How do you break a propaganda spell?

Emerging from Wonderland during an information war

The struggle for narrative control in the media has been absolutely overwhelming this year. It was at full force this past week, wherein much of Western media depicted the military operation that rescued 4 Israeli hostages as heroic and joyful while tiptoeing around the fact that 274 Palestinian civilians including children were slaughtered during the process. Much has been written explaining how this difference in narrative was achieved by Western media. But I see less written about what it’s actually like to live amongst people who are still trapped within this propaganda spell.

Unfortunately, there are some people who are not yet ready to emerge from the spell. There are many reasons for this, which I will explore below, but regardless, the truth of this means that those that have emerged are still required to live between narratives when engaging with those who are still enchanted. We drift between the ugliness of reality and a kind of twisted, nonsensical Wonderland, in which the grim truth of Western complicity in death and destruction is not accepted, but there is still a feeling of something not being right, of feeling off-kilter.

Photo by Meghan Hessler on Unsplash

Though of course the people of Palestine are the greatest victims of this false narrative, those still living in Wonderland are victims of a different sort. Selfishly, I care about them because I am angry I was fooled myself. But as well, it's important to consider how challenging it is to extricate oneself from the enchantment of propaganda. Even decent, well-meaning people—who are intelligent and do not actually want innocent people to be hurt—are just as likely to swallow propaganda as anyone else. Kind people can still be supporters of the Zionist narrative, because they have been fed flawed information for decades.

It is not so easy to suddenly reject sources you have trusted for so long. Some supporters of Israel truly do not know that they have been consuming a flawed media diet regarding the subject of the Middle East for the majority of their lives.

Propaganda is powerful. To detect lies coming from your own media is an incredibly difficult thing to do psychologically. It is counter-intuitive, and cognitively challenging. To realize why Free Palestine is the only true moral position, you must first deconstruct beliefs that are built on a foundation that was created decades ago. It cannot be torn down quickly. Breaking a propaganda spell is not as simple as just telling someone what is true. To accept new evidence that counters your beliefs, you must in some ways reprogram your mind. You must be willing to challenge years and years of information, which tells a completely different story.

Photo by MK Hamilton on Unsplash

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, many Soviet citizens received increased access to foreign media and literature that had previously been censored or banned. As people began to explore new information that countered previous socialist narratives, they became disoriented, forced to contend with a crumbling ideological foundation. Many lost a sense of meaning and purpose.

Generally, it was easier for younger people to adjust. But for some, particularly older generations who had lived their entire lives under this Soviet system, this new information resulted in confusion, and a profound sense of loss. Soviet ideology, after all, indicated that the United States was bent on crushing their socialist “utopia”. The narrative given to them had emphasized that capitalism promoted a life of inequality and exploitation (a piece that, unfortunately, turned out to be more or less accurate). But based on this historical context, how could normal citizens easily reject their own ideologies in favour of something portrayed as morally wrong? How could they really be expected to switch sources of media immediately, when they had been educated to believe other media promoted inferior ideologies?

After the Cold War, Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich recorded conversations with hundreds of former Soviet individuals in her book Secondhand Time. According to her, these civilians were “bound to the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply there was no separating them: the state had become their entire cosmos, blocking out everything else, even their own lives.”

Western folks don’t think of ourselves as being “bound” to ideology. But we have also absorbed lessons imparted upon us through our culture and media that are challenging for some people, particularly older folks, to reject. We generally feel, for example, that history is over because we “won”, and that the world is destined to always be in Western hands. We are generally taught that Russian and Chinese governments are not just governments capable of evil, but ones that are inherently more evil than our own governments. We are generally taught that Western nations are peacemakers, and even if we are capable of cruelty, we are not capable of as much cruelty as the administrations of other countries.

But what if these things weren’t true? And what if you had to come to terms with that really quickly, when you were not quite ready to accept it?

Photo by Soviet Artefacts on Unsplash

I don’t mean to be an apologist for pro-Israel supporters. I am not defending Zionists, particularly not those who defend the ongoing murder of Palestinians. But there are many Western “normies” who did not mean to support a genocidal nation and were simply consuming incorrect information with no reason to disbelieve it. For them, I think it’s important to consider their point of view so that we can best figure out how to lead them to truth.

Now that I know about the historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, I feel out of my depth in educating people about this subject. I know many people are not going to believe me. Even reasonable people may have difficulty accepting how big of a lie our governments have been involved in, that it is the “moral West” that has enabled Israel’s murder of thousands of innocent people. This involves acknowledging that we belong to an empire that has been in the wrong for decades, and involves acknowledging that our own media deliberately misled us. How do you begin telling someone something like this? How do you prevent them from immediately dismissing you; from believing that it is you that has gone down a rabbit hole?

