The Awesome Power Of US Propaganda: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
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Sometimes I can only stop and stare in awe at the power of the US propaganda machine. Almost the entire global north has been paced into perfect alignment with cold war agendas geared toward securing US unipolar dominance by an unprecedented propaganda and censorship campaign.
There's nothing intrinsic in Russia's invasion of Ukraine which says the nation must be strangled to death by unheard-of levels of economic warfare from Washington-loyal governments. A huge international consensus needed to be manufactured for that specific response, and the public needed to go along with it. Just absolutely incredible.
By securing control of global narratives via Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and plutocratic "news" outlets, the US empire has effectively supplanted the UN and international law in its ability to get whole groups of nations moving in a certain way with the consent of the governed. The human species is being led around like a dog on a leash by a collective mind control system of unparalleled and unprecedented sophistication that hardly anyone even notices. Imperial propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society.
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What is the functional difference between state media broadcasters uncritically reporting what the government tells them to report and western news media outlets which always uncritically report "scoops" that are fed to them by government officials?
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American mass media reporters are only allowed to forcefully interrogate US officials when demanding to know why they still haven't started another major war.
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The fawning hero worship of Zelensky is the most embarrassing and self-debasing thing liberals have done since those pink pussy hats.
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War is without exception the very worst thing in the world. The most insane, the most traumatizing, the most self-destructive, the least sustainable. All of the parties involved in this war should have done everything possible to avoid it, and any who claim they did so are lying.
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The hawks from the first cold war claimed the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated their brinkmanship, which meant all those nuclear close calls we had during that period were worth it, but it turns out all that happened was a short break before resuming the insane nuclear brinkmanship.
We see now that this is set up to go on for a very, very long time. This completely invalidates the belief that these "great power competition" games of nuclear chicken are sane and worthwhile, because if you keep rolling the dice on nuclear war day after day and year after year, eventually they're going to come up snake eyes. The only sane choice on the table is therefore to move into a cooperative, friendly relationship with these powers, because facts in evidence show very clearly that trying to dominate and subvert each other will keep going and going until it eventually results in a nuclear conflict.
We came close to wiping ourselves out many times during the last cold war; very close in some cases (look up Vasili Arkhipov). And now we're back at the most dangerous levels of nuclear brinkmanship since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is unsustainable.
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It says so much about the madness of our species that half the controversies surrounding this war exist because we made up a rule that killing people with chemical and biological weapons is illegal but killing them with bullets and military explosives is perfectly fine.
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If you have a problem with someone highlighting the culpability of the most powerful government on earth in giving rise to this war, it's because imperial propaganda has turned you into a power-worshipping bootlicker.
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"Aha I see you've been speaking critically of the most powerful government on earth. That looks very strange and suspicious to me. Perhaps you are a secret agent working for a foreign government. I am very intelligent."
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Empire loyalists hold that the US empire may stage coups and threaten foreign nations in ways it would never allow itself to be threatened, and that if those nations retaliate against those actions the empire bears no responsibility whatsoever.
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There's a common unexamined assumption that the US can't possibly have a villainous role in every major world conflict, that sometimes it's just other governments being evil and that's it. But there really is one uniquely evil asshole on the world stage who fucks with everything.
Few people have trouble believing there's a uniquely evil tyrant in the world. They just have a hard time accepting that it's their own government.
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Any time Ryan Grim seems thoughtful when compared with others in the press pool, you know we're in deep sh*t.
The basic formulas for propaganda have remained the same, but what has changed is the level of precision, and the artfulness of how messages are “framed” and designed to increasingly “nudge” the unconscious mind.
Behavioral nudging is very big, and features in most mainstream narrative construction. For example, “two weeks to flatten the curve” makes use of NLP-style “timelines.” People were made to emotionally lock themselves into a commitment and given a “timeline,” which was simply “calibrated” over time, always with the aim of leveraging people’s empathy as a means of keeping them committed. Masks, while ineffective as medical interventions, are powerful behavioural “cues.” Just imagine how fast people would have stopped listening to the narrative if they didn’t see everyone constantly masked up. That’s why they were so emphatic about masks, even when admitting the medical science wasn’t there, they would just say they’re still useful. They weren’t lying, they just weren’t saying WHY or HOW they were useful.
There are countless examples. There are plenty of subtle hypnotic techniques, which in former times were still used, but instinctively, rather than as a precise science, from illusions of choice to embedded commands, the use of sequences ie say a few obvious truisms everyone agrees with, then throw in something more concrete and targeted. People are more likely to agree if they went along with the first parts of your statement.
Also notice how all the WEF type politicians all use their hands, gesticulating all the time, that’s another NLP behaviour science type of technique.
If there’s one document I would recommend to anyone, it’s the 2010 MindSpace document by the Behavioural Insights Team. That lays down the framework that has now been spread throughout institutions, such that the media largely all sounds the same now, not just because they are controlled by the same people, but because the messaging follows a very specific set of patterns and techniques.
The World Economic Forum, UN, the “Great Narrative,” they’ve all gone full-hog with the behavioural science stuff, which goes back to this document, spawned by the City of London, and then spread across the Five Eyes.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/MINDSPACE.pdf