Category Archives: propaganda

June 30, 2011 · 4:34 pm

When mockery becomes fuel: Bachmann

Presidential politics might be America’s greatest spectacle.   Matt Taibbi writes a nice rant on Michelle Bachmann in the new Rolling Stone.  The piece is an enjoyable introduction into the legacy of irrationality presented by the now-presidential candidate.  I’m interested in a paragraph on page two, where Taibbi talks about how mockery and disagreement are used as a fuel to turbo-charge her desire to win.

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

via Michele Bachmann’s Holy War | Rolling Stone Politics.

It is a good insight.  The question is how to politically challenge these kinds of thinkers without giving them more ammunition?

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June 7, 2011 · 4:10 pm

Racist geography visible in signs

One of my favorite writers is James Loewen, a Sociology professor who wrote Lies my teacher told me.  The book is an analysis of the most popular US history text books assigned in high schools.  Loewen cruises through outlining how the texts are written to exclude and teach generations faulty understandings of our history. His work uncovered “an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation . . .”

He also  has a nice book on American monuments Lies across America: what our historical sites get wrong.

Gwen Sharp is working out some recent work on whiteness and geographical markers in Sociological images.  Here is the discussion of historical markers that identify whiteness.

So what story about our nation do these two monuments tell? The only information contained on the two-sided Fall City monument refers to the activities of Whites; the Native residents were important only when they lost land. For all intents and purposes, the history of the area started only once a White man had set eyes on it. Similarly, Tallent’s arrival in the Black Hills is memorable largely because she was a White woman, whose presence is by definition worthy of note and celebration — imagine, a vulnerable White woman braving the wildness of the Dakota territory! The fact that she was an illegal prospector camping on land she didn’t own while in the pursuit of quick wealth is neither worth mentioning nor a cause to question whether she’s a laudable figure deserving of a monument. Thus, the effect of both of these monuments is to normalize colonization and illegal settlement, and present the arrival of Whites as the beginning of meaningful history.

via Whose History Do Monuments Tell? » Sociological Images.

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June 5, 2011 · 4:18 am

graffiti in Libya: mocking a dictator

photo by Rory Mulholland, The Guardian

Rory Mulholland writes of the new graffiti critiques of Libyan dictator Qaddafi in The Guardian.  Smooth documentation of some cool art.  I liked this paragraph:

The revolution has lifted the lid on a repressed society and the people of Benghazi are making up for the lost years. They have quickly set up newspapers, radio stations and rap bands to say things that just a few months earlier would have got them locked up or worse. But the Gaddafi caricatures are the most striking manifestation of the new-found freedom of expression.

via The Libyan artists driving Gaddafi to the wall | World news | The Observer.

I’ll also note that this graffiti proves the inability of the dictatorship to control the image and the word.  The people can now circumvent state controls, and graffiti is one of the modes of communication which is most likely to allow for anonymity.  Vital for earnest criticism, especially when the subject of critique is likely to shoot you.  I suspect that a fair number of westerners who have been inculcated into the moral panic associated with graffiti read the heavily painted walls of various Arab spring uprisings with anxiety.

It strikes me as a deeply authentic medium of expression which emerges in the context of necessity.  Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and China have all used internet blockades to prevent people from communicating with each other during community mobilizations.  Painting in the street became part of internal communication and collective articulation.

Look again at the painting above.  This image communicates something about the area in which it is painted.  It might mean relative safety from repression, it might be a meeting point, it might even allow non-involved citizens to avoid areas where there might be fighting.   Speaking nothing of the ability of such an image to crack through the conditioning of decades of unquestioning obedience to a terrifying force.

Remember Timisoara?  It’s a small Romanian town, where in 1989, a few citizens rallied around a pastor being bullied by the dictatorship.  After troops were used to put down the protests, a few more people started to make some noise and the town was put under martial law.  To rally the citizens the wretched dictator Nicholau Ceausescu gave a live TV broadcast.  When the crowd started to chant Timisoara and push against security forces, Ceausecu’s face went blank, and seventy six percent of the citizens who were watching got an image they had never seen before — evil on it’s heels.

