On the manufacture of political consent
INDIVIDUALS and organisations that are on the side of power, that benefit from regimes of power, be it military or financial power, frequently afford the privilege to turn their opinions, prejudices and perceptions into truth, in politics.
Power can manufacture reality itself even if it is fake and mythical reality. What is simplistically called ideology by pundits and their wannabes is actually opinions and some versions of the truth that tend to be pushed around and forced on everyone’s head and throat as the Truth that everyone must subscribe to.
What is referred to as propaganda is actually the way in which spin-doctors and their pretenders try to turn opinions into facts using both sophistry at the best. Failed propaganda, that is spin that fails to achieve its effect in communication, and falls down on its sorry face, becomes pure silliness in its mediocrity. From Walter Lippman in his classic book, Public Opinion, in 1922, that framed the concept of the “manufacture of consent” to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in 1988, who expanded the concept, perceptive scholars have unmasked the sophistry of propaganda and debunked its silliness too.
Propaganda has sophistry when it is artistic and beautiful, and its essence as propaganda is embellished behind nuance and persuasive grandiosity. It is silly when it is dry and boring, when it is couched in artless and even idiotic rendition whose falsehood and sycophancy to power is obvious to even the uncircumcised. Interestingly, power in all its might and privilege frequently becomes blind and dull, and falls on the mediocrity and silliness of even the naivest propagandist wannabes for its defences.
In the hands of Samuel Huntington for instance, Americanist jingoism and propaganda became an art and a science as he used his sophisticated mind and artful expression to give dignity and acceptability to a worldwide imperialist monstrosity. Not so in the toddling and muddled intellect of the master of intellectual controversy that has no content, Francis Fukuyama, who scattered high sounding phrases that had no durable sense.
Fukuyama fell into ridiculous phrasemongering and verbosity that only exposed the absence rather than presence of reason in his rhythm of words and phrases. For his intellectual silliness and mediocre propaganda, Fukuyama has had to spend half of his career defending himself and cleaning up the mess of such misfirings as the “end of history and the last man” theses that he excitably pontificated and have been by proven by time to be idiotic. In his clumsy scramble to be counted as a leading Americanist scholar and spokesperson, Fukuyama hurriedly made silly “scholarly” projections that became his idiotic stumble and fall, leading the father of intellectual nuance, Edward Said, to talk of “the end of Fukuyama” in the thinking world. The fall of scholarly mediocrity that hurriedly pretends to have intellectual excellence in academia and politics usually becomes an unhygienic and truly idiotic fall. In serious academies, polities and knowledge economies of the world Fukuyama is now read as an example of what a pundit or a propagandist should not be.
The lesson from the “end of Fukuyama” is that the attempt to turn opinions into fact, and ideology into knowledge, requires rigour and not just excitability and the childish hurry to be famous. Famous thinking and influential public thinking and intellection is not the stuff of pundits of patronage like Fukuyama and his tribe of pretenders worldwide. It is the property of legends like Edward Said that were rejected by publishers, censored by academic institutions, and banned by news sites but still rose from the invisibilised to become world scale public intellectuals, dissidents who spoke truth to power and not sycophants that spoke power to truth. Sycophants use proximity to power to silence truths.
How nations are manufactured
The power that runs the world is owned by economically, militarily and therefore politically powerful nations that are located in countries that have equally powerful states. Nations are populations of people while countries are geographic territories where the nations are located and states are the institutions that run the nations in the countries.
In this short article I posit to observe the nations as “imagined communities” and also manufactured ideological entities that need to be understood and not worshipped. Nations are not an innocent and self-evident truth and reality but are entities that are created by people for different reasons, and as such they are as good and as bad as the people that create them and the agenda of the same people.
Simplistic and naïve nationalist propaganda demands to shepherd everyone in any country to join the nation, be of the nation, regardless of the evil agenda of that nation and its nationalists. Donald Trump’s “make America great again” jingoism is facing that resistance where some Americans are saying America can be great again without Trump as its leader and symbol.
Trump’s imagination and leadership of the nation is being exposed as a threat to the same nation and its wishes for greatness. In a way, great nations, and nations as “imaginative” communities, are those that are forged out of disensus and not simplistic consensus.
Unity that is forged out of national difference, diversity, disagreement and creative friction is more real and durable than that which is an ideological artefact of tyrannical imagination where, like sheep, different and diverse populations are marshalled to their national slaughter by untrustworthy ideologists such as Trump and other bigots.
