Are You Numb to the Propaganda Yet?
Notes on American exceptionalism, militarism, and the much-needed force of antiwar politics.
You can’t fool all the people all of the time / But if you fool the right ones, then the rest’ll fall behind / Tell me who’s got control of your mind, your worldview / Is it the news, or the movie you’re taking your girl to?
—Dead Prez, “Propaganda”
Long ago, somebody tried to explain to me that Americans are the most propagandized people on earth. At the time, I found that risible; I was a different person and wasn’t hearing it. But these days, I find myself using that line all the time—and I say it advisedly, as someone who spent most of my early career studying North Korea.
I have many American friends, fellow travelers, collaborators, and comrades fighting the good fight against war and wealth-hoarding, but they exist in an information eco-system that works against their every breath. MAGA as an ideology has no aspiration to being hegemonic and is not even a majoritarian project.1 But American exceptionalism and militarism are hegemonic in American life, and MAGA exploits the hell out of that. Like every American, I was raised to believe the United States is a beneficent power, and that when it does wrong, it does so with good intentions. That is, of course, hard to square with a culture that venerates violence and warmaking above seemingly all other values.
The ongoing narration of America’s depraved war against Iran is making the problem of pro-militarist propaganda quite urgent.
The “War Crimes Are Good for The Economy” Debate
When the Wall Street Journal published a piece this morning claiming that “The Iran War Is Making the American Economy More Dominant Than Ever,” my reflex was “LOL, no it’s not.”
Even the Bezos-natsec propaganda rag formerly known as the Washington Post acknowledges that the Iran war is profoundly economically harmful. But neither the WSJ nor WaPo question the foreseeable mass death and destruction that was unleashed on the whole of the Middle East for no good reason and that now threatens to engulf the world in financial crisis.2
The media scribes who feed Americans information evade both America’s habit of war crimes and the false pretenses on which war crimes are being committed; they channel your attention only to these sociopathic cost-benefit questions about whether despicable acts of evil are maybe good (or not so good) for Americans.
The Analysis Trap
Or take the “munitions shortfall” discourse. Defense nerds have long known that the limited US inventory of missiles and missile interceptors was a constraint on the US way of war. But they couldn’t do anything about it because munitions are a low-margin product that military contractors can’t profit much from unless they can make them at scale (ie, unless the US is blowing through its inventory).
This very real munitions shortfall is putting the US military in a bad position according to its own aims: Cannibalizing its war-prepper materiel for Asia to keep war-criming (to no particular end) in Iran. But take one of the better strategic arguments I’ve seen:
The intervention here is quite good in its own way but the premise is false. The US can’t win a conventional war against China—a conclusion I long resisted but without which I might not have written The Rivalry Peril. The reason China hasn’t yet invaded Taiwan isn’t because of US missiles.3 And there is no number of standoff munitions that will enable America to beat China in a fight over Taiwan without risking nuclear war.
Still, OP is making an implicitly anti-war argument (“The Iran war should stop because we’re blowing through our munitions”). There is a policy audience that, in theory, can be reached with this kind of argument. But the way it finds expression is in the language of deterrence on behalf of Sino-US war…which is the primary source of the $1.5 trillion-dollar war machine. Most of America’s high-technology force structure is justified solely in relation to war with China. So using the war with China as an argument against a specific war reifies the larger apparatus being used in the war you’re against.
If the language of opposition to one war is the language of much larger war preparations elsewhere, then we are lost. At minimum, it’s a sign of just how hegemonic militarism is in American life.
“Support Our Troops” But Also Send Them To Die
I flew through Reagan National in 2024 and it sucked in many respects but not like this:
As a veteran and a free-thinking human being, I’m disgusted by this display of banners claiming to honor those who served by dishonoring the truth about what these wars were. For god’s sake, banners for Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq!? The US did not bring freedom to these places; it brought slaughter and sacrificed millions of lives on the altar of denying these places sovereign rule. Even the Cold War gets a banner! Not to mention that the military buildups associated with each of these wars directly caused financial crises and perpetuated the very system strangling American workers today on behalf of oligarchs.
But if you’re just an American trying to make ends meet and get through your work week, you don’t have time for critical scrutiny of all this propaganda. You’re just trying to get to the right terminal and find a place to buy a $10 bottle of water. So you let the propaganda bombard you without too much push back, and inevitably much of it seeps in.
All of this leaves us in a terrible position.
The good guys in the mainstream are, in Gramsci’s language, fighting “wars of maneuver” while losing “wars of position.” In Fanon’s language, we’re dealing with the “events” but not the “situation.” The terrain on which we struggle is becoming more unfavorable even as our ranks are swelling every day. This is why the world needs America to revive the antiwar movement—to puncture the myth of American exceptionalism and contest the hegemony of militarism. To fight wars of position alongside wars of maneuver against, ironically, war itself.
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The MAGA coalition uses the grievances of far-right identity politics to justify state-backed accumulation for oligarchs. There’s some Christianity in there, some patriarchy in there, some white supremacy in there, but as soon as you impose a class lens on its political formation you see that it’s the owners of capital who benefit at the expense of workers in every industry that doesn’t entail persecuting other human beings.
It’s always worth footnoting that this war is a longtime fantasy of America’s national security state, held in check by self-preservation given the predictable costs it would unleash. But none of that matters to a far-right Israeli government that has ambitions of empire and sees Arabs as things rather than people.
I don’t want to get sidetracked but the concept of “general deterrence” is not real and is one of the most pernicious ideas in strategic studies.