Media misdirection in the service of empire

Orientalism, author Edward Said famously depicted the western perceptions of Asians as largely stereotypical. He posited a kind of binary relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in which the East represented an exotic, savage, estranged ‘other.’ By labeling the East as lazy, irrational, primitive, and cruel, the colonizing West reverse labeled itself as hardworking, logical, civilized, and magnanimous. The West universalized its virtues, assuming that only those countries that agreed with it and emulated it comprised the true ‘international community.’ Everything that didn’t mirror western virtues was alien and due for a corrective intervention.

In Said’s wake, postcolonial studies luminary Homi K. Bhaba suggested that these stereotypes were no more about the ‘other’ than about the creators of the stereotypes themselves. Echoing Freudian projection, Bhaba thought the stereotyper was unconsciously projecting onto the other what he feared in himself. If to us Iran is an intractable theocracy, is it because we are a rigid theocracy ourselves, slavishly devoted to the secular religion of imperial capitalism? If we think Bashar al-Assad compulsively drops chemical weapons on urban neighborhoods, do we think this because we saturated the streets of Fallujah with white phosphorous, a war crime that has produced hideous defects in the birth population? ⁽¹⁾

A Laundry List of Ego Projections

There are plenty of examples that lend credence to Bhaba’s concept. Many of these narratives are in perpetual state of evolution. For instance, the Russiagate storyline has evolved in ever diminishing accusations. First it was hacking the DNC and state elections. Then it was simply subverting the demos on social media (done daily by the FBI). Now it was down to the pathetically vague ‘meddling.’ The goalposts must shift in order to keep the narrative from sinking below the already low threshold of believability. Yet these accusations, like others, are just reflections of what the American government does itself.   

Clamoring About Russian Interference   

Russiagate is the most absurd and repulsive form of projection in recent memory. Vladimir Putin supposedly ‘sows discord’ in America that imperils our nonexistent democracy. But of course there’s hardly a scintilla of evidence that evil Vlad has sought to or succeeded in imperiling our precious right to choose between two billionaire criminals. On the other hand, we have evidence from the Snowden files that the FBI spends millions of dollars to “manipulate, deceive, and destroy reputations” on social media using sock puppets to demonize and distract average citizens. How is this not sowing discord among the population? Unless you think that silencing all dissent somehow helps democracy, which some people seem to imply. And the Pentagon just airdropped $40M more on the State Department to expand its media propaganda programs. A Carnegie study found that we’ve interfered in 81 elections since the end of WWII.

Accusing Syria of War Crimes

In the same vein, Russians and Syrians are decried for the bombing of Aleppo and East Ghouta despite having established humanitarian corridors and pauses to allow citizens to flee. Of course these often fail because the jihadi terrorists that control the target territory--with our tireless backing--refuse to let people leave, steal humanitarian supplies, and use people as human shields. But the media barely bothers to report on the incineration of Mosul by American fighter jets. Nor did it seem concerned with the indiscriminate slaughter in Raqqa. Why? Because both of these battles featured U.S. bombing campaigns. The numbers suggest plenty more civilians died in Mosul than Aleppo. You can’t feign horror over dead civilians when the enemy kills them, but brush it aside when our side does it. At least not while maintaining a shred of credibility. It becomes obvious your sympathies are little more than political theater designed to push a narrative. A narrative that just happens to be imperial conquest.

Hysterical Claims that North Korea Wants to Bomb Us

“North Koreans are denigrated daily for attempts to prop up a missile deterrent to evade another ferocious U.S. attack, something like the one we inflicted on the Koreans in the Fifties that slaughtered 20 percent of their population. That’s one in five. Think of the trauma this country suffered from 9/11, then imagine the Korean War happening here. There would be no end to the psychological dysfunction that followed the cessation of that conflict. Remember General Curtis Lemay famously celebrating the fact that we tried to burn down all the villages in the country? But I suppose if you’re goal is global hegemony, having a bloodthirsty psychopath in charge is smart policy. Yet we accuse Pyongyang of wanting to hit the west coast, while plenty of beltway savages are clamoring for another Korean War (or technically a resumption of the one that has never officially ended).

Calling Russia Imperialist

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are endless hints from the massively credentialed cowards in NATO that Russia is threatening to overrun Europe. It occasionally stages war games inside its own borders and moves troops around in provocative gestures of competence. Despite the fact that Moscow has largely turned East and started cutting deals with China and its Eurasian allies, finally recognizing that not only is Europe a sociopathic basket case, but it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. Europe is still occupied by American forces, after all, tens of thousands of which never left after the Soviets won the Second World War. They stayed behind as a hedge against Russian encroachment in western Europe, but also to help subdue and eliminate the anti-fascist left across southern Europe. The U.S. state always prefers to rub out leftist rebellions rather than right-wing uprisings. Fascism has always been a friend to capital, socialism not so much.

