Analyzing Right-Wing Propaganda (I)

A friend of mine sent me a link to the right-wing propaganda film Agenda: Grinding America Down and asked for my thoughts on it. Talk about opening the floodgates. Below you will find live-blogging of my experience watching the film in its entirety.

- Ronald Reagan appears onscreen and I already know this is going to be good. Given the black and white picture and his relative youth, I imagine this is a clip from his classic 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech in which he claims Medicare represents the beginning of communism in America and the end of freedom as we know it. I pour my first drink.
- Bunch of people talk and it’s clear this movie is going to be all about culture. Culture is the trump card for the right-wing propaganda machine, because it removes economics completely from the picture. Instead of being the inevitable byproduct of profit-oriented media eager to boost the bottom line, the increasing amount of sex and violence in media is blamed on a nefarious, conspiratorial “liberal elite” and therefore represents one of the first steps on the path to communism.
- So liberals are not actually communists, just the “useful idiots” which the communists use as pawns in their grand scheme to eliminate everything good and decent about America. Nothing paranoid about this!
- Less than 3 minutes in and they’ve brought out the Nazi footage! Even as the talking heads conflate liberalism and communism, it looks like this movie will follow Glenn Beck’s example by conflating communists and fascists (aka the most fervent opponents of communism).
- Why would the left continue to push communist policies? “They’re either ignorant, or they’re evil.” Simple!
- I love how while talking about the left’s evil schemes, they show a book burning in which one of the books being burned was written by Lenin. Doublethink – gotta love it.
- Interesting how Curtis Bowers describes his experiences meeting with the CPUSA. This is a superb example of framing: if you support feminism or gay rights, what you’re really supporting is the destruction of morality and the family.
- Flash-forward to 2008, and Bowers can’t believe how successful their agenda has been! The disintegration of the family, the massive power supposedly wielded by the environmental movement, hate crimes legislation that calls bigotry what it is – all this reveals the utter narrowness and backwardness of Bowers’ views.
- The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen was also one of the books most instrumental in the development of Glenn Beck’s warped worldview. Birds of a feather...
- As I look at all the goals of Communist infiltrators outlined by Skousen, I wonder why I’m supposed to take seriously the paranoid ramblings of a former FBI agent and right-wing Mormon crank as definitive proof of leftist goals in the United States.
- “Goal #27: Discredit the Bible”. You mean like Thomas Jefferson, who ripped out every page in his Bible he believed to be false and was left with a few measly pages clinging to the spine?
- John Stormer cites J. Edgar Hoover calling communists “masters of deceit.” Well, if there’s one figure in American history who was a paragon of honesty and virtue, it’s a guy who blackmailed public figures for their sexuality while wearing dresses in his spare time.
- Hearing these guys talk about Latin America and China and lumping them together as “communist” says much about the lack of nuance in their worldview. Liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists, opportunist capitalists calling themselves communists – whatever, it’s all the same thing!
- Jim Simpson acknowledges that most of the people supposedly spreading communism are not communists, instead calling them mere “useful idiots”. So basically, he’s admitting that any social cause with the merest whiff of progressivism is identical to communism as far as he’s concerned. If anything, all he’s doing is identifying himself as an enemy of human progress! I’m sure if Bowers was alive back in the 1850s, he would have said the same thing about those nefarious abolitionists trying to destroy the Southern way of life.
- Great job, Bowers. With your political spectrum, you’ve once more revealed your utter idiocy and lack of historical knowledge. Even though he tries to lump together liberals, socialists, communists and fascists by saying they all worshipped the state, Bowers seems totally unaware that the Nazis were the declared arch-enemies of the communists, that they beat up communists before they came to power, jailed and murdered them after they did come to power, and – oh yeah, invaded the Soviet Union in the largest act of military aggression in world history. But forget all that – Nazis were basically the same as communists.
- Ah, I see – the entire American political spectrum has moved to the left, not the right. Is that why Obama is cutting Social Security while starting new wars and claiming the right to execute American citizens without charges or trial?
- And there is no opposition to any of this – except, of course, for the entire American right-wing blathering on endlessly about the socialist threat as if it actually existed.
- “What’s So Bad About Communism?” Again, these conservative talking heads have only the most simplistic and base view of what “communism” is. They can’t grasp that there could be severe disagreements and criticisms within the communist movement. They have no apparent awareness of Trotsky’s struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration in the USSR and how he was outright murdered by Stalin’s goons, as were so many of the old Bolsheviks. And they’re so very concerned about how many people were murdered under “communism” – I wonder what their thoughts are on U.S. imperial wars or the current policy of assassination-by-drone-strike based on presidential fiat?
