Without pretending that disinformation and propaganda were in any sense less dangerous, destructive or widespread in the past, pre-Internet era, their sheer proliferation in the 21st century has been rather overwhelming. Among other things, we’ve seen genocides in Myanmar and Tigray being celebrated and intensified through social media, far right murder plots organized through forums, 8-chan and fringe communication apps, large scale organized targeting of voters through Facebook and What’s App, racist and conspiracist ideological radicalization through YouTube’s algorithms, and China’s cross-media disinfo/denialist campaign legitimizing their genocide against Uyghurs. Commercial/profit-driven mass manipulation has largely merged with and systematically enables political information warfare, as well as dehumanizing and genocidal propaganda. If there ever was a striking example of the fact that technology and communication/media systems aren’t politically neutral, today’s media/digital ecosystem is a grim reminder that the only reasonable way to deal with bourgeois society’s unrelenting madness is through critical theory/reflection/discussion and a radical commitment to burning it all down.
Conventional media/public/political and academic discussions about disinformation, propaganda, and digital processes of alienation/socialization/“radicalization”, are characterized by the prevalent epistemic/conceptual bias and mystifications of hegemonic modernity (euro/anglocentrism, bourgeois fetishism/ahistoricism, rationalism/positivism, methodological nationalism, etc.). Multiple authors have already challenged this consensus and started a critical discussion against and beyond “the unholy trinity of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism”: see the papers by Sarah Nguyễn et al. (2022), Rachel Kuo and Alice Marwick (2021), and Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty (2016); and this exchange between J. Khadijah Abdurahman and André Brock, Jr.. In order to understand disinfo/propaganda and related issues, we therefore need to focus on sociological and political processes and relations rather than hanging on to ahistorical and hypocritical assumptions that naturalize and enforce the existing order.
As usual, apologies for the overly long and rambling text, this is just how I prefer to explore topics in as much depth as I can and put things together that I’ve found (concepts, research, documentation, critiques, etc).
How Not to Study or Discuss Propaganda
One big problem is that numerous discourses on and approaches for analyzing propaganda are themselves fundamentally problematic. There are obviously different degrees of wrongfulness, going from reductionist Manichean leftist or liberal viewpoints to outright antisemitic tropes. Likewise, it’s not merely “crazy” fringe elements within the dark underground of the Internet that offer such misleading or troubling conceptions: it can be argued that part of the “counter-disinformation” and “counter-extremism” sector(s) contribute to this in their own ways as well. For instance, you’d be hard pressed to find any liberal reporting on the omnipresent pro-capitalist propaganda and deception; because of their ideology they can’t ever recognize it as equally destructive and harmful than, say, anti-vaccine disinformation or propaganda campaigns by Russia.
As with most phenomena in contemporary societies, the main problem with how disinformation, propaganda and Internet/social media are usually discussed, lies in a failure (or ideological refusal) to think in critical and sociopolitical terms. The fundamental paradigm of bourgeois social theory and ideology is a kind of methodological atomistic individualism and a reification of the capitalist social totality, mystifying or outright denying the actual social relations that characterize modern society.
For example, Matthew N. Lyons and Chip Berlet have noted that there is a deeply problematic centrist bias within the ‘extremist-monitoring field’, including research on political propaganda and social media, ‘terrorism’/’radicalization’, and so on… Their normative and analytical standpoint reflects and is loyal to the “state security apparatus and its commitment to defend the established order”, “treats violence against oppressed groups as a problem to be solved with more policing and longer prison terms—without addressing the ways that police and prisons are themselves active perpetrators of systemic violence against oppressed groups on a massive scale”, and consistently equates leftists with the far right. There are similar problems with liberal anti-fascism, anti-conspiracism and anti-authoritarianism, which I addressed here.
