Noam Chomsky on the Power of Propaganda

Noam Chomsky:

We should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behavior. Take an example … World War I … on both sides, the soldiers marched off to mutual slaughter with enormous exuberance, fortified by the cheers of the intellectual classes and those who they helped mobilize across the political spectrum, from left to right including the most powerful left political force in the world, in Germany. Exceptions are so few that we can practically list them, and some of the most prominent among them ended up in jail for questioning the nobility of the enterprise: among them Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, and Eugene Debs. With the help of Wilson’s propaganda agencies and the enthusiastic support of liberal intellectuals, a pacifist country was turned in a few months into raving anti-German hysterics, ready to take revenge on those who had perpetrated savage crimes, many of them invented by the British Ministry of Information. But that’s by no means inevitable, and we should not underestimate the civilizing effects of the popular struggles of recent years. We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe merely because those are the marching orders.

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New Mashup by Matt Orfalea: The Lies of Nicolle Wallace Presented as Journalism

NBC's Nicolle Wallace keeps proudly getting the facts wrong, over and over. She still has a job at NBC.

Glenn Greenwald comments at his new article: "The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation": Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly.From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying.":

She has an unsurpassed ability to broadcast to audiences outright lies whispered to her by Deep State operatives — one after the next — without flinching or betraying the slightest sense of a conscience or moral compass. She lies like only a sociopath can: exuding charm and warmth yet utterly vacant on the inside, except for a soul festering in rot. Over the last twenty years — from her perches at the White House, on The View, and now at MSNBC — nobody has made liberals eat up Pentagon and neocon war propaganda more eagerly and uncritically than Nicolle Wallace. There is literally not a single liberal/CIA disinformation campaign over the last six years that she did not fully and uncritically embrace.

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Needing More War News, NBC Analyzes Impending War with China

Here's the military-industrial-news-media complex hard at work today, focused on the western flank.  I'm smelling the stink of military manufacturers frightening and corrupting politicians in order to procure more orders for weapons. And why not float the idea of a two-front war with two nuclear armed adversaries, one of whom manufactures much of America's high tech goods?  Trump is mostly out of the news these days than to drum up more warmongering? This will allow NBC to sell more commercials and thus enjoy some largess too.

Caitlin Johnson comments at her website:

NBC's Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China. . . .

As we've discussed previously, citing war machine-funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exist to circulate propaganda, not journalism.

This is getting so, so crazy. That the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the US-centralized empire's final Hail Mary grab at unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass-scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless.

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Congress is Pollyannaish on War

Who could possibly be against financial oversight? And what about additional oversight into how this mountain of weapons will be used next year or five years from now, and against whom? At a time of skyrocketing inflation, Congress wants to spend money that we will be forced to borrow or print out of thin air based on sloganeering, but it is afraid to ask hard questions in public. If I took out a car loan today, I would be asked a hell of a lot more questions then Congress is asking itself.

Over this century, we have a clear track record for coddling our military contractors, pouring weapons and military into conflicts that have little to do with American interests in the absence of any metric of success, eventually slinking out of that shattered country, having depleted our treasury, thereby permanently losing opportunities to address the needs of our own citizens. Has anyone considered how angry we were when we (falsely) accused the Russians of offering bounty for the killing of US troops in Afghanistan? Our leaders are now bragging that they were instrumental in killing a dozen Russian Generals and sinking a Russian warship. Why would we not think that there will be blowback to this, perhaps in the form of Russian funding of terrorist acts against the US or in the form of nuclear annihilation? Why won't Congress discuss any of these issues in public?

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Hmmm. Why Don’t Smart Good-Hearted People Want to Run for Political Office?

One of our biggest challenges, I believe. I know a lot of smart people, none of who are willing to run for high office. None of them are willing to step into the financial cesspool of politics and none of them want to put their families at risk of harm. This article features the thoughts of For the political scientist Brian Klaas.

"[P]ower-hungry people are, by definition, more likely to seek power. Whether running for national office or applying to manage the local homeowners’ association, those who get off on the idea of controlling others naturally put themselves forward, while most people look at the stress, scrutiny and public pressure, and politely decline.

“Our modern society has made it extremely unattractive to normal, decent human beings to end up in positions of power,” Klaas said, noting that he himself gave up any childhood fantasy of becoming US president as soon as he realised how dirty American politics is. “I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think there’s lots of people who think: I could make the world a little better, but the cost might be enormous to me.” For that reason, Klaas believes, the pool of prospective leaders is already skewed towards those who should be kept well away from power. “I conducted 500 interviews with some of the worst people around – and they weren’t normal,” he recalled. “There are quirks about them, there’s something wrong with some of them, but they’re all very, very good at getting into power. And that’s not an accident."

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