John Chuckman

NOTES ON THE INSANITY GRIPPING THE UNITED STATES – RUSSOPHOBIA AND MEANINGLESS WARS WITH THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF PROPAGANDA

 

[Note to readers: this is a collection of thoughts loosely related to the title above rather than a finished essay]

 

In all American mainline publications, you will find Russo-phobia. It comes in many forms and variations, just as is always the case with propaganda and disinformation.

That sense of its being vaguely “everywhere” should serve as a warning for what is a universal characteristic of a certain kind of propaganda. Call it synthetic gossip.

Such propaganda follows the logic of big advertisers who want you to be as continuously aware of their products as it is possible to make you. That is why the Internet now is plagued by advertising, a longstanding reality of print and broadcast journalism and we see “product placement” in the films we pay to see.

That warning largely goes unheeded, just as for most people advertising saturating everything is just taken for granted as part of the atmosphere, part of the air they breathe.

And being “part of the air everyone breathes” has its real effects. In the early days of television, when advertising began to appear in everyone’s living room, often by the deceptively open and honest face of the star or host of a show, it quickly became apparent how powerful its effects were. Companies noted immediate jumps in sales of advertised products.

It had been so for radio, too, with its intimacy of a friendly, attractive voice listened to closely by families from the comfort of their living-room couches and armchairs, especially at certain evening hours.

But television was even more so with a friendly or sympathetic famous face seen glowing in a dimly-lighted room, almost a form of enchantment. A great deal of early television advertising was of the form of a program’s host or star taking a minute from the work of the program to talk to you directly about something he or she especially liked. Neighborly. Chatty. Cozy.

The approach is no longer “cozy” – Arthur Godfrey or Rod Serling or Bob Cummings taking a moment from his show to focus on you with a friendly word of recommendation – because American society in large part has moved on from “cozy.”

Part of the impact of post-early television technology has been to atomize and de-centralize society, each member of a family, for example, focusing on his or her own interests through various “media’ and devices.

A trace of the early form of personal advertising has survived in the endorsements now so widely used in every written or image format from labels to boxes. Companies pay such people great sums of money for lending their influence with fans or followers to the company’s interest of selling its product.

Advertising works as a form of suggestion in the human mind, and as with suggestion, not everyone is equally susceptible, but virtually everyone is to some degree. That’s why advertising works and why companies spend countless billions of dollars every year to place their “suggestions” “out there,” ideally in forms and in places where the most susceptible population will be exposed.

Propaganda and disinformation work exactly the same way. It is naïve to believe, as I am sure most Americans very much believed during the height of the Cold War, that only in authoritarian states is propaganda used on the people of a country. That belief was itself a suggestion constantly reinforced in television shows, movies, and in magazines and newspapers. It was inescapable.

Over the decades, advertising and propaganda have grown not just in volume but in sophistication and complexity. There is still some room for the simplistic stuff of an earlier time, but the dark arts have largely moved on.

The ideal is to plant a “targeted” suggestion in your mind, one targeted to appeal to your tastes and preferences because such suggestions are the most powerful. And ideally, that is accomplished in a manner so that you are really not aware of what is even taking place.

That is part of why we have in our daily-living environment something almost resembling a cosmic storm among the stars, a storm of cosmic rays and particles of every description bombarding everything entering a region.

That’s a pretty good description of Russo-phobia in the United States. It isn’t just in political speeches, it isn’t just in government and political publications, nor is it only in newspaper articles and television programs, it is virtually everywhere in one form or another, including just the word choices writers and speakers make and the attitudes they strike.

It is the contemporary sophisticated descendent of such rather clumsy propaganda as a television series, “I Led Three Lives” in the 1950s, or “The FBI” of the late 1960s, each episode of which had a brief personal anti-communist message at the end from J. Edgar Hoover himself.

