DISINFORMATION has been part and parcel of the political process since, well, forever. It was only in the Nineteenth Century, however, that the need to create narratives advantageous to one’s own cause, and disadvantageous to one’s opponents, gained access to technologies enabling disinformation to be communicated at great speed and on a massive scale. With the dawning of the Twentieth Century, however, even more startling technological innovations upped the effectiveness of disinformation by several orders of magnitude. The old adage: “A lie will be halfway around the world before Truth has pulled his boots on”; became a straightforward description of reality. By the Twenty-First Century, however, technology had advanced to the point where the separation of truth from falsehood required the adjudication of experts – and the ability to distinguish fake expertise from the real thing.
When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians.
In normal circumstances, the pet hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Tragically, however, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19, and, more importantly, the vaccines developed in record time to bring it under control.
In those countries with centre-left national and/or state governments, most particularly the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, politicians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.
From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position, which at least some of the mainstream media might have challenged, could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. Far-Right lies could produce deadly consequences, argued the Left. Free speech should not be considered an unqualified good, not when it empowers “bad actors”.
What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. Indeed, modern disinformation/propaganda was more-or-less invented by Willi Münzenberg, a German political impresario, commissioned by the Communist International to spread the Bolshevik’s revolutionary creed across the West. Tactics we take for granted today: front organisations, activist celebrities, newspapers, magazines, plays, movies, and phonograph records – all with an easily digestible political sub-text, were Münzenberg’s inventions. In the early 1920s, the Right had nothing to match “Willi’s Wurlitzer”.
Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact, but the effectiveness of New Zealand’s right-wing disinformers is well below that of their left-wing rivals. Better educated, more articulate, technically more proficient, and – most importantly – working with, not against, the grain of New Zealand’s official “progressive” ideology, New Zealand’s left-wing activists’ political and cultural production throws that of the Right into the shade. Their output can be found on Facebook, Instagram, X and Tik-Tok – global platforms often denied to the Right by Silicon Valley’s “progressive” billionaires. Freed from the need to hawk their ideological wares in the murky swamps of Telegram, the Left’s disinformers/propagandists have no need for false identities. Operating freely, under their own names, they have ready access to the hearts and minds of millions.
Not that very many New Zealanders know or care what the Left is saying. Indeed, political speech only becomes important in moments of national and international crisis. In the middle of a global pandemic, disinformation is important. When Russia invades Ukraine, disinformation is important. When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day agoby Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League (a front organisation comprised of Pere and his wife Sarah) is important.
With film-star good looks and a compelling verbal style, Pere commands the viewers’ attention from the moment he authoritatively disabuses them of any notion that what is currently unfolding in Gaza is not their fight. New Zealand, he informs them “has troops involved”. An alarming “fact” if one’s knowledge of New Zealand’s role in the Middle East is poor – i.e. most of the New Zealand population. That Pere flashes up a media release explaining that New Zealand has eight military personnel serving in the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation in no way excuses his claim that the country has troops involved. In the minds of his viewers, his words will have conjured up images of Kiwi soldiers rubbing shoulders with members of the Israeli Defence Force. It’s misinformation shading into disinformation.
Pere’s pace is brisk, and just seconds later he is informing his viewers that New Zealand has “long supported the colonisation of Palestine”. This is historical nonsense – and malicious nonsense at that. He states as a fact that New Zealand “invaded” Palestine and “seized it for Britain” in 1917. Curiously, he neglects to inform his viewers that the New Zealand Mounted Rifles was merely one unit in the British Expeditionary Force waging war against the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a mere province. According to Pere, the province was handed over to “Zionist terrorists”. Curiouser and curiouser, since Ottoman Palestine was actually handed over to the British by the League of Nations as a “mandated territory”, and remained in British hands until 1948.
But Pere is just getting warmed up. While they were busy making Palestine safe for Zionism, argues Pere, the Kiwis treated the Palestinian people “horribly”. He cites the Surafend massacre of 1918 as proof.
What happened at Surafend wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t happen out of the blue. Troopers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse went to the village of Surafend to secure the surrender of the Palestinian Arab who had shot dead Trooper Leslie Lowry after stealing his kit bag. Their demand refused, the Anzacs attacked the men of the village (having evacuated the women and children to a place of safety) killing as many as 200, and setting their houses on fire. The Anzac perpetrators received a tongue-lashing from the British commander, Allenby, but none of them were ever punished.
Had Pere homed in on the Surafend massacre right from the start of his video, he could have presented a picture of New Zealand’s complicity in British, and later American, imperialism that was not only persuasive by truthful. Instead, by surrounding the Surafend massacre with a string of disinformative statements, the whole four-minute video becomes an exercise in the most blatant propaganda. And not just any propaganda, Pere’s falsehoods are the falsehoods of Hamas and their Iranian backers – whose cause Pere equates with the cause of Māori nationalism in Aotearoa. Presumably, what Hamas terrorists did to the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel is what decolonisation looks like.
