The urgency of propaganda study under COVID
An appeal from Mark Crispin Miller because…
Only when We the People finally know what propaganda is, and how it works, will we be free at last to live our lives and rule ourselves.
Mark Crispin Miller
More extracts…
… those of us who study propaganda critically, as public intellectuals, must speak out loud and clear, to set things right.
This means, first of all, doing what the “fact-checkers” claim to do, and doing it far more conscientiously, and thoroughly… the “fact-checkers” do quick and sloppy work, and then move on, we work in depth, in scholarly commitment to the truth, which may take decades to discover — as with JFK’s murder, and the other key assassinations at that time, and 9/11… so, throughout these last two years, have we been digging for, and trying to tell, the widely buried truth about the COVID crisis, its true origins, the actual lethality of SARS-CoV-2 (whatever that may really be), the PCR tests used to measure “cases,” the “COVID measures” hatched (allegedly) to “slow the spread,” the absolute futility of lockdowns, and their catastrophic harms, the homicidal impact of the standard COVID “treatment,” and the actual availability of valid remedies, the cynical redefinition of such key terms as “pandemic,” “cases,” “herd immunity,” “vaccine” and, “fully vaccinated,” the likely motives driving this whole crisis (and those still to come), the actual low number of those killed worldwide by COVID, and — above all — the ever-growing global toll of the experimental “vaccination” program; and now that COVID, and its “variants,” and “vaccination” have been pushed out of the spotlight by “Ukraine” (though governments-and-media continue warning us hysterically of “COVID” and its “variants,” and shouting at us to “get vaccinated”), we strive to find, and tell, the buried truths about that conflict — how and why it started, how it’s being fought on either side, and the fact that dozens of “atrocities” ascribed to Russia have turned out to be as bogus as those crimes charged to “the Hun” in World War One, the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1990, and Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, from 2011 until his imaginary barbarism was eclipsed by “the coronavirus,” and then Putin’s barbarism in Ukraine.
And yet our goal must be not merely to instruct the public in those many truths blacked out by the propaganda over COVID, or Ukraine, but to urge the public toward a firmer grasp of propaganda overall; and so our larger goal must be to explain the factors that have ultimately helped turn the West’s “free press” into the propaganda juggernaut now keeping millions upon millions in ferocious ignorance. That real-life Ministry of Truth was not set up ex nihilo by some iron faction of totalitarian oligarchs, but gradually took shape out of a corporate media cartel with interlocking boards, heavily dependent on the advertising revenues of Amazon, Big Pharma (especially Pfizer) and the media’s own parent companies (among other giant players), and with its assets closely managed by BlackRock, Vanguard and UBS; and as that vast commercial system has become more unified, it also has maintained, or even tightened, its covert relations with the military and “intelligence community” …
What, then, are we to do, as analysts of propaganda? For now, under this ever-rolling thunder of Big Lies, all we can do is keep on doing what we’re doing, while maintaining a thick skin, and taking due precautions, as it is ever more important that we tell the truths we know to those still capable of hearing them, and then of looking for them on their own. (This is especially true of younger people who are largely more receptive than their elders.) In the longer term, however, we must re-conceive and rebuild all our democratic institutions, whose absolute collapse has brought this whole world to the brink. Specifically, we need to rebuild journalism, so that it actually reports the news, just as we need a whole new medical establishment — one that will reclaim its Hippocratic duty to make people well instead of very profitably sick (or dead). And, of course, we need a new Academy, to educate its students, not indoctrinate them, teaching them not what to think but how to think, while introducing them to all the arts and sciences that better us as fully human beings; and, as we have learned so painfully these past two years, what these new schools must finally do — and not only our colleges and universities, but all our lower schools as well — is teach our students about propaganda: how to recognize it when it’s everywhere they look, and even (or especially) when they find themselves agreeing with it.
Mark Crispin Miller