The more I study the propaganda tactics of U.S. imperialism, the more convinced I become that Marxism-Leninism represents the biggest threat to capitalist ideological hegemony. Because at the center of every narrative the media lackeys of capital and empire put out is the goal of painting Marxism-Leninist countries like China, north Korea, and Cuba as oppressive and dysfunctional. The core of capitalist realism—the belief in capitalism’s inevitability—is the idea that the alternative to our neoliberal dystopia is unquestionably worse.
This reasoning is always going to be applied, no matter how much poverty and state violence neoliberalism brings down upon us. Because the imperialist propagandists can always invent some new lie about the socialist countries more outrageous than the last, whether it’s that China is imprisoning millions of Uyghurs, that Kim Jong Un executes people on a whim, or (cleverest of all) that these countries are not socialist due to their incorporations of business—meaning communism has therefore been proven unable to overcome capitalism’s supposed invincibility. Whatever the narrative we’re being sold is, the central objective is to convince us that trying to build a different system than the one we have now would be futile.
This centrality of Marxism-Leninism as our ruling class’ designated bogeyman has become especially true with the onset of the era of great-power competition between Washington and Beijing, where more and more countries are being put into the two opposing geopolitical blocs. When the U.S. media vilifies Bolivia’s MAS, or Syria’s Assad, the sins that these governments are accused of get lumped into the larger supposed evils of the pro-China bloc.
This guilt by association when it comes to the alleged wrongdoings of Washington’s targets, where every part of the world that challenges U.S. hegemony is labeled as “authoritarian” and an enemy of “human rights,” also applies to the way that internal dissidents are treated by the U.S. empire and its rhetoric. U.S. citizens, as well as those within Washington’s satellite countries, are indoctrinated to hate communists. This indoctrination goes deeper than the right-wing Cold War-era sloganeering about how communists want to “destroy our way of life” or “hate freedom.” In the era of Washington’s hybrid asymmetrical war against China, anti-communist propaganda has expanded into the realm of “humanitarian” atrocity propaganda, where China and all of its adjacent governments are perpetually accused of outrageous human rights violations.
The last decade’s Syria regime change propaganda campaign, where an unprecedentedly complex campaign of NGO “humanitarian” messaging, scripted child refugee statements, award-winning anti-Assad films, and chemical attack media hoaxes has painted Assad as a monster. This has laid down the model for a new type of McCarthyism. A type where anyone who objects to the lies our government and media tell about Washington’s targeted countries, even if those objections originate from the supposedly oppressed people within these countries, gets attacked as an atrocity apologist. Xinjiang Uyghurs have themselves publicly objected to the U.S. State Department’s mischaracterization of China’s treatment of them as being a “genocide,” and have called U.S. officials liars for repeating the fabricated claims about human rights abuses. But it doesn’t matter how faulty the research behind these atrocity stories is. Once you object to them, you’re an enemy not just of “America,” but of the very concepts of morality and decency.
This is how the imperialists can get not just right-wingers, but liberals who care about “human rights,” to join in on the denunciations of communists. And the harassment, demonization, and marginalization that communists experience is a deliberately considered part of this propaganda campaign. As Ben Norton wrote this week, the empire’s propagandists now explicitly aim to use this kind of emotionally charged rhetoric to turn everyday people into weapons for counterrevolution:
NATO is developing new forms of warfare to wage a “battle for the brain,” as the military alliance put it. The US-led NATO military cartel has tested novel modes of hybrid warfare against its self-declared adversaries, including economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare. Now, NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.” Until recently, NATO had divided war into five different operational domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But with its development of cognitive warfare strategies, the military alliance is discussing a new, sixth level: the “human domain.”A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained, “While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
What does this mean? It means stoking those exposed to this propaganda into such an intense fervor that they become determined to do whatever is within their power to sabotage revolutionary change. On the lowest level of these weaponized everyday individuals are those who shame and berate anyone who challenges the prevailing narratives. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be underestimated in its impact; if applied to a child, it can change the child’s fate from becoming a revolutionary to becoming a reactionary. I once encountered a U.S. mother so aghast at the very existence of the online communities which defend China and the DPRK that she remarked that if her kids ever started posting defenses of these “despotic” countries, she would take away their internet access.
