There’s so much to unpack when it comes to propaganda propagating a society, or in this case, the collective west, that is collectively insane. Amazing is not really the operative word, since there are so many allusions to “good Germans” throughout the collective west, even before Hitler and Bernays and Goebbels and hasbara.
We’ll get to the Covid test in a minute, but the idea of exacting image management and agnotology and black is white, lies are truth mentality has taken off with algorithms and censoring and the onslaught of Google and Deep State and Corporate State seeding the world with a system of dumbdowning by a 1,000,000,000 managed internet hits and mass hysteria.
Zelenskyy has been using 3D imagery to deliver speeches all over the world by using a hologram.
Zelenskyy’s “participation” in world events using a hologram has been reported by several renowned media outlets, as can be seen below.
A hologram is created through holography, a photographic technique which records the light scattered from an object and displays it three-dimensionally.
Images, and the Mass Incarceration Media Management Show:
Oh, these image management boys and girls:
It’s taken off like gangbusters with the few and the mighty controlling 90 percent of “media,” i.e. publishing (including k12 books) and radio and TV and cable and the Holly-Dirt manufacturers of lies, half-truths, multimillionaire thespians who end up acting in politics. All the world’s a stage for coiffing the reality of the poor masses, us, we useless eaters-breeders-breathers-shitters.
Then, with this total absorption of Hollywood images, the marketing ploys, the perceived, planned, hoped for complete transition from citizens to consumers to data zombies to useless to nobodies, we can have this sort of audacity, in my local rag. All full-page rainbow colors and all:
Imagine that, driving in Newport, while seeing all those employee solicitations plastered up on the local Burger King and Pizza Hut billboards, seeking drive-thru help or pizza dough assistants, for $16 an hour plus signing on bonuses and a 30 percent discount on fat, salt and sugar, man.
I’m not sure what the Burger King/Pizza Hut Covidian Madness Requirements are for those teens or Baby Boomers lining up for this gig, to actually get hired with background checks, drug checks, and vax checks, but I know the school district requires SARS-CoV2 experimental jabs, and CDC proof of it, to walk the halls of the school or help those kids on the teether ball court.
Note, the hourly wage for substitutes has been set by a staffing agency working hand in glove with the district — $14.07 an hour. When I was substituting, well, I’d get $18 an hour, and that included pay for a full day if I pinch-hit a couple hours after the morning bell rang. That was $140 for six hours work! Not anymore!
I’d meet the school secretary, get signed in, and then that was it — look at the absent teacher’s notes for the day and then greet the 3rd graders and the math classes in the high schools, music room sub, or special education sub. Even PE and even all sorts of classes K12. Now, the poor souls getting $14 an hour have to jump through the staffing agency hoop, a company out of Tennessee:
And this another aspect of the smoke and mirrors game of Western Society — the staffing agencies, the middlemen and middlewomen just making bank by adding on to all the daily costs of living, of surviving, with their powerful Salesforce apps and servers, all of that, taking over teaching, for the time being, until it all goes on-line, in home “learning”:
Over the last 22 years, we have innovated education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to school districts and professional opportunities to passionate educators. Our team serves over 4.5 million students with a pool of 80,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout 33 states. Internally, the ESS team is comprised of 650 individuals with a passion for education working together to ensure our 900 partner districts experience valuable education every day.
This is the big rip-off, the taxpayers’ spending trillions over the years to establish/prop up public education, schools, busses, college prep programs, all those state colleges and junior colleges, all those school districts throughout the land, so that one day the PT Barnum’s of the world can come in and swoop up and take some munches out of that public-private partnership bs.
I have never seen journalists question this rip-off scheme because, a, journalism has always been on life-support, always there as a town barker and nice guy in the business story realm, and, b, because “going deep” journalistically means going deeper into how immersive the rip-off schemes are in U$A.
I’ve written about my bad times here in Lincoln County, about the spinelessness of ESS, and, well, each criticism of these systems puts another nail into my useless eater-breather-shitter life:
Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?
The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?
My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…
I think once you’re superfluous, you don’t have power.
– from a TRANSCRIPT at Rielpolitic Alexandra Bruce, “Brave New World: Yuval Noah Harari asks, “What to do with all these useless people?”
Harari goes on to outline a transhumanist vision of the future in which brain-computer interfaces make our footedness in the material world obsolete, human relationships become meaningless due to artificial substitutes, and the poor die but the rich don’t.
Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.
Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed.
