Middle Nation Book Discussion: Propaganda by Jacques Ellul -. Opinion, Thinking, and Palestine

I don't have a a particular example to go off of. I just wanted to to second what you just said, which is that a successful and effective propagandist can't actually believe what they're saying. It's ineffective ultimately and and and self undermining. If the propagandist starts to believe what they're saying, then that puts them completely out of touch. The the the the propagandist has to be in touch with with reality as it actually is, but and they have to understand the the myths and the motivations that people have that then they can manipulate to get them to believe in something and to support something and to activate them in in in the cause of something.

And if you if you actually believe in it, it's very difficult for you to manipulate people. And you can't be as strategic as a propagandist has to be. I think that you can see it, I mean, in a in a in a arguably less nefarious type of propaganda as I've talked about in the in the last couple of meetings I think is marketing and advertising. The people who do marketing and advertising know perfectly well that the messages that they're putting forward in their advertising misrepresent their product and misrepresent the effect that their product will have on your life, but they know how to use it. So I think I think it's it's just a sort of a truism that a propagandist can't actually believe in the propaganda.

And once they start to believe in it, is which is what we're starting to see, for example, in The US and in Israel, that you're having a a generation of people who are in charge now who grew up on propaganda, and so many of them actually leave the propaganda, which puts them completely out of touch with reality and then therefore makes them less effective in delivering their messages.

Well, know, that begs the question really when we talk about propagandists. Right? I mean, on on the one hand, they have to be cold blooded and objective. K? But on the other, can they act with with conviction if

they

are not convinced of what they are saying, really?

Well, yeah. Because this is this is it it it's a it's a type of demagoguery where you just know that, you know, it's it's like it's really like a like a like a predator or like a psychopath who themself doesn't really believe in anything, who themself doesn't really believe in the morals and the principles and the ideals and the myths and the values and so on that people and the, you know, the the the cultural mores of a society. They don't actually subscribe to those things, but they have learned to identify that other people do, and they've learned to understand the the very specific emotional triggers that people have and the buttons that they have to push in order to make that happen. So it's very calculated. In order for it to to be effective propaganda, it has to be very calculated, and someone who genuinely believes in something generally won't be as calculated and deliberate in their words.

They will just speak according to their beliefs and that may now that the the confusion might be that that can also be inspiring to people, and that can also motivate people and move people, and that and that's kind of the difference between, you know, a genuinely good, say, leader and a just a cynical propagandist. This is what makes propaganda so effective because it's very similar to genuine leadership and genuinely sort of inspiring figures. As I said, that's this is like it's like a psychopath who knows how to mimic the people who have beliefs, the people who have morals and values. They know how to mimic that. So propaganda and a propagandist mimics it, but they do it in an almost chat GPT robotic way that's very calculated and if people aren't sort of educated or trained to identify the difference between someone who genuinely has beliefs and someone who just says all the right things, then they're more susceptible to the propaganda.

The lightest version of it is sociopathy and the more more dangerous version is just sheer psychopathy.

And it yeah. It's distilled generationally and really gotten concentrated in the current moment, I would suggest.

Well, I think I think that that in in in Western society, especially in The United States, maybe less so in Europe, I don't know, but in The United States it's worsened by the fact that that type of approach to society and that type of approach to human relations, that sociopathic approach to human relations is something that's actually encouraged in every sector and in every segment of society, and it's rewarded and it's applauded and it's admired. So it's it's even worse in a society like that, where sociopathy is actually something that is celebrated.

Yeah. Encouraged in the propaganda.

Well, it's it's encouraged in the propaganda, but it's also encouraged, and it's almost unavoidable just in terms of the very materialistic values. Because if you're approaching life through a purely materialistic in a purely materialistic manner, then that removes any higher morality from your conduct and from your interactions with people. It's purely either parasitic or predatory. You know, there's not this kind of those are sort of the only two choices you have. If you're taking a purely materialistic approach to life, then you're either a parasite or you're a predator, which means that you're going to be a sociopath.

We could perhaps tie this conversation to section two, which has to do with forming a public opinion. I I mean, this is probably the most interesting part I I I could I could read because it essentially talks about the difference between personal and public opinions and how in a propagandized society, personal opinions which are obviously the ultimate expression of of a democratic entity, right, in a democratic society are essentially worthless and that under the crush of propaganda, all the, you know, pre thinkers, rational minds think more or less the same or, you know, have this group think mentality where they don't really like, if they if they want to be part of a community that they have to accept public opinion, group opinion, which is obviously dictated by, you know, powerful agencies, to the state, political party organization, etcetera. Right? So so perhaps we could I I know I know we we said we didn't want to talk about America all the time, but we could perhaps connect the phenomena you've been talking about to, you know, how personal opinions are becoming less less relevant in democratic states primarily?

