Leni Riefenstahl said her epic films glorifying the Nazis depended on a “submissive void” in the German public. This is how propaganda is done.
Leni Riefenstahl, center, filming with two assistants, 1936. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By John Pilger
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 Fuhrer.
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, better connected.
Or do we in the West 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 10 media companies are 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 is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
Harold Pinter Broke the Silence
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.
“U.S. 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.”
Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during 1934 rally in Nuremberg. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
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 U.S. 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-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spain’s Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez on June 28 in Madrid. (NATO)
It says: “NATO’s enlargement has been an historic success.”
I read that in disbelief.
The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, 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 had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.
Dec. 7, 2015: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.
NATO on Hitler’s Borderline
Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million 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 Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.
[Related: John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda]
On the same day, Russia invaded — an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
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On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev 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.
[Read: Joe Lauria: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War]
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 Kiev 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 Stepan 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 Battaltion, “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, 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 U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and “think-tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested these “pests” be “eradicated.”
Andriy Beletsky, commanding officer of the special Ukrainian neo-Nazi police regiment Azov, with volunteers in 2014. (My News24, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
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 south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like 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 is not new. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were given knighthoods for their compliance. In 1917, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. 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.
Julian Assange in 2014. (David G Silvers, Wikimedia Commons)
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian 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 Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange — the U.N. 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 The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, 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 film-makers 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.
This article is based on an address the author delivered at the Trondheim World Festival, Norway.
John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote a book on paradoxical logic of organizations — paradoxical because in spite of coherent logic, it goes against our intuitions based on wishful thinking, in terms of laws and examples.
One law is that the amount of time divided to debate a topic is inversely proportional to its importance. Taking to its limit, topics of paramount importance like war and attendant multi-trillion losses are not debated at all, they are “consensus” that in the latest case, emerged by stealth and was followed by the mother of all obfuscations. And as a corollary, the “message coordination” exceeds that in Communist states before the dissolution of Soviet Union. People could get confused and develop doubts: since 2016, spreading doubts became a crime, “objectively pro Russian” etc., like Consortium News itself.
One need look no further than the word ‘media’. While it has numerous meanings -the middle quality or state between two extremes; a reasonable balance: is to mediate
The MSM is no longer really media at all other than a form of broadcasting – but to be informative and independent is almost extinct
Media is largely an organ of the state – is that media
Even by John Pilgers high standards, this is a great article.
and unlimited hangout with whitney webb and catherine austin fitts. patrick wood
We have distributed this widely….and even got some comments back. People seem to not want to get into the details but say things like ‘sad but true’, or ‘interesting’. I suspect its difficult to face the rabbit hole we all may be living inside……..
Much more self congratulatory to pan the anti vaccers, and trumpsters among us.
But perhaps chinks in the armor of ‘western values’ and ‘imperial nostalgias’ have woke some people up………..but the degree of the nightmare impaired critical parts of their brain.
Fear can do terrible things to a human mind……being the gentle rabbit like creatures that we are: Propaganda about our innate warlike nature to the contrary.
Maybe our angry right wing is just justifiable scared sh***tless??
> I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
I think you’re forgetting about Clinton’s war of aggression against Serbia.
That was every bit as blanket as this one, in fact even more so, because even more of the Left bought into that one.
Always happy to read Mr Pilger.
A pillar of ethical journalism, he is as usual, spot on.
This is such a great article! It’s been appalling to me to see how consent gets manufactured and truth gets ignored. Part of the problem, honestly, is impatience combined with information overload. People are overwhelmed. They don’t have the psychic energy to look for alternate views, and they don’t want to believe that trusted institutions are lying to them. But they are! Our publishers, filmmakers, and news sources are the beating heart of our empire, and that heart must somehow be changed. It’s very hard for me to see how we, as individuals, can change it.
I also firmly believe the U.S. empire is dying. Perhaps truth will eventually emerge as the empire is weakened. One can hope and pray for this. In the meantime, I am very grateful for outlets like this one and voices like yours.
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, “is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
How to term that statement? Ironic? Mr. Biletsky is in a crusade against a ‘Semite led untermensch’.. whilst serving as a leader of a Nazi battalion financed and headed up by Zionist ubermensch. Go figure.
