Guest Post by John Pilger
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch and better connected.
Are we? Or do we live in a media society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies is based in North America. The internet and social media — Google, Twitter, Facebook — are mostly American-owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage are largely unreported, and unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.
“US foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said this: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage — that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.“
It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars”: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that President Joe Biden’s theft of $7-billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.
At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors’. In other words, nuclear war.
It says: “Nato’s enlargement has been a historic success.”
I read that in disbelief.
A measure of this “historic success” is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, and omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor who the Americans made clear was their man.
In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.
Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23-million people dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.
On the same day, Russia invaded — according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
On 25 April, the US defence secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken”.
America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it?
According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14 000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and “think tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labelled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and called for these “pests” to be “eradicated.”
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point-blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of World War I was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory-style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Assange’s character, he was made a public enemy. Then vice-president Biden called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange — the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
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The unelected club that has anointed itself to be the information gatekeepers , or why every TV news channel sounds the same ( same script baby ! )
” Princeton University professor and former CFR member Stephen F. Cohen described the Council as “America’s single most important non-governmental foreign-policy organization”, whose primary role is to “define the accepted, legitimate, orthodox parameters of discussion.”
Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
https://cfrmedia.wordpress.com
Check out the wikipedia page on Leni Riefenstahl, it is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leni_Riefenstahl
Especially nice photo of her with film crew in Poland, 1939.
Looks like she would be ready for the likes of Alec Baldwin.
Slo Joe’s speech in front of Independence hall was a sop to Lani and her work. In case you forgot, it was an othering and declaration of Bidens enemies.
Actually Albert Speer was the architect (literally) of Adolf Hitler’s big performances with the visuals and lights, not unlike the shows at rock concerts. They were to excite and build a mood.
Biden’s Independence Hall whatever it was supposed to be was nothing but him showing his demonic nature. A ten year old could have put that on. His handlers are competent in nothing except being repulsive.
Propaganda is nothing more than marketing.
For those who haven’t seen it, Leni’s Olympia is well worth viewing; shot in the 1936 (duh) its technical innovations have become commonplace in film-making, but were revolutionary for its time.
FWIW, Olympia also well captures the spirit of the Olympic Games – both positive (high-end human achievement) and negative (creepy globalist pseudo-religion).
That is interesting. She lived to be 101.
How’d you like to have an honest no holds barred conversation with her?
Historically TPTB controlled all avenues of acquiring knowledge, such as the Church prohibiting laymen from learning to read the Bible (Until the printing press invention). Today, information/knowledge has never been more democratized and available via our modern day Library of Alexandria, but acquisition of knowledge and syntheses therein seems uninteresting to much of society. Perhaps without the ‘influencers’ (Like public education and parents) strongly encouraging critical thought, our human condition of venal and superfluous pursuits in the era of easy living is the default. Beats me.
Teh Internez has allowed me to so easily seek knowledge just for the sake of its acquisition. Being truthful, this amazing opportunity has repeatedly humbled me as to just how little I know. Maybe in another 100 years, I can report differently.
I can’t find a single search engine that doesn’t give me four pages of propaganda and then quit.
https://yandex.com/
You’re welcome.
Did they sell it to Israel or just part of it? Regardless, founded by a jew.
LOL. LMAF.
Information, knowledge and wisdom, three different things.
Why don’t they define propaganda using simple terms, it is a “LIE” pure and simple. It is either a lie of omission or co-mission. In other words, you can’t shine sh*t!
Propaganda isn’t necessarily a lie. Often the most effective propaganda is in some measure true, maybe mostly, when promoted out of context to the whole story.
Propaganda = carefully using truth to tell a lie.
Some down votes would appear to be a lie.
If only the BRAINWASHED were capable of recovery.
THEN LIFE would be WORTHY of the EFFORT.
Our Country FULL of EDUCATED idiots (my Family included).
THEY will NEVER wake before too late…………………….NEVER!
MY FAMILY was STOLEN from me by the COMMUNIST Education System.
