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Government Property Is Sacred. Your Property? Not So Much. 

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TAGS U.S. History

04/09/2021José Niño

In light of the government’s response to the January 6 storming of the Capitol, anyone with a sense of political sanity can no longer argue that the war on terror is separate from American domestic affairs.

US imperialism came full circle on January 20, 2021, when Washington, DC, was subject to military occupation during Joe Biden’s inaugural address in order to secure the Capitol from alleged domestic extremist threats. When the right-wing violence that DC talking heads were squawking about never came to pass, their focus shifted toward trying to deradicalize right-leaning individuals who hold heretical views that collide with the managerial regime’s gospel.

Former CIA director John Brennan was among the most vocal of the national security analysts who started listing off all sorts of problematic groups that potentially pose a threat to the dystopian political order crystallizing before our very eyes. The very act of a mob entering the holiest of the holy sites was enough to make the entire American political establishment have a mental breakdown.

The message the ruling class sent to those who protested against it on its own turf was quite clear: tread your muddy boots on our cathedral and you will be met with a firm response from the state.

So far, there have been over 380 people charged for participating in the January 6 incident. Rest assured, the politicians who are still shaken from January 6 are thirsting for more people to persecute. Words like coup, insurrection, riot, sedition, and treason were tossed around liberally to describe the January 6ers’ actions. Only a regime insecure of its legitimacy would throw a hysterical fit over the Capitol storming that looked more like a live-action role-play than a rebellion that threatened the sovereignty of the DC occupational regime.

Pace the gatekeepers of political opinion, launching a coup requires strong organizational capacity. Rag-tag groups of disgruntled, working-class Americans, disenchanted soccer moms, and extremely online Trump supporters aren’t going to be pulling off a coup against the most powerful government in human history. The only venues the January 6 demonstrators were capable of taking over were online chat rooms.

Government Property Is Sacred. Your Property? Not So Much. 

The double standards the legacy media is using to rationalize its ongoing crusade against the specter of extremism are farcical, to say the least. Over the course of a year when small business owners had their livelihoods destroyed by arbitrary lockdowns and widespread rioting, the ruling class tipped their glasses to the rioters and scoffed at those who had to put up with last summer’s mayhem. These same media mouthpieces would likely be cheering on color revolutions and lively protests in the Middle East and post-Soviet countries as the maximal expression of democracy. But when a rowdy group of Trump supporters took it upon themselves to stand up to their overlords, that was simply a bridge too far.

Any attempt to try to point out the inconsistency of the media’s hyperventilation with regard to the January 6 incident was met with instant pushback. On Morning Joe, TV host Joe Scarborough did not pull any punches:

I know there are idiots on other cable news channels that will say, "Well, this mom-and-pop store that was vandalized during the summer riots and that's just as bad as the United States Capitol being vandalized." 

He then had some colorful language for those who hazarded to question the prevailing narrative:

No jackass it’s not. It’s the center of American democracy. No, jackass…. I'm not going to confuse a taco stand with the United States Capitol.

Only a detached member of the ruling class whose livelihood is sustained by some of America’s most powerful corporations can have the gall to downplay the trials and tribulations untold numbers of small business owners had to endure during last summer’s mayhem. Scarborough and his coterie would have us believe that paying respect to the hallowed institutions of mass democracy is the highest virtue while trying to defend the fundamental property rights of the common man is the province of buffoons and country bumpkins.

Private Property Is Critical for Civilization

For the adherents of the present political order, symbols of the state have a religious aura. Private property, on the other hand, is a sacrificial animal to be slaughtered as an offering to the state, though the whole conversation would likely change if the property of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Big Tech, or politically connected corporations were defiled. The media would instantly become situational capitalists and vigorously defend the sanctity of their fellow peers’ property. 

Heck, they might just throw some radical free market defenses here and there. But this is out of pure self-interest, not because political leaders and their corporate patrons hold private property in high esteem at a holistic level. As for the rest of the rubes in Middle America, they must put up with whatever political violence befalls them and their property. Simply raising their voices in opposition will have the legacy media branding them as “reactionary,” “racist,” or “bigoted.”

On the other hand, Ludwig von Mises championed private property not just for the sake of sloganeering but to impart to others the necessity property rights as a means of fostering social harmony. As he observed in Omnipotent Government, “If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”

Mises’s vision for a social order predicated on respect for property rights has not disappeared from the intellectual consciousness. Successors of the Misesian tradition such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe have continued making the case for the respect of private property as a civilizing force. Unlike the public sector worshippers, Hoppe understood the bigger picture of why private property, not public property, should be treated as sacred. In fact, he views the modern-day state as one of the principal drivers of the erosion of property rights throughout the West.

As Hoppe argued in Democracy, The God That Failed,

the more the state has increased its expenditures on social security and public safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.

As a consequence of being accustomed to having mandarins in distant government agencies lord over them, Americans have gradually come to disrespect or at least take for granted the concept of property rights. Hence their relative indifference toward the wanton destruction of the property of many small business owners’ establishments during last summer’s riots and toward the devastation government-promoted lockdowns inflicted on these small business operations.

The sign of a healthy society is one where private property is respected, and not just the private property of social media whales or parasitic defense contractors, but that of everyday business owners. By the same token, a society with a modicum of sanity would laud acts of self-defense against criminals who wish to harm the property and persons of lawful individuals.

