Only twenty years ago, when our government and media were doing all they could to sell the war in Iraq, they had almost ideal conditions for carrying out an imperialist psyop. They were able to fully harness the power of religion, and of U.S. patriotism, to convince the majority of the people that Washington had an obligation to intervene in any given part of the globe. Then the country underwent a political reorientation. One where more liberals revealed themselves to be obstinate supporters of the new cold war, while many right-leaning people shifted towards a proto kind of anti-imperialism.
It was a spontaneous mass consciousness shift, brought about through the great disillusionment that came from Obama’s refusal to rescue the working class from the 2008 economic meltdown. And it irreversibly weakened the imperialist narrative managers. “A lot of people probably tuned out from mainstream media long ago,” wrote the journalist Caitlin Johnstone in 2018, “but as the manipulators of the political establishment become more desperate, their movements are becoming a lot more obvious, and they’ve been giving us a lot of valuable information lately.” At this stage, the main thing the narrative managers are trying to do is re-create the old dynamic of left-right culture war battles, and thereby prevent the people’s anti-imperialist impulses from being nurtured.
When it comes to the right, their tactic for doing so is to promote illiberal figures—such as Javier Milei and the far-right polemicist Bronze Age Pervert—to lead conservatives and libertarians towards aiding imperialism. This is an attempt to replace the greatly effective discourse psyop that the empire used to be able to utilize.
The war propaganda machine’s main strategy from the Bush era was based within the ideas propagated by Murdoch media, which portray the world as a struggle between the “good” American side and the “evil” communist side. The ruling class, which at that moment was mainly invested in the Republican Party, could manufacture consent for war by connecting imperialist interventions to God, country, and the family. This was so useful for the propagandists because they were able to make illiberal values, in which one feels devoted to a certain belief system and social structure, appear to be dependent on supporting U.S. foreign policy.
As time passed, and capitalism entered into its next phase of collapse, those illiberal values stayed while the loyalty to the war machine went away. By 2015, the predominant section of U.S. conservatives approved of Trump’s statement “the American dream is dead.” Which translated to them also now being watchful of efforts by our most powerful institutions to scam them, whether through unsafe vaccines or through wars sold under false pretenses.
Milei and Bronze and Pervert are working to sell just such a war: the proxy war against China which the new cold warriors want in Taiwan. Milei’s administration has been participating in Taiwan provocations, while for years BAP has been aggressively promoting the empire’s Taiwan narratives. To make these things appeal to their target audience, they’re surrounding their pro-war activities with an updated version of the Fox News rhetoric that worked so well a generation ago. This month Milei gave a speech at the World Economic Forum that blamed “socialism” for the world’s economic ills, and that’s been described as having “broken the internet.” BAP is promoting a version of this kind of new rightism that’s more extreme, combining his anti-communist arguments with statements decrying our lack of ethnic homogeneity.
You’d think that antisemitism would be central to the rhetoric of these two narrative manipulation actors. But with the present effort to sell the genocide against Gaza, the main right-wing psyops are for the moment pivoting away from that particular tactic. Milei is a fanatical Zionist who’s converted to Judaism because of this, while BAP is Jewish and able to be accepted by far-righters who don’t prioritize attacking Jews. That doesn’t mean antisemitism doesn’t continue to be prevalent on the right, though, with much of the conservative opposition towards Israel coming from antisemitic conspiracy thinking rather than genuine anti-imperialist consciousness. And the modern right’s psyops have potential to take advantage of this widespread antisemitism, even if they’re at present trying to distance themselves from it. (Which is of course nothing more than posturing, as Milei has put Nazis in his cabinet; this mirrors how Israel itself maintains ties to global fascist movements, including Nazi ones like Ukraine’s Banderites.)
Antisemitism is one part of the larger phenomenon of false consciousness, which represents the basis for today’s right-wing psyops. The war propagandists of yesterday told conservatives that they must hate Washington’s geopolitical challengers in order to defend our powerful institutions, because back then conservatives saw these institutions as friends of God and the family. Now that most conservatives no longer see these institutions as allies for their illiberal religious social structures, the war propagandists instead tell them that Washington’s adversaries are on the side of the deep state.
Alex Jones, another one of these controlled opposition “libertarians,” has been pushing this lie the most explicitly. He’s been saying that China and Iran are involved in the social engineering schemes of the Democratic Party, the legacy media, big pharma, and the intelligence agencies. Which is an idea so absurd that someone could only believe it if they’re already on an ideological path which makes them inclined to make conspiratorial connections, while rejecting a materialist analysis.
This is the same way that people come to antisemitism, or “the stupid man’s socialism.” In order to be radicalized towards blaming the wrong sources for capitalism’s contradictions, you need to be persuaded to view serious thinkers as part of the conspiracy. Like when Russia’s czarists tried to save their threatened system by fabricating the antisemitic propaganda piece “Protocols of the Elders of Zion;” or when anti-communists invented the “Judeo-Bolshevism” narrative to portray Marxism as a Jewish conspiracy; today’s imperialist psyop agents want to shift blame onto designated scapegoats while demonizing those who correctly diagnose the problem.
When Trotsky saw the Russian peasantry in large part be susceptible to antisemitism, his response was to stubbornly insist that the peasantry wasn’t worth prioritizing within the revolution, leading him to his idealist “permanent revolution” theory. Communists of today can’t make the equivalent mistake. We must organize against imperialism and monopoly capitalism in our communities, whether urban or rural, with the intent of bringing in revolutionary elements wherever they exist. When we find false consciousness, which is going to be often, we need to respond not by concluding that the people are fundamentally reactionary. We need to respond by working with the allies we can find within the fight against the primary contradiction, that being U.S. hegemony.
This doesn’t mean tailing the reactionaries or condoning bigotry, it means embracing the only strategy which can let us defeat reactionary politics. It will let us smash monopoly capital, while proving communists to be the friend that the people need. This is what will let us expand our efforts to educate the people, and advance our consciousness shift to its next stage: the stage where the people have not only recognized that our imperialist institutions are the enemy, but also recognized how to fight this enemy.
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