A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR editor and columnist Jared A. Ball
America’s oldest psy-op is the centuries-long campaign to torture and manipulate the minds of Black people. “Anti-Black images are so prevalent that even ten year old girls in Baltimore are reduced to begging popular rappers to stop depicting women as they often do.” This “permanent psyop” is essential to [white] American “full spectrum dominance” – on sea, land, air and all the space inside captive skulls.
Anti-Black Psy-Ops and The Propaganda of History
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR editor and columnist Jared A. Ball
“Black America has suffered one constant ‘Shock Doctrine’ after another.”
Noam Chomsky says that “propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.” The freer a society believes it is the more it must be propagandized into that belief. So naturally even its political elite must have their views of the world properly formed for them, and especially those supposedly overseeing this country’s longest-running invasion, Afghanistan. According to a report last week from Rolling Stone magazine, “The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in ‘psychological operations’ to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war…” Yep. From war hero and former presidential hopeful John McCain to former funnyman and liberal talk show host Al Franken, all got a good dose of psyops! But yet again Black America sets an awful trend, because psychological operations against this community have been going on for centuries and that particular brand of terrorism shows no signs of slowing down.
It is important to note the similarity in perspective between how the military and the founders of this country’s academic field of communication studies see communication. In short both see it as a weapon. And a big one too. Propaganda and bombs have routinely been used interchangeably as forms of “communication” and each with the same end in mind, dominance. And that is “full spectrum dominance,” as one scholar describes it, or the complete and total ideological control by the United States of “land, sea, air, space, outer space and cyberspace.” Or as another scholar describes it, propaganda as an “‘ideological offensive’ has been at least as central to U.S. national security strategy since 1945 as the atomic bomb. For one thing, one could actually use ideological offensives on a day-to-day basis, as distinct from atomic warfare.” These ideological offensives are also seen as “adaptable for use against one’s own population” and are, again, absolutely necessary in managing the potential for free thinking to occur.
“Propaganda and bombs have routinely been used interchangeably as forms of ‘communication.’”
So it stands to reason that the first brand-in-chief would also keep his predecessor’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Bryan Whitman, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Relations, aka, chief military propagandist who has already been exposed as having continued Bush’s propaganda campaign designed to win public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But moreover it stands to reason because this country is itself one big psyop targeting its captive inhabitants who might indeed leave, as is often encouraged of those who see it this way, were it not for the massive psyops preventing them from thinking it either desirable or possible. And particularly Black people. From enslavement to sharecropping to debt peonage and prison lease systems, Black Codes and Jim and Jane Crow to today’s ghettoes, prisons and unemployment lines, Black America has suffered one constant “Shock Doctrine” after another – a permanent psyop targeting the identity of Black as human.
Free thinking is to democracy what revolutionary violence is to a dictator. And hence the consistent assault on the African psyche and Black consciousness. Today, six film companies and three music studios determine that popular anti-Black images are so prevalent that even ten year old girls in Baltimore are reduced to begging popular rappers to stop depicting women as they often do and many well-meaning people are reduced to believing these rappers have anything to do with it. Popular rappers exist themselves as psychological operations waged by the state against a potentially threatening internally-held target population. Capitalism is its own perfect propagandist.
But it was DuBois who made the point as early as any of those who would develop these studies into the sciences they are today. We can call it the fundamental or archetypal propaganda, he called it “The Propaganda of History.” Today’s wave of propaganda is only truly understood when viewed in terms of what DuBois said of this country’s propaganda and its “fidelity against the Negro since emancipation in this land, [where] we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.” To this we need only add mass media.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Jared Ball. Visit us online at BlackAgendaReport.com.
Dr. Jared A. Ball can be reached via email at freemixradio@gmail.com.
Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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