Higher on the rungs of this kind of interpersonal counterrevolutionary warfare are those who don’t just go after their family members for expressing unorthodox ideas, but seek out communists and anti-imperialists to target. Barring physical violence, this could range from online harassment to in-person transgressions, which one of my friends recently experienced when white nationalists showed up to his apartment and stole his hammer-and-sickle flag.
This pervasive hatred for socialism and zealotry for the settler-colonial capitalist ideology is how the state can produce police informants, recruits to intelligence agencies, military recruits,bcops, movement infiltrators, and the members of America’s growing “patriot” militias. Beyond all of these things are the vigilantes; the types who’ve been radicalized to commit reactionary violence, which we’ve seen in the Capitol Hill Riot, Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters, the dozens of violent crimes committed with the QAnon conspiracy theory as part of their motive, and all of the anti-Asian hate crimes we’ve seen throughout the pandemic.
The latter is particularly tied to anti-communism, because the entire reason Asians are being targeted is due to politicians and media outlets putting forth the pseudoscientific claim that Covid-19 began in China. This reality that the recent spike in racist violence wouldn’t have happened if not for the U.S. empire’s anti-communist lies reveals the full consequences of additional anti-Chinese narratives like the “Uyghur genocide” claim.
The baseless charges about concentration camps in Xinjiang, sourced entirely from biased research and paid atrocity story peddlers, has undoubtedly made Americans more willing to believe the racist propaganda about China being to blame for the pandemic. And now that China’s Uyghur jihadist deradicalization program has winded down, these Sinophobic propagandists have been forced to change up their messaging, with the Associated Press having stated this week: “The barbed wire is almost gone. So are the armored personnel carriers. Young Uyghur men are back on the streets. Beijing is slackening its grip on Xinjiang after a brutal mass detention campaign, but fear remains pervasive.” Incredible; the first “genocide” in history to not come with a sytemic demonization of the targeted group, a refugee crisis, or mass graves.
For someone who’s already been solidly persuaded towards believing the full extent of the media’s narratives on Xinjiang, the AP’s transparent attempt at covering up irresponsible journalism doesn’t look suspicious at all, because they’re more than inclined to accept these claims of a recent “brutal mass detention campaign” and a widespread “fear” among Uyghurs. They’ll accept whatever new iteration of the Uyghur narrative the propagandists cook up, and will certainly accept anti-Chinese narratives like the media’s recent false claim about China having flown warplanes over Taiwan. There’s no limit to what those under the full sway of the empire’s information war will internalize, because this war’s architects expressly see these people as their most important weapons.
“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” stated the NATO report Norton mentioned. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power….The human is very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital but also to be able to benefit from our adversaries’s vulnerabilities….the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.”
That last sentence was evidently referring to the societies and militaries of Washington’s adversary countries. The empire’s information warfare is certainly now targeting Cuba in this way, with a massive social media disinformation campaign being coordinated to inflame counterrevolutionary acts of terrorism among Cubans who are susceptible to reactionary ideas. This campaign has exploited the profound economic crisis that the country has fallen into due to Washington’s tightening of sanctions during the pandemic, making these incitements towards anti-communist violence fit the essential definition of social engineering: to convince someone to act goes against their own interests.
As our neoliberal hell gets worse than ever, with the U.S. government allowing an eviction crisis during a barely-winding-down pandemic death spike, this is the kind of warfare that the empire is increasingly waging against its own people. A warfare that turns those who might otherwise join a revolution into weapons for emotionally charged ideological battles, ones which are designed to never die down. That poisons minds with darkness and hatred, producing social divisions, psychological torment for harassment victims, and violence.
The goal of this new paradigm of cognitive warfare is to freeze history in place within the imperial center, making the masses too fragmented and influenced by disinformation to unite around a revolutionary agenda. Counter-propaganda is how it can be overcome.
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