One outcome of the development of social media and other Internet platforms as sites where many people get and look for information about current affairs, and where they can bypass the gatekeeping of epistemic authorities and media institutions, has been the emergence of a rhetoric, ethos and/or performativity of so-called “citizen journalism”. It’s a double-edged sword because while the emancipatory possibilities opened thereby are massive, it has also fueled multiple forms of online conspiracist (looking for “what they don’t want you to know”) and populist (the trope of ordinary people’s “common sense” and virtue versus the corrupt, lying, deceitful elites and authorities) pseudo-emancipatory participatory subcultures. In other words, the very progressive and horizontal/egalitarian access to both information and investigative tools that the Internet has made possible (despite the state and capitalist domination, commodification and securitization of most of this technology), has also created deeply flawed and destructive practices of pseudo-investigation on which rely conspiracist contrarianism and paranoia.
The online discussions about the wars in Syria and Ukraine, the performativity of heroic muckraking in Alex Jones’ Infowars, and the QAnon “crowdsourced conspiracy”, are examples of this phenomenon in the past decade. The Bellingcat team offers a noteworthy look at this kind of regressive appropriation of OSI (open source investigation) tools in their piece Toy Rabbits, Chemtrails and German QAnon Fanatics: How Not to Conduct Open Source Investigations:
Satellite Maps, flight tracking websites and publicly available weather monitoring systems can all be harnessed by individuals and researchers for both simple and complex tasks. But they cannot prevent people from a movement known for its baseless conspiracies misinterpreting the information such tools can provide, or employing them to try and support clearly false premises.
On a personal note, a turning point for me as a teenager was when, having learned to be skeptical of traditional media and government/state narratives in the West about geopolitical events but not yet being able to filter through the “other side’s” disinformation and propaganda, I was exposed to the pro-Assad conspiracist fabrications about the ‘White Helmets’. Though initially introduced to this narrative via leftist “anti-imperialist” sources (which says a lot about how reactionary and destructive these outlets/elements are), at some point I felt deeply confused as it did not seem easy to parse out the truth behind all these conflicting claims, and I tried to look a bit deeper into it. Until then I had avoided actually looking at the most explicit materials and the most unhinged critiques or claims because I probably had an intuition something wasn’t right, but to try getting at the bottom of it I eventually found myself one day looking at the pseudo-evidence about ‘White Helmets’ in more extreme conspiracist websites like steemit.com and clarityofsignal.com*. Rather than making me buy into these claims more**, looking at other contents on the Steemit website made me realize that I had reached the darker and most reactionary parts of the internet – because I quickly came across extremely antisemitic posts on that website, which I obviously won’t share here.
* I’ve included here two links to pages that look like what I remember seeing on that day, needless to say I’m only sharing this because it’s important to know who and what we’re talking about, I remember being shocked by some other graphic content on Syria on steemit, when I tried browsing through the website, but no need to include more of this garbage here honestly – I just value transparency as it was a turning point for me
** I would later speak with local leftists and a Syrian socialist who all unconsciously helped me grow out of this ‘phase’ as a teen during which I let myself be exposed to and listen to this kind of conspiracist disinfo. I went through a similar process regarding Venezuela, and I started seeing things clearer by the time of the Hong Kong protests in 2019-2020, if memory serves (it probably doesn’t).
This episode was a real breaking point for me, and I think Olivia Solon, writing for The Guardian, and Scott Lucas which she quotes, rightly emphasize that alongside the direct and explicit disinfo campaign by Russia, there was here a situation wherein “some of [the disinfo campaign’s] participants [didn’t] realise they [were] being used as pawns”, and the confusionist nature of (in this case, Russia’s) geopolitical propaganda:
The campaign to discredit the White Helmets started at the same time as Russia staged a military intervention in Syria in September 2015, supporting President Bashar al-Assad’s army with airstrikes bombarding opposition-held areas. Almost immediately, Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik started falsely claiming that Isis was the only target and throwing doubt on the bombings of infrastructure and civilian sites.
The same propaganda machine scooped up fringe anti-American activists, bloggers and researchers who believe the White Helmets are terrorists, giving them a platform on state TV and amplifying their articles through social media. There is no evidence to suggest that these activists and bloggers are knowingly spreading disinformation, although the stories are often thinly sourced.
