The other day I was accused of having swallowed too much “Israeli propaganda”. I wasn’t aware that I had; and, after all, I had been subject to a mountain of propaganda from the "Palestinian cause”, propaganda which had erupted with violent visibility on October 8, 2023, as demonstrations against Israeli “genocide” exploded, with remarkable spontaneity, around the world, before, crucially, Israel had acted militarily to the massacre of the day before; as if a thread had been pulled, or a switch flipped.
I once whimsically compared, in this publication, the appearance of the multi-coloured tents that had popped up on the sward outside King’s College, Cambridge, to mushrooms, but mushrooms are only the visible manifestations of a vast underground network, and the underground mycelium beneath the student tents around the world had been in place for centuries with every antisemitic trope that has ever been used to justify the persecution of Jews.
The locus classicus of such propaganda in the modern world is, I suppose, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which held, basically, that a secret cabal of Jews not only sought – and had largely achieved – world domination, but also, somewhat paradoxically, sought to end Western civilisation itself. Still cited as fact in certain corners of the world and the internet, it was Russia’s first significant attempt at propaganda as destabilisation, and you cannot gainsay its success. Its echoes reverberate from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day; everyone who equates Zionism with Nazism is singing along to its music. (Cf. every time Putin says that Zelensky is a Nazi as well as a Jew.)
And nowadays, a substantial part of the anti-Israel rhetoric says that anything bad is the fault of the Jews, and one of the latest manifestations of which is the claim, popularised by Greta Thunberg, that the victory in the fight against Israel will also mean victory in the fight against climate change. (I paraphrase to save space.)
Well, everyone wants the world to be a better place, just as everyone likes to think of themselves as good, and also: everyone believes they are immune to propaganda. Unfortunately, propaganda doesn’t work like that: you don’t have to have even seen it to be affected by it. It is like saying you are unaffected by the air you breathe. The best propaganda, the kind that is self-sustaining, that only needs one small shove to work its magic, is the kind that divides: that pits everyone against everyone else, so comprehensively that it doesn’t just have political repercussions: it ends friendships, splits families, and replaces consensus with chaos.
This was exploited to great effect by Russia, who, it is alleged, spread disinformation campaigns during the 2016 US election and UK Brexit campaigns, which have, obviously, affected us all. The genius of propaganda is that it poisons everything, to the extent that some may say even this article is propaganda: and maybe it is, for the very best propaganda of all is that which is spread without awareness or intent.
A lie can travel round the world before the truth has put its boots on: this famous saying predates the internet by many decades and is now even truer than it was. Propaganda has to be a lie to work, with maybe a tiny spot of truth in it, like starter yeast for a sourdough loaf (here we are with the mushrooms again); but even that is not strictly necessary. The starter yeast for the Protocols was that there are some Jewish bankers, and surely I don’t have to explain here why that is historically the case.
One of the most remarkable successes of the propaganda industry has been the shattering of the Progressive consensus. Nowadays you cannot claim to be on the left if you do not also support the Palestinian cause, however many of the left’s precepts you hold yourself to.
This is why I hold those who proclaim “Queers for Palestine” in pity rather than scorn: they have no choice, in a way. Its most hilarious manifestation is in the fracturing, almost immediately after its foundation, of the splinter organisation known as Your Party: Zara Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s falling-out is ridiculous, but note that I have yet to see a pronouncement from either of them on social media that does not mention Gaza or Israel; even those whose political stances are essentially indistinguishable have been sundered, such is the degree of division we are experiencing.
In 1972, the comic book Asterix and the Roman Agent showed how a village in ancient Gaul, indomitable by conventional military tactics, is nearly brought to its knees by Julius Caesar’s insertion of a character extremely adept at sowing discord (La Zizanie – “discord” – is the original title in French). Very cleverly, the speech bubbles of those who had been poisoned by the Agent’s lies and distortions were coloured in various shades of green, the deepest hue showing the most affected. None of the beloved characters in the Gaulish village escaped the discord, or went through the book without a green-hued speech bubble.
If everyone examines their own speech bubbles, how tinged are they with the discord sown by propaganda?
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