Many of the shibboleths that Americans have been so inured to accept are now imploding. Millions of Americans took it upon themselves to buy firearms at record levels during a time when police services could not be relied on to uphold their end of the proverbial social contract. Moreover, a number of Americans responded by forming community defense groups to protect their neighborhoods when police were standing down left and right as cities nationwide burned.

Even the idea of privatized policing is starting to gain traction in certain parts of America. Occasionally, moments of crisis force people to rethink many political premises they’ve stubbornly held. There’s something to be said about how operating outside of one’s comfort zone can compel one to look at things differently.

All things considered, the past year should all but dispel the notion that America is “exceptional.” It’s a country with a myriad of problems that have dotted empires in decay throughout world history—a corrupt ruling class, an overstretched military presence, an unstable monetary system, and declining public order.

Reassuring ourselves of empty bromides that it “can’t happen here” because America is exceptional is a pathetic cope that ignores the iron laws of politics and economics, which the US is not exempt from. The only thing exceptional is the level of befuddlement that many experts will find themselves in once the US inevitably careens into the abyss of social and economic decadence if the country’s leaders don’t get their act together.

Author: 

Contact José Niño

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook or Twitter. Get his premium newsletter here.

https://mises.org/wire/government-property-sacred-your-property-not-so-much

Engineering of Consent: Analysis of the Israel Lobby's Facebook Discourse in the U.S Paper Thumbnail

 Chapter 1

1 INTRODUCTION

The Israel-Zionist Lobby in the United States of America (U.S.A) continues to play an effective role in the American internal and foreign policies, especially towards the Palestinian-Israel conflict (Lieberman, 2014). In 2000, one American official at Camp David agreement said, "Far too often, we functioned as Israel's lawyer" (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006).

This role has been played by The Lobby for many decades and the primary goal is to get support from the Americans towards various Jewish and Israeli issues. Given the array of issues, the Lobby functions as advocacy groups, non-profit organizations, traditional and digital media (social media such as Facebook).

Over the last decade, the Lobby's organizations have become formidable in their effort to dictate their very own narrative of the Israel-Zionist conflict. This effort has led to the engineering of the American people's consent, opinions and attitudes when it comes to the Israeli and Jewish peoples’ issues (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007). In line with this, the present study explores The Israel Lobby's use of media, discourse, narrative, representation, embedded ideology, power relations, language and communication used on the Israel Lobby's Facebook pages.

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The evolution diffusion of communication technologies into civilians' lives over the last decade have enabled politicians, organizations, Lobby and advocacy groups, etc., to control and have a major effect on the public opinion across various countries. Social media, especially Facebook, reaches a huge number of people, and Americans are no exception of this. By the first quarter of 2018, it had 2.17 billion monthly active users worldwide and around 230 millions of them were Americans (Kemp, 2018). This study focuses on the Israel Lobby's Facebook pages in terms of form and content of their discourse (discourse construction, form, themes, representation, ideology and power relations).

In order to achieve what has been stated above, the present study uses qualitative methodology and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to analyze the most active and interactive Israel-Zionist Lobby's Facebook pages which are: StandWithUs (SWU), United with Israel (UWI), Stand for Israel (SFI), Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and The Israeli Project (TIP). This study is theoretically guided by "the Engineering of Consent" (EOC) approach, and the Discourse Theory (DT).

This first chapter presents an introduction to this study. It consists of Background of the Study, Problem Statement, Research Aims and Objectives, Research Questions, Significance of the Study, and Limitations and Scope of the Study.
1.2 Background of the Study

The continuous Palestinian-Israeli conflict practically started in 1948 through Jewish occupation of the Palestinian land. This called for Israelis "declaration of Israeli state",

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and what Palestinians consider it as "Al-Nakba"1 meaning (the Catastrophe). The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been described as one of the most gruesome conflicts in the world. It is said that the Israeli occupies more than (80%) of the Palestinian land. The initiation and origins of the conflict can be traced back to the 1897 Basle Conference which was organized by the Zionist movement in Switzerland when the Zionist movement decided to choose Palestine as a national homeland for Jews and declare their intention to establish Israel in Palestine (Munayer & Loden, 2014; Neal, .)1995

The Israel Lobby in the U.S. is an alliance of mainly Jewish collectives or individuals who seek and make efforts to shape and influence the American foreign policy and Americans attitudes. The Lobby also is mainly concerned with the unwavering support for Israel, its interests, policies and attitudes especially towards the Middle East. Typically, the Lobby does not consist of only American Jewish people. It also includes seculars, Christians, and other groups (Lieberman, 2009; Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, .)2009

The roots of the Israel Lobby in the U.S. dates back to 1941 when the Jewish Agency and Israel was first represented in the United Nations. In the 1950's, American Jewish people established the American Zionist Council (AZC), and the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (AZCPA) which in 1959 was renamed as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Both organizations have been working as

1 "The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, al-Nakbah, lit. "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. The term Nakba also refers to the period of war itself and events affecting Palestinians from December 1947 to January 1949." (Zochrot Organization, 2014, para. 1).

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the first Public Relations units of the Israel Lobby in the United States of America. In and around this time, other important Zionist organizations also operated e.g. Zionist Organization of America. All these organizations worked as the mouthpiece of the issues concerning the Jewish and Israel Lobby mission (Kenen, 1981; Verbeeten, 2006).