“Transhumanism is pure eugenics” at Evolution News, April 27, 2022
Big issues, no, for the 21st Century of Fourth Industrial Revolution, Web 3.0, Social Impact Bonds, pay for success, blockchains, twinning, and so-so much more that the average gumshoe journalist just can’t dig deep because it will upset the entire playing field they so badly need to get a sense of sanity from the insane. But reporting on insanity is what we need in a time of Transhumanism and Covidian Cults?
Try this out for size:
When you enter the “invest in kids bonds” door knowing there are plans to create asset-backed securities in toddlers and trade them (and perhaps short them) on global markets, the single-minded interrogation of cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT rip-offs feels woefully inadequate. If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be amusing to watch folks who’ve been swimming in the shark-infested waters of financial derivatives for years point fingers decrying crypto-Ponzi-schemers. Calls for better regulation and professed empathy for those who lost their savings to fraudulent digital money schemes ring a bit hollow once you realize many of the panelists’ livelihoods are intertwined with the same financial interests, journalism outlets, and think tanks that were enmeshed in the crash of the global economy via toxic-real estate debt products. These are the same folks who are now in the process of developing the risk modeling, tokenomics, and APIs needed to run the smart “Ricardian” contract, “sustainably resilient,” open-air prison. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears
“What Stage Are We On? Immersive Storytelling, Hegelian Dialectic, and Crypto-Spectacle”
Read what the billionaire class and the techno gurus are after, and it’s data, man, tracking us, every blink, twitch, hiccup, burp, step, defecation as well as every purchase, every debt, every desire, to create the ultimate robotics, AI. It’s universal basic chump income blathering, man, and it is that World Economic Forum adage on steroids: “You’ll own nothing but be happy.”
Go here, too, for more:
So, as a real journalist, I have experienced that old time religion of lack of bandwidth, lack of humane reporting, the lack of looking at many sides, and coming out the other end of a story with, well, some solutions that are not the black-and-white game of divide and conquer. False balance, equivocation, relying on diploma-ed and credentialed sources, fear of litigation, the whole nine yards of mainstream journalism requiring an inverted triangle of information, i.e., the lede and important stuff at the top, and the superfluous and unimportant stuff (sic) at the bottom. Of course, it is the stuff at the bottom that IS important.
Case in point: I did the story on 13 Salvadorans found dead in the Organ Pipe National Monument along the US-Mexico border. Newspaperman. Yeah, the hurly burly of all those cops, helicopters, forensics wagons, and a young reporter who happened to have friends working with refugees of El Salvador (and Chile and Guatemala) and who actually did some assistance with the so-called underground railroad. You know, assistance that would have gotten me fired and banned from journalism, even got me arrested, as in, well, helping undocumented folk get from point a to point be in my pick-up truck.
When the grisly scene came into play, and with my background in that work, of course I got a hold of some folk working to assist those coming into the USA for sanctuary and political asylum. Of course, I knew a few academics and authors who had been writing about the dirty schemes of the Salvadoran government, businesses, military and police who were exacting hell on common people, on farmers, and on labor unionists with the material support and intellectual help of USA!
That bottom-of-the-inverted triangle “stuff” was fought over, parsed, edited out, and eventually cut, as the newspapers I worked for was all about the facts, ma’am, if it bleeds, it leads, just get the information from the officials on the spot.
You know, don’t upset the local readers, don’t go into “that” political stuff, and don’t bring in guys and gals from universities all the way from Cochise County, Arizona, to Chicago in your stories?
That was in the early 1980s.
It’s gotten worse. And, I have found over the years that journalists are intimidated by or enamored by the scientists, the reef biologists, the astrophysicists, the dudes and gals mixing up the chemicals, designing the motherboards, and trading derivatives.
Journalists are also tone deaf to history, to backgrounding, and, alas, if the motherships are New York Times and Washington Post and another dozen or so papers sprinkled around the U$A, then that modelling has what has tainted the media, The Press.
How disturbing it is to see the fornication of corporations and media, how disgusting it is to see what is and is not off limits in the reportage arena.
Source: Sheepdog Bernie Sanders site!
Then, in book publishing? Fewer and fewer books of importance.
This prefatory bit I’m etching in hyperbole before introducing a piece on how the “left” failed the Covid reporting test big time is my angst, for sure, and my ability to see the big picture(s), even if they are holograms and 4 D chessboards in the entire propaganda game. Systems thinking, and while much about capitalism is boorish and raw and just plain usury and scamming and parasitic, there are some complicated and very technical aspects of how finance is moving into your local community, your neighborhood, your lives. BlackRock? Who controls the world?
CEO Larry Fink built a shadow government of former agency officials in a bid to become Hillary Clinton’s Treasury secretary. That didn’t stop Fink from becoming part of the main private-sector advisory organization to Donald Trump until that panel disbanded after Charlottesville.
