The Bubble and the Crimes
There's a propaganda bubble that makes people know about certain things and not know about other things.
“The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle.”
“Okay, then comes the hard work. You ask, does it work the way you predict?”
“That is roughly the picture, as I see it, of the way the system is institutionally, the doctrines that lie behind it, the way it comes out.”
“The propaganda bubble keeps people quite uninformed and ignorant about enormous things that they could act to change if they only knew about them—it’s terrifying to look at our world and see what the grisly effects are when many important things are alien and foreign and exotic if they’re even encountered at all.”
I want to use this piece to discuss our propaganda bubble. Our propaganda bubble largely excludes various crimes from our awareness and from our knowledge and from our consciousness—these crimes are largely unknown to people who are inside our propaganda bubble.
The Bubble
Extremely few people actually read the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent—extremely few people know about the actual contents of that book and the actual idea that Edward Herman had about how the US media works. There are so many fundamental confusions about the book—people think that it’s a conspiracy theory or that it means that journalists aren’t honest or that it means that you shouldn’t read the NYT.
The book is actually about the fact that journalists are honest and courageous and serious—the book spends a lot of time defending journalists against criticism.
But the book discusses the media’s institutional structure and the way that this structure presents a certain picture of the world and distorts and slants and warps things and even—sometimes—suppresses important information. Herman came up with the institutional analysis, but Noam Chomsky contributed to the book—I took some notes on a lucid 1997 piece from Chomsky:
“You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand.”
the first source of information: “You ask questions about its internal institutional structure.”
the second source of information: “You want to know something about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and authority?”
the third source of information: “If you’re lucky, there is an internal record from leading people in the information system which tells you what they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system). That doesn’t mean the public relations handouts but what they say to each other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of interesting documentation.”
“Those are three major sources of information about the nature of the media.”
“You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at the structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look like.”
“Then you investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and structure of the media.”
“Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious.”
“Well, what do you expect to happen? What would you predict about the nature of the media product, given that set of circumstances? What would be the null hypothesis, the kind of conjecture that you’d make assuming nothing further.”
“The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle.”
“Okay, then comes the hard work. You ask, does it work the way you predict?”
And Chomsky goes through some absolutely fascinating history in that 1997 piece—I took notes:
“The first World War was the first time there was highly organized state propaganda. The British had a Ministry of Information, and they really needed it because they had to get the U.S. into the war or else they were in bad trouble.”
“The Ministry of Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda, including huge fabrications about ‘Hun’ atrocities, and so on. They were targeting American intellectuals on the reasonable assumption that these are the people who are most gullible and most likely to believe propaganda. They are also the ones that disseminate it through their own system. So it was mostly geared to American intellectuals and it worked very well.”
“The British Ministry of Information documents (a lot have been released) show their goal was, as they put it, to control the thought of the entire world, a minor goal, but mainly the U.S. They didn’t care much what people thought in India.”
“This Ministry of Information was extremely successful in deluding hot shot American intellectuals into accepting British propaganda fabrications. They were very proud of that. Properly so, it saved their lives. They would have lost the first World War otherwise.”
“In the U.S., there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The U.S. was a very pacifist country.”
“So the question was, how do you get the pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda agency in U.S. history.”
“The Committee on Public Information it was called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel.”
“The task of this commission was to propagandize the population into a jingoist hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months there was a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war.”
“A lot of people were impressed by these achievements. One person impressed, and this had some implications for the future, was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, he concludes, with some justification, that Germany lost the first World War because it lost the propaganda battle.”
“They could not begin to compete with British and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed them. He pledges that next time around they’ll have their own propaganda system, which they did during the second World War.”
“More important for us, the American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort.”
“They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.”
“So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think.”
“There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry.”
“this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War”
“The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission.”
“Another member of the Creel Commission was Walter Lippmann, the most respected figure in American journalism for about half a century (I mean serious American journalism, serious think pieces).”
“He was, again, applying the lessons of the work on propaganda very explicitly.”
“He says there is a new art in democracy called manufacture of consent. That is his phrase. Edward Herman and I borrowed it for our book, but it comes from Lippmann.”
“So, he says, there is this new art in the method of democracy, ‘manufacture of consent.’ By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate.”
“So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That’s applying the lessons of the propaganda agency.”
“Academic social science and political science comes out of the same thing. The founder of what’s called communications and academic political science is Harold Lasswell.”
“His main achievement was a book, a study of propaganda. He says, very frankly, the things I was quoting before—those things about not succumbing to democratic dogmatism, that comes from academic political science (Lasswell and others).”
“Again, drawing the lessons from the war time experience, political parties drew the same lessons, especially the conservative party in England.”
“Their early documents, just being released, show they also recognized the achievements of the British Ministry of Information.”
“They recognized that the country was getting more democratized and it wouldn’t be a private men’s club.”
“So the conclusion was, as they put it, politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people’s thoughts.”
“That’s the doctrinal side and it coincides with the institutional structure.”
“It strengthens the predictions about the way the thing should work.”
“And the predictions are well confirmed.”
“That is roughly the picture, as I see it, of the way the system is institutionally, the doctrines that lie behind it, the way it comes out.”