According to Malik (2017), the core agenda of most Israel Lobby's organizations in the United States are; aiding financial and ammunition subventions for Israel, seeking financial support and attempting to influence actions of the White House, influencing public opinion through academics and the regulation of media outlets such as The New York Times and C-SPAN.

Since the Israeli-Arabic October War in 1973, America has been supporting Israel much more than it does any other country, especially against the Middle Eastern countries. This support has been achieved through the influential role of the Israel Lobby in the United States (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007). As of 2003, the total amount of financial support from U.S. to Israel is around $140 billion dollars, given that U.S. provides Israel with about $3 billion annually to develop its artillery concurrently with giving Israel an access to intelligent information and ignoring its nuclear weapons project (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006). Moreover, the U.S has been notably supporting Israel diplomatically since 1982. And in 2017, the U.S. has used her veto power for forty three times against the United Nations Security Council's resolutions when they criticized Israel (Okhovat, 2011; The New Arab, 2017). In addition to this, the U.S.

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has played a vital role in the negotiations of the 1993 Oslo Accords2. They clearly supported and backed the Israeli agenda.

During Bush's presidency, the main strategy excogitated towards the Middle Eastern issues aimed at improving the Israeli strategic relations and security. This was proved in the invasion of Iraq and the U.S.’s attitude in the last war in Lebanon. They opposed calls for ceasefire according to the Israeli demands. According to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), "The United States and Israel have formed a unique partnership to meet the growing strategic threats in the Middle East. This cooperative effort provides significant benefits for both the U.S. and Israel" (AIPAC, 2015). The U.S. justified its support for Israel on the grounds that it is a weak state surrounded by enemies, and that it is the only democratic country in the region (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007). They also justified it with the fact Jewish people have suffered heinous human rights violations and hence they deserve preferential treatments. This has made Israel to be morally superior to its enemies' behavior, and fighting "Islamic" terrorism, especially after 11 September attack (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007). On the other hand, these justifications are contrary to the truth, that Israel today is the strongest power in the Middle East. It is the only state that has nuclear programs and weapons in the region. It refuses to grant Palestinians their own

2 The 1993 Oslo Accords "Is an agreement signed between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on September 13, 1993, meant to effectively bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its end by means of territorial concessions and facilitating the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The accords, representing a milestone in Israeli-Palestinian relations, were finalized in Oslo, Norway, on August 20, 1993. The official signing ceremony was held in Washington the following September, with then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat representing both sides and US President Bill Clinton serving as their witness." (Ynetnews, 2009, para. 1).

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democratic state, and it is controlling the lives of roughly 6.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, occupied Palestine (1948), and West Bank (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006).

Consequently, during the first two years of America’s president Donald J. Trump’s time in the office, he adopted the Israel Lobby and AIPAC’s agenda on the Middle East. He promised before winning the position of the American president election in 2016 that he’d move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem; pushing the Congress and America’s allies to strengthen the nuclear deal with Iran, cutting funds to the Palestinians as a means of forcing them to align more with Israel and the West. In recent times, United States representatives are seen to be releasing strong statements against the United Nations members who oppose the U.S. policies toward Israel (Kampeas, 2018).

As it has been mentioned earlier, the Israel-Zionist Lobby in the U.S. has formed a good number of influential organizations that impacts the U.S.A foreign policy; AIPAC being one of the most powerful and well-known ones. It was ranked as the second most influential organization in the U.S. (International Business Publications, 2009). AIPAC and other key organizations of the Lobby are run by extremists who generally support major policies of Israel's Likud party (right wing) (AIPAC, 2017). The Lobby has two main strategies to get the U.S. support. First, it has the influence and pressure on both the Congress and the executive branch to support Israel in their decisions. Secondly, it ensures that the U.S. public discourse represents Israel positively way, by repeating the Israel-Zionist narratives and myths about Israel- Palestinian conflict to prevent critical comments that could make the Americans critique Israel (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006).

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Accordingly, pro-Israel organizations work hard to influence the American media, think tanks and academic institutions. Numerous of those organizations are funded and ran by people who are committed to the Israeli agenda. The Lobby's perspective of Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media because the majority of American commentators are pro-Israel. For example, Bartley, one editor of the Wall Street Journals, once stated, "Shamir, Sharon, or Bibi, whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me" (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006, p. 19). The Lobby devises numerous strategies in confronting the anti-Israel people. These strategies include writing letters, organizing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts against these individuals, collectives and media outlets (Barringer, 2002). Some American mainstream media that prominently provide a pro-Israel editorial policy include: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Times, New Republic, and Weekly Standard (Lieberman, 2009).

One tool that has largely aided the efforts of all of the above-mentioned groups, strategies of the Israel Lobby in the United States is social media. It has been used in political actions, protest movements and public media campaigns, and it has become a coordinating tool for political movements and governments. Israel-Zionist Lobby uses the same technologies and platforms to mobilize and increase pro-Israel sentiments. For example, they convey a positive representation and coverage about the state of Israel (Ayalon, 2015; Nir, 2005). Since 2013, the Israeli government has collaborated with the Israel lobby's media to engage in recruiting social media and digital "cover units" to defeat a wide range of enemies who provide anti-Israel discourse in all fields. At a digital diplomacy conference in 2016, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "Israel is banking on social media to win the hearts and minds of the 7

public" (Ahren, 2017, para. 1). It coordinates the lobby's media in the U.S. and supplies them with posts, publications, and messages, which indicates that the Lobby is linked to the Israeli government (Ahren, 2017).

