John Pilger – Eurasia Review Aug 22, 2023
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch and better connected.
Are we? Or do we live in a media society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies is based in North America. The internet and social media — Google, Twitter, Facebook — are mostly American-owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage are largely unreported, and unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.
“US foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said this: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually 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.”
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage — that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.“
It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars”: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that President Joe Biden’s theft of $7-billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.
At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors’. In other words, nuclear war.
It says: “Nato’s enlargement has been a historic success.”
I read that in disbelief.
A measure of this “historic success” is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, and omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor who the Americans made clear was their man.
In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.
Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23-million people dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.
On the same day, Russia invaded — according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
On 25 April, the US defence secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken”.
America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn. Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it?
According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14 000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and “think tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labelled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and called for these “pests” to be “eradicated.”
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point-blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of World War I was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory-style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Assange’s character, he was made a public enemy. Then vice-president Biden called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange — the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
” In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer. ”
Didn’t read beyond that guff. Piljer is a disinfo shill. Just like that other “nazi” lover ( LOL ) Carl Jones how is often seen in the comments section making a complete fool of himself.
Shall we talk about “the submissive void” of the Islamic Public? Nazis raised their right arm, but Moslems get on the floor and touch the ground with their heads: having submitted to a God the priest told them about, they then assume the right to have all people submit to THEM, and maybe get fed into the kebab machine if they won’t. Islam actually means submission, and gives you a scientific void (and it never led science, that was some anti-Islamic Azerbhaizhanis in an Aryan resurgence). Nazis got into a war but that’s nothing compared to 1400 years of forced conversions, (submit to the moronic gang or get killed). In Islam, beauty is a bad thing, so Europe gets flooded with depressing uglies, after thousands of years of sifting them out, and we have to look at sad, fat, pregnant, tax-supported mongs instead of humans
The submissive void, the thicko sheeple, who’ve led the NWO Nazi West to the precipice of doom and disaster on so many fronts.
It doesn’t matter how educated you are, you’re still a thicko sheeple by choice. In fact, the more educated, the more embedded you are in the Nazi matrix.
It gets worse. Climb the corporate or state ladders, get a mortgage, yes, the fastest way to instill prejudices, is the death grip (mortgage). As this point, you’ll hate all you precieve below you, and worship all you perceive above you. As for foreigners, you’ll hate them in various degrees, all dependent on which triggers the fake news uses on the thicko sheeple.
Then we have mostly Nazi alternative media operators who tell us that don’t worry, the thicko sheeple are waking up. This is hilarious.
The alternative media is riddled with Nazi state operators. They pull your triggers every day using ‘communists, commies, liberals, wokies, socialists, and even greens, and when I say greens, I mean those who get paid to protest. Not a full list, but all these labels are designed to have you running around the same dead end track every day of your life.
I can’t mention these Nazi alternative media operators, because my comment won’t get. posted. YouTube is virtually saturated with them, and they stay on air. Ask yourselves why.
Then we have this agenda that they are all in on it. In the past, I would have agreed, but today’s conflagration is planned, but it’s not a right hand and left hand Punch and Judy show. This is it! There’s a huge gapping crack in the world order, and it’s real.
Both Russia and China are on massive war footings, they’ve even given Iran their near latest military knowhow, and as I’ve been saying for a few years, Israel is on borrowed time, and in recent months, Israel has been dumped down to a third tier country. It’s foreign policy has become ancient, and the truth is, if Israel or the US, or both, attacks Iran, they will suffer major damage. In fact, Israel could cease to exist if Iran decides to hit the right targets.
Just take a stroll, anywhere you can mingle with the thicko sheeple, and just realise, they have brought us to where we are now. They elected (lol) the likes of Thatcher, Johnson, and Truss. Far too many to list here. Of course, your votes don’t matter. But it’s the fact that so many turn out to vote. If no one voted, their system would collapse.
Like I’ve said on here many, many times. I’ve not heard, read, or seen a single contributor suggest that no one go and vote. Maybe I missed it.
No matter what bullshit propaganda is published on this site, they will never ask you to stop voting.
Take your typical home owner (in name), or a mortgage payer, they don’t want any change. They want those below them to stay where they perceive them to be, and those above, to stay where they are, because they believe they’ll be one of the few to advance, usually by the rigged property market. I read the other day that the housing market is grinding to a stagnation halt. There’s a good reason for this. They don’t want prices to collapse, so you stop sheeple accepting lower prices by strangling the money supply. We will see what new crimes they can come up with to stop the house of cards collapsing.
Pilger fails to mention Kolomoisky’s creation Ziolenskij. Because that is what its all about. The Nazis are the Zionsts creation.
He also fails, but that is jurisprudence difficulty, refering to the question of soverignty in this case. A country that is a bolsjevic construct, although with a properly selected government, crushed by a Zio-coup, massacre against one of its minorities, and so forth, is not the definition of a sovereign state, wouldnt you say?
Not a peep about who pulls the strings behind the curtain
Like Chomsky, Pilger still reeks of the stench of the gatekeeper.
Right about much but only so far and no further.
Still perpetuating the myth that the world wars were accidental and ultimately necessary to defeat ‘evil’, but never the result of aeons of scheming.
Never once naming the you-know-whos.
That he is still allowed to publish in the mainstream says much.
John Pilger? Henry Makow? More pseudonyms for Carl Jones?
It’s those wascalry Nazis again.
I’m afraid it’s way too late for any writers to “stand up”.
