How fiction advances empire agendas

A few years ago I met at a social event a senior executive in a publishing firm. She planned to take a year out of the corporate scene to travel, and especially wanted to visit Korea. “South Korea”, she added, “obviously”.

Obviously. Though I couldn’t but wonder if the sum total of her knowledge of the DPRK held a single meme or factoid not planted by the most powerful propaganda machine the world has ever known. One whose raison d’etre  is to advance, often with subtlety and the flexibility to accommodate and even co-opt irony and contradiction, ¹ an empire with zero interest in being truthful about life north of the 38th parallel, or the enduring legacy of a genocidal war seventy-five years ago – an early instantiation of what would become a pattern of aggression thousands of miles from US shores and borders – which has never formally ended; simply switched from military to economic savagery.

The crimes of the USA have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but few have talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005

And the best part of this witty act of hypnosis? Most of its exponents know not what they do.

Last night, on the strength of actress Anna Torv having impressed me in the Australian drama, The Newsreader, I sat down to watch Secret City. After five minutes I switched off. An opening scene of a young woman self immolating at a temple, while shouting Free Tibet, was followed by dialogue quite natural, as though invoking fact incontestable and hence unremarkable, of a ‘Uighur genocide‘ even the US State Department rowed back from as it became clear to those paying attention – a small constituency I grant you – that the statistically preposterous basis for this claim was the work of a Christian fundamentalist, one Adrian Zenz, who says God put him on this earth to destroy communism.

My criticisms of media – here and here and here for instance – focus on how what we call the news is constructed by corporations which aim directly or indirectly ² to sell audiences to other corporations. Noam Chomsky, having thus articulated that business model, went on to ask what pictures of the world a rational person would expect from such an arrangement.

Good question, and we needn’t suppose mendacious journalists and editors. For the most part career focus, and that very human capacity to believe what it suits us to believe, suffice. ³ In his now immortalised 1996 interview with an Andrew Marr then at the BBC, Chomsky was asked how he could know that he, Marr, self censored. To which his guest replied:

I don’t say you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different you would not be sitting in that chair.

Yet that “witty act of hypnosis”, in Mr Pinter’s words, relies as much on arts and entertainment industries as on those systemically compromised news media. Sometimes this is transparent, as in the action genre from 007 through Rambo and Clint capers to Jack Reacher. Or it can take subtler forms in drama for grown ups. I don’t suppose the Secret City  producers sat down and said, “hey, let’s work into the script some China bashing to please the sponsors”. 

These things work less mechanically, at deeper levels of consciousness, and are driven by a common sense pragmatism – “South Korea, obviously!” – which at every turn, or at least on everything that most matters, both reflects and reinforces a weltanschauung  of power.

Just as those who create news content need above all else to maintain share in their segment – tabloid or ‘quality’, liberal or conservative – of the market, so do dramatists and novelists need above all to deliver fiction that keeps viewers tuned in, readers turning pages. They are effective propagandists only insofar as they act unconsciously, though to truly get this we need a passing understanding of ideology not as a hat consciously donned by socialist, feminist, conservative or Christian ‘ideologues’, but in the more pervasive sense of those largely unconscious beliefs and biases – imbibed cradle to grave; reinforced, adjusted and even jettisoned when competing beliefs sow cognitive dissonance, or external realities render them no longer tenable – which inform our ‘common sense’ interpretations of the world. This is what Chomsky was getting at in his response thirty years ago to Andrew Marr.

So when a drama series as sophisticated and intelligently crafted as the US version of House of Cards  descends, in the episode where a Russian leader clearly Vladimir Putin behaves with vile boorishness, to infantile caricature, that’s unlikely to be because the creators wanted to do their bit for Washington talk points. It’s because they either believe  him an ogre, or don’t much care either way. What matters is that Everybody Knows he is. In this it’s akin to the tropes – memes as we now say – that jokes draw on. Just as the Irish are stupid, Jews and Scotsmen miserly and black men well hung, so is Putin The New Hitler. ⁴ Everyone knows it, though beyond half-baked talk of Navalny, half-assed murder attempt in Salisbury and full on land grab in Ukraine, few could say how to save their lives.

Here’s the thing. Our ‘knowing’ Putin is an ogre draws on a thousand such dramatic depictions. How? Via the self same circular referencing, omission of inconvenient facts, and new unproven accusations given credence by those that came before, ⁵ with which the demonisations of news propaganda blitzes endow a unanimity too many confuse with truth incontestable. In this the two forms, ‘art’ and ‘news’, are mutually reinforcing. Often incoherently so, to be sure, but what of it? As footnotes to a never ending soap opera, the fine details from which such empire meta-narratives are spun are rarely subjected – until we wake up, spot the pattern, and ask cui bono? – to critical scrutiny.

Putin poisons hotel water; Navalny is taken to Omsk hospital. No one kills him there – because poll ratings for this far right xenophobe are a fraction of Putin’s? – though a hospital is an ideal rub-out venue. The authorities approve transfer to Berlin, medics find Novichok. Merkel accuses Russia, EU imposes sanctions. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? ⁶

Think Assad’s penchant – inexplicable other than as that of a comic-book villain who delights in evil for evil’s sake – for gassing children on the eve of UN Weapons Inspection visits …

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Me, I’m still figuring out whether, on my 74th spin round the sun, I still have it in me to get on a flight to Korea. The north, obviously.

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1. That Borg-like capacity to absorb opposition – as when I post an Amazon link to a text critical of empire or neoliberalism – is not infinite. The flexibility I speak of derives from great power. A truth liberal ‘universalists’ like Owen Jones and George Monbiot miss is that states in empire’s crosshairs – Iran or Cuba, say – are states under siege. As such they can little afford the trappings of liberal democracy and free expression. That said, such luxuries are under attack even in the West; now so challenged by multipolarity as to render them decreasingly affordable in the empire metropolis itself.
2. While state broadcasters like the BBC do not sell audiences, they are influenced by media which do. Disproportionately Eton and Oxbridge appointees of governments in dread of press baron fulminations on ‘left wing bias’, how could BBC executives remain stoically unswayed by agendas in conflict – think Gaza – with the interests of truth?
3. Journalists who know what’s good for them please their editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors who for their part need advertisers and/or sponsors of Bill Gates or George Soros largesse.
4. You doubtless spotted the flaw in my analogy. Political correctness outlawed the tropes of thick Paddy, tight-fist Elijah and super endowed Rastus, while that on Vlad the Invader is in polite society de rigeur.
5. It’s not that we’re intellectually incapable of grasping that “we have evidence”  is not evidence. Just that we forget this in the grip of the strong emotions, typically fear and loathing, propaganda blitzes are calculated to provoke.
6. Quoted in Road to WW3. Part 5: information space. See also, Assange and Navalny compared.