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WHO IN THE WEST IS PRODUCING ALL THE PROPAGANDA
How the citizenry in the West is being brainwashed 24/7. The creation of the “official narrative”.
Propaganda machine — originally published in La Fionda, Italy, by Alberto Bradanini, January 5, 2023
Introduction
According to the prevailing narrative, propaganda, i.e., the systemic production of falsehoods, would affect only nations lacking freedom of expression, autocratic, authoritarian or dictatorial countries (appellations, admittedly, attributed according to convenience). In authoritarian countries, with some diversity from one to another, the picture is quite clear, censorship dominates: some things can be done, others cannot. In spite of appearances, however, even in so-called democracies, the goal is the same, to control the discomfort of the majority against the privileges of the minority, only the technique changes, a technique based on LIE, which operates in a sophisticated way, creating news out of thin air, mixing lies and truths, omitting facts and circumstances, abusively rehashing past and future, comparing oysters to elephants.
Confusing the picture further, for the discourse of power — at the top of which, on closer inspection, we always find the American empire in some incarnation — authoritarian countries are then those that do not bow to the rule of the world’s only indispensable nation (Clinton, 1999), the backbone of the Kingdom of Good.
Those who dominate the public narrative, then, control society and by the transitive property the wealth and the anxieties that roam therein. On the other hand, even those who sit at the top of the pyramid are restless, gripped by the anguish of losing wealth and power. And coercion is not enough, consensus is needed, and the role of propaganda is to disarticulate the conflict, to contain that malaise that roams everywhere like a feline waiting for prey. It is also a constitutive aspect of the broader notion of hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of the term,[1] according to which the ruling class, now transnational, needs to drive the public narrative, making use of a scaffolding of service, politicians, military/bureaucrats, journalists, academics.
The power is untethered from any ideology, not being based on values, but only on interests: whether it is liberalism or socialism, conservatism or progressivism, Christian or Islamic fundamentalism, supremacism or miscegenation, and so on, the end is only one, self-aggrandizement and related profits. The Kingdom of Good has no nuance of thought, much less action.
The public narrative also spreads an unconscious message, “we know very well that the situation is not ideal, things should be better, but, alas, there is no alternative. On the other hand, be careful because things could be much worse, and only we are able to prevent the situation from escalating.”
Some are persuaded that only those living on the margins, the poor in spirit and individuals without education or acumen are exposed to the spell of propaganda. A disenchanted look reveals, however, that such dependence has nothing to do with culture or intelligence. On the contrary, both tend to reinforce resistance to recognize porosity to manipulation. The ability to oppose the mainstream appears indeed to be connected with the humble quality of being able to recognize one’s mistakes, and if need be, one’s gullibility. This is a critical characteristic of human beings that expresses emotional maturity and cultural depth. On the philosophical level, on the other hand, the ability to expose deception descends from adherence to the principle of truth, which cannot be separated from a life led in consistency. These are uncommon peculiarities, but they flourish in all kinds of individuals and are essential to the life and prosperity of humankind.
The Propaganda Multiplier
In the opening of the essay The Propaganda Multiplier[2], Swiss Konrad Hummler states that “when faced with any kind of information we should never neglect to ask ourselves: why is this news reaching us, why in this form and at this time? At the end of the day, these are always matters of power.”
Perhaps, this clarifies why no one accounts for the unique conjuncture — this is one example among many — why Russian citizens can read our newspapers and listen to our TV, while we do not have the right to reciprocate, read and listen to Russian media[3]. While we wait to be told about this, we are helped by the Orwellian vocabulary, in which peace is spelled to mean war, democracy to mean oligarchy-plutocracy, sovereignty to express subjugation, and freedom of justice to mean its suppression.
Hummler adds that a fundamentally unknown aspect of the media system concerns the structure of its operation, especially the circumstance that almost all of the news that reaches us about world events is generated by only three international news agencies. Their role is so central that media users — TV, newspapers and the Internet — almost always cover the same events with the same topics, the same slant, the same format. These are agencies that enjoy the cover and support of governments, military and intelligence apparatuses, being used by them as platforms for disseminating piloted information[4].