Scott Lucas, professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, describes the overall campaign as “agitation propaganda” but said that some of its participants don’t realise they are being used as pawns. “The most effective propaganda is when you find someone who believes it then give them support – you don’t create them from scratch,” he added.
(…) The way the Russian propaganda machine has targeted the White Helmets is a neat case study in the prevailing information wars. It exposes just how rumours, conspiracy theories and half-truths bubble to the top of YouTube, Google and Twitter search algorithms.
“This is the heart of Russian propaganda. In the old days they would try and portray the Soviet Union as a model society. Now it’s about confusing every issue with so many narratives that people can’t recognise the truth when they see it,” said David Patrikarakos, author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the 21st Century.
In order to understand propaganda/disinformation, it’s also important to break with the kind of very mechanistic and economistic (i.e. economic reductionism/determinism) assumptions that have become quite widespread in some leftist and conspiracist/populist circles, and in parts of academia. It stems from a vulgar-materialist-to-conspiracist perspective on ‘mainstream media’ promoted and inspired by the likes of Chomsky/Hermann (1988) and Parenti (1986, 1992, 1997) in the US and Le Monde Diplomatique, Acrimed and Serge Halimi in France. I wrote about the PM in my piece on Chomsky:
[Chomsky’s] famous “Propaganda Model”, constructed with his friend and prolific genocide denier, Edward Herman, is clearly still very influential. A few years ago, Joan Pedro-Carañana, Daniel Broudy & Jeffery Klaehn edited a book assessing and discussing this model (available here in open access; the contributors also came together for a discussion here). On the whole, the link between this conception of propaganda/ideological manipulation and Chomsky and Herman’s long record of denialism doesn’t seem to be questioned. Instead, the description of the book says that “the PM has been subjected to marginalisation, poorly informed critiques and misrepresentations” and that “[in] current theoretical and empirical studies of mass media performance, uses of the PM continue, nonetheless, to yield important insights into the workings of political and economic power in society, due in large measure to the model’s considerable explanatory power”.
But in my opinion Chomsky and Herman’s conception of propaganda both opens the way for conspiracist – and denialist – political approaches, and this cannot be separated from the authors’ consistent record of denial and deception. It fails to provide an adequate critical perspective on the media and its roles or functions, and instead fuels reductionist shortcuts that have led to the utterly ridiculous “everything is a plot by the US govt/CIA” (or Israel, NATO, NED, etc) which is now common on significant parts of the so-called “anti-imperialist” left.
Their book came out in 1988 and has been extremely popular in leftist and activist circles ever since. But there’s a clear parallel between Chomsky and Herman’s contribution and that of Michael Parenti, who actually wrote his first book on the topic – Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media – two years before them. Among his obscenely long bibliography, one can also find such writings as Make-Believe Media: the Politics of Entertainment from 1992, and “Methods of Media Manipulation”, from 1997. In this article, a pro-Parenti stalinist unwittingly demonstrates the proximity between Chomsky and Parenti; it goes without saying that Stalinism is one of the world’s most horrendous ideologies, but the parrallel is at least made clear (ignoring all other content lol). In France, Serge Halimi, the leftist publication Le Monde Diplmatique, the group Acrimed, and others, have also proposed a similar critique, in part influenced by Chomsky’s approach. Halimi’s essay-turned movie Les Nouveaux Chiens de Garde was very successful (and sold a lot, which would logically contradict the authors’ self-victimization as alleged victims of censorship…).
As far as I can tell, Philippe Corcuff has offered the most relevant/useful critique of Chomsky & co’s media critique. Crucially, he emphasizes that a critique of hegemonic media is indeed necessary and possible, but should be built on better sociological and critical concepts and perspections (he mentions Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall, we could add classics from Cultural Studies such as Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy). Here are two excerpts from Corcuff (translated by me):
The Manichean critique of the media that was to gradually dominate the militant and sympathetic circles of the radical left took advantage of the analyses of another critical thinker who was very much in vogue in these circles, notably via the monthly Le Monde diplomatique, the organ of the written press with the largest audience within the radical left in France and with a certain international echo: the American linguist and radical militant Noam Chomsky and his “propaganda model” developed with the economist Edward S. Herman . Their book gives a good account of the movement of economic concentration underway in the media sector. However, it tends to unify reality around two temptations that are more or less privileged depending on the moment of analysis: an economism (economic constraints directly and mechanically imposing their law on journalistic practices, independently of ideological mediations and the autonomy of professional practices) and a soft conspiracy (the weight of hidden manipulations, which is revealed to be predominant in a whole series of passages). The political scientist Géraldine Muhlmann is right, therefore, to oppose both Chomsky and Herman and Halimi to ‘ideology, in the sense of Marx’, insofar as the latter ‘exercises an anonymous and diffuse domination over all, a domination that is not reducible to the “manipulation” of some by others.’