SIDEBAR 

In October 2017 the New York Times ran the above photo, illustrating Russia's "Zapad" military exercise. This was perfectly logical considering NATO's undeniable provocations on her borders, the nonstop warmongering in Washington, and the setting up of a neofascist russophobic puppet regime in Ukraine. Such irrefutable facts apparently meant nothing to the Times editors, who used the  drill—modest, by international standards—to  insinuate that Moscow had had the audacity to stage such exercises near the borders with NATO (!), which the innocent West now could not fail to classify as "threatening" Europe. In case some laggards did not get the poison, the paper added: "The military exercise, planned for many months, was part of a larger effort by President Vladimir V. Putin to showcase Russia’s military prowess as it tries to reassert itself as a world power. Beyond Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election in support of the Trump campaign, its military has in recent years dispatched troops to Syria, captured Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine, rattled the Baltic States with snap exercises and buzzed NATO planes and ships." This paragraph alone carries no less than 5 enormous lies (see if you can spot them) all inserted in the passage as unquestionable fact, and all designed to further demonise Russia and her leadership in complete violation of any elementary rules of fairness, let alone professional journalism. Dripping smug exceptionalism, the NYTimes' not-too-subtle cue was quickly picked up by the rest of the media pack, papers, radio and television, and regurgitated almost verbatim. The fact that systemic propaganda, the equivalent of state propaganda, is dished out every day by private entities in the US maintains the illusion that Americans enjoy a truly diverse and free press.  —PG

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is NATO that has moved aggressively toward Russia, not the other way around. In fact, it has been marching eastward with indefatigable menace since Gorbachev shredded the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s. This is unsurprising, considering that NATO is little more than a flimsy facade behind which the beltway deep state manipulates European foreign policy. Under Obama it moved thousands of troops to Russia’s borders, imported hundreds of tons of heavy weaponry with which to provide chest-thumping shows of strength (long road trips across eastern Europe, in one lame publicity stunt). Romania has nuclear capable missiles now. Montenegro has just joined the ever-expanding NATO. Ukraine has been given upgraded status in its western-backed bid to join NATO. The modestly pro-Russian government in Ukraine was toppled with five billion dollars-worth of street violence and cheap fascist propaganda. Naturally, this money is cloaked in the regalia of democracy building, but research has long shown the regime-change objectives of the NED and USAID and its labyrinthine distribution network. Now Donald Trump has signed off on delivering “lethal” aid to Kiev. Obama supplied everything but guns and is hailed as a pacifist by compare. Legions of former administration employees have now come forward, with their sage hindsight, and declared that their former idol simply didn’t do enough to counter Russian meddling. Is it any wonder NATO generals have nightmares of the Russian bear rolling its tanks across the European plain? Nothing like swallowing your own lies. But that is a staple of every good propagandist: The first person they deceive is themselves.

Accusing Caracas of Election Fraud

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e perennially refuse to certify Venezuelan elections, largely because Hugo Chavez won 16 of 17 elections, and his B-List successor Rafael Maduro even fumbled his way to victory. Despite former President Jimmy Carter (so liberal now that he’s out of office) calling Venezuelan electoral system the best in the world, we’ve now gone even farther in announcing we won’t certify results even before the elections take place. But naturally we’re happy to lend our dodgy imprimatur to horrendous Honduran elections in which obvious cheating occurred by the neoliberal candidates. We were equally pleased to anoint a coup government in Tegucigalpa in the name of stability (pleasingly purred to hypnotized media by sleepy eyed Obama). But, of course, we know for a fact that twice in this century U.S. elections have crowned the wrong candidate, due to a mix of Supreme Court shenanigans, racist purges of the voter rolls, machine chicanery, and use of such anti-populist backstops as super-delegates and the vile electoral college. That’s not even to note the principal hurdle to candidacy: the ability to raise a billion dollars from Wall Street capitalists and military-industrial conglomerates. Tall order for a socialist. 

The Inversion Technique 

Is there really any contesting Bhaba’s conclusion about western stereotypes being projections of our own fears? Not really. We are led by an amoral transnational plutocracy huddled in gated communities, which is served by a pathologically deranged deep state hidden in Langley, who are served in turn by a servile mainstream press that has cast its dragnet of groupthink over our heads thanks to the inescapable reach of mass media. We are the vassals of a vast imperial system, delusional in our faith that we alone hoist the flag of democracy on the world stage. But if that were true, why is every onlooker outside our borders cackling with contempt?

George Orwell wrote that we are made through media to think that ‘war is peace’ and ‘freedom is slavery.’ Call it Orwellian inversion. But Bhaba is talking about another kind of inversion that doesn’t confine itself to switching the meaning of words. This isn’t a case of, “We’re trying to establish peace by destroying Iraq.” Rather this is a case of inverting the roles of the principals in the media narrative itself. From a class perspective, the protagonist (often the demonized socialist) is transformed into the antagonist (accused of war crimes) while the antagonist (the imperial power) is refashioned as the protagonist (said to be preventing the very crimes it commits). The astute French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who deconstructed media deceits in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, put it more plainly, “The propagandist will never accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intentions he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit.”

Ellul goes a step farther than Bhaba, arguing that the stereotypes we perpetuate through propaganda aren’t just occasionally projections of our own repressed impulses, but are always expressions of crimes we have, will, or want to commit. Given this premise, one way of reading mainstream news is to see what crime it is accusing some miscreant nation of, and then looking for evidence that the U.S. government is guilty of the same crime. Oftener than not it is, and just as frequently one will find that the accused is either not guilty or its crimes have been wildly overblown or mischaracterized. In other words, the West is deflecting attention from its own crimes by calling its victim the perpetrator. Use this inversion technique next time you digest some mainstream gruel. You might finds some surprising evidence of psychopathic projection, or maybe just a steady stream of plain old hypocrisy. Either way, welcome to blaming the victim, American style.