How does the newspaper (or TV) I read (or listen to) know what it claims to know about an international issue? — Hummler asks — and the answer is trivial: that newspaper or TV knows nothing, it merely copies from one of the aforementioned agencies. These agencies work plushly, behind the scenes. The first reason for such discretion is, of course, control of the news; the second lies in the circumstance that newspapers and TV have no interest in letting their readers know that they are unable to gather independent news about what they are reporting.
The three agencies in question are:
Associated Press (AP), which has over 4,000 employees scattered around the world. AP has the form of a cooperative society, but is in fact controlled by Wall Street-listed financials; as of April 2017, its chairman is Steven Swartz, who is also CEO of Hearst Communications, the U.S. media giant. AP provides information to more than 12,000 international newspapers and TV stations, reaching more than half of the world’s population every day;
Agence France-Presse (AFP),[5] a French state-owned investee, has about 4,000 employees and broadcasts over 3,000 reports daily to media outlets around the world;
Reuters Agency, headquartered in Toronto, employing thousands of people everywhere; as of July 2018, 55 percent of its capital is owned by Wall Street-listed Blackstone Group; in 2008, it was acquired by the Canadian Thomson Corporation and later merged into Thomson-Reuters.
U.S. corporations (and with them the military and security apparatuses, the deep state, etc…) also dominate the Internet world, as the top ten online media companies, except for one, are American-owned and all are based in the U.S.
Since such scaffolding is at the root of media creation, suppression and adulteration of happenings in the world,[6] it is curious that few people are interested in learning about its role and operating mechanisms.
A Swiss researcher (Blum[7]) has found that no Western newspaper can do without such agencies if it wants to cover international affairs. We only know what these decide to report on. The Big Lie in which the population is immersed (with exceptions, of course) is devastating public ethics and collective sensibilities. The brainwashing is relentless, everything is bent to the needs of power (the West and that part of the world piloted by the West), thus hierarchically ordered: the U.S. empire (corporations, deep state, military might), European elites (finance, banks, mostly Nordic), national ruling classes (politicians, media, academia).
Although many countries have their own agencies — Germany’s DPA, Austria’s APA, Switzerland’s SDA, Italy’s Ansa, and so on — private/public print media and TV, if they want to cover international issues, are forced to turn to the three mentioned, which have appropriated an irreplaceable role by being able to rely on resources, geographic coverage and operational capacity: the reports of these agencies are translated and copied, sometimes used without citing the source, sometimes partially rewritten, and sometimes enlivened and enriched with images and graphics to make them look like an original product. The journalist working on a given subject selects the passages he considers important, manipulates them, remixes them with some flutter and then publishes them (Volker Braeutigam)[8].”
What the public thinks are original contributions from the newspaper or TV are actually reports fabricated in New York, London or Paris. Not surprisingly, the news is the same in Washington, Berlin, Paris or Rome. A mind-boggling phenomenon, little dissimilar to the vituperative practices of so-called illiberal countries.
As for correspondents, much of the media cannot afford any. When they do exist, they cover several countries, even ten or twenty, and one can imagine with what expertise! In war zones, they rarely venture outside the hotel where they live, and very few have the language skills to understand what is going on around them. On the war in Syria, Hummler writes, many were reporting from Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo, Cyprus, while the aforementioned agencies have correspondents everywhere and well trained.
In his book People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk candidly described how the correspondents work and to what extent they depend on the three sisters: “I thought these were historians of the moment, that when faced with a major event, they would find out what was really going on and report on it. In truth, no one ever goes to verify what is happening. When something happens, the newsroom calls, faxes or e-mails pre-packaged press releases, and the on-site correspondent bounces them back in his own words, commenting on them on radio or TV, or makes an article out of them for the relevant newspaper. The news is tape-transported. On any topic or event, correspondents wait at the end of the treadmill, pretending to have produced something, but it’s all fake.”
In other words, the correspondent is usually unable to produce independent investigations and merely reshapes reports packaged in newsrooms or by one of the three agencies. This is how the mainstream effect is born.