So that’s an absolutely fascinating history behind the whole doctrinal system—my favorite quote from all of the material that Chomsky has invoked on this front is the following 1945 quote from Edward Bernays:
An important factor in developing the climate of public opinion was the demonstration to the peoples of the world in World War I that wars are fought with words and ideas as well as with arms and bullets. Businessmen, private institutions, great universities—all kinds of groups—became conditioned to the fact that they needed the public; that the great public could now perhaps be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and that the same methods could do the job.
It’s interesting that Bernays refers to WW1’s state propaganda as an “important factor”—WW1 was “the first time there was highly organized state propaganda”, so it’s possible that many people who were involved in creating our modern propaganda system took inspiration from what happened during WW1.
The Crimes
The propaganda bubble is interesting—it’s also terrifying and dangerous and sad. Critics will run around our society trying to spotlight various important and urgent and horrifying things that power is up to—people will largely have no idea what these critics are talking about, since certain things just can’t make it through the bubble in any serious way.
The results are deadly. I’m not sure how many Americans and Westerns would—if polled—say that they know much about Washington’s major atrocities in Yemen. And I just saw another great example of something extremely important that few Americans or Westerners know about:
I took these notes:
“In the midst of the humanitarian disaster triggered by the Biden administration’s decision to seize Afghanistan’s $7 billion in banking reserves, an unlikely coalition of family members of 9/11 victims, Afghan diaspora organizations, and diplomats appointed by the former Afghan government are calling for the U.S. government to take urgent steps to help the Afghan economy.”
“Meanwhile, the largest beneficiaries of President Joe Biden’s action are likely to be lawyers rather than 9/11 victims.”
“Releasing some of the funds to the Afghan central bank, those calling on the administration argue, would be a means of mitigating the catastrophe now playing out.”
“Though billions of Afghan reserves are now earmarked for the potential benefit of a group of 9/11 victim families who had previously filed lawsuits against the Taliban, other families say that confiscating the savings of ordinary Afghans would be an inappropriate way of obtaining justice for their loved ones.”
“In an executive order issued in February, Biden ordered half of Afghanistan’s $7 billion in banking reserves to be set aside for some future undetermined use on behalf of the Afghan people, while ordering the other half to be used to settle lawsuits previously leveled by victims of 9/11 against the Taliban.”
“The confiscation of these funds has meant that ordinary Afghans, already reeling from the collapse of the former government, are now facing a liquidity shock that has left many unable to withdraw cash or perform even basic financial transactions.”
“The impact of all this has devastated the country, already one of the poorest on Earth.”
“The United Nations now estimates that roughly half of Afghans are currently facing acute hunger.”
“Afghanistan’s fledgling middle class, many of whom were reliant on salaries tied to foreign aid agencies to survive, is being driven into dire poverty.”
“A report compiled by a group of aid agencies estimates that as many as 120,000 Afghan children may have been married off to suitors for financial reasons by families desperate to survive.”
Kelly Campbell is “co-founder of the organization 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows”
“‘There are people waiting in bread lines and very poor children with malnutrition visible in public, but there are also many middle-class people rapidly falling into poverty. This is being driven in part because there’s no longer a functioning banking system and people are unable to access their salaries. It’s a problem that humanitarian aid alone is not going to be able to solve,’ said Campbell.”
Campbell: “‘The fact of the matter is that these reserves are the Afghan people’s money. The idea that they are on the brink of famine and that we would be holding on to their money for any purpose is just wrong. The Afghan people are not responsible for 9/11, they’re victims of 9/11 the same way our families are. To take their money and watch them literally starve—I can’t think of anything more sad.’”
Arash Azizzada is “co-founder of the advocacy group Afghans for a Better Tomorrow”
“‘It is such a deep miscarriage of justice to cut a diplomatic deal to withdraw from Afghanistan in order to save American lives, and then seize the money of ordinary Afghan citizens on the way out,’ Azizzada said.”
Azizzada: “‘Afghans are no strangers to injustice, but this is a particularly egregious act of misplaced violence. The people who made up Afghanistan’s middle class not long ago are now on the streets trying to sell vegetables to survive.’”
Aidan Salamone is “among those calling for the administration to act quickly to unfreeze the funds for the benefit of Afghan civilians”—his “father was killed in the 9/11 attacks when he was 4 years old”
“‘I think the Biden administration should have moved months ago to make sure that the entire $7 billion in funds were made available for the Afghan central bank to deal with the crisis there. September 11 families know very well what it’s like to have your life rocked by atrocity,’ said Salamone.”
Salamone: “‘To think that these lawsuits are actively contributing to other people suffering through famine-like conditions is really hard to stomach.’”
So this should be getting attention on a par with the war in Ukraine and on a par with the US atrocities in Yemen—this is a huge deal and millions of lives are at stake and US policy is directly responsible.
We’re talking about a situation where US policy has “devastated the country, already one of the poorest on Earth” and where the UN “now estimates that roughly half of Afghans are currently facing acute hunger”—this is millions of people.
And it’s millions of people in Yemen too—it’s genuinely astounding to look at the magnitudes of these two humanitarian crises that Washington could immediately move to ameliorate and terminate.
The propaganda bubble keeps people quite uninformed and ignorant about enormous things that they could act to change if they only knew about them—it’s terrifying to look at our world and see what the grisly effects are when many important things are alien and foreign and exotic if they’re even encountered at all.