The Manichean critique of the media formulated in Les Nouveaux Chiens de Garde, Le Monde Diplomatique or by Chomsky embodies the more reasoned pole of this critical posture, which nevertheless remains Manichean and which has the disadvantage of diffusing and legitimizing soft forms of conspiracy. From the beginning of the 2000s, the Manichean critique of the media saw the emergence of a less serious pole with insulting tones, with the newspapers PLPL (Pour lire pas lu, 2000-2005, founded by the filmmaker Pierre Carles, with the collaboration of Serge Halimi or Pierre Rimbert) and its successor Le Plan B (2006-2010, born from the partial fusion of PLPL and Fakir, the newspaper launched by François Ruffin in 1999 in Amiens and which still exists). The articles in these newspapers often featured ad personam attacks, resorting to gossip and unverified rumors, distorting words and facts, and sometimes using insults, these characteristics being alleviated but also legitimized by the use of humor and biting irony. On the other hand, in PLPL, the authors of the articles were protected by anonymity, a support for a “lifting of taboos” in the name of an antipathy towards “media personalities” presented as manipulators, in rhetorical procedures similar to those used by “the new reactionaries”. In this way, we can see, in embryonic form, the aggressive and insulting hypercriticism that social networks are often the receptacle of today. Moreover, the staging of a battle between the evil of a total “system” and the implicit purity of its denouncer leaves little room for deciphering the complications of the world and for critical self-examination. (…) Largely left-wing at the beginning, the Manichean criticism of the media, in its reasoned and insulting poles, will be emulated on the right and on the extreme right. (Philippe Corcuff: La grande confusion)
Certainly Chomsky’s analysis gives a good account of the movement of economic concentration in progress in the sector of the means of communication, with real effects of the economic field on the journalistic field. But Chomsky’s error consists in thinking of these effects in a direct and mechanical logic: in the mode of conscious manipulation and/or in that of economic control. On the contrary, Bourdieu notes: “one cannot explain what is done at TF1 by the sole fact that this channel is owned by Bouygues (…) There is a form of short materialism, associated with the Marxist tradition, which explains nothing, which denounces without enlightening anything”. The effects of the economic field on the journalistic field pass then by the mediation of the autonomous logic of the journalistic field: “competition for customers tends to take the form of competition for priority, that is, for the newest news (the scoop) (…) The constraint of the market is exercised only through the intermediary of the field effect (…) Inscribed in the structure and mechanisms of the field, competition for priority calls for and favors agents endowed with professional dispositions inclined to place all journalistic practice under the sign of speed (or haste) and permanent renewal.” It is true that the neoliberal tendencies underway on a global scale have resulted in a growing pressure from the economic field on the journalistic field. But, if we follow Bourdieu, they operate through the intermediary of the logics proper to the space of journalism. And the resistance to this market pressure also draws resources from the autonomous values that have historically been associated with the journalistic profession. (…)
Converging with these original intuitions of Bourdieu and Passeron, the sociology of the media has seen the development of a dynamic pole of reception studies, breaking with “a reified and miserabilistic vision of the public as an amorphous and passive mass”, according to the words of Brigitte Le Grignou, who recently proposed a rich critical synthesis of these works. The studies of television reception were thus systematized from the beginning of the 1980s under the impulse of the British cultural studies. The viewers revealed by these reception studies tend to filter the messages they receive (according to the social group to which they belong, their gender, their generation, various dimensions of their biography, etc.) and show variable (but rarely completely null) critical capacities. The famous “propaganda” would thus not have necessary and univocal effects. One of the most interesting authors among the British cultural studies is one of its initiators: the “neo-Marxist” Stuart Hall. For he associated in his model four important aspects: the capitalist conditions of production of media messages, the stereotyped content of these messages, the relative autonomy of professional rules in their production and their variable critical filtering by the viewers. Thus for Hall, the “coding” of messages in the logic of dominant stereotypes, within a society dominated by capitalist production relations, leaves open gaps with the “decoding” implemented by the viewers according to their social and political experiences.