One might ask why journalists do not try to produce independent investigations. Luyendijk writes in this regard, “I tried to do so, but each time, in turn, the three sisters would intervene on the newsroom and impose their story, period.”[9] Sometimes on TV some journalists show a preparation that inspires admiration, because they answer difficult questions competently and casually. The reason, however, is trivial: they know the questions in advance. What one sees is pure theater[10]. Sometimes, in order to save money, some media use the same correspondents, and in that case the reports that reach the newspapers are two drops of water.
In his book The Business of News, Manfred Steffens, former editor of the German news agency DPA, states “it is not clear why a news story would be reliable if its source is cited. On the contrary, the opposite may be true, since responsibility is then attributed to the cited source, which is potentially just as unreliable[11].”
What the agencies ignore never happened. In the war in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — an organization with little independence, based in London and funded by the British government[12]-has played a prominent role. The Observatory sent its reports to the three agencies, which forwarded them to the media, which in turn informed millions of readers and viewers around the world. Why the agencies referred to the Observatory — and who was funding it — remains a mystery to this day.
While some issues are simply ignored, others are emphasized, even though they should not be: “a blatant falsehood or staging[13] is digested without objection in the face of the supposed respectability of an emblazoned news agency or a renowned media outlet, since in such cases critical sense tends to approach zero[14].” Among the most effective actors in injecting lies are the ministries of defense (in the West all penetrated in various ways by U.S. intelligence). In 2009, the head of the AP agency, Tom Curley, publicly claimed that the Pentagon employed more than 27,000 public relations specialists who, with an annual budget of five billion dollars, were disseminating manipulated information on a daily basis (since then the budget and number of specialists have grown by leaps and bounds!). U.S. security agencies have a habit of gathering and distributing to newspapers and TV news outlets information created in a technique that makes it impossible to know its origin, resorting to formulas such as ‘according to intelligence sources, according to what has been confidentially leaked or hinted at by this or that general, and so on.”[15]
In 2003, after the Iraq war began, Ulrich Tilgner, a Middle East veteran for German and Swiss TV, spoke about the manipulative activities of the military and the role of the media. “With the help of the latter, the military constructs public perception and uses it for its own purposes, spreading invented scenarios. In this kind of warfare, U.S. media strategists perform a function similar to that of bomber pilots.”
What is known to the U.S. military is also known to the intelligence services. On the subject of disinformation, a former U.S. intelligence officer and a Reuters correspondent reported the following to British TV Channel 4: “A former CIA agent, John Stockwell, revealed[16] that it was necessary to make the Angolan war look like enemy aggression. For that reason we supported in every country those who shared this view. A third of my staff were propaganda speakers, paid to make up stories and find ways to get them into the press. Usually, Western newspaper editorial offices do not raise doubts when they receive news stories in line with the dominant narrative. We have invented many stories, which still stand, but it is all garbage[17].”
Fred Bridgland[18], reporting on his work as a war correspondent for Reuters, says, “We based our reports on official communications. It was only a few years later that we were informed that a small CIA disinformation expert from a desk located in a U.S. embassy was producing communiqués that bore no relation to the truth or facts on the ground. Basically, to put it crudely, you can manufacture any crap and get it published in a newspaper.”
The intelligence services, to be sure, have endless contacts to get their lies through, but without the servant role of the three agencies in question, the worldwide synchronization of propaganda and disinformation would not be as effective[19]. Through this multiplying mechanism, narratives entirely fabricated by governments, military and intelligence services reach the public without any filter. The profession of the so-called meainstream journalist, now reduced to the strapline of power, takes the form of rabbling together, on the back of veils fabricated elsewhere, complex issues about which they know little or nothing in language devoid of factual logic and indication of sources.
For former AP journalist Herbert Altschull, “according to the first law of journalism, the media are everywhere an instrument of political and/or economic power. Mainstream newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations never operate independently, even when they would have the opportunity to do so.”[20] He said.
Until recently, freedom of the press was even more theoretical, given the high barriers to entry, licenses to be obtained, frequencies to be negotiated, funding and technical infrastructure needed, few channels available, advertising to be gathered, and other restrictions. Today, thanks to the Internet, Altschull’s first law has been partially broken. Thus, a reader-funded quality journalism has emerged that is superior to traditional media in terms of critical capacity and independence.
