My December 14 post, On Syria, chess, and Nat King Cole, generated this three-way exchange below the line. I’m dressed in a rather fetching red:
You really think [Assad] a good man? A kind leader? At least read Syrian Gulag … by Jaber Baker and Ugur Ümit Üngör and look at the videos pouring out of the country of pure joy [at his ouster by US/Israeli/Turkiye backed ‘rebels’] … Don’t get me wrong. Whilst I’m enjoying the pure happiness of Syrian friends, I’m still wary (as are they) about Jolani and how … external powers like the US and Israel could screw things up.
Yes [to ‘good’ and ‘kind’ – I’d also said ‘weak’]. Though the question is minor against the bigger issues addressed here.
The question may seem minor but it is indicative of your views. That you would support a despot that oversaw a regime as extraordinarily brutal as Assad’s, seems inhumane to me. What are the ‘bigger issues’ – geo-politics?, ideological positions?
Doesn’t matter what I think of Bashar al-Assad. Doesn’t matter what you think. He’s gone, Israel wins, US wins, Turkey wins. For now at least. Them’s the bigger issues and that’s the topic up for discussion here.
Shiite’s, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Palestinians, Lebanese and just about every not on the payroll denizen of the region are at risk of chaos unleashed by groups who have slaughtered their neighbours, and by a rabid State whose people think they are superior to every other human on the planet as they conquer land and shift people off it by displacing them or by televised genocide. Syria does not exist now. Lebanon will not be far behind … Trying to paint this as some kind of ideological position is simply grotesque. Given public domain evidence of Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and the failed states they have become after being sanctioned and bombed by a self-proclaimed “Garden” imposing regime change on “brutal authoritarian regimes” it seems that [your] suggestion is itself an ideological position. 1
For nigh on a decade I’ve had exchanges like the above. I’ve lost pals over Syria. (Sometimes, it has to be said, by going in needlessly hard and forgetting my manners.) Those I engaged are good people (or they wouldn’t have been pals in the first place) and not stupid (ditto). Just blind to the reality of the US empire; exacerbated in those, like my interlocutor, who see access to a few Syrian expats in the UK – no doubt honest folks but a miniscule and by definition skewed sample – as entitling them to speak on behalf of tens of millions. 2 3
Mainly though it’s the first affliction: blindness to empire, aided by the lies and omissions of our corrupt media. 4 That’s why my interlocutor could speak – as if there were a scintilla of doubt on the matter! – of how “external powers like the US and Israel could [!!] screw things up”.
My first video choice, on Day 2 of what promises to be a rocky year, offers a corrective. As their name suggests, Electronic Intifada normally confine their scope to Palestine’s resistance to the genocidal state. On this occasion they make an exception, in light of the fall of Syria to empire backed terrorists rebranded as ‘rebels’.
Duration 18:52.
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My next selection widens the focus. As such it’s one of many on alternative media to say how they see the coming year unfolding. When George Galloway is good he’s very good, but I chose this video not so much because he is on top form here as because his guest on Have it out with Galloway – a young man I’ve been following two or three years now – offers a crisply incisive assessment of global realities more dangerous than at any point in my seventy-two completed spins round the sun.
Over to George, and the impressive Danny Haiphong.
Duration 18:50.
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For my final choice I turn to a man I frequently group with two other political economists. Like Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai, Richard Wolff is both a punchy communicator and deep thinker, though to appreciate the latter we need to take in his longer offerings. Since I want to keep today’s selections under twenty minutes – in this case under fourteen – the emphasis here is on the punchy. Like all really good thinkers who know their stuff, Richard expresses himself in terms so simple we can easily lose sight of his depth of understanding, without which simplicity is either unattainable or, worse, crosses over from simple to simplistic.
Richard too focuses on what 2025 may bring, in his case on the narrower question of what Mr Trump may do when he can’t do all he’s promised for the very good reason that so much of it – let no one accuse the man of being a deep thinker – is mutually contradictory. (Though even if it weren’t, he’d have a hard time getting it through Congress, and a harder time still getting deep state acquiescence. What do you take America for? Some kind of democracy?!?)
Duration 13:42.
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As I proof-read the above an alert to today’s Caitlin Johnstone post pinged my inbox. Sure to resonate with ‘spiritual’ cult escapees like me, its call – to embrace our inner blasphemer – goes wider since pretty much every Westerner is trapped in the mother of all cults.
Awakening From Empire Propaganda Starts With One Small Act Of Heresy
Escaping from the matrix of the mainstream western worldview is like escaping from a cult: it starts with one tiny heresy. One small, secret thought that goes against all your indoctrination. 5
Maybe it’s the realization you’ve been lied to your whole life about Israel and Palestine. Maybe it had something to do with watching the mass media manufacture consent for the invasion of Iraq. Whatever it is, it starts out as a tiny little mental suspicion that the information sources you’ve been trusting to help form your understanding of the world might not be nearly as trustworthy as you’d been led to believe.
If you talk to anyone who ever left a cult, they’ll tell you it started out the same way. They see a sign that the leader claiming he’s Jesus might actually be kind of egotistical. They find themselves asking whether Sri Baba Shiva really needs so many Rolls-Royces. They wonder if Pastor Jeremiah is saying God wants him to have so many wives for reasons more to do with what Pastor Jeremiah wants than what God wants. 6 These little heresies eventually add up and snowball into an avalanche which collapses the indoctrination keeping them in the cult.