Well, with regards to that, I would say that there's a there's a kind of a deeper and and more comprehensive it's it's what you're talking about really, but the the the mechanism for achieving that is very insidious and and it's a very deep and comprehensive process where we we in fact, we talked about it last time, which has to do with the the crippling of critical thinking skills, which is that it used to be the case that in order for you to have an opinion about something, you have to first have information about that thing, you have to know something about it, you have to have looked at the information, you have to look at the data, you have to look have you have to have looked at the facts and have some kind of I mean, there there there didn't used to be a difference between an educated opinion and an opinion. If it wasn't an educated opinion, then it didn't even rise to the level of being an opinion. It was just nonsense. It was just a knee jerk reaction. It was just a reflex.

And the the society has programmed people to the point that they just for for one thing, with with with social media, again, this is another another factor, which is that it used to be the case that only some people got to express their opinions publicly and everyone heard it. And that would that would always be people who knew something about what they were talking about. Now everybody gets to have an opinion. And now an opinion is just content. It's just it's just a way to bring people to your page.

So you must have an opinion about every single thing, whether you know anything about it or not. And so if that's the case, then you will tend to just express an opinion that already has been expressed or is already a popular opinion because your whole point in expressing it in the first place is to bring people to your channel or to your account or or what have you. The whole point is to get the views and the likes and the shares and so forth. So you're just going to express an opinion that already conforms with the majority. And to have an actual independent opinion is not going to get you the social credit or the materialistic achievement that you're that you're even expressing it for in the first place.

So it's a whole social sort of ecosystem that destroys one, the ability to form an opinion independently, and two, that actually punishes you for having an independent opinion and rewards you for having a conformist opinion.

And it instills the idea in your in one's mind that if you express your opinion, you know, maybe you should be careful so people start engaging in self censorship and they're joining the homogenous machine of promoting the ideas that are popular to get views.

Right. And and and and then and you have you have the fact that that opinion is in and of itself, opinion is monetized and your your social media accounts are monetized and you're trying to get brand deals, you're trying to get promotional sponsorships and so forth, endorsements and everything. And in order to do that, your whoever you want to collaborate with, so called, in other words, whoever you wanna shill for, whatever company you wanna shill for, they want you to be able to appeal to the largest demographic possible, to the most people possible. So they want you to be basically a blank billboard. They want you to be just a blank billboard that they can project onto that their products.

And so you shouldn't be too unique, you shouldn't be too different, and if you're different, then it's it's different in a way that's already conforming with the different opinion that is already part of the parameters of allowable discourse. But the ideal for them is for you to just be a blank space, to be to be as unoffensive as possible, to be as ununique as possible, to be as plain and and and, you know, pasteurized and homogenized as possible to appeal to the largest possible demographic so that they can sell their goods, so they can sell their ads. If you say anything that's that's controversial, and controversial here doesn't necessarily mean that it's a dangerous opinion, but controversial in that it's not part of allowable discourse, then you won't make your money. So this this the the the whole the whole, as I said, the whole mechanism around the forming and expressing of opinions has been so undermined and so sabotaged that it no one is even no one even has the the skills nor the motivation nor the incentive to form an independent opinion.

That's actually an amazing point and I wanted to talk about TikTok specifically because that's the platform that I use. For example, I just said that my account has too many violations, community guideline violations that I can't monetize and the reason is is because I don't give the usual opinion that people like and I don't censor myself. I say the word genocide, I say the words like hemers and the IOF and everything. Right? And so what they're trying to do is a lot of the times on TikTok, you see a lot of people can't monetize on their videos because they are using a rhetoric that is not popular in the West and it's not a Western endorsed rhetoric.

So what essentially what they do is they say if you wanna make money, if you wanna work in this sense, you're gonna have to say what we want you to say otherwise you're not going to make any money and that's how you find a lot of these Ziobots and everything. They literally make money to say things that are good about The United States and Israel And so again, like what you said, they are disincentive is disincent anyways, insensify that one. They're not allowing incentive for people to start posting about Palestine and stuff but what they're not realizing is a lot of people who share these opinions like I do, we don't do it for the money, don't do it for the popularity, we do it because people need to understand this kind of stuff and and what a lot of people are not understanding is we are beginning the change today. The change around the entire world has begun and yes we are small in numbers like you might think there's a lot of people protesting around the world but it's still very small percentage of the entire global population but the change has begun today and even though we're not doing it for money right now, we're not doing it for fame, we're not doing it for all this kind of stuff, over time our voices are still gonna be out there.

People who are making thousands of pounds and dollars on their videos are still not as loud as our people who are making literally $0 and £0, if you know what I mean.

Oh, absolutely. No. Absolutely. It's it's we we we talked about this back in the beginning of of in in October, I think, I don't remember. I think it was on one of the call to actions.