Moreover, he pointed out the relative autonomy of the values and the professional rules of those who manufacture the television programs: “the professionals of the television broadcasting manage to operate from “relatively autonomous” codes which are their own, while managing to reproduce (not without contradictions) the hegemonic significance of the events”. These are dimensions that Chomsky cannot perceive, because he concentrates on two aspects: 1) the ownership structure of the media, and above all 2) the analysis of the content of the messages disseminated (by privileging, moreover, the treatment of international politics by the written press, a category of messages whose reception studies show that they are among those that reach the least a large audience: but what is the point of devoting so many pages to media “propaganda” if it hardly reaches its supposed targets?) For the “propaganda model”, in its conspiratorial and/or economistic tones, is not really interested in how media messages are produced and received. The narrative links between characters, events and facts are then largely postulated, without any real empirical evidence as to how they work in practice (multiplying quotations from newspaper articles, as Chomsky does, is not the same as this kind of empirical evidence). (…)
In Noam Chomsky’s “Propaganda & Public Mind Control”, we find the interweaving of economist and intentionalist schemes in the approach to the media through the theme of “entrepreneurial propaganda”, presented as “one of the main elements of the history of the United States in the twentieth century” (p.28). This propaganda would have a systematic scope: “Of course, it is displayed in the commercial media, but it also concerns the whole range of means of communication intended for the public: the entertainment industry, television, a significant part of what circulates in schools, and much of what appears in newspapers” (ibid.). It would be the direct translation of “the war waged against the workers” by “the business community” “a class war” both conscious (“it is waged in a perfectly conscious way”) and hidden (“even if they don’t want it to be known”) (p.27). But in the intersection of economistic systemism and intentionalism, it is the latter that tends to take over the narrative: “From the beginning, the explicit as well as perfectly conscious objective of this industry was to ‘control the public mind’ – as it was then called” (p.28). In this text, Chomsky insists on an argument: intellectuals, associated with the “public relations industry”, would have explicitly thematized “the conscious manipulation of the opinion and social behaviors of the masses” (p.29). But does the fact that some members of the dominant classes are aware of certain aspects of the logics of domination imply that these logics are the direct work of a conscious mastery, that the will of the dominants constitutes the principal factor of the mechanisms of domination? Is this apprehension by “elites” of domination as “conscious manipulation” necessarily the main truth of this domination? Does it imply that capitalists, and the journalists supposedly under their total dependence, have the same consciousness, on a daily basis, of these processes and that it is this consciousness that ultimately guides them? This is only a hypothesis that would suppose, to be endowed with a greater veracity, the description of the mediations between the said writings dedicated to the “conscious manipulation of the opinion” and the social interactions that manufacture daily the media logics. An opposite hypothesis, more nourished by the works of the social sciences, was stated by Pierre Bourdieu: “the social mechanisms are not the product of a Machiavellian intention; they are much more intelligent than the most intelligent of the dominants”(39). If manipulative intentions such as partial concertations would indeed exist among the dominants (the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, etc.), they would only constitute a part, and a secondary part, in the modes of domination, and thus also in media domination. (Philippe Corcuff: Chomsky et le «complot médiatique» – Des simplifications actuelles de la critique sociale)
Understanding how propaganda works and the critique of dominant media are indeed important, but there’s a better conceptual foundation and discussion to be had than the flawed ‘model’ proposed by the likes of Chomsky but also the similar theories found in Michael Parenti – at the very least the model outlined in Manufacturing Consent is incomplete/reductionist and vulnerable to reactionary interpretations/applications (e.g. Chomsky and Herman’s own record of denialism).
