Brainwashed: Part 7

Part 7 – The Media and Propaganda

The Media

Now let us broaden our discussion in Part 6 about the Fourth Estate – the news reporters – to the “media” in general. Please remember that the Fourth Estate is by far one of the most important pieces of this puzzle. We want them to feed our brains information, grist for our mill, not to control our minds. (We also want to retain our useful skepticism, without becoming cynical.)

One of the bridges between the Fourth Estate and the media in general would be such entertainment programs as This Week with John Oliver, in which he takes news stories and reports them in an extreme and humorous manner. It turns out that many, many viewers are obtaining their news reporting from these shows. And that is just one aspect of modern media about which we should be concerned.

“Media” is the plural of “medium,” a vehicle by which we are presented with “content.”

Here we will discuss “the media” as a group of vehicles that provide us content.  Sometimes any one medium – The Times of Israel, for instance, which is a news medium – will use many different formats to accomplish the job.

The media often follow models similar to those arguably created for the “social media” (which we will discuss below), giving us algorithms by which some computer somewhere analyzes what it thinks we are interested in, or is programmed to know what we will click on and interact with, often excluding the rest.  Someone told the computer that we have narrow minds, and that once the computer finds something we will click on, it should keep providing it.

Truly, I do not know how many pairs of shoes it thinks I will buy online without trying them on, but that one pair is not indicative of any sort of personal trend!  More about social media later.

Are platforms media? I mean the online sort of platforms, not shoes.  Please forget I mentioned shoes, we have no time for shopping now.

Is YouTube a medium?  Is Facebook?  Is Gab? X which used to be Twitter?  Telegraph? TikTok? Or are they simply public squares?

At some point we must shape our laws to encompass those platforms. What we can do in the public square may be limited to time, place, and manner of speech. What we can write in a book or paint in a painting should not be so limited.

Let us look, then, at the broader view of all the platforms, all the media, and how perhaps they are being developed to control our minds.

I would like to talk here – purely as example, and one with which you may be overly familiar – about the Middle East. This of course could be a discussion about the situation in the Middle East at any time throughout history. It is a very complex matter. Each of us has a different perspective on what is going on now, what has gone on, and what might go on.

On October 7, 2023, from my own perspective, Hamas terrorists, who had been diverting funds to munitions and tunnels rather than the improvement of their citizenry, led a terror-filled raid on Israelis at home, at a concert, in kibbutzim, and in various other locations, taking a huge number of hostages, and murdering, raping, maiming, and terrorizing thousands more.

The propaganda must have been out within moments over social media, calling attention to the poor, poor Gazans – or lumping all together the poor, poor Palestinians – who had to go to these lengths of raping children and killing babies in their homes because of the happenings of the 1940s which have yet to be avenged.  Our college students around the world were repeating “Naqba” (catastrophe, the name given to events surrounding the 1948 independence of Israel – given by those who teach that Jews are only temporarily in Israel). The students were calling for the rights of the folks who generally condone continually lobbing munitions into Israel, and who support the wiping of Israel off the map and/or the Jews off the face of the earth.

What a perfectly formed set of propaganda! It was foisted upon the left-wing liberals of North America, and many of them devoured it and reposted it. It came not only through social media, but also through the standard news media. It is still coming as I write this.

Here in the United States, the youth are calling us Jews (and not only Israelis) “colonialists.” (That was repeated by various governmental officials speaking about Israel at the United Nations this week.) They are comparing Israel with South Africa and crying “apartheid.” Any negative slogan that could be put out there was put out there, and the youth and the generally far left folks who didn’t know any different were suddenly calling any response by Israel, or in fact the whole matter, a “genocide” against those who had perpetrated the attack. This all derived from the media.

Slogans that hurt, slogans that incite: they abounded. And they captured peoples’ minds.  Those programmed to take action at the stroke of a key showing just cause within one’s network were immediately up in arms. They sent money, they made protest signs, they organized. And all of this fueled the media campaigns to emphasize what they were led to believe.