I'm not sure which group we were in or what meeting it was, but we were talking about how even if you have if if you have people I I think it was when we were talking about some strategies for targeting the private sector. For example, not just boycotting companies that were pro Israel, but boycotting companies that were not vocally pro Palestinian. And the idea was that even if they don't mean it, but they know that it's better for business to be pro Palestinian, they'll be pro Palestinian because again it's just about the money. And if you can make being and and as you say, it is happening, it's very superficial and it's shallow and it's kind of crass, but it is becoming fashionable to be pro Palestinian, it's becoming cool to be pro Palestinian, and I mean, being pro Zionist is like having a, you know, mutton chops and a, you know, a mullet. It's it's very old fashioned now, it's it's not the thing to be.

It's still, as you said, it's still kind of fledgling. But on this, I'll also say another thing though. That you'll you you that there there is one kind of pro Palestinian content that is monetized, that is financially rewarded, and is popular, and is not shadow banned, and is not punished or, you know, put in TikTok jail or YouTube jail or anything like that. And you'll see that, for example, on the Middle East Eye, for example, that that journal, it's an Ihwani journal, and the the most viewed, the most visited articles that they have, the most popular articles that they have, that are pro Palestinian, are the ones that are simultaneously pro Palestinian and anti Arab regime. If you're if you're if you're you'll you'll see that the most popular in terms of their views and in terms of what would obviously coordinate with their monetization, the most profitable views that are pro Palestinian are the ones that are also deflecting attention away from Israel, away from The United States, away from The UK, away from Europe, and redirecting it towards the Arabs, redirecting it towards Egypt or towards Jordan or wherever, or to Saudi Arabia and The UAE.

Those are the most popular and and the and the the most acceptable pro Palestinian views that you can have. I think that's very interesting, and that's a very interesting aspect of of the propaganda that's allowed in the the allowable discourse, that they're making room for being pro Palestinian as long as you are simultaneously against the Arab states.

I I'm sorry. I know I keep speaking, but I wanted to respond to that because it's a very, important point. I was actually talking to my father about it yesterday because he also follows Middlination. We were talking about how a lot of the opinions that you find within Arabs, like, for example, within Algerian population, because I'm half Algerian as well, a lot of them tend to deflect the blame from Israel, from The United States, from the West and everything and always talk about Turkey and Saudi Arabia and they're always like, look what Erdogan's doing, he's not doing anything, he's actually selling arms to Israel and they they literally are so propagandized to the point where they don't even realize that they're completely setting off the blame and putting it on the Arab people instead of putting it on the actual people who are committing this genocide. And again, this is a Western propaganda, like, tactic.

This is them trying to separate everyone within the Middle East, and that's how they've done it. That like, the French put the borders in Africa, in, like, the the North African countries, Moravia, Al Jazeer, Libya Tunis. They're the ones who put the borders over there, then you see the same thing happening with the Arabian countries. It's literally a western tactic to make you think that, oh, the Arabs are the ones who are doing this. They're the ones who are killing the Palestinian people.

They're the ones who are killing the Syrian people. They didn't stand up for them. Oh, look at Jordan, Egypt. They didn't take in the refugees from Palestine. Why would they?

It's literally an ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing also includes a mass displacement. It doesn't only include the killing. So if 2,300,000 people were displaced from Gaza and taken in by Egypt and Jordan, that's what makes them complicit in the ethnic cleansing. Right now, they are standing their ground and they are doing well.

They are literally standing against Israel and The United States, which are the biggest powers today. So a lot of people, what they don't realize, like, Hasatan, especially in the Arab countries, they don't realize or not that they are literally falling into Western propaganda instead of actually thinking critically and thinking in a way where you actually put the blame where blame is due.

Absolutely. And and this is this is why I'm saying, those types of posts, those types of articles, those types of tweets, those types of TikToks get spread far and wide. If you try to write something or you try to post something or you make a video or you tweet something that's just that's pro Palestinian and anti colonization, anti colonizer, your your your views and your your clicks and your likes and your shares and so on will be subdued by the algorithm. It will be, you know, very very deliberately. You'll be shadow banned or you'll be blocked or what have you.

But the ones that are pro pro Palestinian and anti Arab regime, they go everywhere. They're not they're not stopped at all. Those people aren't shadow banned at all. They're you you can't get away from those those videos and those posts and those tweets. It's it's it's very transparent.

It's so obvious what's happening.

And we must remember that the Arab countries were colonized. And so when you have people who were colonized by particular peoples who have some difference in their look from the native population and you have not yet decolonized, you you continue with the mentality that was given to you under colonization until you actively work to release it from yourself. And thus, you see people being bombed, slaughtered, wounded, herded from here to there, but the people who are directly responsible for that, and that's The United States, actually, The people who are directly responsible for that are not held directly responsible for it. Instead, the victims and their surrounding ethnic group are held responsible for it. It's like being beaten by a two by four, and the world watches the beating and then chastises the person who was beaten.

