New Deceiving Propaganda Tactic: Framing Propaganda under the frame work of Global Public Sphere and Global Governance.
The post 911 propaganda of the Bush Administration was compared as no difference to the Nazi’s propaganda, according to Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky argued that the concept of democracy is attacked by the U.S. post 911 propaganda. He said “What honest people are saying is that ‘paying attention to our own crimes and stop committing it” and should not jump into others’ homelands to kill millions of people leaving a country devastated and the people suffering from chemical wars.
From my understanding, the nowadays’s globalization trends created a even harder battle for those anti-propaganda. To better understand the argument, I would like to take a step back for now and look at the bigger picture.
Public Sphere is first introduced by Habermas meaning “an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action.” (Hauser, Gerard 1998) And in accordance with the globalization, the Global Public Sphere is usually interpreted by scholars as “through global media and Internet networks is the most effective form of broadening political participation on a global scale, by inducing a fruitful, synergistic connection between the government-based international institutions and the global civil society. This multimodal communication space is what constitutes the new global public sphere.” (Castells, Manuel 2008) It is usually understood in the frame work of Global Civil Society, which is popularly interpreted as “rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with a global or international frame of reference in their action and goals.” (Castells, Manuel 2008)
Global governance is another concept that can help us better understand how the
propagandists deceive in making use of the global civil society. Global governance can be understand as due to “the increasing inability of nation-states to confront and manage the processes of globalization of the issues that are the object of their governance, network states ad hoc forms of global governance and, ultimately, to a new form of state, examples are as follows: APEC, ASEAN, United Nations International Monetary Fund, World Bank, NATO.
After examining these concepts in the bigger picture, let’s look back at the argument. So the globalization brought up the trends of Global Public Sphere, and the Global Governance. These tendencies simply created scopes for the deceiving democracy imperialism to take place under the cover of them. Look at these organizations: Voice of America – broadcasting the blocked news to the people living in the non-democratic countries, NATO – all the NATO members were involved in the Gulf War and most of them directly or indirectly sponsored the Iraqi and Afghanistan War. APEC and ASEAN have been accused of being instruments of Chinese government economic bullying on the Southeas Asian member countries.
The National Endowment of Democracy (NED) is a cannot-be-better example. The NED funded international NGOs in the name of advocating for democracy and many of which are international NGOs, such as the Fa Lun Gong, and the World Congress of Uyghur. They which are categorized by Chinese government as “Terrorism groups” and “Religion Extremists”.
It might sound ironic, but please imagine and do this comparison:
U.S. -- Al-Qaeda--“terrorists” - war --while China’s is accused of being “behind Iran and Palestine”
China –Dalai Lama and Radeer - “Terrorism group” and “religion extremists” -- U.S. based NED is sponsoring Dalai Lama and Radeer.
According to Castells, Manuel there are three features characteristics of the international NGOS must be emphasized: “In contrast to political parties, these NGOs have considerable popularity and legitimacy, and this translates into substantial funding both via donations and volunteerism. Their activity focuses on practical matters, specific cases, and concrete expressions of human solidarity: saving children from famine, freeing political prisoners, stopping the lapidation of women, and ameliorating the impact of unsustainable development on indigenous cultures. What is fundamental here is that the classical political argument of rationalizing decisions in terms of the overall context of politics is denied. Goals do not justify the means. The purpose is to undo evil or to do good in one specific instance. The positive output must be considered in itself, not as a way of moving in a positive direction. Because people have come to distrust the logic of instrumental politics, the method of direct action on direct outputs finds increasing support. Finally, the key tactics of NGOs to achieve results and build support for their causes is media politics (Dean, Anderson, and Lovink 2006; Gillmor 2004). It is through the media that these organizations reach the public and mobilize people in support of these causes. In so doing, they eventually put pressure on governments threatened by the voters or on corporations fearful of consumers’ reactions. Thus, the media become the battleground for an NGO’s campaign. Since these are global campaigns, global media are the key target. The globalization of communication leads to the globalization of media politics (Costanza-Chock 2006).”
These interpretations mean that
1, Goals do not justify the means, no matter what cover that propaganda is using, propaganda is propaganda.
2. Through the frame work of global civil movement and the influence of global public sphere, it’s very easy for propagandists to take advantage of public’s trust on such medium and play the new persuasion game.
Micro-Look:
Is it working?
I took a look at the NED funded NOGs based on China mainland. Many of the listed names are in the government’s black list, from my belief, which means that they cannot reach out to the public almost “at all”. This trigger the question—so how do these blocked NGOs work? Are the NED’s efforts working in China? This could be my question for further research.
References:
CASTELLS, Manuel. "The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance".The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 616, No. 1, 2008, pp
Hauser, Gerard , 1998 "Vernacular Dialogue and the Rhetoricality of Public Opinion", Communication Monographs 65 (2): 83–107 Page. 86,
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