Such shows were only one of countless ways that the “Soviet menace” was made almost tangible inside America. Politicians speeches, newspaper and broadcast story selection and emphasis and editorials kept fueling the fires.

I vividly remember, near the real start of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War, a local newspaper in Chicago, and certainly not the most conservative one, having an editorial with a big bold headline, “The Reds are at the Gates!” That was likely 1964.

Even the assassination of John Kennedy was employed in the cause. Books and articles suggesting Russia was directly or indirectly involved, or that Russian-supported Cuba was, appeared for many years after his death, another measure of the size and intensity of historical anti-Russian activities.

Those suggestions were interesting because the assassination was almost certainly about the opposite of those claims and suggestions. It was about ending Kennedy’s efforts to form new communications with, and policies towards, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

In the case of Cuba, during the early 1960s, an entire industry had become established in the United States to promote hostility and war.

The CIA and FBI had massive investments in everything from radio and newspaper propaganda to gun-running operations, the training of private armies, the writing of manuals, the regular mounting of a range of terrorist operations against Cuba, plus many other activities right down to relationships with mafia interests who were offended by events in Cuba and keen to display their patriotism through cooperation with agencies like CIA and FBI.

All of it was supported by the vast resources of the State Department and other agencies and departments of government. I think few Americans today, younger ones anyway, are aware of the scale of the enterprise. Well, Kennedy very much got in its way, and it was unquestionably elements of that enterprise who killed him.

I do not mean to diverge into the 1960s or the assassination, a subject of great past interest to me.

I’m only touching on the massive legacy of anti-Russian feelings and notions fixed into the very fabric of the country. It still helps support any new anti-Russian initiatives. That always includes the Pentagon and CIA and FBI – it’s just their gut institutional instinct – but it also very much includes American political interests, and from both parties, each party’s emphasis varying over time.

In America it often takes a very long time for the public consensus to reach a conclusion about something you might think should have been apparent fairly early.

But when the establishment sets its mind to doing something, it is virtually impossible to stop it. And it has so many avenues for influencing people and keeping them confused – from corporate newspapers and broadcasters and hack writers and speakers at many institutions to virtually the entire national political establishment of both parties.

Since America is so much less a democracy than many recognize, it really isn’t necessary to fool all the people all the time. Far from it. And the flow of “information” from establishment sources is constant, virtually around the clock. It becomes part of the air you breathe.

Besides, Americans work very hard, and many have little time for becoming informed about such matters as, say, foreign affairs. If they have to trust someone with the idea of truth, it will tend to be the establishment voices easily accessed.

Most hardworking people at any level have little time or inclination to search for and assess different sources of information, as independent or foreign ones. And, truth be told, there are relatively few solid independent voices out there despite the apparent crush we can see on the Internet.

Apart from outfits on the Internet that now function virtually as agents for the establishment – outfits like Facebook, Wikipedia, or Google – the establishment has a good many inauthentic “independent” publications that it keeps going. The CIA always followed that practice with magazines and news sources during the Cold War, and it does still with sites many believe are independent voices.

Major Western European news sources today – as in Britain, France, or Germany – are in virtual lockstep with their American counterparts. If you think the Washington Post is biased – and it is, heavily – try The Guardian or BBC. They are often toe-scrunchingly insincere.

At the higher end of the employment scale in America, up-and-coming corporate and large professional office types work long hours, ten and twelve hours a day is not unusual, and often more than five days a week. It’s just expected of them. It keeps you looking like someone suitable for promotion. And the competition of others looking for promotions reinforces the discipline. When you do get home, there’s all those middle-class obligations, from the kids’ sports teams or music recitals or meetings at school to walking the dog or attending a service club meeting.

At the low end of the employment scale, millions of Americans must work more than one job just to make a go of things. Or, many jobs demand unusual hours and days. On public transit, for example, pretty good-paying working-class jobs, it is common to have “swing shifts,” where you are responsible for two periods each day. Yes, the hours between are free, but they are often effectively not very useful with not enough time to travel home and do anything substantial. These realities of everyday American economic life are I think not widely appreciated abroad.