And a few hours later, Ceausescu was dead.

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June 4, 2011 · 4:20 pm

Hacking and the paranoia of the nation

The assumed brightline between information warfare and warfare has become blurry.

Here is the LA Times reporting that the British have used government spy hackers to attack an Al Qaeda newspaper, replacing the bomb making instructions with the winning cupcake recipe from an Ellen episode.   Huh?

In its summer edition last year, Inspire featured an article titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” But British spy agents belonging to GCHQ infiltrated the pages and “corrupted” them, erasing the instructions and leaving the cupcake recipe in its place.

The Daily Telegraph in London also ran a story that said “the code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for ‘The Best Cupcakes in America’ published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.”

via British spy agents reportedly hack Al Qaeda magazine, replacing its bomb-making instructions with recipes for cupcakes – latimes.com.

The Guardian reports on the well-established Chinese military hacking unit “known as the cyber blue team.”  China announced that it had established the group to influence culture.

Rather than hacking attacks aimed at obtaining private or secret information, Ye and Zhao said China was threatened by psychological operations that used the internet to shift public opinion against governments. They cited the “domino effect” seen in the Middle East and north Africa created by Facebook, Twitter and other social media that are banned by China’s great firewall of censorship.

via China brands Google ‘snotty-nosed’ as cyber feud intensifies | World news | The Guardian.

A couple of days ago, the United States announced it’s new International strategy for cyberspace.  The big change?  The United States wanted to make clear that we can respond with military force when hacked.  That’s right, the next North African kid who messes with the US firewall might face some Cruise missiles.

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June 3, 2011 · 4:33 pm

Rest in power Geronimo Ji Jaga

Thanks to CNN for the photo

I had the pleasure of talking with Geronimo Ji Jaga.  He provided some crucial insights and helped me to realize some stuff about racism, alliances, and capitalism.

For those whose RSS feeds don’t include radical websites, Geronimo Ji Jaga was the Los Angeles Black Panther Party field marshal, and he died yesterday.  He had fought in Vietnam and shared his insight on urban guerrilla struggles with other L.A. panthers.  His role in terms of clarity of cause for the Panthers comes through in quite a few memoirs.

David Hilliard gives Ji Jaga the space to tell his own story in a lengthy first-person quote in his book This side of glory.  Here is an excerpt of Ji Jaga describing his changing awareness.

I stay until ’67.  I’m a sergeant now.  After a few months at home base in Carolina, the riots jump off in Detroit and we’re sent there.  The next thing I know I’m standing next to Lyndon Baines Johnson at Fort Bragg — I want to say something to him but he doesn’t shake my hand.  Then I’m on my way back to Vietnam going to Hue to retake the city.  We get there and the dead are everywhere.  They give us a parade down the streets.  It was like something out of a movie.  Thousands of people.  A weird feeling, just coming from the situation in Detroit.  But I survive all that and now I’m a sergeant, making money, sending it home to Mama, got a girlfriend, got another woman, got a trailer I won shooting dice, got it made in the service, and it’s April fourth, 1968, and I’m about thirty miles south of Hue and I’m on the bunker and on the radio I hear Martin Luther King is assassinated.  Everything got quiet.  I will never forget that feeling — standing on top of that bunker, looking over the country and feeling as though I missed my calling, and within a month I’m out of the service (Hilliard and Cole, 217)

Here is Geronimo describing the moment of his arrest, four days after the police murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago.

The police had made a dry run at the end of November,” Remembers G., ” during a regular community night, at which you had parents and people in the community coming to the library and stuff.  They went through terrorist tactics for fifteen minutes and then it was over.  Then we got the word that they were hitting hus on December 7.  So I stayed there.  Had everything prepared, sandbags at the location, weapons and stuff laid out.  And they didn’t come.