The Israel Lobby constantly works on the national branding of Israel. These images include the assumption that Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East and the defender of liberal democracy. It also portrays Israel as a global hub of technological and high-tech innovation, and it promotes Tel Aviv as a gay city with open and liberal mind, in other words a metropolitan city. They also portray the Palestinian terrorism as synonymous to ISIS’s i.e. just like ISIS that targets European countries, Palestinian terror targets Israel. Also, the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas are both dedicated to harming Israel and there is no difference between them, Palestinian terrorists attack Israel not because of the occupation but because of its liberal democratic nature and finally, Israel is leading a global war of "light" vs. "darkness" (Manor, 2015, para. 10).

The Lobby uses social media strategies to keep the Israeli narrative alive through varied social media accounts for the Lobby's organizations, leaders, media, and members. They shut down social media pages that belongs to opposite groups or anti- Israel media. They also organize social media propaganda campaigns and secret campaigns etc. (Abunimah, 2019; Silverstein, 2018).

1.3 Problem Statement

It is unmistakable as mentioned in the Background of the Study that the Israel Lobby has an influential role in pushing the Israel and Jewish issues in the American society. Indeed, it has managed to engineer the American public’s consent, opinions and 8

attitudes. They have done this through the discourse and narrative addressed in the traditional and new media platforms.

One of the major concerns and concentrations of this study is the representation of the Israel Lobby in the Palestinian Israel conflict. This representation helps to shape attitudes and perceptions of every element of the war. This representation also covers the attitudes and perception towards the Palestinians, Israeli, Jews, Muslims and other foreign involvements.

Despite the vital significance of the issue, there is dearth of scholarly focus on the Israeli lobby's role in the U.S. especially from the angle of engineering of the publics consent. This is largely because there is evident repercussion from studies like this because of the immense power and opportunities of the Lobby to influence academia across the world.

What is more, this study has even become even more indispensable with the use of social media by the Israel Lobby; hence investigating the, discourse used by them has become a sine qua non.
1.4 Research Aims & Objectives

The current study aims to:
1. Contribute to the scarcity of studies in this area by adopting CDA.

2. Investigate how the language, discourse and communication of the Israel Lobby on Facebook pages is used in engineering the Americans consent regarding to the

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Israeli narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This study adopts the EOC approach in this regard.

3. Regarding the Israel-Zionist Lobby's position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; this study explores discourse aspects such as, most frequently used terms, news sources, quotations, textual and linguistic features, symbols, ideologies and power relation.

4. Identify the abuse of power and ideologies within The Israel Lobby's discourse in the U.S. in respect to the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

5. Find out the themes and major topics that the Israel Lobby discusses and presents to its American audience.

6. Clarify the kind of relationship between the Israel Lobby and the U.S. in the Israeli perspective which made U.S. as the most pro-Israel country around the world.

7. Find out how the Israel lobby's Facebook pages represent the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including the representation of Palestinians, Arabs, Israelis, Jews, United States, and Jerusalem.

8. Define the prominent justifications highlighted by the Israel Lobby for the Israeli occupation crimes in Palestine.

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1.5 Research Questions

This study aims to explore how the content of the Israel-Zionist Lobby is used in engineering the American people's consent, opinions and attitudes through the Israel- Zionist lobby's Facebook pages. In line with this, the researcher seeks to answer the following research questions:

RQ1. How did the Israel Lobby in the U.S. construct their discourse and represent the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the selected Facebook pages in the year 2018?

RQ2. What are the main themes that emerged from the Israel Lobby's discourse in the selected Facebook pages in the year 2018?

RQ3. How did the selected Israel lobby's Facebook pages work to engineer the Americans consent regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during 2018 in the U.S.? 1.6 Significance of the Study
This research is important for several reasons, the first of which is the lack of studies of scholarly efforts in this area and provide a deeper analysis and explanations about the Israel lobby; there is no study that has focused on the issue yet. Secondly, it is important because it examines the issue through the EOC approach. The third reason is that, a study like this will serve as an important resource for further studies in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Fourth, the study is expected to provide newer insights for researchers, journalists, Public Relations practitioners and governments etc.

What is more, this study will inform the Palestinians publics about the Israel-Zionist Lobby's narrative of their conflict and how it works. Also, the analysis of the Israel-

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Zionist Lobby's social media content provides a clear understanding of the Israel Lobby and how it engineers the world in the Palestinian- Israel conflict.

This study would also provide insights into important events and issues such as the relocation of U.S. embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, pulling out from the Western- Iranian nuclear agreement and other decisions that he took regarding to the Palestinian- Israel conflict (Begley, 2016).

Fifth, the study is also important is the sense that it buttresses other studies that has talked about how social media, big data and new forms of technology are used in engineering the consent of the publics.
1.7 Limitations and Scope of the Study

The current study focuses on the discourse, of the Israel-Zionist Lobby's Facebook pages. It specifically centers on the English language content of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2018. The Israel Lobby's social media pages and websites of organizations are examined by the researcher and after scrutinizing it, the most popular and interactive five pages are selected for this study. These pages are (StandWithUs, United with Israel, Stand for Israel, Christians United for Israel, The Israel Project).

