Swapping Propaganda for Propaganda

the weird certitude of careful vagueness

See also what I wrote today at The Blaze, but there’s a lot of this going around:

See, it’s not that there were any kind of real events, or that, say, the mass slaughter of unarmed people at kibbutzim or a music festival were really things worth mentioning, but they’re making you hate with their propaganda. It’s a trick, and the news media is deliberately manipulating you by claiming that this event occurred. And on and on and on, just an endless bucket of bilge:

“Atrocities and images of war race across the screen as the people rage. No one asking any questions, and, of course, no one was actually there to personally witness these atrocities.”

What does this mean? Does it mean it didn’t happen? They’re getting you to refocus on an imaginary oppressor. Hamas is imaginary?

None of this worthless babbling replaces credulity with skepticism. None of it is, as they like to say, just asking questions. It’s just a refusal to see a real event, and to refuse to see it because it leads to places people don’t wish to be taken. I don’t want a war, so these pictures must be propaganda. Look for the places where the people who say this shit — don’t fall for the propaganda! oh, right, they murdered babies, you moron! — tell you what they think actually happened. They question and occlude, but they don’t clarify. They impede claims and reject claims but don’t make claims. They only say what didn’t happen:

The Israelis lied and said babies were beheaded! So did Hamas kill some babies? How many? What did they do? Not addressed. “The price Gaza is paying is unimaginable.” So the price Gaza is paying is only and entirely because of the false claim that a lot of babies were beheaded, and no price would otherwise be called for if a bunch of babies were murdered but mostly not beheaded? What does any of this rhetorical cloud add up to?

Governments lie to start wars, and lie at the start of wars, and lie about the conduct of wars. None of this means that nothing in war is ever true, or that every event depicted in media didn’t happen. Throwing it all out, wholesale, is just the inversion of believing it all. It’s not anti-propaganda; it’s the mirror image of the same propaganda: I’m not some rube who falls for sick government lies, I’m sophisticated! I believe nothing!

The bizarre thing is that none of the blanket rejection of fact claims is necessary to get people where they want to go. You can acknowledge [Aggression One] and still resist or seek to limit [Aggression Two]. Here, watch me perform this miracle of rhetoric: “I’m horrified that Hamas murdered all those helpless people, but we’ve got to keep the response from becoming a major regional war that turns into a bloodbath.” You can acknowledge the thing that happened without being passively dragged — by them, of course, by the “they” who want you believe all of this propaganda! — to outcomes you decline. You can still think in the presence of disturbing evidence, and argue for your preferences.

At the end of a week of reading news and watching coverage of war and protest, I feel emptied; I feel like I see less than I did when I started. So much of the discussion is this nihilistic shit-throwing that shuts down information instead of building it. My mind is glutted with angry claims about what didn’t happen.

[X] is what they want you see, idiot!

So [X] is false?

Well, like, it’s all propaganda, man.

The real thing lurking under all the discourse of occlusion is that discourse has become functionally meaningless. Protests and media product decry Israeli viciousness and savagery, but then look for the action. What other Middle Eastern states are acting against Israel? Is Egypt rushing troops to its border with Gaza to throw a protective ring around Palestinians? Are Saudi fighter jets chasing away Israeli bombers? What is anyone doing? It’s interesting, isn’t it, to see the chasm between words and deeds.

Action and discourse have gone in different directions because discourse is empty, emotive and platitudinous. There’s no thought in it, and none of it means anything.

Events continue, unimpeded by the idiocy of political symbols and campus protest. We have to find a way out of this wilderness of empty gestures.