Nevertheless, traditional media remain crucial, as having far more copious resources they are able to capture a multitude of readers even online. And that capacity is linked to the role of the three agencies, whose up-to-the-minute updates form the backbone of most mainstream sites found online.
To what extent political and economic power, according to Altschull’s law, will be able to maintain control of information in the face of advancing uncontrolled news, thus changing the power structure and at least to some extent the public’s awareness, only the future will tell. Looking at the balance of power, the outcome would seem a foregone conclusion. Man remains, however, the arbiter of his own destiny. The struggle is always on.
International media practitioners
Noam Chomsky, perhaps the greatest living intellectual, states in his essay “What makes the mainstream media mainstream,” that: “if you break the mold, power has many ways to bring you back into line. Yet, you can and should still fight back[21]. Some great journalists claim that no one has ever told them what to write. Chomsky clarifies this apparent contradiction this way, “they would not be there if they had not already proven that they write or say the right thing every time, and spontaneously. If they had begun their careers by writing the wrong things, they would never have gotten to the place where they can now say, seemingly, what they want. The same is true of university faculty in the disciplines that matter.”[22]
British journalist John Pilger,[23] known for his gritty investigations, writes that in the 1970s he met one of the Hitler regime’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, who said that in order to achieve the total subjugation of the German people it had been necessary, but not difficult, to manipulate the minds of the liberal, educated bourgeoisie; the rest had come automatically.
The tragedy of such a scenario is that events of political, geopolitical or economic significance with international implications (but generally all sensitive topics) are received with minimal critical sense. The Western media live on advertising (private corporations) or public subsidies, and reflect the interests of the Atlantic narrative, under the auspices of the American economic and security architecture.
The mass media aim to distract people from the central issues: “you can think what you want, but we run the show. Let them be interested in sports, news, sex scandals, celebrity problems, the fake government-opposition dialectic, but not in serious things, because those are reserved for the big guys.”
Moreover, key people in the mainstream media are co-opted by the transatlantic elite, getting careers and positions in return. The inner circles of transnational power — such as the Council for Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Aspen Institute, the World Economic Forum, Chatham House and others-recruit media operatives hand over fist (the names of Italians, along with politicians, are available online).
For Chomsky, universities do not make a difference. The prevailing narrative reflects the mainstream narrative. They are not independent. There may be independent professors, and this applies to the media as well, but the institution as such is not, since it depends on external funding or government (itself bent to the aforementioned powers). Those who do not conform are shelved as they go. The system rewards conformity and obedience. Good manners are learned in the universities, particularly how to interact with representatives of the upper classes. This is how, without having to resort to explicit lying, the academy and the media internalize values and postures of the power on which they depend.
As is well known, in Animal Farm George Orwell makes a merciless satire of the Soviet Union. Thirty years later, however, it turns out that, in the introduction he wrote at the time, and which someone had suppressed, he wrote “literary censorship in England is as effective as that of a totalitarian system, only the technique is different, again, further evidence that independent minds, those that generate wrong thinking, are everywhere obstructed or extirpated.”
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. People did not want to fight other people’s wars. Peace without victory, therefore without war, had been the slogan. Once elected, Wilson changed his mind and posed the question: how do you convert a pacifist nation into one willing to wage war against the Germans? Thus was established the first, and formally only, state propaganda agency in U.S. history, the Committee on Public Information (nice Orwellian title!), called the Creel Commission after its director. The goal of pushing the population into warlike, jingoistic hysteria was achieved without too much difficulty. Within months the United States entered the war. Among those who were impressed by such success, we also find Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, he states that Germany was defeated in World War I because it lost the battle of information, and he promised: next time we will know how to react with a proper propaganda system, as in effect happened when he came to power.
