ok propaganda
Make Agitprop Great Again!
You might have seen this guy on YouTube in the past few weeks.
Predictive History is the YouTube channel of Chinese “professor” Jiang Xueqin, who lectures in English at the MoonShot Academy high school in Beijing. You can probably take some of the biographical details about him with a grain of salt, but it seems noteworthy that he has Canadian citizenship. He (apparently) was briefly expelled from China for documenting the labour movement (on behalf of an American documentary crew), but he now lives in China, and his high-profile work occurs there.
Anyway, if you’ve watched any of his lectures about the conflict involving Iran and the application of game theory to it, you’ll likely come away nodding along with the relative commonsense of his pitch and predictions. Especially if you compare it to the “no quarter” / “bomb them back to the stone age” level of Crusader subtlety that is coming out of the USA.
To be clear, China is not in this war, and wouldn’t officially describe Iran as a “proxy”, but it is still fighting an ‘empirical’ battle against the USA on the periphery of it—both in the sense that they are trying to own the right to ‘truth telling’ and, of course, angling to become a literal hegemonic empire themselves.
In the absence of death-dealing warfaring, nations do this work with propaganda. Among the players in this conflict, Trump’s version of this takes the form of ‘slopaganda’ AI-generated trash, like him wearing a crown and dropping shit on democratic protests from a fighter jet. Trump’s Secretary of ‘War’, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of his administration are focused on “owning” their (stated) enemies with memes and grim assurances of civilian deaths.
Iran latched onto (also AI-generated, but marginally less sloppy) Lego animations for their propaganda game:
Israel, of course, has an entire global influence complex, typically referred to as “Hasbara”. This—best I can tell—puts Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’ into a blender and then injects it into their bloodstream, and uses it I-know-you-are-you-said-you-are-but-what-am-I any horrific example of state surveillance, imperialism, or war crime, while they shelter behind “antisemitism”.
China is the interesting one in this mix. Their attempts at influence have long been more typified by things like the Belt and Road Initiative than through the building of military bases in foreign countries, but I am curious to see which approach turns out to be the best long-term strategy. I’m not the first person to wonder how connected “Professor Jiang” is to the CCP propaganda establishment and, look, I really don’t know. After all, Jiang has gained most of his audience through YouTube, and YouTube is officially blocked by the ‘Great Firewall’ in China. The thing is, I’m not too worried. Although I don’t agree with everything Jiang concludes, and he does like to dip into Dan Brown–ish secret society stuff a bit, I still feel like I get some interesting insights out of his lectures.
Not so much the hard-rock, night-vision-hazed, missile impact montages that the US keeps posting.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve basically conceded defeat on trying to exist outside the brainwashing world we have now. After all, apparently, we’re coming across advertising even 5km under the ocean now; at depths visited by roughly the same number of people who have walked on the moon.
Propaganda is such a terrible thing to waste. I’m old enough to remember when Hollywood could be reasonably relied upon to turn military subsidies and access into enjoyable shoot-em-up romps. Even the South Park writers felt the propaganda in their “Team America: World Police” universe needed at least Broadway-level talent to pull off.
But now… 🙄
Maybe I have just aged out of this new propaganda climate, but I can’t help feeling the US has lost its way with this one. They can’t keep their story straight from one talk-show to the next, they’re leveraging the same garbage content creation and distribution ‘tools’ that (unrelatable) incel teenage boys use, and—even if there really are intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles stashed in the Ayatollah’s back shed1—the lies and double standards about deal-making, piracy, and war crimes are just so conspicuous that it’s hard to believe anything that comes from the “good guys’” side anymore.
Anyway, just a rant. If you want to indoctrinate people to support your stupid wars and the boom-boom-rockets, vroom-vroom-tanks, and womp-womp-helicopters that you’re replacing healthcare and public schools with, at least make your propaganda ok.
-T