Propaganda

Wednesday

Oliver Jia

The Americans who defected to North Korea

Last summer, US Army soldier Travis King ran across the Korean Demilitarized Zone into the arms of the North Koreans. It wasn’t because of some mental break or as part of a spy operation. North Korean state media claims he was motivated by racism and mistreatment — of course they would. The DPRK’s outlets have previously criticized the US for its treatment of African Americans, around the same time they compared former president Barack Obama to a “wicked black monkey.” Like the six American servicemen who crossed the DMZ before him, King probably had a mixture of reasons for his flight. Unlike in the previous cases, however, King’s detention was a short one.

North Korea

Tuesday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The rebuilding of the Tower of Babel

The going explanation for the critical international situation today is that the authoritarian, statist powers of the world are cooperating with one another against the Western, democratic, capitalist ones to smash the supposed “rules-based” order on which they imagine Western hegemony rests. This is certainly one cause of the present global crisis but I do not believe it is the proximate one, which is rather the entirely predictable — though inexplicably unpredicted — result of the network of nearly instant electronic communications in which international society is enmeshed as if in the web of a malignant cosmic spider, combined with a reinforcing system of cheap global transport operating at not much below supersonic speed.

communication

Tuesday

Cockburn

Jen Psaki’s MSNBC propaganda hour

If you’re looking for accurate, hard-hitting, unbiased journalism, look no further than former Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki interviewing the former chief of staff who hired her, Ron Klain, about the administration they both worked for. That’s just what MSNBC tried to pass off as balanced coverage of current events, as Inside with Jen Psaki this weekend looked more like a segment of propaganda you’d see on the Korean Central News Agency than on a major American news network trying to be taken seriously. Of course it’s par for the course for former press secretaries to move onto TV jobs, but something about a former administration mouthpiece becoming a mainstream media administration mouthpiece seems a bit off to Cockburn.

ron klain jen psaki

Wednesday

Matthew Foldi

China woos the Washington Wizards

China’s new foreign minister issued his first public statement at a Washington Wizards game this weekend. “Happy Chinese New Year to DC family,” Qin Gang said, in a video blasted on the giant screens across Capital One Arena and shared by news outlets controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. https://twitter.com/cgtnamerica/status/1617008162275528711?s=42&t=IQmzS3-Fo2PbedZyvgzBIg It was a continuation of China using American sporting events as a means of exerting its soft power, and yet another stark example of the existential challenge that the United States faces in its struggle to outmaneuver the Chinese Communist Party — even in its own capital city.

china washington wizards

Monday

Timothy Jacobson

Ukraine in black and white

Displays of wanton brutality and heroic resistance in the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 have prompted some in the West to proclaim a moment of “moral clarity.” Some caution might be wise here, since moral clarity in world affairs is not always as clear or as moral as its claimants think. It was Soviet ideology, succeeding czarist imperialism, that for so long smothered Ukraine, along with the other captive nations consigned to Stalin at Yalta. As Ukraine may now be slipping captivity at last, the West rejoices. But how clear is the clarity? History’s players sometimes switch roles even from one act to the next. It has not, for example, always been brutal Russians that heroic Ukrainians went up against. Eighty-one years ago, it was brutal Germans.

North Star

Wednesday

Slavoj Zizek

Secret bioweapon labs are Putin’s MacGuffin 

Some commentators have already noted the strange homology between Russia’s evocation of “secret bioweapon labs” in Ukraine and the US evocation of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which in both cases were used to justify military attack. It’s not that the US was unsure if Saddam had WMDs; they positively knew he did not have them, which is why they risked a ground offensive in Iraq, rather than sticking to air bombing. The nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction perfectly fulfill the role of a “MacGuffin” in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. A MacGuffin is “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance,” per Merriam-Webster.

bioweapon labs

Friday

Peter Van Buren

Ukraine and the war for your mind

Deterrence works. Russia's nukes are the only thing keeping the US from full-out war in Ukraine just six months after retreating from Afghanistan. The unprecedented propaganda effort by Ukraine and its helpers in the American mass media to drag the US and NATO directly into the fight has failed — so far. But the struggle — the one for your mind space — is not over. To understand what follows, you have to wipe away a lot of bull being slung your way. Insanity is not the only explanation for Putin’s actions of the past few weeks.

ukraine

Monday

Bill Zeiser

Watch out for Ukrainian social media propaganda

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about the Ukrainian beauty queen who volunteered to fight the invading Russian forces. If you’ve been on social media these past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the striking photo of the woman clad in tactical gear and holding a rifle. “We are living in a materiel world, and I’m a materiel girl,” the stunner says to the viewer through her steely glare. Or the one about the Japanese ambassador to Ukraine kitted out in his ancestor’s samurai gear and ready to defend his adopted homeland? You’ve surely heard about the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot who has been terrorizing his Russian counterparts, accomplishing the feat — uncommon in contemporary air combat — of becoming an ace.

propaganda

Thursday

Peter Van Buren

Russia’s war is not a Trump redux

I hate going back, again, to Orwell, but since the world is intent on using Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instructional guide, I have no choice. So proles, take note: this week's Two Minutes Hate will be split between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. They apparently share the goal of destroying American democracy via the invasion of Ukraine. Something very sinister has happened in the American mind-space over the last few days. Ukraine, a country of little importance to the United States, suddenly became the sole focus of most media-consuming Americans. This was constructed to appear organic, but it is impossible not to imagine guiding hands behind the shift of every single media outlet to a single story told in a single way.

trump-russia hoax

Tuesday

Cockburn

Beware the dragon, Mr Bannon!

Everybody knows that the Communist party of China is sensitive to criticism. Internal critics have a tendency to disappear; external ones often find themselves silenced. Beijing pursues a policy of ‘elite capture’ — using powerful non-Chinese actors to pursue influence perceptions of China and advance its interests.Enter Steve Bannon, the former White House senior adviser, who likes the CCP even less than the elites. Bannon has been waging economic war on Beijing for years and is now using his new smash-hit radio show, War Room: Pandemic, to launch endless broadsides against the tyranny and malfeasance of China’s leadership. Bannon has been sharper than almost anyone in seizing the opportunities the pandemic has created to trash China’s global prestige.

steve bannon

Thursday

Cockburn

Inside the Chinese Twitter spin machine

Donald Trump is often called a troll — and, in the internet sense, he is. Certainly, he has elevated the art of irritating people online into a form of politics, diplomacy and statesmanship. It’s perhaps his most significant innovation. But the trouble with innovation, as we all know, is that at some point the Chinese will copy you — and that’s exactly what some influential Twitter voices are doing right now to counter Trump’s viral appeal. Take for instance the curious account of Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Chinese and English editions of the Global Times, another CCP rag which spews out state propaganda dressed as journalism.Xijin is another fanatical nationalist, or at least pretends to be for public advancement.

chinese twitter

Friday

Charles Lipson

Beijing’s attempts to elude blame for the Wuhan virus will backfire

Facing harsh criticism for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, Beijing has settled on an international communications strategy: smearing the United States by claiming the virus originated with American soldiers visiting China. This strategy, based on obvious lies, will not work out well.Nobody outside China’s state broadcasters and some information-starved viewers could possibly believe it. For good reason: it’s bunk, and vile bunk at that. An infected unicorn is more likely to have started the virus in Wuhan than the US military. Yet that is the story the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is trying to peddle.

wuhan