How do we combat US propaganda when it's so prevalent?
How do we combat US propaganda when it's so prevalent?
Serious post warning, sleep-deprived wall of text ahead.
Someone who I dare say I respect publicly discouraged joining or supporting Lemmy on the basis of being The Tankie Place, linking this raddle post, a collection of horrifyingly flimsy evidence that Dessalines (lemmy.ml admin, maintainer of the wonderful dessalines.github.io/essays/) is a freedom hating redfash tankie who likes it when the evil CCP genocides uyghurs and bans femboys.
Naturally it all sucks but now i'm investing too many brain cells into thinking: how do you even refute this garbage?
I'm not proud of it, but I was an "anti-authoritarian leftist" too. I unironically said "tankie" once. And if i were told there is no Uyghur genocide, i would react exactly as if they had told me there was no holocaust. To the westerner, China really is as bad as nazi germany and straightforwardly saying otherwise, in their mind, is no different than if you replace Uyghurs with jews and China with germany. When this narrative is so deeply ingrained, how do you fight it? How the hell did I get here?
i really have no idea how to address it when, to them as it once was to me, it is so obviously true that anyone suggesting otherwise is not even worth listening to. these are fundamental beliefs and challenging them is grounds for instant block and report. its not open for discussion. all i can do is hope they find the truth on their own.
i'll stop rambling now and sleep instead. so i wont respond for a while. sorry if theres a better community to post this in i just needed to get this out before i spontaneously combust. good night comrades.
Here is a good article that I think can help.
Roderick Day - The Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing"
Here are some choice excerpts: "Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits."
"I reject only the common misconception that propaganda “manufactures consent” (Chomsky) or “invents reality” (Parenti), because it exaggerates the feat accomplished by propagandists, and, in doing so, it obscures the real material basis that has historically made even the working poor in the imperial core complicit."
"Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough... It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose."
"Forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis."
This helped me refocus and not become so frustrated with trying to "convince" people who have class interests that make it unlikely they will ever change their minds.
I’ve seen this article linked a bunch and yet again I want to say that it makes an assumption that people are way more self aware than they actually are.
Basically no one is weighing the cost benefit analysis of falling for propaganda.
At best, this encourages a fatalism of political organization, where we morally condemn vast swathes of the population for something they never consciously chose, and at worst, it’s just an example of us convincing ourselves we’re superior to them.
Not to mention all the examples of people saying their minds did change because of exposure to different facts contradicts this article’s thesis.
Edit: Reading the article and finding myself agreeing with it. This is what I get for being a LIB smdh
I don’t think I disagree with the article, but with the conclusions many people draw from it. It’s certainly true that many Western proles are drawn to accepting propaganda, but that isn’t free license to morally judge them.
An example is the common usage of this article to condemn veterans completely. Veterans suck, generally, but this article is completely irrelevant to that discussion. The point of the article is that this process is mostly instinctive, and for us to be able to start using it in moral arguments, it would have to be a conscious process. Otherwise our moral complaints make about as much sense as trying to morally complain about a cat chasing a mouse.
The article isn’t saying that all human beings are rational actors choosing to fall for propaganda in the “marketplace of ideas”. Instead, it’s highlighting the instinctive complicity of the Western proletariat, not to encourage people to morally dismiss it in its entirety or to give up organizing with it, but rather to give us knowledge of the mechanism with which it is convinced out of class solidarity, and therefore how we can interrupt it, clearing up that it is not because the Western proletariat is “unenlightened” or needs a Great Man critic to “snap them out of it”, but because the Western prole’s current material interests are contradictory towards other countries. That is the root of an issue, and, unlike universal magical propaganda, it is an issue we’re able to actually consider solutions to.
I don't think it is intended to be a moral condemnation. Rather, I think it just points out that approaching people in the imperial core as noncomplicit, brainwashed and unwitting participants in propaganda is a serious error that will lead nowhere and burn out comrades who think that people are one good article or piece of data away from changing their minds. I think Day does a good job relating this back to the western ideological tendency to cast issues as being entirely orchestrated by a cabal of sorts and imposed entirely on a helpless population. I definitely think the author could do a better job of filling in the edges of his argument though.
But these liberal online spaces that OP is talking about are comprised precisely of westerners intentionally seeking out propaganda to reinforce their world view that their system and society is superior. In my view, understanding that these people are making, on some level, a deliberate choice to accept this propaganda indicates that they are not who we should be seeking solidarity with. I think this idea helps avoid frustrations that OP is experiencing and helps us re-orient to find individuals we can actually build movements with.