Alas, though, we’d expect that non-legacy journalists, or those who were once in the Mainstream who are now leftist, supposed anti-monopoly, anti-corporation, skeptical beyond skeptical of any governmental narrative reporters, that they would have peeled back the onion peels on this SARS-CoV2 bioweapon, and then question the funny juiced-up cocktails that we call the mRNA jab.
You’d think that the censoring of doctors, scientists, just plain deep thinkers and activists on the lockdowns, the mandates, the failure to get the data from the Moderna’s and the Pfizer’s on these bizarre untested and rapidly released jabs would pique their interest.
Instead, many went blank, called millions of us as poorly informed, conspiracy theorists, anti-this and anti-that dupes. Imagine that, journalists who question empire, question the United Fruit Company, question authority, Vietnam, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the MIC, FIRE, and who want to look deep into the well that is American Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism, that they would flip like dying dogs, or either go blank on the virus front, or even patronize those of us who have the gumption to look into the origins of that “virus” and who have the interest in understanding what a great reset is, and how a pathogen and mass hysterical and controlled media on that front can people to submit to these fascist things. Typical leftist yammering:
“I got my vaccinations, but I understand that some people who might have personal or whatever beliefs have the right, I guess, to not get forcefully jabbed. Well, yeah, I got the jab because the information just came to me in a dream -haha. I understand science and I understand how much smarter these virologists are, and, heck, a conspiracy of them producing products that would be bad for us, or cause deaths, or that the decent governmental employees would cook up fakes on all this, get real? I get why people might not want to have blood transfusions because of their religion, or not get this vaccine, but for the greater good of all, really, this is a pandemic. We have to follow the science. Sometimes the government-law has to intervene if the Jehovah Witness parent is putting their kids in jeopardy with this inane superstition about blood transfusions and keeping them on life support. Get real, and be part of our collective society.”
So, yes, I only have a BS in marine biology from a long time ago, and, yes, only a masters in Rhetoric and another one in urban and regional planning, and only years underwater diving, and decades as a many-venue journalist, and many decades teaching college, and many years as a sustainability coordinator, and, well, so, if I doubt the narratives around Event 201 and Gates and gain of function lies and what those bio-labs in Canada and USA and even Ukraine and former Soviet Union region are actually up to; and if I delve into many many sources tied to what the hell is going on with corona virus, bats, civets, and SARS, and what the history of Japan’s Unit 731 is, and what the history of biological warfare (ARPA and DARPA) and what is in the minds and labs (Plum Island, Fort Detrick) of U$A, well, again, lefties, liberals, Democrats: “Shut the f#@% up and just do what a good citizen should do . . . your commie countries are doing it too . . . China, Nicaragua, Cuba . . . so take off that tin foil hat and just relax and take it as it is: these scientific things, these mRNA clipping things, this incredible advancement in the science of working with RNA and DNA, well, it supersedes your ability to understand where these big Pharma outfits are coming from. Shut up, and if you doubt any of this, then you are, well, akin to a Trumpian or Q-Anon or just a plain wacko antivaxxer, man. Embarrassing.”
Sure, everything else written about exposures of this bizarre multiple front narrative is verboten:
No Doubting Thomases here:
RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company
Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence. (source)
Sinister, man, and I will not belabor the point here citing even a dozen of the hundreds of sources I have read that look at what was being cooked up in labs, from North Carolina to Toronto to Wuhan, and on and on. Bill Gates? The media? Big pharma? The media? Pathogens dropped on the Chinese in Korea in 1950? Right, the record of scientists and MIC working hand in hand is wonderful!
This billionaire is a murder incorporated, continuing criminal enterprise booster:
In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife, runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. But intriguingly Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.
Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organized a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.
Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play. (source)
Enough already. Here, Mister Harrington’s piece which does question those journalists which I have cited many many times concerning US and global policies that are screwing us over royally. With permission from Harrington, to reprint over at Dissident Voice, where it was originally found at, Brownstone Institute.
Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?
By Thomas Harrington
Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.
The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.
And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.
With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.
But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”
Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.
What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.
Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.
The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.
This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwarzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.
Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.
Why not?
With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.
It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.
Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.
Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.
The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.
It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.
What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.
A sanctuary for the weary
While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.
When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.
Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.
And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.
And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.
There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.
A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.
In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.
The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.
All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.
Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:
When will real journalists stand up?
And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.
The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.
Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?
Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.
Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?
Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?
Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?
Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?
Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?
As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?
Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?
And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?
Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?
Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?
I could go on.
As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”
I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”
Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.
Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.
But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.
But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?
And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?
Author bio: Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.
Paul Haeder, Author 