unrepentant. See this video at the bottom of this post.
It's impossible to overstate how much our society is shaped by the fact that those who are given the most influence and the largest platforms will experience our status quo systems as working very nicely and have a vested interest in preserving those systems which benefit them. The media-owning, culture-manufacturing class of the super-wealthy elevates people to wealth and celebrity who look like they will be good protectors of their class interests. Those people will necessarily speak fondly of the status quo political systems which let them be rich. Reading by Tim Foley.
BELOW: THE FULL ARTICLE
Celebrities Protect The Interests Of The Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Megalomaniac Sean Penn during one of his pilgrimages to Kiev, to kiss the ring of Zelensky.
Listen to a reading of this article:
If you say you oppose Russia because you're an anti-imperialist but you don't oppose the US empire for its role in starting and perpetuating this war, then you're a liar. You don't oppose Russia because you're an anti-imperialist, you oppose Russia because you're an imperialist.
The only people who say "Putin can end this war at any time by withdrawing" are those who deny the US empire's aggressions which led to this conflict, which is just a nonsense garbage position based on lies. They don't actually want peace, they just want victory for the empire. The real unbiased position which supports peace is wanting both Russia andthe western empire to begin engaging in diplomacy, de-escalation and detente to end this war. But empire simps will call you treasonously biased if you support anything other than total Russian defeat.
This dopey propaganda-addled notion that the west did nothing wrong and Putin attacked Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom actually prevents peace from happening. If one side only acknowledges the reality of the aggressions of the other side, peace is impossible. If you don't understand how a war was started and perpetuated, then you can't understand how peace can be started and perpetuated. The empire deliberately works to prevent the public from obtaining this understanding, because the empire wants war.
It's not okay for grown adults to act like Putin is just running around invading countries willy nilly because he's a crazed madman. You've got a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it.
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It's impossible to overstate how much our society is shaped by the fact that those who are given the most influence and the largest platforms will experience our status quo systems as working very nicely and have a vested interest in preserving those systems which benefit them. The media-owning, culture-manufacturing class of the super-wealthy elevates people to wealth and celebrity who look like they will be good protectors of their class interests. Those people will necessarily speak fondly of the status quo political systems which let them be rich.
A rich celebrity who makes millions of dollars a year in a fun, easy and egotistically gratifying job is not going to be spotlighting all the lives who are being destroyed by the status quo systems which elevated them. They're not going to favor the revolutionary changes that are needed. They're not going to be calling for a massive, sweeping overhaul of the systems which are crushing ordinary people to death and creating widespread misery; at most they're going to be telling you to vote Democrat or Republican and quibbling about minor disagreements on tax rates. But these are the people with the loudest voices in our society — not just the loudest, but many orders of magnitude more amplified and influential than the voices of the ordinary people who are suffering under existing systems. These loudly-amplified rich celebrities shape and direct mainstream culture.
This dynamic plays such a massive role in hiding from mainstream attention the ways our status quo systems are exploiting, oppressing and abusing people while killing our biosphere and pushing us toward nuclear annihilation, that it's hard to wrap your mind around how far it goes. The way everyone's thinking about the world is so pervasively informed by perspectives that are favorable to the status quo prevents them from even noticing how bad things are for everyone else. It's widely assumed that if you're struggling in this mess, it's because of your own failures. If any media you turn on depicts people who are doing basically fine and are content with the way things are while you're barely able to keep your head above water, the take-home message is that the problem is with you, not with our systems. That you are what needs to change.
The failings of the status quo are hidden in mainstream culture, and people aren't permitted to consider the possibility that there might be a better way for things to be. People don't know, and they don't know that they don't know. They're kept in the dark about what's possible.
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People are like, "Oh yeah right Caitlin, it's ALWAYS America's fault. You're always blaming the US for every conflict, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it."
They're like, "Right, right, blame EVERYTHING on the violent unipolar planetary hegemon."
It's a lot like saying, "Okay sure we're trapped in a room with a tiger, and sure we keep getting eaten, and yes your leg is missing and you've got a large bite out of your torso, but you can't blame ALL of that on the tiger. It's not fair. Some of it might be Steve's fault. Steve's kind of a jerk."
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People whose opinions are grounded in facts and logic don't need to resort to accusing those who disagree with them of being secret agents working for foreign governments.
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Most people on this planet couldn't give a shit who governs Crimea, but one small group insists we risk every life in existence on earth — every bee, every frog, every tree, every child — for their current t-shirt-of-the-week issue. It's so arrogant.
