The emperors do have clothes… just drenched in blood

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In his famous book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky described the corporate media as “effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function: by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”.

Propaganda manipulates people into accepting the moral iniquities of empire. It programs them to accept the official narratives and the underlying morality of economic and military imperialism.

The morality of imperialism pivots around an economic and ethnic apartheid in which only people of a certain class, ethnicity, religion and nationality matter, and are entitled both to exploit others and be protected from the consequences of that exploitation.

Imperial courts are inevitably classist / racist and it is the function of the officially appointed propagandists of the court to program the masses to accept this.

A perhaps unprecedented propaganda triumph of the western empire has been to convince its cowed citizenry that they don’t live in an empire. This is quite the feat when one considers:

• The huge military budget of the USA / NATO axis (more than all others combined).
• The 750 American military bases on foreign soil (more than any empire in history).
• The vast and intrusive global surveillance network of the USA and its vassals.
• The 80+ U.S. regime change ‘interventions’ since WW2.
• The conspicuous wealth and consumption of the U.S. elites and their enablers.
• The global dominance of the dollar and U.S. corporations.
• The many powerful propaganda outlets of the Western empire.

It is only when one realises that the propaganda outlets, military industrial complexes and political cabals of the western empire are not free floating molecules of a ‘free world’ but a tightly controlled consortium of imperial assets, that one can begin to properly understand world events and the way they are presented to us.

The West’s fabled ‘humanitarian interventions’ are never in service of freedom, democracy or morality, for all empires are allergic to such concerns. They are simply geo-political gambits that seek to defend, entrench and extend the power and territory of the western empire.

The most supine and captured of all court stenographers live in the UK. As Glenn Greenwald bluntly stated:

Let us observe then the two flagship portals of the UK media, the BBC and The Guardian: hard at work programming the hoi polloi to accept the latest narratives and directed racism.

Armaments fell yesterday on a football pitch on the Israeli occupied Golan Heights in Syria and this was headline news in both publications. This attack was not merely deemed newsworthy but the lead story in all empire news outlets and one can see in microcosm all one needs to know about Western empire news by watching carefully.

Here is a list of my initial observations about how the BBC / Guardian et al reported this event (augmented by the ever wonderful Jonathan Cook) :

1. This is a horrifying event in which a rising number of young people have lost their lives or been horribly injured.
2. The Western media has been routinely ignoring similar attacks in Gaza: most recently operating selective news blackouts about the hundreds murdered in schools and refugee camps during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington (and Lammy’s visit to Tel Aviv).
3. An attack on Israeli occupied territory presents a propaganda opportunity for the Israelis and thus must be reported. This problematic duality was resolved in The Guardian by putting the attack on the Golan Heights (10+ dead) in big headlines and the recents attack on Gaza (50+ dead) as a subtext

   

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4. This prioritisation of deaths in Israeli occupied territory over deaths in Gaza covers the facts in such a way that the directly implied racism becomes normalised. In this case 50+ Palestinians killed in Gaza are less newsworthy than 10+ people killed in the Golan Heights. So the brain gets programmed to process news and people as the West sees it and them.
5. The BBC declined to mention the inconvenient truth that those killed were Syrian and not Israeli citizens, living under an illegal Israeli occupation.
6. Both the BBC and the Guardian were quick to platform Israeli propaganda that blamed Hezbollah while ignoring Hezbollah’s denials, inverting the procedure for Israeli attacks.
7. Unsurprisingly these attacks got a wholly different framing than Israeli attacks in Gaza. Israeli atrocities become merely “allegations of misconduct” that Israel must be given relaxed time to investigate itself to see if they are true.
8. The allegations from Israel that placed the blame for this attack on Hezbollah were not only immediately accepted out of hand by both the BBC and The Guardian but offered as evidence of a ‘dangerous escalation’ and the inherent menace and murderous terrorism of Hezbollah. Israel by contrast is never said to engage in terrorism: merely ‘strikes’ and ‘operations’ in which people are ‘killed’.
9. The BBC admits to worrying that this incident might ignite the ‘simmering conflict’ between Israel and Hezbollah into an all-out war. Oddly they haven’t been worried that:(a) The illegal Israeli invasions, occupations, massacres, starvations and genocidal rampages throughout Palestine and the West Bank might do that.
   (b) The illegal Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights might do that.
   (c) The illegal Israeli attack on an Iranian embassy in Syria and then Iran itself might do that.
   (d) Israeli incursions into Lebanon and their assassinations of senior Hezbollah commanders might do that.

   No, THIS is the thing that will be responsible for a regional war in the Middle East: this attack by Hezbollah. Not the contemporary holocaust inflicted on the Palestinians, not the serial violations of international law by Israel or the billions of dollars of weaponry poured into supporting a genocide by The West.

10. By talking in sorrowful hushed tones about this attack after months of placing Israeli atrocities in Gaza within tasteful reframes, we are being programmed to dehumanise the Palestinians once again.
11. By giving stern and unquestioned gravitas to these Israeli claims and pushing the idea that THIS incident above all others will be the preamble to war with Lebanon, we are being prepared to accept whatever Israel does next as both legitimate and an affirmation of their status as the eternal victim.

This is how it all works: just another day for me as a citizen of the ‘free world’ looking helplessly at the atrocities of the imperial court and at the lies and manipulations of their stenographers and propagandists. All that people of good conscience can do is to point out that the emperors do indeed have clothes….and they are covered in blood.