(How many other parents suffer the same fate?)
Anon II,
I talked to an old friend today who’s 40 something daughter is suffering so horribly from Long Covid he is worried she may kill herself…the pain in his voice was heartbreaking…her business and marriage are falling apart, she can’t get out of bed due to brain fog and no energy – plus depression, and is neglecting her kids.
Her sudden list of health problems is long…and she is seeing a host of medical specialists who all to date are zero help…oh yea…SHE HAS HAD 4 JABS…and he can’t convince her to DETOX from the detailed information I have long sent him to give her. She won’t even consider it. Funny thing she was vibrant and healthy before the 4 jabs…hmmm.
But she has joined a ‘LONG COVID’ therapy group of similar miserable and sick Covidians who are emotionally supporting one another in their brainwashed slow death.
I wonder at the LONG COVID GROUP THERPY meetings if you have to stand up when it is your turn to talk do you say:
“Hi, my name is ______ and I am a propagandized, brainwashed, dumbed down Covidian”.
I have been thinking of starting a Group Therapy movement for people who have family who have become Covidians…I’ll call it:
PURE BLOODS WITH BROKEN HEARTS.
There is no such thing as “long covid”, she is suffering from the effects of the fake vaccines.
Pretty much his point.
Research The Smith Mundt Act of 1948 and the Smith Mundt modernization Act of 2012 (was buried in that years NDAA) . All you need to know. Allows American media to show fake news without fear of prosecution.
In other words, LIE!
Correct.
Jim Quinn should be mentioned in the third to last paragraph.
Did you know that in mainstream publications ONLY joos are allowed to pen propaganda pieces. Ever wonder why practically every article presented in the last decade (at least) has a jooish author? Propaganda is reserved for the club.
You’re just stuck in a “submissive void” , like the Germans , bruh.
The struggles of the nineteenth century had at last brought the beginning of unity to the German tribes —” the last of the major races of Europe to achieve nationhood. Yet even this union had been imperfect, with the old Ostmark of Charlemagne’s empire still outside the Reich and often, owing to the dynastic interests of its reigning House and its mingled races, at divergence with the rest of the German family. The Great War — according to Allied computation a Teutonic bid for “a place in the sun” and, according to Hitler, a struggle against jealous encirclers — saw that young and imperfect union tested and found wanting. The lack of common purpose, the treachery of the Jew and the stranger within her too open gates, above all, the lack of consistent purpose in her leadership, had consigned Germany to the lowest hell of even her unhappy history. Her starving and defeated people had been subjected to insult, robbery and virtual enslavement. All their hard-earned possessions had been taken from them, and henceforward they were to pay — seemingly to all eternity — tribute to the conquering foreigner, and submit in patience to whatever he ordained.”
https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_bryant__unfinished-victory/
What should we expect from a British aristocrat?
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Written by another anti-American who is a socialist at heart. I suspect that most of his litany of horrors against other countries (unfortunately no list was included for fact checking) occurred during the cold war. During that time the West, and particularly the US, was fighting for survival (“we will bury you”) against history’s greatest evil, communism. Would the world be better off if Stalin and his progeny had attained world domination? The writer seems to believe that there are no bad guys other than in the US. But, there are and sometimes it is necessary to descend to their level to survive.
Where exactly did the east move on the west. “Fighting for your survival” What a lame excuse for simple unjustified paranoia. Americans allowed the long March through the institutions not Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese etc etc etc. If you claim to fight for your survival get the F on with it then. Your enemies aren’t out there in the world they run your very country.
Eastern Europe iron curtain, N. Korea and China goes Commie, China and N. Korea invades S. Korea, Commie N. Vietnam attacks S. Vietnam, missiles in Cuba, multiple Commie “wars of liberation in Africa and S. America, armed suppression in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, USSR invades Afghanistan, etc. See a threatening pattern yet? If we had not resisted the spread of socialism/communism our country would have been surrounded by red. As the cliché goes, “sometimes the paranoid have real enemies.”
see above
America the greatest war monger in the world
WSWS?? Counterpunch?? Hedges? WTF??? Those places lost all legitimacy years, and I mean YEARS ago.
