US propaganda gets more insulting by the minute
On the genocide in Palestine, we're meant to believe that the most powerful people in the world are not only powerless, but not half as well informed as any reasonably awake consumer of the news
This week, ProPublica published a bombshell revelation: leaked documents revealing that the US State Department and soft power agency USAID knew months ago that Israel was preventing food and medicine entering the occupied Gaza Strip, home to over 80% of the people facing ‘catastrophic hunger’ worldwide. These documents had been available to the ever-ghoulish Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, before he falsely stated in Congress that he was aware of no such thing.
Anyone who’s been paying attention to Palestine over nearly a year of slaughter and mendacity will be excused for wondering where the ‘revelation’ part comes in, let alone the ‘bombshell’ bit. After all, Israel openly announced back in October 2023 that they would be cutting off all food, medicine, water, electricity, and fuel to the occupied Gaza Strip, a declaration that they have reaffirmed ever since. International aid agencies and Palestinians on the ground have confirmed that almost nothing has been allowed into the Gaza Strip, in direct violation of both the Fourth Geneva Convention and multiple orders from the International Court of Justice dating back to January of this year. In case that were not enough, the Israeli military welcomed goons from Im Tirtzu, one of Israel’s leading fascist paramilitary groups into the closed military area around the Gaza Strip so that they could physically obstruct and destroy humanitarian aid in front of news cameras.
Literally nobody who’s been paying any attention at all will be surprised to hear both that Israel’s been keeping aid out (to some extent or other they’ve been doing that since the inception of the nearly 18-year siege on the occupied enclave) and that US officials knew all about it.
Because, after all, we have known all about this all along. It’s never been a secret. Millions of people in the US and elsewhere have been protesting over this. Yemen is interdicting Israeli-linked shipping as a sanction for the genocidal campaign in Gaza, specifically citing the US-Israeli refusal to let in basic humanitarian supplies.
But within the propaganda bubble that is the US, certain conventions have to be observed. The first is that US officials will regularly deny knowledge of things they cannot possibly be unaware of. The second is that the media, bar a few honorable exceptions, will treat these denials as fact and do nothing to call their veracity into question, even if - indeed especially if - they are so obviously false as to be insulting to the intelligence of anyone who’s paying the slightest attention.
Hence, documents proving that the US government has known at least as much about the genocide in Gaza as the rest of us, despite their denials, are treated as some sort of revelation. A bombshell revelation, even.
Over these horrible months, US propaganda has had recourse to two key themes. One is that US officials, despite access the most all-encompassing intelligence system in world history, are completely ignorant of well-documented matters of public knowledge. The other is that the most powerful regime in the history of humanity is utterly powerless to have any influence at all on the behaviour of a colonial ethnostate that could not even consider carrying out a genocide on this scale without active US support.
In short, the Biden-Harris administration has been at great pains to present itself as sort of an anti-West Wing. Where Aaron Sorkin’s series presented the US regime as controlled by powerful, principled, benevolent people who were, above all, the smartest people in any room they entered, the current US approach to what is now called ‘information statecraft’ when the US does it and ‘disinformation’ when people we’re not supposed to like do it is to project the image of a bunch of utter rubes who know nothing about what they’re doing, and are powerless to do anything about it anyway: We can’t make it stop, we don’t know how it works!
The propaganda system depends on us having short memories. As such, it’s worth recalling that it wasn’t always like this. In the early months of the genocide, the US took the criminal, but honest, stance of outright rejecting a ceasefire. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called those calling for an end to the genocide ‘disgraceful’ and ‘repugnant’. Biden himself glibly dismissed the idea of a ceasefire when asked about it by members of the media. Bernie Sanders, who exists to be the leftmost limit of what people are allowed to hope for in the US, also outright rejected the idea. The US government stood behind the genocide their proxy was carrying out, and told anyone who didn’t like that where they could go.
This only began to change as protests intensified and polling increasingly showed that the official pro-genocide stance was about as popular amongst Democrats’ voters as a dogshite sundae with swastika sprinkles, and was probably killing Biden’s reelection chances. Then, as Adam Johnson has noted, the administration decided to flip the narrative, to distance the administration from genocide in Gaza, which is easily one of their most unpopular policies:
Beginning in late February, and capping off with the President’s deeply cynical May 31 speech, the White house has successfully co-opted the concept of a “ceasefire” in Gaza by rebranding the term to mean something else entirely. As I’ve noted in these pages and elsewhere, what used to be called a “temporary pause” for the purposes of hostage exchanges is now being called a “ceasefire.” And what used to be called a “ceasefire”—actually ending the war, removing Israel from Gaza, ceasing the bombing—is simply no longer an option presented by our media or mentioned much at all. It’s become a total nonissue. Because of the US’s successful rebranding campaign, the burden for an actual ceasefire that actually ends the “war” has been shifted from the Biden White House to a nebulous, open-ended “diplomatic” process between Israel and Hamas that is always ongoing but never progressing.
Since then, we’ve been treated to a fantasy world in which the most powerful people not only can’t do anything about the genocide being committed with weapons they’re sending in record quantities, but don’t even know as much about it as we do. The media, of course, are happy to cooperate in this farce.
Meanwhile, Israel’s dependency on US weapons has only grown. They’re dropping bombs on the occupied Gaza Strip (and increasingly the occupied West Bank and Lebanon) about as fast as they can be delivered. They’re literally running out of armoured vehicles because of the Palestinian resistance’s success at targeting them. Yemen’s sanctions have bankrupted Eilat Port, and things aren’t looking much better for the regime’s other key ports. The only thing that has allowed the Zionist leadership to continue to reject Palestinian peace offers is the continuing flow of weapons from a supply chain that runs right through the heart of the US. As the US and Israel look to expand this local genocide in Palestine into a full-on regional war (one Israel’s at long odds to emerge in good shape from), the importance of putting real pressure on the supply chain, and on the government that is underwriting this slaughter, grows. With it grows the administration’s need to pretend that this whole thing is nothing to do with them.