Without being as outlandish and extreme as some other conspiracist visions of the media and propaganda, most leftist approaches are still reductionist and unconvincing, because as Corcuff points out they rely on two problematic viewpoints/framings, which pave the way for confusionism and rightward drifts:
– Economi(ci)sm: “economic constraints directly and mechanically imposing their will on journalistic practices, independently of ideological mediations and the autonomy of professional practices”
– Soft conspiracy (or conspiracism): assuming “the weight of hidden manipulations”
Indeed, the PM is widely cited as inspiration by groups that often go much further than Chomsky in their conspiracism, denialism and so on. If the infamous Grayzone conspiracist and redbrown outlet is a notorious example of this, I want to mention here another group I came across during my research: the Swiss Policy Research SWPRS (swprs.org). They are slightly more sophisticated than the Grayzone, but the problem of confusionism (and redbrown drift), denialism and authoritarian bootlicking remains the same. In that sense they’re closer to Chomsky himself. Like the others, SWPRS starts from a seemingly legitimate criticism of American imperialism and its methods of deception/propaganda, but ends up adopting reductionist and conspiracist approaches that lead to reactionary positions. Once you dig deeper than seemingly reasonable framings like their “propaganda key” – a set of ‘media manipulation techniques’ and ‘most common messages of war propaganda’, which clearly are inspired by Chomsy and Herman’s PM (which they cite) -, you find more troubling and problematic things.
Namely, on their website there are multiple long-form articles/lists that mix legitimate sources/concerns/critiques with redbrown, antisemitic and wildly conspiracist materials, but for the most part trend toward the latter. One piece addresses the issue of elites’ pedocriminality: it’s a good example where there’s no denying that tons of horrendous shit has been happening and covered up, but as we’ll see later a conspiracist panic is the endpoint of their approach, rather than a serious radical critique of existing social relations. They have the obligatory conspiracist pieces of atrocity/genocide denialism (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Syria), one alleging that Russian hacking during the 2016 US elections was a “psyop” (psychological operation) by the US and NATO, another on the “Israeli lobby”, a list of “organizations funded by the NED” (National Endowment for Democracy), and anti-vaxx stuff. I kid you not, in the piece on the “Israeli lobby”, they not only include a whole section on supposed Jewish control of media/Hollywood, as well as links to Holocaust denialist materials (all while saying that they don’t deny the genocide; you’ll forgive my skepticism about this claim given that they also have links to pieces by the founder of Holocaust denialist outlet The Unz Review), but perhaps most strikingly they recommend Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, an antisemitic book masquerading as science/legitimate scholarship, which has been deeply influential on the contemporary far right. And yet, they open this page by saying that the works included there “do not advocate anti-Jewish positions”.
One of the most widespread fallacies of conspiracist conception of propaganda and how ‘soft power’ works is a form thoughtless web weaving where people look for a ‘smoking gun’ to tie any given person or group to a global conspiracy, often by bringing up alleged funding by or ties to institutions that are considered nefarious propaganda/soft power agencies, such as the aforementioned NED, or to George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Reactionary populist grifters like Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore are no different than the far right conspiracist web weaving of the likes of Alex Jones. Blumenthal and Dore have for instance attacked leftist youtubers like Shaun or Abigail Thorn (PhilosophyTube) claiming that they’re supported by nefarious forces like the CIA. The made-up accusation against Shaun was that his video criticizing Dore’s anti-vaxx propaganda had been boosted algorithmically, and their claims against Thorn is that she was funded by the Royal family because she had once taken part in a study on vaccine hesitancy conducted by the Royal Institution, which is actually unconnected to the British monarchs (by the way, by doing this they were targeting a transgender leftist woman, which is of course a widely used tactic on the far right as well). The nonsensical article published by the Grayzone cites and relies on the book Breadtube Serves Imperialism by Caleb Maupin, a redbrown fascistic grifter if there ever was one; he mixes some form of stalinist authoritarianism with reactionary and outright fascist views and ties, and a love for Putin, Iran, Assad, etc. (he’s a also the darling of fascists, e.g. this book was apparently praised by the Daily Stormer). Maupin also wrote Satan at the Fountainhead: The Israel Lobby and the Financial Crisis, which unsurprisingly includes antisemitic arguments.