Furthermore, the researcher chose Facebook because it is the most popular social media platform that the Israel Lobby uses in the U.S.

This study is limited in its focus on content in the year 2018. The study focuses on this year because, first, it comes after the America’s 2016 presidential election which enable the researcher to identify the new president’s policies as it affects the

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Palestinian-Israel conflict in favor of Israel (O. Abu Arqoub, 2018). Second, it analyze the discourse of 2018 which will reveal a recent and newest results about the Israel Lobby's work, role, and discourse.

This study is also limited to the Israel Lobby and the researcher focuses on the Israel Lobby because it is one of the most powerful and influential lobbies in the U.S. They date back to many decades and they’ve helped achieve numerous Zionist goals and hence deserves to be studied.

Furthermore, this study is also limited in its sample considering that it focuses on the 60 most interactive posts on the five pages selected. The content includes texts, images, videos, hashtags, links, and emojis etc.

FURTHER READING: https://www.academia.edu/40463566/Engineering_of_Consent_Analysis_of_the_Israel_Lobbys_Facebook_Discourse_in_the_U_S?email_work_card=title

 FEBRUARY 27, 2020

How We Stay Blind to the Story of Power

BY JONATHAN COOKFacebook

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Artwork by Nick Roney

If one thing drives me to write, especially these posts, it is the urgent need for us to start understanding power. Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths. There is no more important issue. Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species.

Which is why it should be simply astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party politics and celebrity scandals.

And yet, of course, this lack of interest in analysing and understanding power is not surprising at all. Because the corporate media is the key tool – or seen another way, the central expression – of power.

Very obviously, power’s main concern is the ability to conceal itself. Its exposure as power weakens it, by definition. Once exposed, power faces questions about its legitimacy, its methods, its purposes. Power does not want to be seen, it does not want to be confined, it does not want to be held accountable. It wants absolute freedom to reproduce itself, and ideally to amass more power.

That is why true power makes itself as invisible and as inscrutable as it can. Like a mushroom, power can grow only in darkness. That is why it is the hardest thing to write about in ways that are intelligible to those under its spell, which is most of us, most of the time. Because power coopts language, words are inadequate to the task of describing the story of real power.

Ripples on the surface

Notice I refer to power, not the powerful, because power should be understood more as an idea made flesh, an ideological matrix of structures, a way of understanding the world, than a set of people or a cabal. It has its own logic separate from the people who are considered powerful. Yes, politicians, celebrities, royalty, bankers and CEOs are part of its physical expression. But they are not power, precisely because those individuals are visible. The very visibility of their power makes them vulnerable and potentially expendable – the very opposite of power.

The current predicaments of Prince Andrew in Britain or Harvey Weinstein in the US are illustrative of the vagaries of being powerful, while telling us little meaningful about power itself. Conversely, there is a truth in the self-serving story of those in power – the corporate executives of an Exxon or a BP – who note, on the rare occasions they face a little scrutiny, that if they refused to do their jobs, to oversee the destruction of the planet, someone else would quickly step in to fill their shoes.

Rather than thinking in terms of individuals, power is better visualised as the deep waters of a lake, while the powerful are simply the ripples on the surface. The ripples come and go, but the vast body of water below remains untouched.

Superficially, the means by which power conceals itself is through stories. Its needs narratives – mainly about those who appear powerful – to create political and social dramas that distract us from thinking about deep power. But more fundamentally still, power depends on ideology. Ideology cloaks power – in a real sense, it is power – because it is the source of power’s invisibility.

Ideology provides the assumptions that drive our perceptions of the world, that prevent us from questioning why some people were apparently born to rule, or have been allowed to enclose vast estates of what was once everyone’s land, or hoard masses of inherited wealth, or are celebrated for exploiting large numbers of workers, or get away with choking the planet to the point at which life itself asphyxiates.

Phrased like that, none of these practices seems natural. In fact, to a visiting Martian they would look pathologically insane, an irrefutable proof of our self-destructiveness as a species. But these conditions are the unexamined background to our lives , just the way things are and maybe always were. The system.

True, the individuals who benefit from the social and economic policies that uphold this system may occasionally be held to account. Even the policies themselves may occasionably be held up to scrutiny. But the assumptions behind the policies are rarely questioned – certainly not in what we are taught to call the “mainstream”.

That is an amazing outcome given that almost none of us benefit from the system we effectively sanction every time we turn out to vote in an election. Very few of us are rulers, or enjoy enormous wealth, or live on large estates, or own companies that deprive thousands of the fruit of their labours, or profit from destroying life on Earth. And yet the ideology that rationalises all that injustice, inequality and immorality not only stays in place but actually engenders more injustice, more inequality, more immorality year by year.

We watch this all unfold passively, largely indifferently because we believe – we are made to believe – we are powerless.

Regenerating like Dr Who

By now, you may be frustrated that power still lacks a name. Is it not late-stage capitalism? Or maybe neoliberalism? Globalisation? Or neoconservatism? Yes, we can identify it right now as ideologically embedded in all of those necessarily vague terms. But we should remember that it is something deeper still.