This guy is an idiot. Every one is a former lion that either was too stupid to survive the last decade of true intelligent Darwinism or sold out obviously for shillings.
How many were pro-poison mandates? Too many in the list. Did Johnstone ever decry the tyranny of the mild cold totalitarianism? NO!!! SHE DID NOT!!! Did Hedges? NO, HE PROMOTED THAT POISON!
Go get your booster, pilger, you are past.
TV believers connect with certain media figures from the local yokels to the big names. They feel a kinship with them. They trust and believe them. Idiots.
A hostile foreign race has controlled the western media for at least a century.
This is why people believe the holocaust happened, and that Hitler was bad. It’s why people think niggers are human.
Every stupid thing you believe, was put into your skull by people that hate you because you’re White.
Sub Saharan Africans are the only pure humans on earth, bruh.
“In its pejorative usage amid the modern Anglosphere, “Neanderthal” is exclusively used to demean whites. In fairness, pale skin, blue eyes, and red hair were all Neanderthal traits. But although being Neanderthal is a white thing, it is not exclusively so. A landmark 2010 study suggested that not only did ancient Neanderthals breed with modern humans, all modern groups except for sub-Saharan Africans possess a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
So genetically, humans can somewhat tidily be divided into two groups: those who have Neanderthal DNA…and black people. If a black person’s DNA test reveals any Neanderthal ancestry, you can assume they have some cream in their coffee.”
LOL. 15 to 20% of the niggers’ DNA is from some non-human ancestor, probably Homo erectus. Only the niggers carry this DNA.
If humanity had moved out of Africa, everyone would have it. Humans developed elsewhere, maybe near the Caucuses, and moved out from there. In Africa they were presumably raped into extinction by Homo erectus, producing modern niggers in the process.
East asians carry a small amount of Denisovan dna that nobody else has.
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/dtcgenetictesting/neanderthaldna/
Kent State
Four Dead In Ohio …. http://mileswmathis.com/kent.pdf is an example of where a psy op was needed to quell a disturbance where otherwise there would be none.
Radicals who went from campus to campus using normal students gatherings to make their “cause” appear bigger than it was, created and led a bunch of dupes into a very dangerous situation.
National Guard was tasked with a psy op to make otherwise straight and narrow students to think before playing such a dangerous game using actors.
Here is a great vid
That video in conjunction with the above article claiming it was a complete hoax will give readers a clearer picture of where we are.
The “radiclas” of yesterday are now elected and in control of psy op. and narrative.
Steve R. Pieczenik warned that since 911. the US by continuing psy op as policy is now based in a false reality.
Does it really matter if Hitler was a bad man or not? Is Bill Clinton a bad man or not? What about Trump? How about a man that is obviously a homosexual married to a man, with two fake daughters.
I don’t know about Hitler I wasn’t there. But at this point in my life I don’t believe a thing the media says about Hitler or what the approved history books say.
Weimar Germany was being destroyed like a cancer from within. That’s the real story of WWII. What were the Germans supposed to do, cheer for their new transgender clinic (1923).
THERES NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT…America and her US CONSTITUTION ARE GONE FOREVER,those who claimed to be men DID”T stand up to take back control of their country,NOW its lost and the blood will flow like water in every town in america..THE LORD called and called the men to stand up..AND THEY FLATLY REFUSED,they told the LORD WE LOVE THESE EVIL PARASITES who are our friends and Hero’s,no one cared enough about their country ,SO NOW ITS BEEN GIVEN TO 11 countries to do as they please with,THEY WILL STRIP AMERICA OF EVERYTHING THEY HAVE ,they’ll even take the women and children,and EVERYTHING you cowards owned,MOST of you will be leaving soon to spend eternity with your new DADDY SATAN IN HELL,hahaha,WITH YOUR HERO”S,the police gangs and us military…..