It's one thing to draw a line and say "The world must never let anyone cross this point, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon." It's quite another to make that line something as trivial as the question of who governs Crimea. It's not legitimate to risk all life over that. This is especially true because the US empire provoked this war and because even the Crimeans themselves prefer to be Russian. But even if none of that was the case, it still wouldn't be legitimate for the US empire to risk the lives of people in Africa or South America by backing an offensive on Crimea.
The correct response to anyone who supports this is "Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck are you to risk the life of every human and non-human life on this planet over an issue only a tiny fraction of the world cares one whit about?"
All these armchair warriors saying "We need to be brave and take a stand!" are willing to gamble billions of lives who do not consent to being gambled over a war they're not even fighting in. All while refusing to deeply contemplate what nuclear war would entail. They're the worst kind of cowards.
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I just want the rapidly rising threat of nuclear war to be treated, reported on, and discussed like the supremely important issue that it is. It's the single most important matter in the world and it just gets casually mentioned here and there like it's just another issue.
It's actually a huge problem that nobody wants to talk about the single most important issue in the world and everyone acts like you're a crazy hysterical idiot for pointing out the very real ways we're moving closer to that very real possibility. I've been writing about the growing risk of nuclear war for years and people have been calling me a delusional lunatic and a Putin puppet the entire time, meanwhile we've demonstrably and indisputably been seeing massive steps toward that outcome and it's still being dismissed.
Even if you believe that all this nuclear brinkmanship is justified and good, you still need to fully acknowledge the reality of the risk and the unfathomable horrors that it would unleash upon our world. And you need to do it with all the respect and solemnity the subject deserves.
Caitlin Johnstone is a well known cultural and political commentator. She's simply brilliant in this case, so our deepest thanks for focusing on the issue. BTW, here's one comment she received that we think deserves special note:
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People who are against Russia in this Ukraine/US/ EU conflict are either totally ignorant of the situation, or hopelessly brainwashed. They are working against their own best interests as well, more ignorance compounded by stupidity, and are against the only side with a rational and just position, as pitiful and regrettable as is the plight of all Ukrainians, at the hands of EU/US machinations. And this brainwashed/ignorant element are pitted against a superpower, to boot, that is determined not to suffer the terrible harm and losses unjustly inflicted on it during WW II. There are no salient facts or conclusions other than these. |
Caitlin Johnstone Substack columns can be found at: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/
The preceding presentation on this subject is followed by an equally powerful and eloquent video produced by a young radical activist and intellectual, Honduran Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez, who created the Unmasking Imperialism channel on YouTube ( we hope he seeded his material elsewhere, too, for Google is, as I'm sure he knows, a capricious but ultimately reliable agent for imperialist censorship, known for deleting the work of invaluable activists and content creators in a matter of seconds, and with no appeal).
Celebrities Shill for Empire | Unmasking Imperialism Ep. 105
Ramiro Sebastián FúnezExposing Hollywood's collusion with U.S. imperialism. During today's episode, we examine the role of celebrities in supporting regime change operations abroad, such as those being carried out against Iran, Russia, China, and Cuba. We discuss the weaponization and tokenization of Black and Brown people for U.S. imperialism. We also expose how the imperialists have subverted music, television, and film to promote the agendas of the small, international financial ruling class. Lastly, we discuss revolutionary African, Indigenous, and Global South movements that provide the antidote to liberal U.S. mainstream media. Today's guest is Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Wayne State University and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Research & Political Education Team. She is the co-author of "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History," the co-editor of "Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing" and the co-editor of "Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State." Unmasking Imperialism exposes imperialist propaganda in mainstream media. Hosted by Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez.
Unmasking Imperialism Podcasts
✅ SoundCloud: https://bit.ly/3wkxZX1
✅ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3yp5Mjb
✅ Apple: https://apple.co/3hhlIOQ
✅ Google: https://bit.ly/3xpqz6g Video Playlists
✅ Unmasking Imperialism: https://bit.ly/3ifCPkJ
✅ Communism 101: https://bit.ly/3fg9l4a
✅ Nicaragua Against Empire: https://bit.ly/37eunvy
✅ Presentations: https://bit.ly/3ygfuFa
✅ Demonstrations: https://bit.ly/38R9is1
"We're at War with Russia!"
STILL SHILLING FOR RUSSIAGATE
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Jan 29