How Imperialist Propaganda Weaponizes Genocide to Justify War
By Rainer Shea – Nov 8, 2021
The imperialists have a weapon more powerful than the atomic bomb. It’s called propaganda. The type of propaganda that’s been fine tuned by decades of practice in false flags, fabricated atrocity stories, and glorifications of militarism. With the onset of the new cold war, and its correlating advancements in the high-tech sector, the U.S. empire’s cognitive warfare has taken on unprecedented scope and subtlety. Should aspiring U.S. revolutionaries succumb to the deceptions this manipulation matrix is laying down for us, the movement towards proletarian revolution in the imperial center will succumb to the same fate of the socialist projects Washington has destroyed.
Zionism’s exploitation of the Holocaust
The empire’s biggest tactic in this weaponization of the mind is to exploit people’s empathy. The Zionist state, which was founded around the same time that the CIA’s disinformation campaigns began, has pioneered this practice.
Ronen Berelovich is a Jew whose family extensively lost members in the Holocaust. In his 2009 documentary The Zionist Story, he recounts that he grew up in Israel, then used Hitler’s crime against his family as a rationale for serving in the occupation’s military. He then became a member of the anti-Zionist movement, with the documentary being his way of attempting to rectify his wrongdoings. In it, he concludes:
In terms of racism, there is no difference between apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel. The Zionists, however, have the biggest weapon that was not available to South African apartheid. Bigger than F-16s, tanks, and nuclear missiles put together. It’s called the Holocaust. The Holocaust allows Zionists to manipulate world public opinion, and to stifle any possible open discussion. It is simply their biggest asset. Today, to be an anti-Zionist is construed as being antisemitic, and to be antisemitic can send you to prison in Europe.
The Holocaust is such a useful tool for the Zionists because only monsters willfully deny it; it’s a product of capitalism’s darkest side in fascism, an incomprehensible evil that needs to be protected from erasure by any means necessary. And the Zionists are eager to exploit this extreme emotional power that the Holocaust holds, using it as a weapon to demobilize resistance towards the genocide, regional belligerence, and illegal annexations that Israel perpetrates. The forces of capital behind Israel’s formation have taken one of the horrors that capital has created, and wielded its historical trauma as a bludgeon to fortify a fresh batch of such horrors within occupied Palestine.
The imperialists aim to replicate this manipulation model across every other front of their wars, including the empire’s internal war against communism. They want everyone who stands up to their schemes, not just the anti-Zionists, to face the kind of intimidation and emotionally charged vitriol which gets directed at the opponents of the Israeli occupation. They do this by constantly making up atrocity stories designed to give the public the impression that Washington’s enemies are all as bad as Hitler, that the imperialists are simply meddling in countries for the sake of “humanitarianism.”
Because these propaganda campaigns are modeled after Zionism’s exploitation of the Holocaust, while lacking the basis in historical facts which make the Holocaust real, they’re in themselves also efforts to exploit the Holocaust. Westerners are generally educated about the horrors of the Nazi genocide, so they’re naturally instilled with a strong sense of empathy for persecuted populations. This empathy is used for convincing them to believe the untrustworthy accounts of “genocide” that get fabricated by the imperialists.
The projection of Nazi atrocities onto communists
The “Holodomor” is the original example of this kind of attempt to pin imperialism’s crimes upon imperialism’s enemies. Its creation was an attack against the first workers state, and its creators were ironically the same people who perpetrated the Holocaust. As part of the propaganda runup to Germany’s invasion of the USSR, Nazi propagandists fabricated claims about Stalin having deliberately starved Ukraine. These “accounts” were then distributed throughout the capitalist world by the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst—one of Hitler’s many allies and enablers within the structure of U.S. imperialism—and have since been adapted into a broad-ranging anti-communist atrocity narrative. It’s also been given a name purposely similar to the Holocaust, making it even more cynical.
The fascist regime in Ukraine—which Washington installed in a 2014 coup—is using the “Holodomor” narrative to justify a repeat of Nazi Germany’s crimes. The regime’s promotions of Soviet atrocity stories make up its rationale for banning communist organizing, detaining and torturing dissidents, and glorifying the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust. The regime claims that these collaborators are the country’s heroic “founding fathers” who “liberated” the people from communism, a narrative which requires reiterations of Nazi propaganda like the Holodomor.
The Ukrainian regime’s persecution of Jews, Romas, the LGBT community, and ethnic Russians, as well as its instigations of paramilitarism and warfare against Russia, are the logical conclusions of accepting imperialism’s atrocity propaganda. Because Ukrainian nationalists believe the communists have persecuted their people, and have tied their targeted groups into this persecution narrative via the “Judeo-Bolshevism” conspiracy theory, they can rationalize committing these horrors. As Voltaire warned, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
The same goes for the arbiters of the Uyghur separatist campaign, who seek to create an ethno-nationalist breakaway state in China’s Xinjiang province that they call “East Turkestan.” This fantasy of theirs is predictably modeled after Zionism, and if successful, it will no doubt immediately entail a proxy war against the rest of China in parallel to the anti-Russian proxy war Ukraine started after Washington’s coup. This violent campaign has just as strong of an anti-communist agenda, since its target is the world’s largest workers state.