It also tends to play out this way when it comes to leaving a psychologically abusive relationship. A little spark forms in the back of the victim’s mind, questioning whether the thoughts their partner put in their head are really true — and noticing who would benefit if they weren’t. Enough little sparks like that, and you eventually get a fire that burns the whole relationship down.
Those are the kinds of sparks we’re trying to get flying when working to wake people up from the indoctrination of the empire. We’re trying to get those first tiny heresies to form in people’s minds, using whatever’s happening in the news at the moment or whatever relevant ideas are trending.
We don’t need to get anyone to wake all the way up in one go — we just need to get the snowball rolling. One little heretical thought can be all it takes to get someone seriously questioning whether everything they’ve been taught about the world is a lie. 7
So we point out the lies as we find them. Any glaring plot hole in the official narrative, anywhere it pops up. Right now Gaza is a constant deluge of information and raw video footage that can spark major heresy if truly seen and ingested. The way we were just told to cheer for Syria being taken over by Al Qaeda is another. The lies we were told about Ukraine and the events that led up to the war is another.
Every day there’s something coming up you can show anyone who will listen, and say “See? Look at that! They lied! They’re lying right now! I wonder what else they’re lying about?”
And it just takes one. One well-placed spotlight on one obvious plot hole is all it takes to get someone pulling on a thread that will eventually unravel the whole matrix of delusion for them. And once they’re awake, they can join us in helping to wake up the others.
So make a vocation of being a blasphemer. Get people asking inconvenient questions, and spark as many small acts of heresy as you can. People are only going to awaken from the imperial narrative matrix one pair of eyelids at a time, and we can each spend some time every day trying to help open them.
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- “Self-proclaimed Garden”? This alludes to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, whose orientalism contrasted a civilised West with an uncivilised Rest he called the “Jungle”. The comment as a whole is scathing of being “wary” of Al Jolani (leader of Al Qaeda cut-out, HTS). And even more so of concern that “external powers like the US and Israel could screw things up”. The first ignores the West’s Janus-headed form on funding the jihadists it thunderously denounces. The second implies a US and Israel with noble plans for Syria (and beyond) but occasionally Getting It Wrong. For an antidote to the touching but misplaced trust here, see my four posts on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right.
- The primacy of personal experience in reaching wider conclusions is, like our weakness at statistical probability, deeply ingrained. For most of the 140,000 years homo sapiens sapiens has walked the earth – 126,000 of them in small bands of hunter-gatherers, while only in the last century have we had the mixed blessing of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” – personal sources sufficed for the goldfish bowls we swam in. Now it’s a trait routinely exploited by the powerful, to manufacture consent for dark agendas.
- In Syria and other artificial Arab entities whose ruled line boundaries betray the intent – to divide and rule an oil rich and geo-strategically pivotal region – of their Anglo-French architects, success is a relative term. A ruthless Ba’athism, inspired by Colonel Nasser and his Pan-Arabism, fought the Western backed Muslim Brotherhood while negotiating a degree of autonomy. (Like that other Ba’athist, Saddam Hussain, Hafez al-Assad here colluded with imperialism, there stood in its cross-hairs.) It allowed for a secular state, despite ethno-religious fault lines baked in by Sykes-Picot, 1916. That in turn allowed for state control of key sectors. Was there cruelty? You bet. Was their corruption? Ditto. Was a third way, neither empire nor Ba’athism, possible? I doubt it but a balanced reckoning of fifty-three years of Assad rule is needed and may soon be possible.
- On many matters our ‘quality’ media serve us passably well but this enables a greater lie. Media must show themselves trustworthy even if this embarrasses high office. (Not only does long term capacity to manufacture consent depend on this. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust so gained helps them mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of states and leaders in the way of empire designs – to the power they ultimately serve.
We need not suppose dishonest practitioners. The corruption is systemic. Media are, as Chomsky said, “corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations”. (“Public service” broadcasters like America’s PBS, Britain’s BBC or Australia’s ABC are not only headed up by appointees from ruling elites, but subject to market pressures at one stage removed, via politicians who fear and/or are in bed with moguls like Rothermere and Murdoch.) At a more personal level, I speak less of outright mendacity than a well honed human capacity to see the world in ways that best suit our perceived interests. Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors not only crave seats at the high table but need advertisers and/or wealthy sponsors. Last but not least, all are as much influenced as influencers, a truth I touched on three years ago in Monolithic control at the Guardian?
The subject of ideology … is vast. Here it suffices that in our messy world: (a) humans are good at believing what it suits us to believe; (b) we’ve imbibed since infancy – from news media journalists consume as well as produce, from school and college, and from arts and entertainment whose soft propaganda power is underrated – that liberal democracy is the worst system except for all the others; ergo (c) most journalists believe the dangerous drivel they put out on nations targeted for regime change.
- I can’t easily disentangle which of three “tiny heresies” prompted my escape from empire blindness. Was it the shafting of Greece in 2015? The shafting of ‘Jezza’? More than either, I think, it was the sheer enormity and intensity of the propaganda blitz on Syria, and its attendant flat out – and proven to be so – lies.
- My ‘spiritual’ cult leader craved neither riches nor sexual gratification. Indeed, he made a big deal of not doing so when other gurus were routinely tripped up by these things. This blinded him, and his followers, to the biggest addiction of all: power, not as means to an end but as an end in itself.
- Sadly, being alert to the peddling of power-serving twaddle on one matter doesn’t always provoke wider questioning. See the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.