Wars, Propaganda Wars and Funding Them

 

Eve Ottenberg

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

By now it’s clear even to the thick-skulled nabobs running our government, that the U.S. can’t win actual wars. It puts up a more respectable performance with propaganda campaigns, probably because those are things the mighty intellects in the CIA truly enjoy, but even those, with their ferocious philippics against malevolent Moscow in The New York Times and Washington Post, even those go down eventually to ignominious defeat. Truth will out.

Like it did in Afghanistan where, for 20 years our military men assured us victory was just around the corner and the established press harrumphed at any peacenik outraged by the slaughter. Then, practically overnight, the whole house of cards collapsed. Even those of us who had predicted a Taliban victory were stunned at the speed with which the U.S. puppet regime folded. It was a disgrace for the Empire. Not unlike the imperial misadventure in Iraq, but somehow worse. It brought all too forcibly to mind those U.S. military helicopters fleeing from Saigon rooftops so many decades ago…

For the past two and a half years, we Americans have been deafened by the clang of a stupendous propaganda war waged against Moscow and on behalf of Kiev and supposedly the west in our mainstream news outlets. We read early on that Russia would soon run out of missiles. It didn’t. Embarrassed silence greeted this uncomfortable fact. Even worse for our press and elite political fabricators, it turned out Russia BRISTLES with missiles. Little said about that in our corporate media. We also read that the desperate Russian military cannibalized washing machines and dishwashers to produce weapons, a lie that I’ve never seen retracted.

Also, those fiendish northern Slavs were accused of every conceivable atrocity against the Ukrainian population, and when later it emerged that the Russian military actually avoids targeting civilians with a care utterly absent in, say, the U.S. assault on Iraq or the Israeli one on Gaza, there were no apologies, no retractions, no expressions of contrition. Nope. The press just moved on to the next tall tale. My guess is that when this whole sorry proxy war ends with Ukraine’s defeat, the propaganda chickens will NOT come home to roost, no, they’ll flap their wings to the next nest of lies. Located where? Farther over the horizon. In China, of course.

For those who dread these frenzies of press prevarication, the news that Washington may allocate $1.6 billion for anti-Chinese propaganda cannot be good. According to a Responsible Statecraft article September 11 by Marcus Stanley, the House passed the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund” on September 9. This money is “about twice, for example, the annual expenditure of CNN,” and it goes to the state department and the infamously, covertly CIA-associated USAID over the next five years. The Global Engagement Center and USAID will lead on spending these monies, making “grants to foreign media and civil society organizations.” The bill, “HR 1157 would supercharge these programs.”

Because the bill doesn’t require transparency to foreign citizens for this U.S. financing, “it’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging…Such anti-Chinese messaging could cover a wide range of bread-and-butter political issues in foreign countries.” In other words, the U.S. government is poised to launch a MASSIVE black propaganda campaign. Foreigners exposed to its efforts can expect epics of Chinese depravity that make J.D. “One Whopper After Another” Vance’s phony cat-eating Haitian fantasy in Ohio look like child’s play. Who knows what the state department and CIA chefs of hogwash will serve up, but you can be sure it will explode your tastebuds. And for the constipated American legacy purveyors of CIA poppycock, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, it’ll doubtless barrel through them like magnesium citrate.

So to foreigners one can only say, keep your arrant-nonsense meters handy, ‘cause Washington’s coming with a campaign of slurs and fibs about the five-thousand year old civilization that’ll make your hair stand on end. In and of itself, such a propaganda war is bad enough. But worse – it can lead to actual hostilities with bombs and bullets, something the maniacal congressional Sinophobes would likely not be sorry to see – until it dragged in Russia, Iran and North Korea and went nuclear of course. But then it’d be too late – for anything. What good would excuses from the capitol be – “but we didn’t mean to render half the planet radioactive!” – once we all glow in the dark or five billion of us claw through the dirt for something, anything to eat as we starve via nuclear winter? Our fate is in the hands of wildly aggressive morons, monomaniacs drunk on bloodlust, ready to make the lethal error of attacking a military peer – if so, the whole planet will pay for the imperial hubris of a pack of congressional crackpots, amped up on Sinophobic steroids.

What form will this anti-Chinese propaganda take? According to Responsible Statecraft, “a combined propaganda campaign and labor unrest” inflamed by an American “influence campaign” could disrupt Beijing’s plans, for example, to invest in deep-water ports in African countries. The aim would be to “discredit Chinese activities,” particularly those linked to China’s glorious, globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative. China connects the world through beneficial infrastructure investments, while the U.S. does something vaguely similar though far less helpful with its 800 foreign military bases. In recent years, the contrast between the two approaches at planetary linkage has reflected rather poorly on Washington in the Global South. Hence this target in the U.S. propaganda war: take down BRI, no matter how much good it’s doing, because it’s a bad look for Uncle Sam.

Naturally, this anti-Chinese propaganda could “flow back into the American media space…It’s easy to imagine U.S.-funded foreign media being used…to attack U.S. voices that advocate for a different view of China.” (If those U.S. voices get too loud, or are of Chinese extraction, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a reprise of the World War II internment camps for Japanese Americans.) And of course, also quite bad, this bipartisan push for propaganda is profoundly hypocritical. If China or Russia did this, our congressmembers would climb up on their high horses in a heartbeat. You’d never hear the end of it. In fact, we already haven’t – because during the Trump presidency we had four years of phony Russiagate hysteria over Moscow’s very ineffectual and tepid moves to influence the 2016 election on social media. You never heard such sententious, righteous indignation from Beltway bigwigs. But now when congress proposes doing the same thing – crickets.

That’s probably because this is nothing new. It’s just much bigger and it’s officially out in the open. For the United States has busily spread lies, color revolutions, coups and regime change operations for many, many decades. Can you really expect the nation that overthrew the democratically elected, politically moderate Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed the sadistic shah with his infamous SAVAK torture chambers and then, going on 45 years, never forgave the Persian people for ousting said shah – can you really expect a country that did that and multitudinous similar things all over the globe, not to indulge in yet another campaign of lies? I fully expect a lurid Chines propaganda war to match the insane hate campaign we’ve had against Russia. The only reason we haven’t had one specifically targeting Iran is that we don’t really need it. Our corporate media got their marching orders regarding all three of these so-called adversaries years ago. Now congress just makes it official. Your tax dollars at work.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/27/wars-propaganda-wars-and-funding-them/