The brain-washing of the ZOG Zombies has been multi-generational… and, for all intents and purposes, is now part of their genetic make-up…
and you’d have better luck trying to teach a jellyfish to do the high-jump
than you would trying to penetrate into the dense abyss the passes for the “mind” of the typical THICK Brit, DUMB Yank or Euro’TARD
Ha…it’s not Fascism John..Fascism sought to contain the Corporations..hehe.. to para-doxically ‘incorporate’ these aggregates of lifeless greedy nonsense in service to the non existent so called state..these death cults animated by the Spells of ancient snake eyed Yahoodim…
These ‘technocrats’..’futurists’..’progressives’…’communitarians’… these hehe..
‘moderns’…. Wizards of Oz..
Of course he’s right aboot one thing..and that being…when you stare into the void..it stares right back at you… as a lonely Syphilitic German imbecile once noted when pissed on absynth.. (not Leni or Adolph)..
..hardly revelatory..though….is it?….
Pilchard says…
“An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone”…
Pilger just like these people he lists is a controlled op..a pied piper leading you back to where ‘they’ want you.. a ‘serious’ journalist..oh yes..one that knows where he is allowed to stray..
and where he isn’t..
to a man all these people and publications listed pushed the vaxxine…
and have somehow missed the biggest ‘story’. of their sad and co-pted careers… the WSWS and ‘Caitlin’..were particularly cringe..
Yay go lefty’s.. bash the righty’s.. left right left right..and over the cliff you go!..
Dear dear…
He is missing the massive common denominator in all he writes. Just another deflection agent.
What will it take for John Pilger to write,
‘there is something very wrong with the official story of 9/11’
Sad really
Just another pro-Putin Commie agent.
Let’s be clear. There is no functional alternative. We can rant and rave to our heart’s content, yet the inexorable march to transhuman State capitalism continues. Where I live the local university held its annual Society Day. While attending I approached the table where sat supposed Anarchists. I asked what they thought of Bakunin’s fight with Marx. Their response was: Who? Then I visited the local Anarchist bookstore hoping to find people opposed to the State imposition of mandates over the hoax Covid pandemic. Upon my arrival I was met with a sign requiring me to wear a mask and swab my hands. Even they had swallowed the State’s edicts and propaganda. I repeat: There is no alternative. We are doomed to continue down the road of self destruction until we come to the end. Just another failed civilization.
99% of people in politics, medias, justice, military,
secret services are unproductive parasites !
Stalin was right to send many of them into the gulag
or deathchamber .
old Pilger still writing the good fight. I take it he has saved the Aboriginals and is once again setting his pen on our demonic overlords. Another project of his is the curious case of Assange, who has always supported the official account of 9/11, very strange, even stranger people believe Assange is some sort of martyr. His take on that event proves he cannot be trusted.
Good grief, Carl Jones – do you know any Mortgage Owners?
I doubt any of the institutionally Left Cultural Elite Rent instead of Buying.
Harold Pinter certainly didn’t, and he drove around in a Rolls and had a Maid opening the front door to people.
This hatred of ordinary people owning their own houses is pure Karl Marx – direct quote – ‘The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.’
*******
‘Like I’ve said on here many, many times. I’ve not heard, read, or seen a single contributor suggest that no one go and vote. Maybe I missed it.’
Maybe not here, Mr. Jones, but when I used to read Peyer Hitchens’ blog, he was always saying it.
He is always open about his ex-Communism , too.
‘Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.’
Perfect finale to a loveable rant. Thank you, Mr Pilger!
I still remember “they hate us for our freedoms” a multi level campaign in a few words.
John never mentioned covid or global warming two of the biggest propaganda campaigns of all time. Gotta wonder why.
In NZ the government pays radio and TV stations to broadcast their Covid and climate change ‘news’. The TV news should have to tell viewers that they are listening to a government paid segment about global boiling etc. It probably happens the same way everywhere else?
This too is going to come to an end. The Jews have come as far as they are going to come. The job they were given, without their knowledge has run it’s course.
They believe they worship and serve Yahwey, dwelling in Thick Darkness, but have been Baal’s proxies all the time.
They have been empowered to gain full power, showing their greed, filthiness, and murderous child killing, as the unknowing people of Baal.
Yahwey timed this to perfection.
What a way to show his mighty power and destroy the world power of the Jews in one fell swoop at his coming.
Lerch: I don’t think they even know the system they are in.
a german edjucated truthteller, dead now by
jew poison , found more provaxers under his
old academic friends . I only find healthy resisting
spirit under workmen . they have still more instincts .
they smell when something stinks . and last 8 years
hell of a lot stank . jewish brainshit stinks !
CIA/MI5+6/Mossad media .
Leni Reifensthall made heroic films that inspired Germans. So what? Gag me with the Nazi spoon too many times, then shame on me.
Mass propaganda is a Hewish specialty, which is why they recycle their usury dollars into buying up the media.
Leni Riefenstahl was much more than a mere propagandist. She was a pioneer of documentary film-making, whose use of panoramic landscapes, vignettes of traditional German life, prominent intervals of musical score and taste for close-up, wildlife photography, interspersing her narrative, demarcate Riefenstahl as a genuine artist.
She has had a considerable influence on film-making, though this is rarely acknowledged.
Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ (a fiction) was, in my opinion, clearly influenced by the unique editing style of Leni Riefenstahl, which was intended to provide commentary of itself.
The latter part of her life, up to her death in 2003, at the age of 101, was taken up by her love of underwater photography and she had several compendiums of her work published. Leni Riefenstahl, despite endless harassments, remained loyal to the Fuhrer till the end.
She ought to be an icon of womanhood, not its outcast.