Everyone here knows the Parenti quote referenced in the title by now.
“During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.”
That is to say, if the Soviet Union does something bad, that’s bad. If the Soviet Union does something good, that’s also bad. “Communism is evil” is an implicit truism Americans and westerners carry with them everywhere.
Parenti was writing for the audience of late 20th century America, before the maturation of the internet. Now, in the 21st century, we still see this thinking (or lack thereof) applied against the PRC, the DPRK, Cuba, and even modern Russia. Even so, it has changed with the times and the media technology available.
For most of the 20th century, there was a relative dearth of information. You only got your news from television broadcast or even radio if not newspaper, meaning geography and language constituted a significant limitation to the information you could even theoretically receive. There are no such barriers anymore. The world wide web lives up to its name, and google will translate anything for you with the click of a button. Forums also allow distant people who would have never met thirty years ago to talk to each other in real time about subjects never discussed in a person-to-person setting, often with a metaphorical crowd of onlookers. Now, there’s too much information to make sense of, too many different perspectives, coming from everywhere.
This makes control of information by governments, corporations and police forces extremely difficult. For every person decrying the barbarity of Hamas, the five genocides conducted simultaneously by the evil Chinese Commie Party, Putin’s unprompted aggression in Ukraine, etc, there are naysayers in the comments, alternative media outlets contesting these claims, “Russian trolls” in your twitter feed, and so on. Twentieth-century unfalsifiable orthodoxy requires a set of shared data to act upon. Now, we don’t have that.
So you want to demonize the Chinese communists, but it’s increasingly difficult to persuade anyone of anything, at least consistently. You can trick HBO viewers into buying into Uighur genocide as quickly as they bought HBO, sure, but what about all the people who aren’t idiots? In my observations, “unfalsifiable orthodoxy” now resembles splattering paint over a canvas randomly and seeing what emerges from the chaos. It relies less on objective events and more on the preexisting anticommunism embedded in the American political consciousness, and the possibility of something bad happening rather than the possibility of something that happened being bad.
I once argued with a redditor while browsing a gardening subreddit. Someone made a post claiming they were shipped “mysterious” seeds of unknown species, package said they were from China, didn’t remember ordering them. Said redditor posted a comment, claiming it was a Chinese bioweapon designed to destroy the Usonian ecosystem. I asked him to give evidence, and they cited the police response to the then-recent Hong Kong riots.
Bill Maher, a couple months back, called China “the new Islam,” saying “the left” “couldn’t be honest about them.” He went on to claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab. Evidence? “China does some bad things!”
It is not anymore “USSR bad, therefore the thing they did (objectively) was bad in some way.” It is now “China bad, therefore China did something bad. If there’s no evidence of anything happening, it’s being hidden.” This bad thing that China did can itself become evidence of a different bad thing China also did. “What do you mean no Chinese bioweapon? Hong Kong! Uighurs!”
Eventually, it becomes impossible to dissuade someone of any claim about China’s atrocities, because it’s embedded in a dozen other falsehoods assumed true themselves based on other unproven accusations. It’s fractal, identical all the way down forever.
The need for actual data has been conveniently boiled away. China could have performed any act of villainy simply because it seems like the kind of thing they might do. Since they could have, and since it seems like they would do it if they could, they did. What did they do? Something. Anything at all. There are no wrong answers.
So be watchful of people doing this, note it when it happens. I don’t know how to stop them from doing it. Sometimes listening to liberals feels like talking to cultists.
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I sometimes visualize narrative management from libs and chuds like a baseball game with bases loaded, but in which the ‘‘opposing teams’’ are not playing against themselves, they bat for each other. I dunno if it makes more sense to think of it as: a team playing itself so that it always wins.
The idea of nonfalsifiable orthodoxy is one of the most brilliant observations and syntheses that we possess. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I’ve watched it working in real time from escuálidos regarding Venezuela. The same show on a gusano channel, EVTV, would say that Kharim Khan, the ICC dude, was in the pocket of the Maduro ‘‘regime’’, but also that he was going to finally bury them. They play both possibilities simultaneously in order to cover their asses, and most importantly manage the narrative in their favor no matter the circumstance or result. It truly would make Goebbels’ blush at his own incompetence.
There’s another element to it that you alluded to, Nikki. That libs can fill in the blanks. If there’s nothing there, they’ll place it, horror vacui style.
This tactic is part of information warfare, as a part of class warfare. It is meant to maintain the status quo and proselytize with TINA: ‘‘There Is No Alternative’’. It’s very hard to fight back against it in a world with social media. You will wake some, like us and some lurkers, but others will remain asleep. We are ‘‘curados de espanto’’, as we say in Spanish, ‘‘cured of fright’’, meaning that we know much of this by now because we’ve seen it play out so often. But it’s always worth the effort to point it out, and hopefully, once it is out in the light, it becomes more apparent.
That reminds me
If China or more especially DPRK didn’t do that certain atrocity, they would then say something along the lines of “but their country is so wacky and insane that the story would’ve made sense anyway”
Insert Masses Elites and Rebels quote
Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.
If you haven’t already, you should check out Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”
Thank you for linking this, I found this to be a great read.
Not to turn into big brain man here but lately I have been feeling like the focus of our party should be more on achieving things on our own merit to show people what organizing can do and funnily enough that’s exactly what the article mentions. Only now I have a way to word it better at our next meeting.
Ultimately there is no winning such discussions as the goal posts are constantly being moved. From ‘media said so’ to ‘well, they are bad so it could have happened you know!’. Some people live in a permanent state of delusion it seems.
Today I had a conversation with an anarchist and she accused one of our leading party figures for being a ‘China apologist’. It doesn’t even make sense as the dude in question, Jos D’Haese, is at the very best maybe lukewarm towards China in a sense that he doesn’t really mentions it ever. The same anarchist gets all her inormation on China through mainstream media, the media that she doesn’t trust on any other topic, ever.
I’m not sure how to handle it in a good way either. Usually I just ignore whatever bullshit comes from their mouths because I can’t debate it using facts as all facts regarding China are fake anyway according to them. I’d much rather focus on our internal problems and figure out a way to go forward while China does their thing regardless of the opinions of some Belgian communists and anarchists.
The quote
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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