Hello fellow sleep-deprived human! I am not proud of it, but for a brief moment I also thought that way.
What convinced me to reevaluate my views was discovering how brutal the US actions around the world actually are. I already agreed with basic idea of Communism and I thought that whatever Stalin was doing, it could not be much worse than what the US empire did and keeps doing everywhere, so I was curious what other arguments do Marxist-Leninists have.
Understanding that capitalism inevitably leads to imperialism and breeds fascism was another blow that convinced me that whatever happens in China cannot be worse than total society collapse and so on.
I had to peel layers of my prejudice, one at a time, starting from what I considered most believable to least believable. At some point I found myself agreeing with most of the ML talking points and I decided to let my guard down and start reading about provided sources with open mind.
I'm not sure that you can convince someone that there is no Uyghur genocide if they are emotionally invested in this narrative, because, like you pointed out, on emotional level for them it is like Holocaust denial or something similar. Besides, people tend to stick with others who already share their views and bias, so they reinforce their paranoia among each other (just like we reinforce our bias here).
Maybe changing material conditions will make people look for alternatives more seriously and reconsider their views. Maybe some need to actually feel some more effects of capitalism before they engage with a good faith discussion.
Sorry that I have nothing better for you, but I felt like rambling a little.
Not sure if this will be useful, but the thing that broke the China bad programming was actually the Huawei ban. Looking back at it, I realized how ridiculous it all was and didn't make any sense. This was even before I considered myself a Marxists. But not really sure if that will help with convincing many people, especially if they are not into tech.
Starting off with enemy states of western imperialist nations is probably not going to go well. It's better to start with talking about subjects that directly relate to and affects their material interest.
This is all assuming you are talking to someone who isn't a bourgeoisie or materially well off. You can then talk about how their wages aren't improving, and change in the nation isn't for the better for people like him and how no matter who is elected it seems like they don't change anything for the better. This can then get into discussions about class interests (how the proletariat and bourgeoisie obtain wealth and their conflicting interests) and exactly what determines a "democracy" and how the nations they live in aren't "democracies" as they are dictatorships of the bourgeoisie. Get them to understand what capitalism really is and then describe features of communism without the word communism that they may agree with. Materialism vs idealism can also be discussed here. Debunking propaganda against communism and AES nations is gonna take a long time unless they are open-minded and willingly want to get a new perspective.
My quick go-to is to roll my eyes and say "If this was 2002, you'd be telling me allll about Saddam Hussein's WMDs."
You don't. Back in Marx's day the pamphlet was the main tool of propaganda, and so it was an even playing field. Now with carefully curated mass media, it's basically impossible to get the masses to look away from their phones and fight back. Every revolution in the 20th century happened because of incredibly desperate conditions workers were put through. It seems that capitalists have it dialed in just how much they can push us to where we won't revolt, only stew in indignation. They'll eventually get greedy and try to push us past our limits but who knows when that will happen. It seems like they'll just keep putting the squeeze on us indefinitely. Oh, and then there's this civilization destroying climate catastrophe developing, totally indifferent to our inter human struggles.
It all depends what you're trying to accomplish, and on the backgrounds of the people you're talking to.
When you bring in certain kinds of vocabulary, your inviting a conversation based on identity politics. If that's not what you want to talk about, sometimes your conversation will be more productive if you frame it differently, without using the buzzwords.
Another point to keep in mind when you're dealing with dogmatists is that probably you cannot reach many of them, but what's even more important is that your voice is out there so that everyone else can hear it.
Laughter. It's a powerful thing to laugh in someones face who is (possibly unknowingly) stumping for imperialism and fascism
We do as we've always done, and because it is our interests we represent, not the bourgeois'.
Get some sleep comrade, we all get this way some times
What might help is a consideration for Third-Worldist bourgeoisification theory, i.e. workers in the imperial core are in material contradiction with the global working class. While I don't think all workers in the so-called First World should be written off (I favor the theory that there are internal colonies of super-exploited workers within the imperial core), I think you're always going to struggle to combat US propaganda when the majority have a material interest in believing it.
I also think the decline of the empire is a proletarianizing force within the imperial core, and as things get worse the internal colonies will grow until only a small minority actually can benefit from empire.
I’ve tried to have discussions about DPRK and it’s impossible. The propaganda is fierce. Everyone is convinced people are starving, just as people were convinced there was wide spread starvation in the USSR in the 80s.