It proposes ‘multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan – and 30 seconds to its starving people.Īt its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarizes the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are – not that Joe Biden’s theft of $7billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. They are called ‘forever wars’: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. 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. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. ‘It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. I asked him if the ‘hypnosis’ he referred to was the ‘submissive void’ described by Leni Riefenstahl. Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.’ It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. 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. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.’ It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. ‘US foreign policy,’ he said, is ‘best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence. The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognized and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The United States dominates the Western world’s media. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.Īre 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? Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies. 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 Fuhrer. 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.ĭid that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. GUEST COMMENTARY - In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis.
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