The Stories We Believe

Some ruminations on that Signal chat.

The news outlets seem to be focused particularly on the incompetence indicated by the leaked Signal chat involving Trump's top advisors having an emoji-filled discussion about how and when they were going to bomb Yemen.  The story is that having such a top-secret chat on a messaging app and accidentally inviting the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine to join all indicates scary levels of incompetence among the leadership of the world's preeminent military power.  And this is obviously true. 

But there are other stories that this incident speaks to, that aren't being as widely analyzed in the news.  Which is the fact that these top advisors seem to have fully immersed themselves in a form of self-deception, and it is not an act.  They are, apparently, not playing the part of being deluded nationalists, they are actually fully delusional.  They didn't just drink the Kool-Aid, they seem to have been raised on it, and now they're swimming in it.

Hearing about how they discuss the geopolitics they're apparently responding to, they seem to actually believe that NATO is a defensive organization, that the US is somehow protecting Europe, that the US has been taken advantage of by Europe, and that the US has regularly been engaged in a form of self-sacrifice through the practice of being the world's policeman, which seems to involve the thankless task of protecting shipping lanes for the benefit of Europeans.

It's just one example of the type of conversation that presumably must take place often, that the public isn't privy to.  But just being privy to this one conversation seems to very much bolster the observation many of us made a long time ago, that this new crop of far right leaders in the US seems different from many of those from previous generations, in that they appear not to be using propaganda as a tool to get the public to support their duplicitous policies, but they believe the propaganda themselves.

We in the US live in a society governed by money, which is obvious to any reasonable observer of how things work in the US.  But at the same time, we can all hear politicians from both parties regularly rejecting such basic observations out of hand, claiming they govern on behalf of the public, rather than the corporate elite, even though they accept massive amounts of corporate donations and then proceed to do things like cut taxes on the rich and eliminate regulations and oversight bodies that get in the way of corporate profits.

We've never had much democracy in the alleged fatherland of modern democracy.  It's always been rule by the rich.  We've never had much free speech in the home of the First Amendment.  It's always looked good on paper, but not been effectively enforced in practice, when the speech involved is critical of the establishment.

The propaganda has always been patently false.  But increasingly, it seems, it is internalized and believed as factual by the heirs to the creators of the propaganda machine.  This Signal chat is evidence of a degree of self-deception, of a sort of blowback of the propaganda machine, that seems somehow even more alarming than if these advisors were lying and knew they were lying.  If they believe their own propaganda, what else will they believe next?

The propaganda that these advisors are all steeped in is largely rooted in the propaganda of the so-called Cold War.  Much of it is also rooted in pre-Cold War propaganda, but the bulk of it comes out of what we now know of as the Cold War era, so it seems like a useful exercise to review the basic precepts of the American propaganda version of Cold War reality, and contrast it with the actual motivations for US policies, for which the Cold War was mostly a wild story invented to justify policies that were otherwise extremely difficult to justify.

According to the propaganda version of reality, the US has long been beneficently looking after the welfare and security of its allies in places like Europe, spending lots of money to fulfill the role of being the world's policeman, for the benefit of the world.  The reality has been much more about serving US imperial and corporate interests, and compelling Europe to participate in this project.  The new rulers say they're done being helpful, and now just want to serve US national interests, by which they mean the interests of the US corporate elite.  What they truly seem to be confused about is how the institutions they're actively dismantling used to serve those interests in a somewhat less direct way, too.

Let's go over some of the major developments over the past century or so that might help inform our understanding of what might be going on here in the minds of Trump's advisors, in terms of the reality vs. the propaganda version of it.

Starting with World War 1.  The propaganda version is the US got involved in order to save European countries from other European countries, since eventually the Wilson administration decided they liked one side of the war better than the other.

In reality, the US got involved with the war -- quite late -- in order to be in a better position to be one of the Great Powers dividing up the spoils of war afterwards.

The labor movement in the US (and many other countries) was very big and very militant at the time of World War 1.  Repression against union members seeking to speak freely on the sidewalks, let alone organize a strike, was intense, because the labor movement was a threat to the profits of the owners of industry, which the government represented.

The propaganda version of reality promoted heavily at the time was the problems in society weren't about workers being unemployed, hungry, working in dangerous conditions, not paid a living wage, etc., but about too much immigration, immigrants being mostly communists and anarchists, or what at the time they identified as "German agents," or by later in 1917, "Bolsheviks," or supporters of the Russian Revolution who wanted to create chaos and smash our great democracy, too.

With World War 2, Americans were willing to sacrifice themselves in tremendous numbers because they were told they were in a war against fascism, defending free peoples from this evil, out of concern for the welfare of humanity -- and European humanity in particular.