For all its reputation for individualism, too, the United States in many matters exhibits very little of it. It is a remarkably lockstep society at a certain social level, the level that counts in influencing anything. I’ve never quite understood where that reputation for individualism, as touted in movies or novels, comes from.

The Vietnam War was a decade-long killing spree in defense of an artificially created rump state, South Vietnam, which for its entire existence was run by dictators. Although run by dictators, Americans were steadily given vague assurances that they were fighting for the values of American democracy.

The rump state served almost exclusively the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. It served as a toehold in Southeast Asia, a kind of colony, a base for American corporations to market their wares. A pied-a-terre for the CIA. Those were the only American values ever really being served.

The big fighting got started not too long after the flimsiest of excuses, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in the summer of 1964. It was a non-event, even as described in the news at the time, and later we learned it was truly a non-event with virtually nothing having happened.

But it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen in so many other places since, and notably in Syria where non-existent poison gas attacks, supposedly by the government, gave America the excuse to hurl fleets of cruise missiles at people it wanted to hurt anyway, the Syrian Army.

Of course, it was the presence of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” that gave America the excuse to invade Iraq, destroying one of the most advanced societies in the Arab world and ultimately killing about a million people with all the violent aftermath included.

The destruction of Iraq’s basic facilities was so thorough that all these years later many in Iraq do not have dependable drinking water and electricity. The term “Shock and Awe” was coined by the public relations flacks at the Pentagon for the opening massive, overwhelming destruction, a term which gives some idea of the intensity and one, by the way, with clear bloodlines to Hitler’s concept of “Blitzkrieg” (lightning war).

Once America got into heavy fighting in a protracted war, Vietnam became many other things, including a testing ground for new methods of mass killing, an important part of a supply chain into North America for hard drugs, a laboratory for mass CIA terror tactics attempting to influence a population, and a place of endless lies.

While not all the details were apparent to anyone at the start, enough was understood by a good many to question the United States ever seriously entering the war. John Kennedy, who was inclined not to get involved beyond the level of a significant body of military advisors, was replaced by perhaps the most corrupt and ruthless man ever to become President, Lyndon Johnson, who had his chance to be a “war president,” and he wasted very little time getting things moving.

Today, we have among other wars, the war in Afghanistan. The pointlessness of the war in Afghanistan – that 18 years of bombing peasants and strafing wedding parties – was apparent to a good many from the start. I wrote a number of essays on the subject.

At the time of the invasion, I felt it was just a brute need for some kind of vengeance over 9/11, even if they didn’t know who to take vengeance on. I could imagine certain Americans sitting at bars across the country doing a lot of elbow-pumping and hooting and yelling at the first broadcasts of bombs dropping in Afghanistan, something resembling a scene from a big football game.

But the Taliban were not terrorists, the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. They are not pleasant people, but that is common enough in poor places where people earn hardscrabble livings. And I think my original view remains valid.

Recent revelations by The Washington Post (which to a certainty reflect someone in high places leaking for political purposes, not the investigative thoroughness of a newspaper which always doggedly supports America’s wars with the same enthusiasm as the late John McCain) tell us that even inside the military, no one understood why the United States was fighting in Afghanistan.

Yet America still fights there.

And will be still after Trump makes his election-campaign withdrawal, whose size is said to amount to a fraction of the troops.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Please, yet another “conspiracy theories” put-down.

You’ve done at least three of them in the last few weeks, almost as plentiful as attacks and put-downs on Jeremy Corbyn.

This kind of article is just about as brainless as the conspiracy mutterings of a poor homeless schizophrenic.

Thoughtful people do not need preaching to on this subject.

The truth is we live in a civilization in which conspiracies – genuine ones – are a normal part of our landscape.

And why is that?

