The Propaganda is Everything
otherwise no politics
You tell me: are the Israelis deliberately starving the Gazans or is Hamas using food as a method of controling the Gazans?
It depends, experts agree, on your “priors,” your “pre-existing beliefs, assumptions, or knowledge about a particular subject or situation.”
So if you believe that the Gazans are helpless victims of the colonialist Israelis led by the far-right corrupt Prime Minister Netanyanhu, you believe Hamas propaganda. If you believe that the Israelis are reacting to the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, and you read that the Israelis are providing lots of food to Gaza, then you are inclined to believe that the Gazan people are helpless victims of their brutal Hamas overlords.
What is interesting to me is the extent to which we humans Are Not Allowed To Doubt The Narrative.
Some things aren’t too defended too strongly. For instance, I haven’t seen anyone getting riled up on the US entry into World War I because of German submarine attacks on US ships supplying the Brits and French in Europe. And the notion that FDR knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, because codebreaking, is not too controversial. But the use of atom bombs on Japan is controversial, while the bombing of Dresden not so much. The horrors of the Bataan death march is still a thing, but the deaths of German soldiers — by the hundreds of thousands at least — in camps after World War II are not much talked about.
The one thing you are not allowed to doubt is the standard narrative on the Holocaust. And you are not allowed to doubt that Auschwitz and Belsen were there to kill Jews. You are not allowed to wonder about Winston Churchill wanting to get a war going against Hitler.
On the other hand, the idea that FDR’s New Deal was a failure that failed to dig the US out of the Great Depression is just ignored. McCarthyism is monstrous, but Soviet spies Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss hardly mentioned.
Hey! Don’t forget about the French and Indian War of 1754-63 between France and Britain. King George thought that North Americans should help pay off the debt with new taxes. American patriots thought that was monstrous. In the Revolutionary War against Britain the escaped apprentice Ben Franklin helped persuade the French to help the Yanks defeat the Brits.
My favorite line is Henry V’s “once more unto the breach” speech during the disaster of the siege of Harfleur. This guy, that got England into a failed attempt to conquer Paris and got lucky at the Battle of Agincourt, is considered a national hero, thanks to William Shakespeare?
All politics is propaganda, all the time. Depending on whose side we are on we believe the lies of Our Guy and we all agree that the lies of the Other Guy prove he is a liar and a crook. Or her, in the case of Hillary Clinton.
The fact is that almost every great political narrative that politicians use to get us into wars, including fake wars like climate and COVID, are lies. And we humans are obviously programmed to believe them because, from time immemorial, tribal leaders needed some narrative or other to get the men to assemble and march to defend the border.
But I don’t think that God intended that propaganda to defend the border would eventually be used to start world wars.