Power always has an ideological shape and physical structures. It has both faces. It existed before capitalism, and will exist after it (if capitalism doesn’t kill us first). Human history has consisted of power consolidating and regenerating itself in new form over and over again – like the eponymous hero of the long-running British TV sci-fi series Doctor Who – as different groups have learnt how to harness it, usurp it and put it to self-interested use. Power has been integral to human societies. Now our survival as individuals and as a species depends on our finding a way to reinvent power, to tame it and share it equally between us all – and thereby dissolve it. It is the ultimate challenge.

By its very nature, power must prevent this step – a step that, given our current predicament, is necessary to prevent planetary-wide death. Power can only perpetuate itself by deceiving us about what it has done in the past and will do in the future, and whether alternatives exist. Power tells us stories that it is not power – that it is the rule of law, justice, ethics, protection from anarchy or the natural world, inevitable. And to obscure the fact that these are just stories – and that like all stories, these ones may not actually be true, or may even be the opposite of truth – it embeds these stories in ideology.

We are encouraged to believe that the media – in the widest sense possible – has authority alone to tell us these stories, to promote them as orthodoxy. It is the lens through which the world is revealed to us. Reality filtered through the lens of power.

The media is not just newspapers and TV news broadcasts. Power also exerts its hold on our imaginative horizons through all forms of “popular” entertainment, from Hollywood films and Youtube videos to social media and video games.

In the US, for example, almost all media is owned by a handful of corporations that have diverse interests related to power. Power expresses itself in our modern societies as wealth and ownership. And corporations stand at the apex of that power structure. They and their chief functionaries (for corporate executives do not really control power, it controls them) own almost all of the planet’s resources, they hold almost all of the wealth. They typically use their money to buy attention for themselves and their brands while at the same time buying invisibility for deep power.

To take one example: Rupert Murdoch’s power is visible to us, as are his negative personal qualities and occasionally the pernicious influence of his newspapers. But it is not just that his media outlets play a part in shaping and controlling what we talk about on any given day, for good or bad. They also control – all the time – what we are capable of thinking and not thinking. That is true power. And that role will never be mentioned by a Murdoch organisation – or any of his supposed rivals in the corporate media. It is the preserve of blogs like this one for very obvious reasons.

That makes media corporations a key pillar of the matrix of power. Their journalists are servants of corporate power, whether they know it or not. Mostly, of course, they do not.

The veiling of power

These thoughts were provoked by a rare comment from a prominent corporate journalist about power. Jonathan Freedland is a senior columnist at the supposedly liberal Guardian, and a British equivalent of Thomas Friedman or Jeffrey Goldberg. His job is to help make deep power invisible, even as he criticises the powerful. Freedland’s stock-in-trade is using the ephemeral dramas of political power to veil true power.

It was therefore intriguing to see Freedland actually try to define “power” in a recent column intended to dissuade people from backing Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee. Here is what he writes in reference to power:

“If recent events have reminded us of anything, it’s that in politics, power is the whole ballgame. …

“Most significant of all, a [political] party in power has the ability to create the conditions that ensure it keeps it. …

“It’s understanding the power of power, a truth so obvious that it should barely need stating, that is driving some battle-hardened veterans of past left campaigns to despair. ‘Nothing. Without power, there is nothing,’ fumed James Carville, who ran the last successful Democratic effort to oust a sitting Republican president when he masterminded Bill Clinton’s victory back in 1992.

“But the first step is to accept its importance, to recognise that winning power is the sine qua non of politics, literally the thing without which there is nothing.”

Notice that from the outset Freedland limits his definition of power in ways that are designed to assist power rather examine or scrutinise it. He states something meaningful – the importance of “understanding the power of power, a truth so obvious that it should barely need stating” – but then resolutely obscures the “power of power”.

What Freedland addresses instead is a lesser form of power – power as visible political drama, the illusion that we, those who currently have no real power, can exercise power by voting for candidates already selected for their ideological subservience to power, in a political and economic system structured to serve power, in a media and cultural landscape where those who try to address or challenge real power either end up being dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, or “tinfoil hat-wearing” leftists, or crazed socialists; or end up being locked away as subversives, as a menace to society, as has prominently happened to Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

A small hint that Freedland is veiling power – from himself too – is his unthinking reference to Bill Clinton’s election adviser as running a “left campaign”. Of course, stripped of a narrative that serves power, neither Clinton nor his campaign could ever have been described as of the left.

While Freedland frets about how political power has moved to the right in the US and UK, he also indulges the deceptive consolation that cultural power – “the media, the Academy, entertainment”, as he refers to it – can act as a liberal-left counterweight, even if an ineffective one, to the right’s political power. But as I pointed out, the media and entertainment world – of which Freedland is very much part – are there precisely to uphold power, rationalise it, propagandise for it, and refine it so as to better conceal it. They are integral to the shadow play, to the veiling of real power. The left-right dichotomy – within the severely circumscribed limits he and his colleagues impose – is part of that veiling process.

Freedland’s seeming analysis of power does not, of course, lead him to consider in any meaningful way the most pressing and vital issues of the moment, issues that are deeply entwined with what power is and how it functions:

* how we might upend economic “orthodoxy” to prevent the imminent collapse of a global financial system fallaciously premised on the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet,

* and how, if we are to survive as a species, we might deal with corporate power that is polluting the planet to death through the aggressive cultivation of rampant, profit-driven consumerism.

These issues are only ever addressed tangentially in the corporate media, in ways that do not threaten deep power.

