We find ourselves wondering how come those of us who weep for the Palestinians, content ourselves with weeping. Why are there no armies of angry citizens with pitchforks in front of every US or Israeli embassy in Europe? Why do we allow unelected EU commissars to refer to Israel as a “beacon of Democracy”. What’s the matter with us?
Propaganda is not a new science. I have previously written about Arthur Ponsonby’s remarkable little 1928 book Falsehood in War-Time, about how nations were fooled into starting WWI and about how their populations were bamboozled into believing they were sacrificing their lives for a noble cause.
Since then, propaganda has made even greater strides, whereas our ability to resist propaganda has not. We swallow the bait, time and time again.
In school we were taught to look up information, to question its reliability, to consult sources, to seek other sources, to consider dissenting opinions without prejudice and assess the sources for them. That, we were told, is how science has brought us to where we are. Since then, however, those who have questioned official narratives – be they about Covid, the Ukraine war, Russia-gate, the murder of JFK or the weather forecast are labelled “conspiracy theorists”. Such an approach to controversy bodes ill for so-called Democracy and, for that matter, also for “science”.
We have long understood that history is written by the victor, and nowadays there are numerous researchers who challenge the victors’ stories, after the fact, as it were. Thus we know a great deal about the infamous cruelty of colonialism, for instance. That was a long time ago, and the perpetrators are dead. But what about the cruelties being perpetrated as we speak? Who dares expose them?
If you tell me, “time will be the judge”, I will riposte: Too much damage will have been done, by the time “time is ready to pass its verdict”, if we choose, today, a very dangerous course.
We are choosing a very dangerous course, Many dangerous courses, in fact. The old world order is cracking, but governments in the West are desperately trying to hold it together rather than pave the ground for a more just system.
There are numerous ways of airbrushing history. You can f.ex. apply the playground narrative: “He started it!” The other guy, the one with the bloody nose, will indignantly protest, “But that was after he––” before teacher grabs him by the ear and drags him off to be whipped. This constitutes what Yanis Varoufakis calls “truncation of history“. Our governments define one particular event as the catalyst of a conflict and all preceding events are simply deleted from the public memory. We won’t even be allowed to hear what the other guy, the one with the bloody nose, has to say for himself. This method has been used again and again by, not least, the USA to lend legitimacy to the new wars it needs to engage in, every couple of years or so.
Thus the Gaza war started on October 7, not a day earlier, when Hamas, the aggressor, allegedly mass-raped women and beheaded babies. Yes, here we apply not only “history truncation”; we also resort to demonization, as we did about Sadam, i.e. outright lies. When you are going to wipe out a population, you need to resort to fiction. By the time your lies are exposed, your own population is so emotionally involved that nothing can shift its outlook.
Thus the Ukraine war started in February 2022 with the so-called “unprovoked invasion” of 120 000 Russian troops in Ukraine. Yet an example of “history truncation” + demonization – as Russia’s president is regularly referred to as a modern-day Hitler. I have written extensively of this elsewhere on this site.
Now if, as is often the case, a US war ends badly for the USA, we have to resort to “framing“. By “we”, I mean not only the USA but all the US vassals in Europe. We make a big show of how good we are and how unspeakably horrible the opponents are. In Afghanistan, for instance, we provided schools and health care and, above all, we liberated women from the madmen who had used them as cows. To this day, we often see an unforgettable meme: desperate Aghans hanging from the underbelly of departing NATO planes. Yes, NATO suffered defeat in Afghanistan, but NATO was loved and missed by some thousand Afghans who had worked with the NATO forces and had reason to fear reprisals.
Now I put to you, that through framing, past Afghan history has gone missing in the most extraordinary way from the official narrative. Admittedly, I know very little about Afghanistan. But there is no doubt that Afghanistan has been egregiously fiddled with by all and sundry powers. Few seem to have noticed that (according to Wikipedia) the period 1933 to 1973 was not bad at all:
Zahir Shah [1933-1973,] like his father Nadir Shah, had a policy of maintaining national independence while pursuing gradual modernization, creating nationalist feeling, and improving relations with the United Kingdom. Afghanistan was neither a participant in World War II nor aligned with either power bloc in the Cold War. However, it was a beneficiary of the latter rivalry as both the Soviet Union and the United States vied for influence by building Afghanistan’s main highways, airports, and other vital infrastructure. On a per capita basis, Afghanistan received more Soviet development aid than any other country.
Needless to say, that king was deposed in a coup. We can’t have heads of state who actually benefit their country. Neighbouring countries might be tempted to follow their example.
Currently, Afghanistan is subject to a US-imposed starvation campaign, euphemistically referred to as “sanctions”. (Israel did not invent starvation campaigns!)
“Perception management” is big business in the US, not only for dealing with dissenters against wars. Environmentalists, for example are a menace to “US interests”, i.e. the interests of the proverbial 1%. Trump’s and Biden’s people deal with them differently, but none of them intend to avert environmental disaster.
In US vassal states, US “soft power” has blinded us. All the films we have seen, with all those good and honest heroes and heroins have dimmed reality.
Then there is the matter of why poor countries are poor and getting poorer in spite of all the aid we are giving them? We have been led to blame corrupted officials, bad governance, inefficient institutions, difficult climates, lazy workers, etc. And of course too much fornication, which we politely refer to as “too many children”.
This is an example of “truncated history” + framing. Mind you, I am not referring to the ghastly age of colonialism, which most governments are quite willing to “fess about”. I am referring to the decades since the 50s and 60s. See, for instance, the paper by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel in Review of African Polical Economy. The details of how and why Africa has had to pay the west far more than the amount it has received in loans, aid and investment combined would take far too much space in a humble blog. Besides, it’s about economic exploitation, a field most of us find too technical. What seems clear, though, is that African countries have had to accept the terms of the more powerful countries. The injustice has been papered over with “aid”.
Which, of course, is why “perception management” is so effective. Few will be bothered to read papers published in the Review of African Economy. At least here in Norway. Most ordinary citizens in “the West” are left with the idea that in spite of a US invasion here, a US-orchestrated coup there – and yes, aggressive meddling just about everywhere, for instance in Haiti – we, the West give enormous sums of aid every year. We care about you poor sods, even if you are incompetent; we honestly try to keep you afloat. [For the record, Haiti was hell on earth under the French, then under USA until Aristide. The Haitians loved Aristide, but the US Americans did not, needless to say, so Haiti is still hell on earth.)
In his 2023 book, The Divide, Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, Jason Hickel explains it all to us. I have not read the entire book because I stopped for a break after reading about how he was taken on a long drive on a dirt road to a place on the West Bank with an enormous sign: USAID. Apparently a well had been paid for by US tax payers to alleviate “Recurring water shortages” in the area. The well was, the sign read, a “gift from the American people”.
What made me feel quite ill as I read this was that since the 1967 war, Israel illegally controls:
water-rich territories like the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. These areas now provide a significant portion of Israel’s water supply. However, this control has come at the expense of neighboring states and Palestinians, who face severe restrictions on water access. For example, Palestinian per capita water consumption averages just 20 cubic meters annually, compared to Israel’s 60 cubic meters.
The Israeli government strictly regulates Palestinian water use, prohibiting the drilling of new wells and imposing fines for exceeding quotas, while Israeli settlements face no such restrictions. The result is a terrible inequality in access to water, …(source)
Perception management has been a priority in the USA ever since Reagan decided to energetically get the American people to “kick the Vietnam syndrom”.
Jason Hickel’s 2023 book, The Divide, is addressed to people like you and me, not to academics. However, if you are willing to read academic papers you can find him here.