The campaign’s rationale comes from the fraudulent reports the CIA’s propaganda network has produced about China committing a “genocide” in Xinjiang, a lie that’s not only fueling a militia culture among Sinophobic right-wing American Uyghurs, but fanning the flames of Uyghur extremist violence within Afghanistan. This violence is being perpetrated by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the U.S. proxy terrorist organization that Washington no longer even considers a terrorist group.
What Washington wants the ETIM to do in both Afghanistan and China is a larger version of what Washington’s proxy the YPG has already done within northeastern Syria.
Doing to Syria, Ethiopia, & Eritrea what NATO did to Yugoslavia
The YPG’s Kurdish ethno-state Rojava has committed numerous war crimes against neighboring cultures, all so that Washington can use this breakaway state as a partner in stealing Syria’s oil. Ironically this atrocity campaign, and the movement of U.S.-backed jihadist terror that’s produced Syria’s war, is rationalized by the narrative that Assad is guilty of massive atrocities.
For the last ten years, the world has been bombarded with perhaps the most extensive and elaborate atrocity propaganda campaign in history, all directed at Syria’s government. From the numerous “Assad chemical attacks” that have been revealed to be fake or not actually committed by Assad, to the award-winning Netflix film promoting the terroristic NATO-backed Syrian While Helmets, to the scripted statements from Syrian refugee children the media exploits, to the narratives painting Assad as the aggressor for defending from an attempted jihadist takeover by U.S.-backed terror forces, the deceptions surrounding Syria have been encyclopedic. And as Maidhc Ó Cathail of Consortiumnews has written, it’s all served to exploit the memories of the Holocaust, using the fears of history repeating itself to convince people that there’s a moral imperative to get Assad oug. To support this point, Cathail quotes Norman Finkelstein:
“The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression,” Norman Finkelstein tells Yoav Shamir in “Defamation,” the Israeli filmmaker’s award-winning 2009 documentary on how perceptions of anti-Semitism affect Israeli and U.S. politics. “Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust.” If you’re looking for evidence in support of Finkelstein’s thesis today, you need look no further than the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibit of images of emaciated and mangled bodies from contemporary Syria….The small exhibit, entitled “Genocide: The Threat Continues,” features a dozen images said to be from an archive of 55,000 pictures allegedly smuggled out of the country by “Caesar,” a mysterious source who claims to have defected from his job as a Syrian military photographer after having been ordered to take photos of more than 10,000 corpses. Emphasizing the threat of an impending genocide, the reportedly conscience-stricken defector warns that a similar fate awaits the 150,000 people he says remain incarcerated by President Bashar Assad’s government.
Yugoslavia is the great model for this kind of campaign to dismember nations. This model consists of manufacturing a genocide narrative in the vein of the Holodomor, then weaponizing it to the point where states and borders in the targeted countries are obliterated. As even some of the CIA’s own former operatives within Yugoslavia have admitted, Washington used the Serbs as scapegoats, with Serbian socialist leader Milosevic having been charged with numerous war crimes that he’s since been exonerated on. The imperialists then claimed that the Serbs had committed a genocide against their surrounding ethnic groups, absurdly painting the besieged last remaining bastion of socialism in Europe as a new Nazi Germany.
It was through the promotion of these slanders that the imperialists could get away with systematically destroying Yugoslavia’s infrastructure, bombing Yugoslavian civilians, and imposing cruel neoliberal policies onto the nation. This was all explained to the U.S. public with propaganda statements like the New York Times headline: “Bomb the Serbs. Now.”
This is how the imperialists justify genocide, or at least atrocities that are rationalized through genocidal language; just imagine if that headline had said “Bomb the Jews” or “Bomb the Blacks.” In the twisted reality they’ve constructed, no atrocity by the U.S. or its proxies is too severe, because it’s all merely a proportionate response to real or fabricated human rights violations.
At the moment, the biggest targets for this tactic are Ethiopia and Eritrea, which are under attack from the U.S.-backed terrorist organization the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. Like the ETIM, Washington refuses to acknowledge the TPLF is a terrorist group. And this negligence is rationalized by the atrocity stories that the CIA is throwing at the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments, motivated by a broader U.S. campaign to destabilize the horn of Africa to counter China’s rise. These two governments in particular are under attack due to their willingness to collaborate with China on infrastructure projects, making for a dual imperialist campaign against both Global South development and communism.
The consequence is the worst famine in a decade. Since the TPLF invaded during harvest time to deliberately destabilize the food supply chain, the region’s people have been thrown into mass starvation that harkens back to colonialism’s biggest engineered famines throughout the continent. Washington is pitching its sanctions on the targeted governments as necessary for addressing the human rights abuses they’re accused of. But those who’ve studied imperialism’s disgusting manipulation tactics see this charade for what it is: a weaponization of empathy for utterly inhumane purposes.
Featured image: Art by Domain-of-the-Public on DeviantArt
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