Glitches in the system

The kind of power Freedland focuses on is not real power. He is interested only in taking “power” away from Donald Trump to give it to a supposedly “electable” candidate for the Democratic party, like Pete Buttigieg or Michael Bloomberg, rather than a supposedly “unelectable” Sanders; or to take “power” from Boris Johnson through a “moderate”, pliable Labour party reminiscent of the Tony Blair era rather than the “alienating” democratic socialism he and his colleagues worked so relentlessly to undermine from the moment Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader.

In other words, for Freedland and the entire spectrum of the corporate media, the only discussion they care to have is about who might best serve a superficial, ephemeral political power – without actually defining or even alluding to real power.

There is good reason for this. Because if we understood what power is, that it depends on ideas that we have been force-fed our every waking moment, ideas that enslave our minds and are now poised to kill us, we might decide that the whole system of power, not just its latest pretty or ugly face, needs to be swept away. That we need to start with entirely new ideas and values. And that the only way to liberate ourselves from our current pathological, self-destructive ideas is to stop listening to the loyal functionaries of power like Jonathan Freedland.

The current efforts to stop Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination do at least help to open our eyes.

The Democratic party is one of the two national US parties whose role, like the corporate media, is to conceal deep power. Its function is to create the illusion of choice, and thereby keep the viewing public engrossed in the drama of politics. That does not mean that there are no differences between the Republican and Democratic parties. There are, and for some people they are meaningful and can be vitally important. But those differences are completely trivial from the perspective of power.

In fact, power’s goal is to magnify those trivial differences to make them look like major differences. But whichever party gets into “power”, the corporations will keep despoiling and destroying the planet, they will continue driving us into profit-making wars, and they will carry on accumulating vast wealth largely unregulated. They will be able to do so because the Republican and Democratic parties’ leaderships rose to their current positions – they were selected – by proving their usefulness to deep power. That is the power of power, after all.

That is not to say there are never glitches in the system. Mistakes happen, though they are usually corrected quickly. The system is not all-powerful – not yet, at least. Our situation is not necessarily hopeless, though the struggle is immensely difficult because most of us have not yet worked out what power is and therefore have no idea how it might be confronted.

Power has had to make historic compromises, to take defensive actions in the hope of maintaining its invisibility. In the west, it eventually conceded the vote to all adult men, then women, to ensure its legitimacy. As a result, power shifted from expressing itself through implicit or overt threats of physical violence to maintain order and moved towards manufacturing an ideological consensus – our current passivity to our imminent self-destruction – through education systems and the corporate media.

(The threat of violence is only veiled, and can be made explicit against those who doubt the legitimacy of power or try to stop its descent into self-destruction, as Extinction Rebellion will increasingly find the more it pushes for deep and systemic change.)

Power’s relentless drive to feed the insatiable appetite it has created for us as consumers, and its obsession with technological fixes as a way to maximise efficiency and profits, sometimes create these glitches. They open up new possibilities for exposing power. One recent example is the information publishing revolution embodied by social media. Power is now desperately trying to stuff that genie back into the lamp with self-serving narratives about “fake news” on the left (made more credible by conflating it with power-serving fake news on the right), as well as making drastic changes to algorithms to disappear the left’s rapidly emerging counter-narratives.

And most importantly, power is struggling to maintain the illusion of its benign nature, of normal service, in the face of real-world facts, such as the planet heating up, runaway fires in Australia, balmy winter temperatures in the Antarctic, the mass die-off of insects, and the tide of plastic choking the oceans. Its efforts to exploit the wealth-generating opportunities offered by the climate and wider environmental emergencies, while refusing to acknowledge that it is entirely responsible for those emergencies, may yet backfire. The question is not whether we wake up to the role of power, but whether we do so before it is too late to effect change.

The Sanders threat

Sanders is one of those glitches. Just like Jeremy Corbyn was in the UK. They have been thrown up by current circumstances. They are the first signs of a tentative political awakening to power, sometimes dismissed generically as “populism”. They are the inevitable outcome of the ever greater difficulty power faces in concealing its self-destructiveness as it seeks to remove every last limit to its voracious acquisitiveness.

Once upon a time, those who paid the price of power were out of view, in disenfranchised, urban slums or far-off lands. But the accelerating contradictions of power – of late-stage, global capitalism, if you prefer a specific name – have brought those effects much closer to home, where they cannot so easily be ignored or discounted. Growing sections of western societies, the central locus of power, understand that there needs to be serious, not cosmetic, change.

Power needs to be rid of Sanders, just as it previously had to rid itself of Corbyn because both are that rarest thing – politicians who are not imprisoned within the current power paradigm. Because they do not serve power cultishly like most of their colleagues, such politicians threaten to shine a light on true power. Ultimately, power will use any tool to destroy them. But power prefers, if possible, to maintain its cloak of invisibility, to avoid exposing the sham of the consumption-driven “democracy” it engineered to consolidate and expand its power. It prefers our collusion.

The reason the Democratic party establishment is trying to bring down Sanders at the primaries stage and crown a power-functionary like Buttigieg, Biden or even Elizabeth Warren – or if it must, parachute in a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg – is not because Sanders would on his own be able to end the globe-spanning power of pathological capitalism and consumerism. It is because the nearer he gets to the main shadow play, to the presidency, the more power will have to make itself visible to defeat him. (Language makes it difficult to describe this dynamic without resorting to metaphors that make power sound fancifully human rather than structural and ideological.)