- How many people have died due to capitalism? Funny how nobody ever compiles those figures.
- What a fucking warped view of history these people have. So America’s public schools are teaching how to carry out genocide? Funny, they always seemed to mostly ignore what happened to the Native Americans...
- I was about to praise the narrator for explaining the difference between socialism and communism – until he said that socialism can be summed up as “Big Government”. HELP! I’m trapped in a sea of right-wing talking points!
- The central fallacy – liberalism/socialism/communism are evil because of “wealth redistribution”, because they take money people earned through hard work and give it to the undeserving. You know what that reminds me of? CAPITALISM, which is based on not paying people the full value of their labour while the capitalist pockets more than his fair share. That’s where profit comes from. But you’re never going to hear the right complaining about those lazy capitalists mooching off the workers.
- Why use an atomic bomb to illustrate how socialism destroys everything in its path? I checked the social system of the only country ever to actually use nuclear weapons in war, and it wasn’t socialist.
- You know, I wish there were as many people on the left who believed that the final victory of socialism was at hand as there seem to be on the right.
- Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but right after David Noebel talked about how Venezuela was “hard-core Marxist”, I swear I heard him refer to Nicaragua as “N*gger-agua”.
- The “red plague”. Are you kidding me?
- Watching them talk about how Karl Marx begat the Fabian Socialists who begat the Students for a Democratic Society who begat the Weather Underground, and how many of them are still in positions of power, such as Rev. Jim Wallis. Oh yeah, Rev. Jim Wallis – there’s a figure who will send shivers down the spine of the ruling elite. Amazing how right-wing propaganda manages to make the oppressed look like the oppressors and vice versa.
- Sympathizing with the Viet Cong, how dare he! It’s not like they were morally in the right, fighting for national liberation against a military superpower attempting to protect its puppet government, or anything like that.
- Jim Simpson is correct – throughout my impressionable years in elementary school, all I ever heard from my teachers was how great it would be if I grew up to become an atheist alcoholic homosexual.
- Have to laugh out loud at the juxtaposition of July 4, baseball and apple pie with a group of intellectuals plotting behind the scenes to “make America so corrupt it stinks.”
- There is no middle ground: either the father is the breadwinner, disciplinarian and protector of his family, or the government is. Nice to know there is no alternative possibility to the mother being a domestic slave without her becoming married to “Big Government”.
- “Cultural Marxism” was also one of the obsessions of mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who accused young members of the Labour Party of such when he gunned them down in 2011.
- “Most people will give over to the [government], because they don’t want the chaos.” Kind of like how so many people on the right wet their pants and asked Big Bad Government to protect them after 9/11 with the Patriot Act? And how they continue to demand government take away their rights to protect them from the omnipresent threat of “terrorism”? I pour my third drink.
- Thanks to Saul Alinsky, we now know that everyone on the left worships Satan as a matter of course.
- Saul Alinksy defines the modern American left? Funny, I thought lesser-of-two-evillism did.
- The Piven plan to “overload the welfare system” – how exactly did they encourage this? Was there an organized strategy to overload the welfare system? I’d love to see some proof of that, but that would overwhelm the paranoid fantasy.
- That section on Betty Friedan is almost painfully stupid. But then, so is the rest of the film.
- Society is falling apart - I’ll grant you that, Bowers. But your proposed solutions have no relevance to existing power relations.
- “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Awesome Karl Marx quote!
- The Progressive Caucus of the Democrats – truly, a life-and-death threat to the government of capitalist America which trembles before its 20% representation in Congress.
- I know, Christianity gets so much flak in America, more than any other religion. This is especially unfair when we consider how Christianity has traditionally faced persecution in U.S. society to a degree unmatched by any other religion.
- As the narrator says, those who believe in the sanctity of human life have always been the biggest challenge to those totalitarian regimes who would impose “Big Government” on all of us. Just ask Pope Pius XII.
- Why is it that, unlike Aristotle, we now know slavery to be wrong? Because we have the Bible. ("You may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." - Leviticus 25:44-46)
- Whether we know it or not, “the Left is at war with God.” Such a thoughtful, nuanced interpretation of events.
- “Anti-God” is the same thing as “Anti-free enterprise”. Perhaps an unintentionally revealing analogy...
- If we tell people about problems with the environment, racism, etc., we are stunting their critical thinking skills. If we tell them that the whole world was created by God and all the proof you will ever need is in the Bible, we are creating free-spirited independent thinkers. Gotcha.
- Movie is promoting the idea that it’s all about self-reliance. How many huge corporations got that way without government assistance? Just want to know.
- Global warming is nothing but a hoax! Well, there’s a reasonable and well-considered idea.
- Jim Simpson says socialism will lead to extreme hardship for most Americans. I suppose that makes sense, if you don’t consider the fact that 1% of Americans own 40% of the national wealth.