Instead they came the next night.

At that time I had been up like two and a half nights: Fred Hampton had been very close to me.

I figured they would hit the central office on Central Avenue.  Around three-thirty that morning the other Panthers said to me, “Brother you got to get some rest.” It was looking like they might not do it.  We were hoping our information was wrong.

So I say, “Okay.”

We have a bunch of different houses.  I got to Fifty-fifth — a community center — and I just fell out, sleeping on the floor like I always do becuase of Vietnam.

I’m in a deep sleep.  I might have been drugged.  Or it could have been from me staying up so many days and nights.  I don’t even hear the first boom from the front door.  Then they’re shooting everywhere.  But they miss.  because it’s completely dark and because I’m sleeping low.

They bust in.  I see the shots.  My wife, Sandra, goes “Ahh!” She throws herself half on top of me.  She’s screaming and hollering at them — screaming at them the whole time.  She was a very audacious woman.

I’m still trying to focus, trying to figure out whether I’m in Vietnam or here, and what the hell is this?  The detectives come in.  You can tell something is wrong because they look surprised to see me there still living.  They swing me over to handcuff me and I see them take a gun out and put it under the bunk.  To justify the shooting.  Because there wasn’t a single weapon in that building.  That was a community center.  (Hilliard and Cole, 269-270).

Ji Jaga is being framed.  Charged with a murder that he supposedly committed while he was speaking to 400 Bay Area panthers, a meeting that the FBI surveilled, and in fact knew Ji Jaga was innocent. The FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) dictated that law enforcement lie to get revolutionaries off the street.

Clang. Twenty-seven years incarcerated.  Eighteen months on death row.   Years locked down in solitary confinement, because the FBI labeled him dangerous.

A few folks fought hard for his appeal — most notably Johnny Cochran and Stuart Hanlon.  Investigations confirmed that the prosecution had hidden evidence that pointed clearly to Ji Jaga’s innocence.  In 1997 his conviction was overturned.  In subsequent lawsuits, he was awarded 4.5 million dollars for false imprisonment and civil rights violations.

I saw him on the speaking tour shortly after he was released.  The spirit of mutual solidarity was quite strong during this time.  The messages from this talk and our visit were quite clear about mutuality and the need to build bridges between movements. This is a pretty good description of his talk at the time.

Geronimo talked about his background, how he came up in rural Louisiana and how he bought his first pair of shoes by selling catfish. He described how his family organized against the lynching of Black people in the south. And he recalled how his family told him and others to go to the army, “to get some training so we could come back and further protect the community against the Klan terror and we did that.” He talked of his great faith in the ability of people to rise above the everyday struggle for survival and all the other traps the system lays out. He spoke about how the Panthers had gone to gang members and how, “they would change their gangster mentality into a revolutionary mentality.” He said that while he was in prison, “not one time was I ever disrespected by one of the Crips or Bloods” and that the youth need leadership, not contempt or cynicism. He put the blame for problems in the community like drugs and guns and “Black-on-Black violence” on the system, not the people.

via RW ONLINE:Geronimo Speaks Out.

That message still lives.  And if you watched the 1491s video on that OTHER Geronimo, then you know that of course Geronimo Ji Jaga certainly isn’t dead.

 

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June 2, 2011 · 5:35 pm

The best of intentions: Cholera in Haiti

The earthquake which struck Haiti in 2010 resonated world wide.  Concerned humans gave money, donated time and exuded compassion.  Despite these best of intentions, the way that people helped was often symbolic.  A few charities got rich on the quick cell-phone donations.  More than a few donations went astray, and of course, some of the people helping brought carnage.

Like the Nepalese workers contracted by the United Nations who brought cholera with them.   In December, an Al Jazeera camera crew filmed UN workers dismantling latrines which dumped right into the Artibonite river.   Shortly thereafter, a respected epidemiologist announced that Cholera was most likely brought by the UN.  The Nepalese denied this.

Epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux conducted research in Haiti on behalf of the French and Haitian governments.

Sources who saw the report said it had evidence the outbreak was caused by river contamination by Nepalese troops.

The UN said it had neither accepted nor dismissed the findings. The Nepalese army condemned the study as unfounded.

The cholera epidemic has killed 2120 people, and nearly 100,000 cases have been treated, according to the Haitian government.

via BBC News – Haiti cholera: UN peacekeepers to blame, report says.

While people debated the cause, Haitians died.  How bad was it?  In the spring, citizens enraged by rising deaths began piling up coffins of dead relatives in the street to protest lack of action.  You’ve got to be pretty angry (and out of options) to put your dead family members out  as protest blockades.

photo from the SF Bay Guardian, taken by Ansel Herz

What was the response to the Haitian indignation?  Mostly the United Nations denied their responsibility, leaving Haitians dying of Cholera.  This morning, Spoonful of medicine brought the fascinating news that the UN had looked into the subject and yes, in fact, it looks like the UN brought the deadly disease, although they share the responsibility for the spread of the disease with the earthquake itself.

Here is a quote from the actual UN report, written in classic bureaucratic language, but clear enough for my purposes:

“Based on the epidemiological information available, the cholera epidemic began in the upstream region of the Artibonite River served by the Mirabalais Hospital on October 17th, 2010. This region has little to no consumption of fish or shellfish products, which are known to be associated with outbreaks of cholera worldwide. Therefore, the most likely cause of the outbreak was the consumption of contaminated water from the river. An explosive cholera outbreak began on October 20th, 2010 in the Artibonite River Delta, indicating that cholera had spread throughout the Artibonite River Delta within two to three days of the first cases being seen in the upstream region.” UN-cholera-report-final.pdf (application/pdf Object).

The United Nations volunteers contracted for a trucking company to remove their waste.  Here is the waste removal strategy, sometimes called out of sight/out of mind:

The contracting company dispatches a truck from Port-au-Prince to collect the waste using a pump. The waste is then transported across the street and up a residential dirt road to a location at the top of the hill, where it is deposited in an open septic pit (Figure 11). Black water waste for the two other MINUSTAH facilities – Hinche and Terre Rouge – is also trucked to and deposited in this pit. There is no fence around the site, and children were observed playing and animals roaming in the area around the pit. UN-cholera-report-final.pdf (application/pdf Object)

How do you know that this is caused by the UN workers?  Well the strain of Cholera is identical to the strain in Southeast Asia.

A careful analysis of the MLVA results and the ctxB gene indicated that the strains isolated in Haiti and Nepal during 2009 were a perfect match. The strains isolated in Haiti are also perfect matches by MLVA and ctxB gene mutations with South Asian strains isolated between or since the late 1990’s.  UN-cholera-report-final.pdf (application/pdf Object).

And of course lets discuss the cover-your-ass conclusion paragraph.  After thirty pages of exposition explaining the 99% likelihood that the UN disaster assistance brought more terrifying disaster to Haiti, the report authors punk out.

The introduction of this cholera strain as a result of environmental contamination with feces could not have been the source of such an outbreak without simultaneous water and sanitation and health care system deficiencies. These deficiencies, coupled with conducive environmental and epidemiological conditions, allowed the spread of the Vibrio cholerae organism in the environment, from which a large number of people became infected. The Independent Panel concludes that the Haiti cholera outbreak was caused by the confluence of circumstances as described above, and was not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual.

The source of cholera in Haiti is no longer relevant to controlling the outbreak. What are needed at this time are measures to prevent the disease from becoming endemic.

The claim that the “deficiencies” of the Haitian health care system are equally responsible for the introduction of the disease into Haiti is ridiculous.  These factors account for the spread of the disease, but certainly not the introduction.   No longer relevant?  How about for the next United Nations disaster relief?  How about for the kids dying of cholera in Haiti this morning?  Seems like victim blaming to me.