And, this is this is very, very deep, I believe, in the subconscious of the, former colonies of, The United States and the Western world. Because while The United States may not have called what it was doing colonization, it never met a colonizer. It didn't love and support, and we simply use our military and military bases in point of fact as as our colonizers.

To who to blame?

No. It's

not. That is really yes. I I really think that it is relative to the the population. So if we were talking about, like, Arabs, we're talking about, like, their field of maneuver. It's like their governments and what should be done by their governments.

So this is why I think that it's important to mention that. And when you see, like, Israeli government, for example, like, blaming the American administration not to provide enough. Although, like, I don't know. Like, I no one did to Israel, like, what America is doing to them. And, like, nobody does to another nation what America is doing to Israel.

Like, even though Israel is blaming America for not doing enough. So that's their point of view because they're allies, and they expect that from America. And they expect even more. And that's what the Arab population expect from their governments to as not only allies to Palestine, but as like a brotherhood. They are expected to do more, and that's why I think that the who to blame question, like, have to return to the Arab leaders and Muslim leaders.

Well, I I understand. I understand. That's a that's that's a valid point. However, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the idea of having an opinion about something without having information. Because if you think that the that the Arab leaders I mean, generally, what I've in the encounters that I've had, the engagements that I've had with people who make these kinds of arguments about the Arabs aren't doing enough, they don't even know what they've done.

They literally will say that they're completely silent, and they're doing nothing, and they're betraying, and they're they're they're just lackeys of the West. And when you point out to them the things that the Arabs have done, and then in fact no one is doing anything more than the Arabs, they can't accept it. But it's not information that they have that they even have. So they just it's a knee jerk reaction. It's this it's it's again and and we're we're finding it largely among people in the West, among Muslims in the West.

And and quite frankly, in Arabic media and English language media that is consumed by Arabs and Muslims that is from the Ikhwan, from the from the Muslim brotherhood and and these types. And they have a very clear agenda and they're I mean you literally if you take almost any of these for example, any of the accusations against the Arab regimes, don't wanna go on a tangent here on this particular topic, but the the if you investigate any of these widespread accusations against, say, Saudi Arabia or The UAE or Jordan or Egypt or what have you, the source is the Israeli press almost without fail. The source is coming directly from the Israelis. It's coming from the Israeli media. It's coming from Zionist sources, and then it's getting duplicated and repeated and copied and pasted into other western media, and then it's getting copied and pasted into Arabic media and media that is consumed by Muslims, and then it and then it spreads far and wide by people who just have this knee jerk reaction.

So this is this is a matter again of what we were talking about before of people forming opinions without information.

This book, I believe, was written in 1965. It's 2024. This has been a process over the decades, and part of the process of colonization is the infantilization of the adult populace, by the colonizers, and you you just don't throw that off automatically. So you have adult people in these countries and from these backgrounds who who do not think in a rational adult manner. They are reactionary, and they're very juvenile in their perspectives.

Well, that that was a process that was put in place so that we would arrive at this point. And the other part of it is, I believe that colonized people, because for some period of time, they were not the ones making the ultimate decisions over their lives, colonized people retain a subconscious viewpoint that their men aren't aren't actually men or they're they're only 80% of the man that a colonizer is. And so this feeds into the belief that no matter what the rulers of our nations do, it isn't enough. It equals nothing. And everything that the Israelis and the western rulers do, is definitive over the populace of the entire world, and it, you know, cannot be broken unless we get another Salahuddin and his army to come to defense.

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think I think it's it it it's also worth looking at the reality that westernization is basically decivilizing and it is, as you said, infantilizing. And it's not just colonized people, it's in their own society. This is what they do to their own people.

If you want to if you if your country if you're not a western country, but you're being pushed to become western, then that's going to mean that your own population is going to start to resemble intellectually the same low level, the same low standard of intellectual prowess that they have in the West. The same lack of attention span, the same lack of critical thinking skills, the same immaturity that they have in the West. It's decivilizing to become Western, and to a certain extent this has happened. To a great extent this has happened unfortunately, and when you're calling for something like what sister iman said, if you if you actually think that if you think that going to war and just rallying your troops and going to war, well, that's western thinking. That's the way they do things, and so you think, well, they do it that way, so we should do it that way.

Even though you don't even though strategically it would be absolutely catastrophic, but you just think to do it that way because that's the way they do it and we wanna be like them. Even though so so then when you are asking your rulers or you're demanding your rulers to do this immature, insane thing that they will never do, then you will reject them for not doing it, and then the hope is by the West that you will rise up against your rulers and cause anarchy and chaos in your society, and that will save the life of Israel.