Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works

Leni Riefenstahl said her epic films glorifying the Nazis depended on a “submissive void” in the German public. This is how propaganda is done.

JOHN PILGER

In the 1970s I met one of Hitler's main propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We were staying in the same hostel 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 did not depend on “orders from above,” but on what she called the “submissive emptiness” of the German public.

Did that include the liberal and educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.

I think about this as I watch the propaganda that now consumes Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from the Germany of the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.

Or do we in the West 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 media of the Western world. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The Internet and social media (Google, Twitter, Facebook) are mostly American owned and controlled.

During 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 population of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. He has tried to assassinate the leaders of 50 countries. He has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The scope and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognized, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

Harold Pinter broke the silence

In the years before his death in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter gave two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“The foreign policy of the United States,” he said:

“It is best defined as follows: kiss my ass or I will kick your head. It's as simple and as raw as that. The interesting thing about this is that it is so incredibly successful. It has the structures of misinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but in reality they are a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. “They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get their way, and they do it.”

Upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, heinous, merciless, but very few people have really talked about them. You have to give it to America. He has exercised a fairly clinical manipulation of power around the world while posing as a force for universal good. It is a brilliant, even ingenious and very successful act of hypnosis.”

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political savant, that is, before dissident politics was gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he was referring to was the “submissive emptiness” described by Leni Riefenstahl.

“It's the same thing,” he responded. “It means that the brainwashing is so complete that we are programmed to swallow a lot of lies. If we don't recognize propaganda, we can accept it as normal and believe it. That is the submissive emptiness.”

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect union of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 11/XNUMX, war industry stock prices 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. They are all based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. NATO's destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that did not happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 11/XNUMX, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are, not that US President Joe Biden's theft of $7 billion from the country's bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington dedicated two hours to Afghanistan and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, the U.S.-controlled NATO adopted a strategy document that militarizes the European continent and raises the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes “multi-domain combat against nuclear-armed competitors.” In other words, nuclear war.

He says: “NATO enlargement has been a historic success.”

I read it in disbelief.

News of the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion and omission. I have reported on several wars and have never known such general propaganda.

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine in response to nearly eight years of murder and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on its border.
In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup in kyiv that removed Ukraine's democratically elected, Russia-friendly president and installed a successor who the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years, American “defensive” missiles have been deployed in Eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances dating back to James Baker’s “promise” to the leader Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.

NATO on Hitler's border

Ukraine is the front line. NATO has effectively reached the same border across which Hitler's army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, ridiculed or suppressed in the Western media. Who read your proposals step by step? On February 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless the United States armed and protected Ukraine.

The same day, Russia invaded, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass in Minsk counted for nothing.

On April 25, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin flew to kyiv and confirmed that the United States' objective was to destroy the Russian Federation; The word he used was “weaken.”

The United States had gotten the war it wanted, fought by a funded and armed American proxy and an expendable pawn.

Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.

The Russian 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 current war in Ukraine start and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14.000 people have died in the kyiv regime's civil war in Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

In the same month, dozens of Russian speakers were burned alive or suffocated in a union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”

“The historic mission of our nation at 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 Untermenschen led by the Semites.”

Since February, a campaign of self-styled “news monitors” (mostly funded by Americans and Britons with ties to governments) has tried to maintain the absurdity that Ukrainian neo-Nazis do not exist.

Airbrushing, once associated with Stalin's purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.

In less than a decade, a “good” China has been retouched and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world's workshop to a new Satan in the making.

Much of this propaganda originates in the US and is transmitted through representatives and “think tanks” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning. Herald, who has labeled those who spread Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested that these “pests” be “eradicated.”

News about China in the West refers almost exclusively to the threat from Beijing. The 400 US military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that stretches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea, are touched up. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point-blank at China's industrial heartland. One Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”

Palestine has been misinformed for as long as I can remember. For the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives”. The longest, most brutal and lawless military occupation of modern times is unmentionable.

The affected people of Yemen barely exist. They are media people.

As the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside Saudi officials, more than half a million children face hunger.

This brainwashing by default is not new. The carnage of World War I was suppressed by reporters who were awarded knighthoods for carrying it out. In 1917, The Manchester Guardian editor C. P. Scott confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George:

“If people really knew [the truth], the war would stop tomorrow, but they don't know and they 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 deeply imperial vision.

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 extreme poverty in China, are hardly known. How perverse and sordid this is.

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wonderful 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 moved away from the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces that were once open to nonconformists, to journalists who went against the grain, to those who told the truth, have been closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks were able to win readers and awards for The Guardian, The New York Times, and other important “papers of record,” there was celebration.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of the hard drives and the assassination of Julian's character, he became a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “high-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can't we just fool this guy?”

The subsequent campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange – the UN torture rapporteur 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? There is already an inspiring samizdat on the Internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, The Grayzone by Max Blumenthal, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, 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 rise up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers rise up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will the satirists rise up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in the deep bath of justice that is the official version of the last world war, isn't it time for those who must keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

John Pilger He died on December 30, 2023 in London, where he lived. Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker, he twice received Britain's highest honor for journalism. His 61 documentaries have won countless awards around the world, including a BAFTA and an Emmy. His documentary “Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia” is considered one of the ten most important films of the XNUMXth century.

This article is published in collaboration with Consortium News.