Fake News and Propaganda

In the last few years, the phrase "fake news" has become very common and is used by both the right, the left, and those in between. Another term, "propaganda," has been in use for much longer as a synonym, although these are not synonyms. Propaganda derives from the word propagate, and what it actually means is simply material developed to spread a point of view. In other words, it is neutral. Propaganda can be developed to educate honestly and to spread real facts. I often heard the word used in that sense by organizations describing their published materials. However, in wider usage, it came to acquire a connotation similar to fake news.

I have lived in the USA now for 72 years, and I've seen lots of fake propaganda. I was very young during the fake propaganda of the McCarthy period. Anybody with any direct experience of the Communist Party USA (and I have had a lot) knows that they never plotted the overthrow of the US government. In its period of most strength in the 1930s and early 1940s, it focused its efforts on labor organizing and civil rights. After that, it was a much smaller organization with similar priorities and absolutely no threat to any government. Yet US government propaganda continued to portray it as a dangerous enemy for a long time. They jailed and blacklisted many communists, and they tried to purge them from the labor movement. There was also tremendous, and often false or inaccurate, US propaganda against the Soviet Union.

In the 1960s, we saw massive US propaganda to "justify" the war in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson's phony Gulf of Tonkin incident was used as a pretext to send hundreds of thousands of US troops to try to bolster the corrupt and undemocratic government of South Vietnam. People my age will vividly remember the so-called Domino Theory, by which the loss of Vietnam would lead to the spread of communism to neighboring countries. Ironically, it was precisely US intervention which accomplished that.

The state of Israel is a very active purveyor of what they call Hasbara, which is Hebrew for phony propaganda. Israel portrays itself as a peace-loving, honorable, democratic state when it initiated all but one of its wars (1973), rejected countless peace offers from its neighbors and from the Palestinians, engages in systematic torture and genocide, and denies full democratic and political rights even to Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, let alone those who live under the jackboot of Israeli occupation. As Israel's political mainstream as moved to the ultra-right, it teaches its children that Palestinians are foreigners who must be driven out of all of Palestine or simply exterminated. I could go on at much greater length about Israeli propaganda and falsification of Jewish history, but that is for another time.

My main point is that in my 72 years I have learned to question propaganda, to investigate its claims, and to refute it when it proves to be false. I'm sure I have been taken in at times, too, but refusing to be swayed by false propaganda is essential to critical thinking and critical thinking is essential to that refusal. In the present period there are many blatant examples of false propaganda or fake news. The US (and Israeli and Saudi) claims about Iran are largely false. It is not a very significant actor outside its borders, whether in Syria or Yemen. It is not a threat to anyone other than its own citizens. Nicaragua is also not a threat, nor is Venezuela or Cuba. All those countries have functioning institutions of democracy. Most of what passes for news about those countries in the United States is demonstrably false. The contemporary major purveyors of this false propaganda include John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and Trump himself, but we also hear this fakery from the major media and from many Democrats. Exactly the same is true about the so-called threat to our southern border, which is demonstrably non-existent.

I would be remiss if I only discussed US government and media propaganda. Since the 2014 uprising in Ukraine and the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine, there has been massive and incessant Russian propaganda about Ukraine, which invents a fascist threat (Ukrainian fascists are a tiny percentage of the population as demonstrated by their ability to only get 3.1 percent of the votes in the last election, far less than in Poland, Hungary, France, Austria, Sweden, or in Russia itself). There is a very good Ukrainian website called Stop Fake, which investigates this wide stream of propaganda and exposes its lies. Many leftist commentators have been taken in by those lies.

As citizens, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves and learn enough to expose all this phony propaganda. What did we learn from George W. Bush's blatant lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks which led us into a destructive and dangerous war in Iraq? That experience ought to have taught us to be skeptical, to investigate our government's claims. But has it? The most important phony propaganda is that which targets us right now, propaganda intended to justify an unnecessary war against Iran or a totally unwarranted coup in Venezuela. The time for skepticism and critical thinking is always right now.