January 13, 2017
For students of official
propaganda, manipulation of public opinion, psychological conditioning, and
emotional coercion, it doesn’t get much better than this. As Trump and his army
of Goldman Sachs guys, corporate CEOs, and Christian zealots slouch toward inauguration
day, we are being treated to a master class in coordinated media manipulation
that is making Goebbels look like an amateur. This may not be immediately
apparent, given the seemingly risible nature of most of the garbage we are
being barraged with, but once one understands the actual purpose of such
official propaganda, everything starts to make more sense.
Chief among the common
misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its
goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not “the truth”
(that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera).
However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually
believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim.
The primary aim of official
propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly
repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them.
This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort
of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a
Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined
by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.
Imagine this Maginot line
as a circular wall surrounded by inhospitable territory. Inside the wall is
“normal” society, gainful employment, career advancement, and all the other
considerable benefits of cooperating with the ruling classes. Outside the wall
is poverty, anxiety, social and professional stigmatization, and various other
forms of suffering. Which side of the wall do you want to be on? Every day, in
countless ways, each of us are asked and have to answer this question. Conform,
and there’s a place for you inside. Refuse, and … well, good luck out there.
In openly despotic
societies, the stakes involved in making this choice (to conform or dissent)
are often life and death. In our relatively liberal Western societies (for
those of us who are not militant guerillas), the consequences of not conforming
to the official narrative are usually subtler. Despite that, the pressure is
still intense. Conforming to the consensus “reality” generated by these
official narratives is price of admission to the inner sanctum, where the jobs,
money, professional prestige, and the other rewards of Capitalism are. Conforming
does not require belief. It requires allegiance and rote obedience. What one
actually believes is completely irrelevant, as long as one parrots the official
narrative.
In short, official
propaganda is not designed to deceive the public (no more than the speeches in
an actor’s script are intended to deceive the actor who speaks them). It is
designed to be absorbed and repeated, no matter how implausible or preposterous
it might be. Actually, it is often most effective when those who are forced to
robotically repeat it know that it is utter nonsense, as the humiliation of
having to do so cements their allegiance to the ruling classes (this phenomenon
being a standard feature of the classic Stockholm Syndrome model, and
authoritarian conditioning generally).
The current “Russian
hacking” hysteria is a perfect example of how this works. No one aside from
total morons actually believes this official narrative (the substance of which
is beyond ridiculous), not even the stooges selling it to us. This, however, is
not a problem, because it isn’t intended to be believed … it is intended to be
accepted and repeated, more or less like religious dogma. (It doesn’t matter
what actually happened, i.e., whether the “hack” was a hack or a leak, or who
the hackers or leakers were, or who they may have been working for, or what
whoever’s motives may have been. What matters is that the ruling classes have
issued a new official narrative and are demanding that every “normal” American
stand up and swear allegiance to it.)
The ruling classes are not
exactly making it easy for their followers this time. Their new official
narrative (let’s go ahead and call it “The Putinist Putsch to Destroy
Democracy”) is so completely fatuous that it’s beyond embarrassing. The plot is
more or less what you’d expect from a mediocre young adult novel or a Game of
Thrones-type fantasy series. And if that wasn’t already humiliating enough for
the liberals being asked to pretend to believe it, the PR folks in charge
couldn’t even be bothered to assemble a new collection of liars to market their
childish fairy tale for them. Not only are they insisting that liberals take
the word of the “Intelligence Community” and the mainstream media that sold the
world the “Saddam Has Secret WMDs” hoax, they actually dispatched James R.
Clapper to sit there, in more or less the same spot he sat in the last time he
lied to Congress, and do his dog and pony show again.
Meanwhile, the ruling
classes’ papers of record, which cosmopolitan liberals rely on to provide a
simulation of “serious journalism,” highbrow “arts and culture,” and so on,
have descended to the level of the National Enquirer. Among the recent
highlights was The Washington Post‘s “Russians Hacked the
Vermont Power Grid” story, which it turned out involved neither
Russians nor hackers, nor the Vermont power grid’s actual computers, and was
basically just another made-up story, like the one about Putin’s Fake News
Army. The New York Times, which has also been dutifully
rolling out the new official narrative, has taken the leash off Charles M. Blow
(aka “The Withering Gaze”), who is accusing Trump of being Russia’s appointment”
and proclaiming his election “an act of war.” And now, as I was writing this
piece, they hit us with the “Golden Showers”
story, in which Trump paid a bunch of Russian hookers to pee on the bed where
Obama slept. Any day now we are going to be told that Elvis is secretly working
with Putin to deploy a Zhirinovskian gravitational weapon in a UFO disguised as
Jesus that Assange and Snowden will personally pilot across the Atlantic to
sink America. It’s like some kind of loyalty test in which the ruling classes
are trying to determine just how far they can go with this crap before liberals
refuse to salute any more of it.
The point of all this
propaganda is to delegitimize Donald Trump, and to prophylactically reassert
the neoliberal ruling classes’ monopoly on power, “reality,” and “truth.” In
case this wasn’t already abundantly clear, the neoliberal ruling classes have
no intention of giving up control of the global capitalist pseudo-empire
they’ve been working to establish these last sixty years. They’re going to
delegitimize and stigmatize Trump (and any other symbol of nationalist backlash
or resistance to transnational Capitalism), bide their time for the next four
years, and then install another of their loyal servants … after which life will
go back to “normal,” and liberals will do their best to forget this unfortunate
period where they pretended to believe this insipid neo-McCarthyite nonsense.
If I wasn’t worried that
Trump is going to launch an all-out War on Islam, or that one of “our boys” in
the tanks Obama has theatrically ordered to the Russian border was going to go
bonkers and try to “git some” for Clinton, I’d be looking forward to seeing
just how batshit crazy it’s going to get.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning
American playwright and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (US). He can reached at
his website, cjhopkins.com, or at consentfactory.org.
