War, smoke and mirrors

On the war propaganda and the digital unreality

There's something wrong.

I mean, of course there’s something wrong. That’s why you and I are sitting behind screens on opposite ends of a global tangle of copper, poison and plastic, trying to make sense of this increasingly disturbing and manipulative horrorshow (Хорошо), rather than lazing around in the afternoon sun, eating mongongo nuts and watching our kids play.

But there seem to be things more sinister simmering here. Things more ominous than the old rut of the spectacle and its frivolous lies that everyone always knew were half-truths at best.

You remember that old trope about how everyone in the USSR paid lip service to what was reported in Правда (the official newspaper of the CPSU) but nobody really believed a word?

Now it’s rather like people in general, innocently and fervently, takes the official media narratives at full face value. The situation is reminiscent of some sort of secular fundamentalism, yet with a surprisingly honest and almost childlike adherence to what’s being said.

Just look at this bouquet of… Journalists.

Ryan Grim @ryangrim

This is wild

The fourth estate in action. A bunch of hawkish lobbyists cluelessly pushing for war over diplomacy, basically shilling for the US arms industry and imperial mandates. Their felt moral superiority is evident, with a virtue-signalling demeanor and tenor clearly letting us know how they’re on the good side in this simplistic Hollywood narrative.

They’re like teenagers advocating for some bullshit cause they know exactly nothing about, topped off with a tinge of valley girl.

This is mainline US journalism today. And it’s really indicative of the contemporary Western mindset in general, with its increasing disconnect from reality, preoccupied with simplistic stories in the mold of television dramas, flanked by algorithmic censorship and information control.

And this almost innocent fervor, I think, can only really be explained with regard to the incredible strength of the new consensus reality foisted upon us through the digital media, the rather silent social disruptions following in its wake, and the ideological state of emergency of the last two years.

But we’re really seeing a new level of narrative intervention here. We’re not just dealing with censorship in the sense of suppressing certain publications or even of stripping certain groups of the right to assembly. It’s not simply about banning books and limiting access to unapproved sources of information.

We’re approaching something akin to full-spectrum narrative dominance, where the very tools by which we seek out and retrieve information are not just actively censored, but positively engineered in real time.

Just stop and listen to how this sounds. It’s pure madness. But it’s actually happening.

As you might have noticed, we don’t really communicate face-to-face anymore. We don’t congregate in large halls on the lecture circuit, learning of things through word-of-mouth or by distributed pamphlets.

The discourse is shaped by posts on social media. And yeah, we know everything about censorship and algorithmic tailoring of the newsfeed, but now, it’s not just Google filtering your search results in relation to political interests. “Free speech” search engines such as DuckDuckGo will now align their information flow in relation to the Western geopolitical priorities (yes, only nazis would complain). Vimeo bans “fake news” and sanctions Russian users. Firefox removes Yandex search and mail.ru from their software in new updates, citing the prevalence of “state-sponsored content”.

However you frame it, everyone above the age of reason ought to be able to grasp that a conflict such as what now plays out in Ukraine, does not take place in a vacuum. That there are larger processes in play here. But this narrative lockstep renders even reasonable and marginal criticism all but unthinkable, and the active content management removes most resources for that purpose.

(I think social media exerts a strong conditioning influence on us in ways that have hardly been discussed, and that a certain confluence of isolation, vulnerability and oversocialization is the result. I’ll try to dig into this in a bit more detail in a coming piece.)

And “Meta” (Facebook & Instagram) throws every shred of credibility out the window in making a point of explicitly allowing calls for violence against Russian nationals and support for the neo-nazi Azov battalion. It’s a boast. It’s a challenge. They could have just discreetly tuned the algos to deal with the flood of automated flagging, but they chose to be very public about this. About how they can do what the fuck they want.

It’s like Western media would have actually called for hate speech against Arabs after the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait.

To top it all off, neoliberals of the Atlantic Council are now rehabilitating Hitler:

Kevin Gosztola @kgosztola

Anders Åslund is senior fellow at Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. Atlantic Council has Digital Forensic Research Lab, which advises and pressures tech companies to censor content on Russia-Ukraine War that "minimizes" violence. Here Åslund minimizes violence of Hitler:

And while we’re all mesmerized by this increasingly weird, dreamlike spectacle, collectively behaving like zombies, food prices (which were already catastrophic) are spiking as a perfectly predictable outcome of the events of the last weeks; inflation and financial crisis looms on the horizon, which would severely aggravate the aforementioned issue; and…

They’re about to smash the petrodollar, launching a Eurasian monetary and financial system.

I can’t see that the West would ever stand for something like this, so the current little discord is probably not going to end well.

(Mosul, Iraq)

Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.