The role of power and propaganda in shaping history, revealing moral compromises, manipulated narratives and the silencing of dissent to justify atrocities, perpetuate wars and protect private wealth
[The following text & images are taken from chapters 3 & 4 of the article ‘What We Do Not Forget,’ first published in the zine accompanying our 2024 We Do Not Forget mini-album / EP release]
We lost most of my father’s side of the family in the Holocaust. At the hands of the Nazi regime my family were among millions of men, women and children who were subjected to the most depraved acts of inhumanity imaginable including humiliation, torture, experimentation, rape, brutalisation and ‘extermination’ as they called it. Our song Take It All Back deals with the traumatic impact of these events.
Growing up I found it hard to imagine how these horrors could have occurred. I was taught that the German people had experienced a kind of crisis cult mass hysteria, that it was all okay now because the good guys had won and they’d prevent it from ever happening again.
In time I learned that the good guys had done terrible things too: the firebombing of Dresden, two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities, the use of both Nazi and Japanese research from horrific human experiments conducted in the Death Camps and Unit 731 whose practitioners were pardoned as long as it could all be kept secret, IBM running the information logistics of the Death Camps, the forcible displacement of Palestinians in order to create what the British called ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster in the heart of potentially hostile Arabism’ and so on.
On the 11th of November 1939, 364 Jewish men, women and children were executed by a firing squad in the town of Ostrow Mazowiecka, allegedly for setting fire to the town. The execution was carried out by the 4th Police Battalion commanded by Police Colonel, Brenner.” This is my grandfather’s town. He’d already emigrated to New York but most of his family were still there. The 3rd photo shows the last person to be shot, an old man forced to watch everyone else die first. He could be my great-grandfather. We’ll never know.
It turned out there were no good guys. I came to realise that the true purpose of Power—the kind that conducts wars, that runs corporations, countries and empires; that effectively runs the world—is to accumulate and protect private wealth by any means necessary. There is apparently no act so depraved that it can’t be rationalised, ignored or pardoned as long as it serves Power’s true purpose. I have seen very little evidence, if any, across history and today’s world to challenge this assertion.
The story of reality
We live among ever shifting webs of overlapping and often contradictory realities. There is the empirical, measurable reality of the universe in all its dynamic complexity, such as we are able to perceive with our senses and scientific tools. It is difficult enough for any individual to grasp even a tiny fraction of this reality.
Then there are the realities provided by stories. Stories ‘act as cognitive scaffolding, shaping how we interpret the world and the events around us.’ Stories are much older than the written word. Across human history, stories have proven to be arguably the most effective vehicle for widely conveying ideas, information and values; for preserving history, for galvanising communities, for consolidating cultural identities and, last but not least, for ruling over people.
At its most basic level, a story can be defined as ‘an account of imaginary or real people and events’ while a narrative is ‘the choice of which events to relate and in what order.’ In other words narratives determine how a story is told.
Stories are routinely used by ruling classes to influence and even manufacture people’s perceptions. Such stories often borrow from a society’s foundational myths and sometimes even form their own myths over time. Take the story of the British Empire. Through hundreds of years of colonialism ‘the imperial experience led to a sense of national superiority and a belief in the right to rule over other peoples.’ This sense of superiority still lingers in the national consciousness and is today called ‘exceptionalism.’
The story of British Empire can be told in many different ways and this is where narratives become the operative component. If you create a narrative that leaves out the brutality of colonialism—the slave trade, raping, pillaging, genocide etc—then you’re left only with that sense of national superiority and the bountiful days of a glorious former empire that its descendants can feel proud of.
Ruling classes tap into this story by crafting and applying a particular narrative that usually serves a hidden purpose. For instance, when attempting to advance a major government policy that benefits private interests but effectively means channeling public wealth into private hands, the policy must somehow be made palatable or even desirable to the public. Brexit is an example of this. The Leave campaign’s entire narrative was distilled into a simple slogan: “Take back control.” The Remain side failed to match this turn of brilliance and it cost them dearly.
“‘Take back control’ effectively combined not just a sense of a positive future albeit never defined or elaborated, but also suggested a sense of rightful ownership. Moreover, it helped to mobilise the anti-establishment support of voters who felt let down by their politicians. The Brexit referendum, as referendums are so often, was only driven in part by the question on the ballot paper. Frustrated by the sense that the political class had failed them, many ordinary citizens took the opportunity to vent their fury.”
— Dr Tim Haughton
Another example is war. The primary beneficiary of large-scale armed conflicts today, in financial terms, is the defence industry, with the US being the largest exporter of weapons globally. When Israel began bombing Gaza, stock prices of US corporations RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin (et al) skyrocketed. The directors of these companies openly discussed how good for business the Israeli strikes were.
The defence industry is a major contributor to US election candidates. In the 2020 US election, Biden received $3,338,205 from the defence industry for his presidential campaign. Trump received $2,895,339. The total defence industry lobbying spend for that year was $111,977,492. These facts help to illustrate the close relationship in the US between defence contractors, the Department of Defence and politicians which is what constitutes the US military-industrial complex. There are similar arrangements in the UK and other major weapons exporting nations.
The very thing that President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address has come to pass: that if left unchecked the military-industrial complex would eventually produce unnecessarily vast amounts of arms and skew policy to ensure their sales. Taxpayer dollars are sent to countries like Israel and Ukraine in the form of military aid and are then funnelled back into the US defence industry who sell arms to those same countries. This is known as a transfer of wealth. It is also the incentivising of not only war itself but wars that go on for as long as possible. The military-industrial complex is incentivised to facilitate ‘forever wars’ that are happening right now in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere.
There is of course a requirement here to gain consent from the public. Too much outrage leads to instability that can disrupt the system. It is quite a challenge to justify the ripping apart of toddlers and mass graves of civilians, especially when those realities are broadcasted daily on social media. What we have seen deployed in order to ‘manufacture consent’—to borrow Noam Chomsky’s phrase—for the conduct of Israel in particular is both an extraordinarily vast propaganda campaign and an often violent silencing of dissenting voices, particularly within Gaza where more than 173 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023 with international media still barred from entering.
The use of narratives in this case runs the gamut from elaborate lies to the subtle use of the passive voice in headlines. There is hard evidence revealing the alarming extent to which Israeli lobbying has infiltrated the UK government. Protesters across the world have had to be vilified and persecuted, especially those attempting to disrupt and call out arms manufacturers supplying Israel. Opposition to Israeli actions has been systematically labelled anti-Semitic whether it is or not. Many academics and journalists are fearful that speaking out against Israel will risk their livelihoods and reputations. Indeed many who have spoken out have found this to to be true. The scale of the propaganda campaign and how it works would require an entire book to cover adequately.
The next chapter discusses an example closer to home to help illustrate how public consent is manufactured.