Walter Lippmann, a leading exponent of the Creel Commission among the most respected in American journalism for about half a century, said, “In democracy there is an art called creating a consensus,” where, of course, there is nothing democratic about it. “If you can make it work, you can even accept the risk of the people going to the polls. With adequate consensus you can make even voting irrelevant. In order for the moods to be aligned with the wishes of those in charge, it is necessary to maintain the illusion that it is the people who choose governments and policy directions. In this way, democracy will function as it should. This is what it means to apply the lesson of propaganda.” After all, James Madison, one of the fathers of the U.S. Constitution, said that the main goal of the system was to protect the minority of the rich against the majority of the poor. And again, to this end, the main tool was propaganda.
The aforementioned John Pilger recalls[24] that in the past 70 years the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in the democratic elections of some thirty countries. They have bombed the populations of thirty nations, most of them poor and defenseless. They have attempted to assassinate the political leaders of some fifty sovereign states. They have financed or supported repression against national liberation movements in some twenty countries. The scope and magnitude of this carnage is occasionally evoked, but quickly dismissed, while those responsible continue to dominate American political life.
The U.S. writer Harold Pinter, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, had said, “U.S. foreign policy can be defined as follows: kiss my ass or I’ll bust your head. It is simple and crude, and the interesting aspect is that it works because the U.S. has the resources, technology and weapons to spread disinformation through distorting rhetoric, while managing to get away with it. They are therefore persuasive, especially in the eyes of the uninformed and subservient governments. Ultimately, it is a mountain of lies, but it works. The crimes of the United States are systematic, constant, vicious, without qualms, but very few people talk about them and become aware of them. They pathologically manipulate the whole world, presenting themselves as champions of the Kingdom of Good. A mechanism of collective hypnosis that is always at work.”
Brainwashing is sophisticated and must be called by its real name if it is to contain its deadly effects there. The limited spaces, once open even to countercultural intelligences, have closed. We are waiting for valiant men, as in the 1930s against fascism, together with intellectuals (the authentic ones), the outraged, the restless minds, those who have pity for their fellow human beings, those who do not have to sell their souls to make sense of existence. The catharsis of a cultural revolution, which remains the salt of history, could perhaps one day lead us to shout together in a loud voice: enough, lords, enough now! From now on, the people turn off your funereal apparatuses, generators of lies and turpitude, and return to trampling the paths of truth and life. It is getting late, there is not much time left.
[1] “The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as domination and as intellectual and moral direction. A social group is dominant of the opposing groups that it tends to liquidate or subdue even by armed force, and it is directive of related and allied groups. A social group can and indeed must be managerial even before it conquers governmental power (this is one of the main conditions for the very conquest of power); afterwards, when it exercises power and even if it holds it strongly, it becomes dominant but must continue to be managerial as well” (Prison Notebooks, The Risorgimento, p. 70).
[2] https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/
[3] Russia Today and Sputnik can be reached if accessed from the Brave search engine and from cell phones
[4] Hammler reports, for example, that according to a report on coverage of the war in Syria (which began in 2011) by nine major European newspapers, 78 percent of the articles were copied in whole or in part from reports by one of these agencies. None of the articles were based on independent research. As a result, ça va sans dire, 82% of the articles published were in favor of U.S.-NATO military intervention.
[5] https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/
[6] Höhne 1977, p. 11.
[7] Blum 1995, p. 9.
[8] For ten years editor of the German TV station ARD.
[9] Luyendijk p.54ff
[10] Luyendjik 2009, p. 20–22, 76, 189
[11] Steffens 1969, p. 106
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Observatory_for_Human_Rights
[13] Blum 1995, p. 16
[14] Steffens 1969, p. 234
[15] Tilgner 2003, p. 132
[16] https://swprs.org/the-cia-and-the-media/
[17] https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/
[18] Fred Bridgland — Wikipedia
[19] It is instructive to scroll through the information found on this site https://swprs.org/media-navigator/.
[20] (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298)
[21] Chomsky 1997, What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream.
[22] Chomsky 1997
[23] https://cambiailmondo.org/2022/12/28/il-silenzio-degli-innocenti-come-funziona-la-propaganda/
[24] https://cambiailmondo.org/2022/12/28/il-silenzio-degli-innocenti-come-funziona-la-propaganda/
By: Alberto Bradanini
Source: Lena Bloch
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