Because where great wealth and power are at risk – as they frequently are in our western world of unprecedented affluence – there is the constant attraction to manipulate events to remove the risk, thus conspiracies.

In recent decades, we so many events which have been secretly manipulated, thus rendering them conspiratorial in nature, it seems to me laughable when someone publishes a piece such this one.

For example, the United States overthrew governments secretly in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and kept a huge secret operation against Castro going for decades, a genuine secret terrorist operation which made bin Laden’s mountain redoubt resemble a boy scout camp. Troops were trained, weapons distributed, assassins launched, bombings undertaken (including one Cuban airliner), and immense resources squandered on America’s trying to get its own way.

The genuine holocaust of America’s invasion of Vietnam (3 million left dead there) was launched with a staged provocation called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Later secret bombings and surreptitious incursions into peaceful Cambodia resulted in the fall of a neutral government and gave the world “the killing fields,” and ultimately the deaths of another million people.

The fall of Sukarno in Indonesia – an event manipulated by the CIA – resulted in a massive terror campaign. Half a million people were hacked to death as though in a spontaneous uprising and had their bodies thrown into rivers. The American State Department was burning the telephone wires into the night submitting lists of names of “communists” it regarded as suitable for such treatment.

The Soviet downing of Korean Air lines 107 was held up as an example of Soviet brutality, but what we learned later from Sy Hersh, the world’s best investigative reporter, was that the plane was on a secret mission for the CIA to test Soviet air defences.

America has launched dozens of lesser coups, interventions, and minor invasions in the last fifty years. The invasion of Panama, on the pretext of drugs, removed a disliked leader. Recent manipulations in Venezuela have destabilized that government. The first Gulf War was just such an operation with America’s ambassador in Iraq having told Saddam the U.S. had no interest in what he did in Kuwait, then using his minor invasion as a pretext for a massive war and horrible aftermath.

How about the supply of poison gas to Saddam during the long (American manipulated) Iraq-Iran War? It was used to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers, and no war crimes accusations were made.

Look at events in Syria. What a completely deceitful destruction just to topple a leader America and Israel hate. And to this day, there’s no honesty about what has gone on, the only truths we’re receiving coming out of Russia’s government-invited intervention.

Look at the mess made of Libya.

Look at the mess made of Iraq, once the Mideast’s most progressive and economically capable state. How was that miracle of destruction accomplished? A river of lies and manipulations about “weapons of mass destruction,” false papers about purchases of yellowcake, and even the CIA career of an honest Republican figure’s wife ended over his refusal to go along with the lies of Bush and Cheney.

The Dr. Kelly incident, about which we’ve never been told the truth. Kelly knew where the bodies were buried in the business of weapons – including importantly what happened to South Africa’s fissile stockpile after the fall of the apartheid government. Did it go to Israel? Dr. Kelly’s handedness made completely implausible the published version of his death.

The recent Sarin poison gas incidents in Syria are completely fraudulent. The gas was used on some poor people, but it was not used by Assad’s army, it was used by the ISIS or al-Nusrah terrorists up until now secretly supported by America. It was to provide a pretext for an American air assault – thus creating another Libya – but the Russians foiled the plot.

Israel’s entire modern history is riddled with such activity. It is not for nothing that Mossad’s motto is, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” The Lavon Affair. The bombing of the King David Hotel. The assassination of Count Bernadotte. The manipulation of events to create the 1967 War which Israel knew it could win while grabbing Palestinian and other land they coveted. The long air assault on the USS Liberty. America’s refusal to come to the ship’s aid. Israel’s lame stuff about a mistake. Secret assistance to ISIS and al Nusrah.

One could continue writing along these lines for a long time, so the article and its predecessors are nothing but propaganda to discredit those with genuine doubts and concerns.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget the journalism practices of the newspapers belonging to David Cameron’s country-house buddy, Rupert Murdoch. Corruption and lies and manipulation on quite a grand scale, and likely never to be all sorted out.