In reality, US victory in World War 2 set the stage for a vast expansion of the network of US colonies and neocolonies around the world, which were generally organized for the purposes of wealth and resource extraction that would benefit the rich and immiserate most others.

With the post-war formation of NATO and beginning of what they called the Cold War, the American propagandists created an atmosphere of fear of their former ally in the fight against Germany, the Soviet Union, pushing the same old 1917-era line about Soviet intentions to attack western Europe, the US, and the rest of the world.  NATO, it was claimed, would be a defensive organization, mainly about defending Europe from the Soviet Union.

In reality, NATO was created to encircle and "contain" (to use their popular euphemism) the Soviet Union.  Rather than being a defensive organization, it has proven itself to be a way to exert control through very offensive initiatives, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Libya.  It has also demonstrated itself to be very oriented towards expansion, inviting many former Soviet states to join.

With the rise around the world of Soviet and Cuban soft power in the form of medical missions all over the world, food aid, advisors helping countries develop in various ways, etc., the US formed agencies to engage in the same sorts of efforts, to counter Soviet and Cuban influence, such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Aside from providing things like food and medicine to some people who benefit from that, at least on the face of it, what has really driven policy for groups like USAID and NED has been the effort to undermine the governments they don't like, and promote largely false narratives about how things are in the west.  These groups provide so much funding for things like independent journalism in eastern European countries, for example, that they effectively give the impression that in the US, there's lots of state funding for independent journalism, which of course there is not.

These groups were not set up in order to feed the hungry and clothe the naked out of the goodness of the hearts of the American political elite that set them up.  They were set up in order to exercise American soft power, for the purposes of promoting US interests, by spreading disinformation, in various forms, about how things really were.

Copious evidence suggests that US support for Israel has never been about concern within the US leadership about the plight of Jewish people.  The desire for some Jewish people to pursue the Zionist project of stealing the land from the Palestinian people for Jews to occupy was convenient for US imperialists, it was thought, and thus, like other settler-colonial projects, it was supported as a venture that would at least potentially be very profitable in many ways, at least for the ruling few.

Similarly, US support for Ukraine has never been about supporting the Ukrainian people, but about undermining Russia.  It would be a grave error to assume that there's any motivation to help Jews or to help Ukrainians involved with US support for Israel or Ukraine.  This is the propaganda.  The reality is about serving US interests, whether that's about keeping the Suez Canal open for American ships, or keeping Russia out of the mainstream of global commerce in order to make massive profits on the scarce supply of commodities induced by the sanctions.

Throughout the Cold War period, every war the US got involved with was a war against communism, to contain the expansionist communist menace, and to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights.  Post-Soviet Union, every war the US has gotten involved with has been a war against the irrational, predatory ideology of "terrorism," and in support of democracy, freedom, and human rights.

In reality, the millions of civilians killed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere have all been killed by an invader that treated the entire populations of these countries as their enemy -- not at all the sort of war-fighting methods that had a chance of winning the hearts and minds of the populations being bombed -- because the point was not to help these countries develop, but to suppress opposition to US hegemony, and make the world safer for unquestioned US corporate domination.  In none of these cases was the US motivated by actually believing they were fighting "communism" or "terrorism" -- the leadership knew this was propaganda meant for mass consumption, to justify unjustifiable cruelty and mass murder, in the minds of the domestic population.  There was nothing beneficent about these imperial adventures.  They were all intended to bolster US control over a global order that was set up to benefit the US and other, lesser members of the imperialist club.

In the minds of Trump's advisors, however, it seems clear that they believe all of these wars really may have been about protecting the world from communism and terrorism, and now they resent all of this work the US has allegedly done to protect the world from these evils, and now Europe needs to step up and involve themselves more fully in this epic struggle.  It's all just a fantasy based on a fantasy, but for them, it happened -- it seems like they saw it on the History Channel, so it must be true.

It is the nature of propaganda to be convincing.  Countries around the world that consolidated their national identities and institutions by the middle of the 19th century and developed distinct national narratives and national media have mostly been very successful in instilling in their populations a sense of national identity and purpose that even might be worth fighting and dying for.  For most of this period, though, there has generally been the sense -- partially real, partially not, probably -- that the leadership is aware that the propaganda is fake, and is meant for public consumption, in order to pacify and control the public.

That reality is bad enough.  But now we seem to be in a new one, one where reality itself has been entirely thrown out the window, in favor of a fantasy based on Cold War propaganda that has been fully absorbed as truth by a stunningly unqualified collection of incompetent advisors, who are actively making policy based on their completely confused understanding of where we are and how we got here.