Six years before Benedict Anderson offered his novel understanding of nations as “imagined communities,” in 1978, Edward Said proffered his classic concept of countries as “imagined geographies” negatively, and “imaginative geographies” positively. It is my defendable guess that Anderson benefited from Said in crafting his now much used and so abused concept, in simplistic and naïve nationalist uncritical and unanalytical discourses. Interpretatively, on the one hand, countries as “imagined geographies” are created by imperialists, colonialists and tyrants who draw maps, create borders and impose upon populations one identity and one name by force and coercion as Berlin 1884 did to Africa. African nations and countries were imagined and created by colonialists and imperialists with force, fraud and genocide.
As works of art, and “imaginative geographies,” on the other hand, countries are beautiful collectives of populations that are weaved together by “imaginative leaders” that use the arts and sciences of peace and persuasion, inspiration to get different races, tribes, clans and other identities to salute the same flag, sing the same national anthem and be different and happy together.
This is critical and creative nationalism that is poetic but not populist, simple but not simplistic, and is therefore not violent or genocidal like what the colonists did when they forced national identities upon Africans.
Critical nationalism is an epistemology and a knowledge whereas uncritical and violent nationalism is an ideology and as such, as Karl Marx noted, a “false consciousness” that is peddled as cheap propaganda by simpletons comparable to the proverbial Fukuyama of the infamous Americanism and its neo-liberal fundamentalism.
In the hold of my present interpretation of Edward Said, therefore, “imagined nationalism” is an evil and violent ideology, Anderson himself reflects this in the way he describes imagined national communities as zealots that create national insiders and national outsiders and dabble in bigotry, racism, tribalism and xenophobia.
On the other hand, “imaginative nationalism” is creative and positive knowledge that uses art and science to inspire people of different identities to become one broad and inclusive, fair and just community called a nation and located in a country that has a name. In that way, nations as “imagined communities” and nations as “imaginative” societies are radically different things as Edward Said illustrated using the example of the nation of Israel apropos the nation and country of Palestine. On nation-building
The difference between “imagined” nations as violent, constructed and commandeered entities of coercion and “imaginative” nations as works of beautiful art is illustrated by Edward Said in his essay of 1995: The Current Status of Jerusalem.
In 1948 Said notes, the nations of Israel that existed in the wishes and the imagination of its Zionists and zealots was declared a nation with Jerusalem as its “eternal, undivided” and indivisible capital. Palestinians were by force of arms moved away or bludgeoned into this state of political affairs where out of nowhere a nation and country was forced upon the unwilling and unhappy into existence.
The Six-Day war of 1967 between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria only served to concretise the imagined, constructed and commandeered nation and country at the expense of Arabs and Palestinians in particular.
That is an example of the cruel and evil imagination and construction of nations using Zionist tribalism and xenophobia as nationalist ideology and not knowledge. Zionist tribalism and xenophobia, as ideology, then and now, peddles some cheap and silly propaganda that Israel is the victim of Palestinian fundamentalism when historical knowledge is clear that Palestinians are victims of Israel apartheid and genocide. The nation of Israel, as fleshed out by Edward Said, is an example of an imagined, constructed and then commandeered nation that has produced Palestinians into outsiders and victims in their own country. Much ideologically, and not knowledgeably, Israel propaganda sees and calls critiques of Israeli Zionism as a kind of “tribesmen” ideology when it is Israel that has elevated bigotry into a religion beyond which its naïve spokespersons can see nothing or can they hear a thing.
Imaginatively, that is creatively and artistically, Edward Said suggests that Israel and Palestine could have together and in through rigorous debate, and peacefully, even if frictitiously, built an ecumenical nation and country. A Pentecostal nation of people of many times that understand each other.
Critical humanism and the politics of disensus, and not manufactured consent, could have allowed the building of a nation and country where people of different religions, cultures and identities could live together happily in their differences and diversity without commandist Israeli apartheid and genocide.
Naïve and simplistic Israeli propagandists and protagonists are willingly and also blindly pushing a political fundamentalism that they need to be liberated from or else they will sink humanity further into a dark hole. Propaganda that innocently or naively defends evil participates in the same evil and history shall judge it so. Nations, if they are to be works of art and beauty and therefore peaceful, they must be built on the progress of disensus and not the manufacture of consent through naïve propaganda of simpletons or the force of arms.
That is the lesson Edward Said gleans and delivers from the case-study of Israel and Palestine.