Remembrance Day: War, Myth and Reality

91 years ago today, the First World War finally ended. The man-made hell in Europe marked the dawn of a new age of industrialized slaughter. Its dubious status as "the war to end all wars" became a bad joke almost immediately following the Armistice, contradicted most visibly by the even greater atrocities of the Second World War. Even today, historians disagree on the causes of World War I, a needless conflict that inalterably changed the course of human development in the 20th century and beyond. War is a contagion that feeds on the collective sense of anger and tragedy engendered by every previous conflict. But even today, the historical conditions that allowed, even encouraged, such collective madness, endure through the continued dominance of the capitalist mode of production.

The world of 1914 was in many ways as globalized as our own. It was the heyday of imperialism, and the European powers had carved up most of the world in an effort to lay claim to raw materials and captive markets that would help enrich the ruling classes of each respective country. Long before the assassination in Sarajevo, there was no room left for each of the powers to expand without encroaching on the territory of the others. In his 1915 pamphlet War and the International, Leon Trotsky explained that the move to total war was borne out of the inevitable contradictions between international capitalist markets and the outmoded, artificial boundaries imposed by the nation-state:

The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit.

The nation must continue to exist as a cultural, ideological and psychological fact, but its economic foundation has been pulled from under its feet. All talk of the present bloody clash being the work of national defense is either hypocrisy or blindness. On the contrary, the real objective significance of the War is the breakdown of the present national economic centers, and the substitution of a world economy in its stead. But the way the governments propose to solve this problem of imperialism is not through the intelligent, organized cooperation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country; which country is by this War to be transformed from a Great Power into a World Power.

The War proclaims the downfall of the national state. Yet at the same time it proclaims the downfall of the capitalist system of economy. By means of the national state, capitalism has revolutionized the whole economic system of the world. It has divided the whole earth among the oligarchies of the great powers, around which were grouped the satellites, the small nations, who lived off the rivalry between the great ones. The future development of world economy on the capitalistic basis means a ceaseless struggle for new and ever new fields of capitalist exploitation, which must be obtained from one and the same source, the earth. The economic rivalry under the banner of militarism is accompanied by robbery and destruction which violate the elementary principles of human economy. World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions but also against the capitalist economic organizations, which has now turned into barbarous disorganization and chaos.

The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its inherent contradictions. …

Capitalism has created the material conditions of a new Socialist economic system. Imperialism has led the capitalist nations into historic chaos. The War of 1914 shows the way out of this chaos by violently urging the proletariat on to the path of Revolution.

The results of the First World War ultimately satisfied no one save the United States, which was the only Great Power left relatively unscathed by the calamity. The Treaty of Versailles paved the way for the Second World War, which was ultimately fought for the same reasons as the First; namely, rising powers (Germany and Japan) were dissatisfied with the restrictions placed on their access to international markets by existing geopolitical power arrangements. In 1914, Germany's chief rivals were France and Great Britain; by 1939, with France and Britain weakened by the strain of fighting the last war, it was the USA that ultimately represented the greatest challenge to German supremacy.

The fact that the world wars were fought out of conflicting economic and geopolitical interests between the Great Powers has been distorted and romanticized in the time since; as always, the winners write the history books. The propaganda message of the Allied powers in the First and Second World Wars - i.e. that this was a fight against militarism and dictatorship on behalf of freedom and democracy - has become ingrained as official historical truth, aided by the undeniable brutality of the Nazi and Japanese war machines amid atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking. But we should not permit historical romanticism to get in the way of analyzing the real concerns of the ruling classes in each belligerent nation. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us today in a story about the increasingly autocratic Iraqi administration of Nouri al-Maliki, governments do not fight wars to spread freedom, democracy and human rights. They do it for more basic economic interests - not for the country as a whole, mind you, but to ensure the elites continue to reap the benefits of captive markets around the globe.