Responding to a natural disaster provides the kind of cover for half-assed assistance.  Because of the “disaster” the lack of reflection can be blamed on the need for speedy action.  The risk of this is that we excuse terrible decisions, because the people were ‘trying to help.”

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May 12, 2011 · 4:23 pm

Propaganda: facebook vs. google

Propaganda impedes the ability of the viewer/listener to distinguish who is making the message.  Facebook hired a P.R. firm (Burson-Marsteller) to plant semi-bogus stories about privacy concerns in the media.  Here is the Guardian on this trickery:

Suspicions in Silicon Valley were aroused earlier this week when two high-profile media figures – former CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman, and John Mercurio, a former political reporter – began pitching anti-Google stories on behalf of their new employer, Burson-Marsteller. The pair consistently refused to disclose the identity of their client.

Goldman and Mercurio approached USA Today and other outlets offering to ghost write op-ed columns and other stories that raised privacy concerns about Google Social Circle, a social network feature based on Gmail.

In their pitch to journalists, the pair claimed Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users – in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google’s] agreement with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission]”.

Facebook’s cover was blown when Burson-Marsteller offered to help write an op-ed for Chris Soghoian, a prominent internet security blogger. Soghoian challenged the company’s assertion that Social Circle was a privacy threat and accused them of “making a mountain out of a molehill”.

Soghoian was stonewalled by Burson-Marsteller when he asked them who their client was. He later published an email exchange between himself and Mercurio.

Cordasco said on Thursday: “Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client.

via Facebook paid PR firm to smear Google | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Offering to ‘ghost-write’ stories is fairly common in P.R. circles.  A casualty of the 24-hour news cycle, many reporters and editors are on constant copy hunts.  The lengthy time given to reporters to fact check has mostly disappeared instead replaced with quick internet searches.  Corporations (and their public relations mouthpieces) can offer to write the whole article in journalistic prose and then offer the article to a well-known pundit (or a beat reporter).

For those reporters on the grind — it is like a sudden snow-day off from school —  you are freed from the responsibilities of actually reporting.  But of course for those of us who still wish that mass media was actually reflecting accurately what someone SAW this is a tragic development.

But of course, the tendrils of internet companies (and google in particular, the medium by which many 0f us do our own ‘fact-checking’) quietly re-adjusting written history is a terrifying possibility.

Internet barriers presented by nations (China for instance) quickly become comfortable to the citizens. Evan Osnos wrote a fascinating essay describing his conversations and observations on a Chinese tour of Europe.  When he asks one of his fellow tourists if they used Facebook, he comes up with this reflection.

I asked Promise if he used Facebook, which is officially blocked in China but reachable with some tinkering. “It’s too much of a hassle to get to it,” he said. Instead, he uses Renren, a Chinese version, which, like other domestic sites, censors any sensitive political discussion. I asked what he knew about Facebook’s being blocked. “It has something to do with politics,” he said, and paused. “But the truth is I don’t really know.” I recognized that kind of remove among other urbane Chinese students. They have unprecedented access to technology and information, but the barriers erected by the state are just large enough to keep many people from bothering to outwit them. The information that filtered through was erratic: Promise could talk to me at length about the latest Sophie Marceau film or the merits of various Swiss race-car drivers, but the news of Facebook’s role in the Arab uprisings had not reached him.

via Chinese Citizens on Tour in Europe : The New Yorker.

It isn’t so much that any citizen of any nation censors themselves to protect the nation, but we swim in so much state-oriented media that it would be impossible to know what we don’t know.  Those elements that are forbidden to us, must be inaccessible for a good reason.

In this context, we should probably argue that corporate media filtration is more dangerous than national media filters.  As Osnos points out, people can circumvent national information barriers, but it is trickier to outwit google or facebook.

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