It is becoming more difficult to detect propaganda. There is no one to much trust anymore. So many of the people, companies and institutions you interact with on a daily basis are pushing some ulterior motive…pure propaganda, a sordid agenda or mass marketing. You really have to pay attention or find yourself swallowed up by cowflop.
“In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity…”
At one level, that is obvious to many left-leaning readers. But at a deeper level, many are blindered to ignore the implication that all of us who live in a corporate-democratic system are inextricably tied in to the system. We are made to be the agents of our own destruction, even as we rail and protest against the injustice of it all.
I could move to a cabin on a hillside and pretend that I’m out of the system. I could even move to the Falkland Islands, raise sheep, and pretend that my local society is outside the system. Until the war comes to where I am. Nobody is outside the system. Not any more.
The renewed aggression of the US against Russia and China is most coherently understandable in the context of Great Power competition for economic domination. (More subtly, the sacrifice of Europe in the name of Ukraine is another play in the Great Game, to cripple the EU as an economic competitor).
When investigating local corruption, whether political or some other sort, it’s always good advice to follow the money. Turns out, that aphorism scales up all the way to the global.
Thank you for this wonderful article Mr. Pilger! Your truth rings loud and clear – now if the masses will only pay attention rather than remaining in their collective self-induced stupor…
Important article which unfortunately brings to mind Troy’s Cassandra.
OTHERS
TAE and Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Thank you so much John Pilger for the hope you help sustain with your critical writing in these very dark days. I am now an old man, and you help me think that there is hope that my grandchildren will live in a world with a greater justice, more tolerance and peace.
I’ve been writing critiques of complicit Christianity and blind devotion to our two-party politics for sixteen years. I can’t say that even among my friends I have made a dent. The Fox-fed and MSNBC-fed devotees go mindlessly along with what they are fed nightly. I’ve long pondered the simple line that Luke records Jesus as saying as he laid out the crux of his sermon on the mount: “I say to you that listen.” I’d suggest the prophet knew and was articulating in simple fact–most won’t ever listen.
TP Graf: The very question I put to the Lord in 2020 when the churches all closed on command.. What’s up with the complicit/ignorant Christians? Those spirit-of-truth filled – (supposedly) people who should be the FIRST to know. Not the last to grasp the facts. What he told me was very compelling. He said ‘We are in the mirror of Mt. Sinai. First of all, the mirror meaning ‘the end is told from the beginning’. (Isaiah 46:10). At Mt. Sinai – (Numbers 13 – 16) you have a people SAVED from Egypt (the world) by a savior (Moses/Christ) just outside the Promised Land – being tested one last time. Of 12 spies sent to scout out the Land the Lord had promised to His people, just 2 believed him and gave a good report. WE CAN DO THIS! (Joshua and Caleb). The majority (10 in this case) brought an ‘evil report of unbelief’. OK Here it is.. the mirror of the Church today.. whether it’s a virus (Covid) which should be of no consequence to a man walking with God.. or the deceit of a hundred years of US foreign policy.. etc etc.. WHO are the believers lining up behind? The true report or the evil report? The men of faith, or men of this world? The rest I think you must know. 100% of the adults at that time, of God’s Chosen People, lined up behind the fearful unbelieving 10 men. ALL of them perished in the wilderness. ONLY TWO men alive at that time, Joshua and Caleb, went into the promised land, along with the innocent (not yet tested) children born in the 40 years of wilderness wandering. Yes. This is what he compared to our day. Do the math. The numbers are pitiful. The reality is pitiful. A handful of ‘saints’ know the score. But we are not leading the pack by any score.
Nothing says that you want to counter the pernicious influence of the People’s Republic of China more than consciously employing the most hubristically anti-life, totalitarian rhetoric from the Great Leap Forward, right?
Why stop there when he could also hang dogs on lampposts with incomprehensible signs about Xi Jinping being an SOB to really send a message? Heck, while he is at it, Peter Hartcher might as well proclaim “Year Zero” and prescribe remedies for “memory sickness” to stop the export of Maoism in its tracks.
Glad to see Western world still have people like you even after reading this fantastic artical. Good luck.
To be clear, my comment was a send-up of Peter Hartcher’s editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald mentioned by John Pilger, rather than being a critique of Pilger’s article itself, not least given Pilger’s record of adversarial but nuanced work documenting what happened in, e.g., Cambodia:
“The US not only helped create conditions that brought Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot’s exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support – $85 million from 1980 to 1986 – was revealed six years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then-counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Winer said the information had come from the Congressional Research Service (CRS).”
