The way people in the core think about the war machine is complicated, just not in a coherent or consistent way. Very few people like seeing mass violence that’s this brazenly targeted at civilians. That’s precisely why American media largely ignores or blows past international news. The resulting institutional knowledge and structures date back to Vietnam. The whole point is to prevent the US losing the war of public opinion domestically. Many wars function as PR campaigns, so controlling attention is a huge boon to the consent manufacturing machine.
I think it would be interesting for someone to write about how the attention economy relates to this aspect of the war machine. Because the whole idea that social media corporations are complicit in war is no exaggeration. But it tends to be seen as interferences “over there” with anecdotes about Facebook allocating more or less resources for moderation being a political decision. But surveillance companies cosplaying as media hosts are granted a pseudo-monopoly status by the government in exchange for making mass surveillance cheap. This is true both on the private side with ad companies and on the public side with things like the NSA’s integrations with Google and Facebook. So in a very material way, these companies are hooked straight into the war machine.
For sure. And that’s the weird thing. Most people here (edit: Most working class people here) have the belief that war is bad and that killing civilians is bad. They also have the belief that the US military is mostly justified most of the time. And those beliefs don’t go together, so they have to be activated at separate times by distinct media campaigns. When Ukraine gets invaded by Russia, war is bad and it’s war crimes this, war crimes that. When Iraq got invaded by the US, it was all about righteous missions. These aren’t empty beliefs. They both drive action, causing people to protest and donate en masse. I think it’s the cognitive dissonance of believing both these things at once that makes US citizens so easy to manipulate when it comes to foreign affairs. The Palestinian uprising happened to hit in the middle of a War Bad cycle, which is doing some odd things to people’s brains here.
The way people in the core think about the war machine is complicated, just not in a coherent or consistent way. Very few people like seeing mass violence that’s this brazenly targeted at civilians. That’s precisely why American media largely ignores or blows past international news. The resulting institutional knowledge and structures date back to Vietnam. The whole point is to prevent the US losing the war of public opinion domestically. Many wars function as PR campaigns, so controlling attention is a huge boon to the consent manufacturing machine.
I think it would be interesting for someone to write about how the attention economy relates to this aspect of the war machine. Because the whole idea that social media corporations are complicit in war is no exaggeration. But it tends to be seen as interferences “over there” with anecdotes about Facebook allocating more or less resources for moderation being a political decision. But surveillance companies cosplaying as media hosts are granted a pseudo-monopoly status by the government in exchange for making mass surveillance cheap. This is true both on the private side with ad companies and on the public side with things like the NSA’s integrations with Google and Facebook. So in a very material way, these companies are hooked straight into the war machine.
If it the USA military killing them they wont care about numbers
For sure. And that’s the weird thing.
Most people here(edit: Most working class people here) have the belief that war is bad and that killing civilians is bad. They also have the belief that the US military is mostly justified most of the time. And those beliefs don’t go together, so they have to be activated at separate times by distinct media campaigns. When Ukraine gets invaded by Russia, war is bad and it’s war crimes this, war crimes that. When Iraq got invaded by the US, it was all about righteous missions. These aren’t empty beliefs. They both drive action, causing people to protest and donate en masse. I think it’s the cognitive dissonance of believing both these things at once that makes US citizens so easy to manipulate when it comes to foreign affairs. The Palestinian uprising happened to hit in the middle of a War Bad cycle, which is doing some odd things to people’s brains here.Ok