[Image © pipr.co.uk]
Veteran journalist John Pilger wrote in February this year on how we in the west now live in a world controlled by propaganda and laments how truth has now become all but meaningless in modern political and commercial life. His analysis of the situation in Ukraine is at once refreshing and depressing.
Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain.
On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.
But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.
John Pilger
Published: 17 February 2022