As the other candidates increasingly look unsuited to the task of toppling Sanders for the nomination, and rigging the primaries has proved much harder to do covertly than it was hoped, power has had to flex its muscles more publicly than it likes. So narrative is being marshalled to destroy Sanders in the same way that the antisemitism and Brexit narratives were used to halt Corbyn’s grassroots movement in its tracks. In Sanders’ case, the corporate media is preparing a readymade Russia narrative against him in case he gets nearer to power – a narrative that has already been refined for use against Trump.

(Trump’s relation to power could be the basis for an entirely separate post. He is not an ideological threat to power, he is one if its functionaries. But he is a potential Harvey Weinstein or Prince Andrew. He can be sacrificed if needs be. The Russiagate narrative has served two purposes useful to power. It has tamed Trump’s ego-based politics to ensure he does not threaten deep power by making it more visible. And it has created a compelling political drama that channels and dissipates the “resistance” to Trump, satisfying much of the left’s own need to feel they are doing something, when in fact they are simply strengthening Trump and deep power.)

Caught in a trap

Late last week, as the landslide in Nevada for Sanders was imminent, the western media uncritically reported claims, based on unnamed “US officials”, that the Vermont senator is seen by the Russians as an “asset”, and that the Kremlin is trying to help either him or Trump to get elected. No one making that claim was identified, no explanation was offered of how Sanders could serve as an asset, nor was evidence cited for how the Russians might be able to help Sanders win. Power doesn’t need facts or evidence, even when its claims are self-evidently disruptive to the democratic process. It exists chiefly in the realm of narrative and ideology. This is a story, just like Corbyn’s “antisemitism crisis”, that is made true simply through repetition.

Because power is power, its narratives can defy the most elementary rules of logic. After all, how could an unverified, evidence-free narrative about Russian interference on behalf of Sanders’ campaign be more important than actual interference by anonymous “US officials” intended to damage Sanders’ campaign? How could such undemocratic, unaccountable efforts to interfere in the outcome of the US election be so readily peddled by the media unless the entire press corps is incapable or unwilling to engage their critical faculties in favour of the democratic principles they claim to uphold? Unless, in truth, they are not there representing us, the people, and our interests, but are instead simply servants of what amounts to a power-cult.

As I have documented many times before, Corbyn found himself caught in a trap of the kind now faced by Sanders. Any supporter (including Jews) who denied that the Labour party Corbyn led was antisemitic, or argued that the antisemitism claims were being weaponised to damage him, was cited as proof that Corbyn had indeed attracted antisemites to the party. Concluding that Corbyn’s Labour party was not antisemitic, based on the evidence, was treated as evidence of antisemitism. But as soon as Corbyn agreed under media and party pressure to accept the alternative – that an antisemitism problem had taken root on his watch – he was also implicitly forced to concede that something about him and his values had allowed antisemitism to take root. He found he was damned either way – which is precisely how power makes sure it emerges the winner.

Unless we can develop our critical faculties to resist its propaganda, power holds all the cards and can play them the way that best suits its interests. The Russia narrative can be similarly written and rewritten in any way needed to damage Sanders. If he dissociates himself from the Russia narrative, it can be cited as proof that he is in the Kremlin’s pocket. But if Sanders supports the claims of Trump’s collusion with Russia, as he has done, he confirms the narrative that Vladimir Putin is interfering in the election – which can then be twisted when necessary to present Sanders as another of Russia’s assets.

 

The message is: A vote for Trump or Sanders will put Putin in change of the White House. If you’re a patriot, better to choose a safe pair of hands – those of Buttgeig, Biden or Bloomberg. (Paradoxically, one of the glitches might be a US presidential election campaign between two billionaires, a “choice” between Trump and Bloomberg. Should power become too successful in engineering the electoral system to serve its interests alone, too successful in allowing money to buy all political influence, it risks making itself visible to a wider section of the public than ever before.)

None of this should be seen as sinister or conspiratorial, though of course it sounds that way to those who fail or refuse to understand power. It is in the logic of power to exercise and consolidate its power to the greatest extent possible. And power has been accumulating power to itself over centuries, over millennia. Our failure to understand this simple truth is really a form of political illiteracy, one that has been engendered by our submission to, our worship of, power.

Those caught up in the drama of politics, the surface ripples – which is almost all of us, almost all of the time – are actors in, rather than witnesses to, the story of power. And for that reason we can see only other actors, the battles between the powerful and the powerless, and between the powerless and the powerless, rather than power itself.

We watch the drama without seeing the theatre in which that drama is unfolding. In fact, power is much more than the drama or the theatre. It is the unseen foundations on which the theatre is built. To employ another metaphor, we are like soldiers on the battlefields of old. We slaughter – or are slaughtered by – people no different to us, defined as an enemy, cheered on by generals, politicians and journalists in the service of a supposed ideal we cannot articulate beyond the emptiest slogans.

Power is the structure of the thoughts we think we control, a framework for the ideologies we think we voted for, the values we think we choose to treasure, the horizon of imaginations we think we created. Power exists only so long as we consent to it through our blind obedience. But in truth, it is the weakest of opponents – it can be overcome simply by raising our heads and opening our eyes.

This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/27/how-we-stay-blind-to-the-story-of-power/