It’s completely irrelevant if conspiracist actors talking about propaganda and manipulation occasionally mention relevant points or troubling things that can’t be dismissed (usually sensationalizing them and jumping to unwarranted conclusions). Conspiracist claims are not always totally detached from reality or completely inventing the sociopolitical dynamics they’re talking about. For example, it’s clear that NED has been a tool of US soft power and propaganda, but the mechanistic, superficial, and simply lazy understanding of international politics that conspiracist approaches – like the the campist and pro-authoritarian narratives produced by the Grayzone – offer is both going too far (when any tie, no matter the context or nuances, is used to delegitimize all domestic opposition against one of the US’s enemies) and not far enough (critiquing only the US, rather than all states and geopolitical powers, who all play this game; and thus ending up supporting and doing PR for any and all of the US’ enemies, from the Venezuelan populist regimes of Chavez and Maduro to outright reactionary govts like Iran and Russia). In a 2005 interview, William I. Robinson, the author of Promoting Polyarchy – a classic 1996 study on the US imperialist framework of “democracy promotion” -, emphasized that this critique of US foreign policy should never be about delegitimizing emancipatory movements across the world but showing how the performative rhetoric of progress and democratization is a modality of continued imperialistic intervention:
The promotion of democracy is inherently not imperialist; on the contrary, it is inherently revolutionary, progressive and wonderful! But the people who are promoting democracy are social movements in the global north and global south, solidarity movements in the north, mass movements in the south. What the United States is promoting, in Venezuela or elsewhere, is not democracy. United States foreign policy has absolutely nothing to do with promoting democracy; what it is doing is inherently imperialist.
But my argument in no way suggests that democratisation movements around the world are creatures of foreign policy; rather, it says that changes in US foreign policy and new modalities in US intervention are meant specifically to challenge, undermine, limit, and control the extent of social and political change in countries where masses of people – including the elite – are struggling for democracy.
In this perspective, US political intervention under the banner of “democracy promotion” is aimed at undermining authentic democracy, gaining control over popular movements for democratisation, keeping a lid on popular democracy movements, and limiting any change that may be brought about by mass democratisation movements so that the outcomes of democracy struggles do not threaten the elite order and integration into global capitalism.
If democracy means the power of the people, mass participation in the vital decisions of society, and democratic distribution of material and cultural resources, then democracy is a profound threat to global capitalist interests and must be mercilessly opposed and suppressed by US and transnational elites.
What is new about the strategy of “democracy promotion” is that this opposition and suppression is now conducted under the rhetorical banner of promoting democracy and through sophisticated new instruments and modalities of political intervention.
[Note: I’m not gonna comment on all the political arguments or assumptions in quoted authors, that would make this text even more unreadable than it already is! For example, we can of course question the framework of democracy as a whole, and oppose it for more revolutionary aims/visions. But usually when writers mention it they usually mean to address/point out the destructive aspects of disinfo/propaganda/authoritarian politics. And even if I don’t share the political framing of “defending democracy”, generally speaking these destructive things are indeed really harmful and dangerous, so it’s right to criticize and oppose them.]
Being skeptical about conventional state or media narratives in the US/Europe about other countries – and especially geopolitical rivals -, or Israeli media campaigns demonizing Palestinians and their resistance, isn’t equivalent to believing in baseless nonsense like a flat Earth or creationism. It’s indeed important as part of a broader critical and emancipatory framework! But that doesn’t make the conspiracist and confusionist approaches okay either, nor are these (reactionary) actors reliable as sources of information or analysis. Ethical/political and methodological/epistemic consistency is actually important, if you can believe it…
Featured propaganda image: Soviet space propaganda poster during the space race (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images). [Source]