Source:
John Pilger, “The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1997
Mr Pilger asks,
“When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?”
Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five were great anti-war novels portraying the insanity of WW2. Deer Hunter and Platoon were great anti-war movies portraying the insanity of the Vietnam war. Where is the great anti-war novel portraying the insanity of the 20 year long US murder of Afghans? Until then, here is a hilarious satirical political / scifi dystopian story downloadable for free (until it gets censored for too much truthiness):
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwwY2c16I4w
John that is such a wonderful cri de coeur that I have to send it to everyone I know! I wish I could send it to those on MSNBC and PBS and CNN; but I know it will never reach any of the reporters. Nightly I watch the news and wonder how Judy Woodruff can say the garbage she spouts about Ukraine. When I can’t listen to it, I switch to MSNBC and then wonder how Chris Hayes can live with himself by simply ignoring the actual news and talking about Trump and Mara Lago for the unpteenth time. I don’t even try CNN any more.
THANK YOU FOR CONTINUING THE STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH, and thank you to Consortium for still trying to keep people like you out there for us to read. There have been so many reporters who have been “disappeared” or “defenestrated” as you call it. The truth is truly depressing these days, but we can’t even begin a process of healing without it. However, I’m afraid that, like untreated cancer, the propaganda has gone on so long it has mestastisized throughout our body politic and it’s terminal.
Thank you, Mr Pilger for this and for all that you do. Free Assange!
Alarms keep being sounded, but conversation about what to do is nowhere to be found. We are boxed in and no one knows how to think outside the box. How will real journalists stand up? You’re a real journalist. So are your buddies you named. Why don’t you all get together and speak with one voice?
We need a voice that everyone would listen to so it isn’t just gadflies all the way down. It also could come from collecting powerful people from all walks who care about humanity — like George Clooney and Madonna and Oprah and MacKenzie Philips and Greta Thunberg and Chris Hedges and Robert Reich and Noam Chomsky and Thom Hartman and Michael Moore and John Perkins and Heather Cox Richardson and David Korten and more. Let them deliberate on what they would do if they ran the world (fed from a Suggestion Box for we-the-people) and everyone would listen. John, you start: you pick one, the two of you pick the third, the three pick the fourth, and so on. And we could create a Human Survival Party to collect ourselves to become a force.
One way to see our situation is that perhaps all we lack for is good ideas. Let’s look for some!
“George Clooney, Madonna, Oprah , Robert Reich”
These people do not care for humanity and are not your ally. They are supporters of the neo-liberal order, the vote blue no matter who crowd. Move beyond the cult of personality.
Great idea! Perhaps if the collector of the signatures would promise to hold them until their number reaches 200. Then release 10 names at a time. Or whatever would have the greatest impact on the lessor journalists to give them courage to speak out. Assange Defense has collected names and organizations and needs support.
Oprah, Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson and likely others you mentioned are neoliberals through and through who are heavily invested in promoting the establishment/empire line. What makes you think they would join in speaking out against “western journalism” (sic) as it’s currently practiced?
“western journalists” = presstitutes.
Get the terminology correct.
We need many more people like you Mr pilger
The Corporate Owned News have always been the servants of elites and rulers. You don’t get those jobs if you are a loose cannon. You need to stick to the script you are given, like any actor. I recently wrote about the importance of omission in reporting on Ukraine by the Corporate Owned News.
hxxps://johnmoffett.substack.com/p/bidens-proxy-war-with-russia
I followed your link, but ended up gravitating to the One Side Fits All piece you wrote. I found it very well stated. That’s the most frustrating thing about all of this to me. I mean, it’s happened in local/state politics for a while – one side refuses to have a meaningful debate w/o scripted questions – but on the international level it’s exactly what leads to and prolongs wars. Of course the latter is exactly what the Blob wants, so we’re not even *allowed* to read, much less speak dissenting opinions – least of all if one has a big platform. No, that would be too dangerous to the Western FIRE sector capitalists and MIC’s agenda, all of which is shared by the MSM, both “sides.”
And it’s precisely why Julian Assange continues to be made an example of, after previously being the hero (and cash cow) for the formerly liberal media.
Thank you, Mr Pilger. Your article above is extremely helpful.
“Isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda?”