Living in 2024 thus means existing in a feeling of perpetual whiplash. People consume completely different media, trusting completely different sources. This does not seem like it should be so significant. But in fact, trusting different media means living in different universes, and speaking different languages. It’s an alienating experience.

What I, and you, must explain to our community is not just that Palestine must and will be free. It is much more distressing, disorienting, and confusing for Western folks than that. We have been essentially forbidden from criticizing Israeli policies for our whole lives, but many of us did not properly recognize that this happened.

As such, one cannot just say: Palestine will be free. You must also say: a lot of what you believe in your everyday life is a lie. Many people cannot handle that. If one is to believe our government and media lied to us about Israel, it could send someone into a spiral, because they must then also question whether any other of their beliefs they have developed were also built on a foundation of lies.

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People have an inherent desire to maintain consistency and avoid disharmony in their beliefs. Psychologist Leon Festinger conducted a series of experiments regarding cognitive dissonance theory in the 50s. His studies indicated that when new conflicting information arose to challenge previously held beliefs, people often would either ignore the new evidence, or revise beliefs to align with the evidence. He found that cognitive dissonance could result in constructive dialogue and re-evaluation of beliefs. But it could also lead to confirmation bias, where individuals only sought out information that supported their already-held beliefs and ignored anything that countered it. People who did this were not necessarily evil people. It was the natural instinct of many.

This is why, if you have evidence to back-up your argument, it may still not be acceptable to some. I can certainly provide receipts to back-up my argument that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and that the West has been complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for decades. I can show how the deaths of Palestinians have been downplayed in our media and show them how Zionists are trained to self-victimize when anyone criticizes Israeli foreign policy and mass deaths (see here for a clip of White House spokesperson John Kirby saying it’s “offensive” to ask for more help in stopping the murders). I can show how Hamas did not in fact attack “first” on October 7 and that Israel has been the richer and more powerful aggressor in this conflict for about a hundred years, participating in aggressive actions as close to October 7 2023 as October 5 2023.

But if you are already unwilling or unable to believe, you may still end up not believing. If your brain has been wired to tell you for decades that Western media is reputable and that all other media is the actual propaganda, all evidence from Al Jazeera will go out the window in favour of the Washington Post, regardless of which one has proven to be a rag this past year.

Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

One can really dismiss just about anything. Oh, one of your sources is the Middle East Eye? Well that’s not Western news so it’s therefore biased and wrong. Oh, you’ve seen video after video of Palestinian corpses including beheaded babies? Well, that was on Tiktok or Substack so it’s therefore biased and wrong. Oh, you’ve seen footage after footage of White House officials being completely unable to answer any questions about why they’re not holding Israel accountable for civilian deaths? Well I didn’t see that on the BBC so it’s therefore biased and wrong. Oh, you’ve seen a lot of evidence that the New York Times reporting has been incredibly unethical this year? Well, they gave themselves a Pulitzer prize this year, so shut it. And on and on and on.

I feel a bit at a loss for even how to begin explaining this to people. I also feel pissed off that my country and the Western empire has forced me into this position where I am morally obligated to do this. I want to explain this to people in a way that is informed by compassionate understanding, knowing that people are human and can easily be misled, particularly by powerful forces. But I don’t know how to do it well.

I know that it is inevitable that everyone will learn. That those still under the enchantment of propaganda will eventually be outnumbered by public opinion. The media will shift its narrative to try and explain it, but it will not be believed. A recent poll by Polling Canada shows that Israel has already lost a ton of public support. But some people are still enchanted and struggle to get out of it. If anyone has stumbled upon this article, I would be interested to see how people are approaching this in their own lives, and how you are working to try and break the spell.

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Writers and articles I’ve been reading on Substack:

• Media Keeps Playing Along With Fiction There Is an “Israeli Ceasefire Deal” by Adam Johnson

• Ignoring Daily Massacres In Gaza While Still Babbling About October 7 by Caitlin Johnstone

• Rishi Sunak promises tax cuts for your favourite people: landlords by Laura K

• Why does our government keep lying? by Joshua P. Hill

• France Sends Troops to Ukraine by Stephen Bryen

• US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration’s Foreign Policy by Dennis Kucinich

• UN Finds More Evidence of sexual violence committed by the IDF against men, women and children in Gaza by Council Estate Media