Note this analysis by veteran British Trotskyist Barbara Slaughter, who lived through World War II as a young girl. She beautifully punctures the Churchillian myth proffered by the government of the time and since adopted by all Western governments, getting to the reality of the situation:

After the fall of France, Churchill and the government propaganda machine portrayed Britain as a brave little island fighting on behalf of the people of the world for the defence of democracy. And this was widely accepted. The country was mobilised into the war effort, and a whole generation of youth was conscripted into the armed forces believing they were in fighting for democracy against the evils of fascism.

But far from being just a “little island,” Britain was the most powerful colonial nation the world had ever seen. The British Empire made up one-fifth of the earth’s surface, including the Indian subcontinent as well as vast regions in Africa.

The colonial peoples were cruelly oppressed and exploited and the British bourgeoisie extracted vast raw materials and financial resources from every corner of the globe. It was this power which was challenged by the German war machine. In order to become a world power, the German bourgeoisie required access to the resources of the world. And the establishment of Germany as a world power was something which the British ruling class could not tolerate.

The only possible response of all the major capitalist powers to the economic crisis that was raging in the 1920s and 30s was trade war, leading to military conflict.

In 1938, Trotsky had warned of the imminence of war, which he described as “a catastrophe that threatened the whole culture of mankind.” And what was the essence of that conflict? It was an imperialist war waged by the capitalist great powers—“democratic” and fascist alike—for the division of the world and its resources in the interests of profit.

If the ruling classes' lust for dominance and access to global markets was the key impetus to two world wars, can we now say that this gruesome period in human history is well and truly over? Sadly, no. As long as the capitalist mode of production persists, the bourgeoisie of each Great Power will aim to establish its own predominance in the zero-sum game of global hegemony. Frank Capra's World War II-era American propaganda film Why We Fight pointed to the potential for Axis domination of the Eurasian land mass as the key factor in compelling the USA to join the war effort. Today, the leading ideologues of American imperialism - most notably former Carter advisor and current Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard - emphasize the continued importance of U.S. dominance over Eurasia and its ample natural resources. Is it any wonder that the seemingly pointless war in Afghanistan - with its key strategic location in central Asia - continues to command unswerving support among ruling classes in Canada, the United States and Europe?

As the United States continues its historical decline - aggravated by the inability of the American political-media establishment to see beyond its own imperialistic hubris (biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Expand the war into Pakistan!) - we see the potential for rival powers like China, India and Russia to step into the fray and advance the economic interests of their own elites. The key question is, as the United States is further weakened and these powers grow ever stronger, will we see a new global conflict? I used to think the possibility was remote, given the deeply entangled trade relationship between "frenemies" China and the United States. However, as America becomes ever weaker economically, might it exploit the one area in which it is still indisputably a world leader - i.e., military force?

As this article helpfully explains, that is precisely what the world's premier rogue state has been up to for the last 20 years. The United States has engaged in military action against Iraq, the Balkan states, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and is now seemingly determined to pursue a war against Iran. The military-industrial complex, the backbone of the American economy since the Cold War (and, for all intents and purposes, the Second World War), has truly spun out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if, like Germany in the 1930s (to use a tired comparison), the country's elites turn to renewed war as an economic stimulus. They seem to prefer that to any other option.

Remembrance Day should be a day in which we reflect on the colossal waste and pointless slaughter of war. Sometimes we do, but even today we feel the need to justify the killing through abstract ideals, proclaiming that Canadian soldiers in World War I died "fighting for democracy". Perhaps the individual soldiers did, but the politicians who sent them there most certainly did not. Warren Beatty, as American Communist John Reed in the film Reds, had a piece of dialogue that summed it up best. When asked about the causes of the First World War, the Reed character simply responds, "profits".

It's a considerably less romantic picture than the one we commonly associate with slain soldiers, but an absolutely essential perspective if we are to educate the people about the true causes of war and the need to end the subjugation of human life to corporate profiteering. Sanitized war memorials and regurgitation of contemporary propaganda only serve to remythologize the pointless slaughter.