America Surrenders in the Global Information Wars

Ironic (at least to me) that trying to go to the URL results in a message that I am blocked because it thinks I'm a bot. I assume for the same reason I get that from the NYT (because I tend to use a VPN... horrors).

At least they are both consistent in that trying to sign up for a subscription leads to the same message.

I was watching one of America’s greatest war propaganda films recently. Casablanca. It is remarkable how far we’ve come from making the hard decision to do what’s best for Victor Laszlo. Our modern US propaganda is all 24: the righteous man is on his own fighting a shady terrorist conspiracy, where nobody is above suspicion. We’ve successfully convinced ourselves and probably the world that the US federal government and its employees could not possibly have benevolent motivations for anything they do.

Propaganda is always coercive, always designed to make people act against their inclinations. It serves the interests of the powerful. But what I don’t get is why we’re making this propaganda instead of that propaganda.

I guess America finds old media less useful for its propaganda than online bots.

I think the rest of the world have realized, even before most Americans, just how cheap our politicians can be bought for. Not billions, not millions, but for a few thousand dollars you can get a member of congress to scuttle a bill or praise a despot. A few million dollars gets you a national social media disinformation campaign. And for $200k, membership into Mar-a-Lago “country club”.

Our government sold out our ideals for cheap.

meta propaganda, from one of the best.

Yawn. The idea that we were somehow providing access to "truth" and not our version of it was always a bit of a farce. We meddle too much to not undercut potential trust.

The atlantic itself is a megaphone for american interests. There's a revolving door between DC and these rags

Interesting article by someone who once argued that state-sponsored journalists are legally combatants, "the Voice of Palestine—the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority ... will remain what it has become: a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war"[0]

NED also enjoys deep support across Congress, and has an organizational structure designed to protect it from political attack: It is run not by the U.S. government but by an independent, bipartisan board, which allows it to keep its distance from partisan politics. I was on that board from 2016 until 2024 and can attest that the conspiracy theories are wrong. The endowment’s board members are not secret intelligence officers but former civil servants, members of Congress, academics, and regional experts. Nobody pays them for the work they do, pro bono, on NED’s behalf.

And apparently contrary to conspiracy theories, NED is just a bog standard NGO?

> In 1983, Casey and Raymond focused on creating a funding mechanism to support Freedom House and other outside groups that would engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA had historically organized and paid for covertly. The idea emerged for a congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this money.

> But Casey recognized the need to hide the strings being pulled by the CIA. “Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate,” Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III as Casey urged creation of a “National Endowment.” [1/2]

> In 1991 a cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy, Allen Weinstein, explained its work by saying, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[3]

A bog standard NGO conceived of by the Director of the CIA to fill the role the CIA once did. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln?

[0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/01/targeting-radio-...

[1] https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/08/cias-hidden-hand-in-de...

[2] https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/casey-...

[3] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/10/21/what-is-national...

> The U.S. is reorienting its foreign policy to protect governments that manipulate and suppress information.

At best, this doesn't support the headline. If the U.S. is truly influencing the world so well with its foreign policy, regardless of policy changes that's the complete opposite of a surrender. That's domination.

In reality this article is just dumb and The Atlantic thinks the reader is even dumber. People don't like any form of propaganda regardless of where they live. If the U.S. is shutting down its own outdated and ineffective propaganda machines, who cares? That's not protection of foreign propaganda if nobody listens to that stuff either.