This is only the current installment of a concerted effort, as described by the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), that began decades ago when factions in the Middle East began buying professorial chairs in universities in the United States. It was in the 1990s that the American Muslims for Palestine began having a presence on campuses through the group Students for Justice in Palestine, and that the teaching of the history of the region took a decided slant away from Israel’s freedom and development, and towards the tinted glass of colonialism and a need for the whole world to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel. The same organization (SPME) understands that they are also buying influence in kindergarten through 12 schools.

Now, if you only listen to one kind of music, one medium if you will, eventually you forget how many other types there are, and your opinion of them will be skewed.

I did not notice anyone over the past hundreds of years putting out memes (or even memos) against those who oppress, maim, and kill the Yazidis in Kurdistan (which now spans various countries). I have not seen anyone calling for boycotting any goods coming from or created by China due to the oppression and genocide of the Uyghurs. And neither the Yazidis nor the Uyghurs spend major amounts of time, energy, and money lobbing bombs at their surrounding neighbors; they are simply victims. There have been demonstrations here in the US against the decimation of villages in Darfur – we participated in one in 2014, and the situation is once again increasingly bad, but it has not caught on in the online world of our college students and liberal activists the way the Gaza situation did.

The Uyghurs, Yazidis, and those oppressed in Sudan all are suffering definite genocidal actions, which are ongoing. Yet here in the United States, according to appropriate sources, the propaganda now said to be put forth by Iran, by terrorist organizations, possibly by Russia, and maybe even by China (probably put forth on TikTok), has been the main source of the ignition behind all of these demonstrations against Israel – against the country which is continually attacked and which was suddenly savagely brutalized.

Someone definitely had the number of the far left in the US and elsewhere. And the continued fighting and the high death toll on any humanity is not helping what the presumably far right Synagogue Shooter referred to as “the optics.”

How do we point this out to those who follow those incendiary posts about genocide and naqba and colonialism? It would be inappropriate to shame them. How do we call out lies and prejudice when our friends and colleagues are falling for it?

Falling for it. Propaganda is one of the oldest forms of mind control. And those who control it control us.

The way the media are set up provides more and more of the same fodder to those who eagerly consume it. It does not show a full picture. It does not give a true reflection.

Meanwhile, the right-leaning folks are also bouncing around in their echo chambers and silos, reverberating with how Jews are somehow guilty of everything that is wrong with the world, and must be stopped. They want us to “go back” to where we came from, which they imagine is somewhere in Eastern Europe. This while the Emir of Qatar speaking at the United Nations accuses Israel of (in official translation) “Judaizing Jerusalem.”

The Middle East is, of course, not the only matter being addressed by propaganda.  The Middle East is just a very good recent example of its use. The meme-makers have been involved extensively in our elections, in our civil life, in all matters of government, and certainly of autocracy, all around the world. And they are getting the upper hand.

Remember what we discussed a couple chapters ago. We desperately need to conserve our Fourth Estate, for without them in their purest form we will have lost everything.

Does that make our social media an effectual propaganda machine? And is the Fourth Estate now a part of that ugliness?

Propaganda in General and High Production Standards

Of course there has been propaganda since the world began.

Producing it is both an art and a science.

The Germans in the 1930s, for instance, were very good at persuasive spectacle. If one is going to tell lies, apparently one should do so with tall banners, columns of military, giant armories, new forms of marching and salute, much fanfare, big bold music, and huge parabolic reflector beam projectors sending columns of stark light hundreds of feet into the air.

Is the difference between advertising and propaganda the degree of truth or applicability in the information being conveyed?

We see this on a more human and less offensive scale in the US in campaign rallies and especially in political party conventions. We also see it in political advertising.  If a commercial tells you a politician “is too weak to fix the economy” and you should vote for the fellow with the guns in his picture, you may believe that commercial if you wish. But it is upon you to control how much they are able to push your buttons. Does strength really have anything to do with managing the economy? Is strength represented by military weapons? Will you go and repeat that ridiculous statement about “too weak to fix the economy,” thus helping to make strength into some kind of new hallmark for politicians to achieve? And does this tend to push us toward the Germany 1930s image of strength and power? Do we want to go there? Your clicking on “like” and “forward” and “repost” contributes to that movement.

I wouldn’t mind, however, were you to click “like” about this posting. See you next time, for Part 8.

Brainwashed – Part 7 – Media and Propaganda. Image by Audrey N. Glickman, used with permission.