Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Novorussian Propaganda vs. American Propaganda

Russia is not the right-wing utopia that it is sometimes portrayed as. Neither is the United States the global capitol of degeneracy and evil.

However, the stories that people tell each other about different nations, and what they believe, matters a great deal. Stories are always simplifications, but they are the simplifications that people use to form their thoughts, shape their decisions, and frame their emotions.

Here’s the first one, from Novorussian propagandists:

In the video, President Poroshenko appeals to the audience by basically saying that his Ukrainians will get pensions and kindergarten, but the people that his country is constantly trying to get to sign ceasefires are going to get nothing.

A recent ad from the American army instead focuses on the individual, and the status that comes from service:

From 2011, a similar theme with a lite Hans Zimmer-style backing music:

These campaigns have often been criticized for focusing on you-you-you — they make a personal appeal that time in the service will benefit the soldier’s career. This is the opposite of what contemporary corporate motivation copy emphasizes — what leading corporations have found is that service to abstract goodness tends to attract higher quality candidates (at least according to the most fashionable management theories) than those motivated by personal gain.

So while Google tells recruits that they will change the world if they come to work for them, or organize the world’s information, the Army sells people on a mediocre benefits package with heavy obligations, a benefits package much worse than the one that Google or any other corporate employer above the mid-level offers.

When there is reference to a mission in American military propaganda, it’s usually towards some abstract sense of goodness that does not map with the American national interest. A combination of seven ad agencies at Interpublic have the Army contract, and the underlying concept of ‘Army Strong’ has remained consistent since around 2006.

By comparison, Novorussian propagandists are mostly volunteers, with inferior technical skills, but a more compelling message. There are certainly many American professionals working to support the Poroshenko government, but they must be having a lot of difficulty with coming up with a compelling pitch, because the government finds itself in an insupportable position.

They have a large budget, but the fundamental product is a piece of shit.

This is not really an accurate comparison, but intended to be a vague one: US communications firms helped with the overthrow of Ukraine, just as they did in Egypt and Libya, along with US technology companies lending their platforms and technical expertise in consultation.

They can bring greater flash, create facile taglines, and get people to tweet support for something, but they can’t bring forth the kind of motivation that results from an enemy invading your territory and shelling your town, nor can they call forth an authentic sense of justice, or a a sense of outrage that can lead people to volunteer for a dangerous war.

The other big difficulty that consulting Americans must have is that it’s generally a terrible idea to bring in foreigners to try to move a culture that is entirely foreign to them. The Novorussians know how to speak to their own people. The Americans don’t even know how to speak to the Ukrainians who are in their own camp, and most probably have no language skills and must go through interpreters.

Americans barely even know how to speak to other Americans anymore without sending one faction or the other into rage spasms.

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t even know enough about anything to realize how badly US foreign policy is collapsing by any metric right now. What the general thinking public enjoys is participating in these hashtag campaigns, like the ones decrying Boko Haram or praising the Maidan protesters, without actually considering that there are real people whose lives are being affected by the reckless destabilization campaigns.

The problem is similar with the  inability of the pro-war American factions to raise the kind of support that they were once able to: they have burned their credibility on a series of counter-productive interventions which has made it impossible for the state to use conscription to meet its political goals. It is also becoming impossible for it to put its volunteer military into real danger, also, because of a lack of public support for the danger.

Knowing this lack of resolve, the rivals the US has can chip away at its territory and influence with something close to impunity, alternatively convincing credulous think tankers that they are ‘moderate rebels’ of one kind or another to receive foreign aid and weapons besides in return for pretending to fight.

Filed Under: War

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Special Audiobook Offer For Readers

It’s come to my attention that some of you with long commutes like listening to and buying audio books. This offer through Amazon started on February 1st, but I just read about it the other day.

If you sign up for the trial through the link below, you get two free audio books from Audible through your Amazon.com account.

This blog gets $5 when you sign up. You can cancel the trial at any time with a mouse click — no phone calls required.

If you find any particularly good audio books that you think other readers would like, tell me about them in a comment or by email.

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The Progressive Labor Theology

The most durable narrative told by liberalism, acknowledged by almost all liberals of all factions across the political spectrum, is that liberalism lead to gradually improving labor standards within Western countries. The planks of this story are:

  • Work-hour reduction laws
  • Environmental protection laws
  • Minimum wage guarantees
  • Workplace safety legislation
  • Mandatory unemployment insurance
  • Outlawing of child labor
  • Workplace-centered tax collection legislation
  • Abolition of slavery, indenture, and heavily regulation of apprenticeship
  • Transference of workplace training to the regulated school
  • Gender equality legislation
  • Banning of hiring practices that lead to disparate racial, gender, and sexual orientation impact

The trouble with this story is that it did not actually end any of these practices in the world. It simply displaced many of the older labor patterns into the ‘third world,’ which is where the West shoves all the practices that it finds aesthetically and morally displeasing to make their own countries more appealing to their moral aesthetics.

On occasion, there is a temporary moral craze about labor practices overseas, but those crazes are always short-lived, because the only way that liberalism can be maintained is by shunting the necessary labor that goes into supporting it out of sight, into foreign countries.

The shunting of these labor practices overseas creates a pervasive sense of guilt on the part of those inculcated into the higher strata of liberal spirituality, but part of that guilt can be abrogated by importing more third world inhabitants into living in the purer, more moral states which they inhabit.

Making a great show of how ‘anti-racist’ and ‘tolerant’ these liberals are makes up for their denial of the unpleasant (to their sensibilities) work must go in to supporting their shining cities, which are not really all that shining at all when judged against the great cities of traditional Europe.

The moral pretenses of the progressive labor theology are coming undone financially, as it becomes more difficult to maintain the currency-and-bond schemes, redistribution, and enormous global supply chains which mandate an incoherent, insupportable foreign policy.

In order to adapt to the failure of this set of religious beliefs which tries to shunt all the ‘dirty’ labor onto lower castes of foreigners, we have to learn to accept that some practices which we have long considered morally abhorrent are really not so bad after all.

We should also recognize that many of the theological planks motivating the labor laws were never supportable either in law or in reality. Ask any salaried worker if they have a ’40-hour work week.’ There is a good chance that such a work week is a legal fiction for them. Schools are not preparing people for labor, but stuffing their heads with nonsense ideology and immorality. Nor are schools appropriate institutions for preparing people to be laborers.

Welfare is morally corrosive as compared to labor. We have to re-learn to be accepting of social arrangements that are often permanent and hierarchical, rather than holding the pretense that we are all equal market participants.

This is the most profound challenge in handling labor issues today: almost every single thinking person in the West has accepted without question every plank of liberalism, while denying vociferously all the loopholes that make the pretense feasible. Liberals have turned away from the working classes of their own countries by pretending to have abolished the working man.

Pointing out that this is not true, and can never be true, punctures a pervasive and false world view. Providing a plausible vision for a society in which more people have legally and economically feasible roles would relieve much of the broadly-felt anxiety throughout the Western world, in which realism has died in favor of the promotion of various dreams which have little to do with the real world in which we must all work and suffer together.

That those roles are liable to be highly stratified, unequal, and unfairly distributed across lines of race and gender makes it more difficult to advance, but it must be advanced in any case.

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