Imagine the reaction of the Disinformation Project if they had found a video presentation promoting right-wing disinformation and hate on such a scale. A video dripping with Islamophobic hate in the same way Pere’s drips with annihilationist hatred of Israel. Such a video would have been presented to the mainstream media as evidence of the danger posed by radical political extremism; of the need to take decisive action against such horrific hate speech.
And they would have lapped it up.
Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s leading leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.
” Their output can be found on Facebook, Instagram, X and Tik-Tok – global platforms often denied to the Right by Silicon Valley’s “progressive” billionaires. Freed from the need to hawk their ideological wares in the murky swamps of Telegram, the Left’s disinformers/propagandists have no need for false identities. Operating freely, under their own names, they have ready access to the hearts and minds of millions.”
I agree with the overall tone of this article, but the left is routinely suppressed by the algorithms on the tech platforms. Overall readership of the left media: counterpunch, znet, truthout, socialist media drammatically dropped around 2016. Google has admitted to suppressing left wing perspectives in order to convince people (like Trump), that they arn’t biased.
In terms of “progressive” billionaires, one might want to look at Marc Andersons latest screed, just to see how leftwing they are.
Douglas Renwick, The left also suppresses itself. It was the left’s secretive Helen Clark who decided that the New Zealand public should not be told when she sent the SAS off to join in America’s 2001 bloody invasion of Afghanistan. Recent brutish attempts to shut down women’s voices here has not only been left-lead, but celebrated by them as some sort of perverse freedom.
No argument there from me.
Whatever one thinks the terms “left”, and “right” mean, I do not consider Helen Clark to be left wing, or progressive in any way. Her record is as a managerial officer for neo-liberalism from what I can tell.
Counterpunch is not leftist at all! It is Alt Right/libertarian. How can you be so confused?
You’re definitely confused. Counterpunch.org is one of the main leftwing media platforms.
Yes Chris T wont accept that though. Not after this preposterously tone deaf posit.
‘What happened at Surafend *wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t happen out of the blue*. ‘
Quite.
No more than Oct 7th as hideous as the most atrocious of acts did either.
‘Troopers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse went to the village of Surafend to secure the surrender of the Palestinian Arab who had shot dead Trooper Leslie Lowry after stealing his kit bag. Their demand refused, the Anzacs attacked the men of the village (having evacuated the women and children to a place of safety) killing slaughtering them.
200 for 1 then?
‘as many as 200, and setting their houses on fire’. ‘The Anzac perpetrators received *a tongue-lashing from the British commander, Allenby, but none of them were ever punished.’*
Yep .Ahem?
CT a cheer leader for disproportionate collective punishment just like his fellow blogger the SSlater ?
Jax.
with a shrug though.
Chris omits to mention that Allenby denounced his own Anzac troops as “cowards and murderers”. More than a “tongue lashing”. So this post by Trotter is the real example of “left-wing disinformation”. As is typical of colonialists, Trotter evidently believes that the collective punishment of native peoples can be justified by the circumstances.
Whence did you get the impression that CT approved of that collective punishment?
Chris Trotter disputes Pere’s record of events, writing: “What happened at Surafend wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t happen out of the blue”. He goes on to emphasize that only Arab men were killed in the massacre. His wording is carefully intended to convey the impression that this was an unfortunate event perpetrated by high-minded colonials who made a mistake in challenging circumstances. As you would expect for a man who has now come out as an explicit defender of British colonialism in New Zealand.
I think these words from Allenby, directed at the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse qualify as a tongue-lashing: “I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”
It is, however, important to note that Allenby’s words brought the New Zealand and Australian troops close to mutiny. Since London needed them to quell a growing Arab revolt against British rule, Allenby was forced to back away from his criticism, and those responsible for the Surafend Massacre escaped punishment.
I’m not sure that Geoff Fisher appreciates objectivity.
The progressive left have a well earned reputation for zealotry in this country, think gender, race and class.
jack Yep, but they’re the regressive left, not the progressive left, and wittingly or not, they’re part of the pernicious divide and rule agenda.
I suspect that Jack is a pernicious Right troll.
Wrong. Working class lefty for over 40 years.
Possibly ossified then?
If true, I apologise and withdraw!
I suggest that Jack’s fairly consistent concern about the genderID ideology being promulgated in the school system, aligns him more with the generation of grandparents who’ve lived through more rational and fact-based times than the brainwashed woke who know little different and rule the roost in the public service.
The majority of the population in all eras has failed to be impartial and objective.
Probably our major failing as a species.
100% Jack
Who needs disinformation videos when Assange released the real deal ,condemning right wing Western behaviour!
In a world full of war, economic turmoil, and forever rising economic inequality, how people, from either side of the political divide, choose to inform themselves on these matters, and how this may shape their behavior/actions thereafter, is not the key problem here. The real problem is the reason(s) for the state of today’s world and that inherently is political. We must not allow political debate, whether good or bad, to be stifled by a mere whiff of the disinformation machine. All the ills of today are political, likewise, censorship, or our ability to push back on these ills are rising.
Who is responsible for today’s world is the key issue here, please do not be distracted from this by those reacting to today’s world.
@ AO: Quite. Here’s an interesting report:
“There are people (the Arabs, Editor’s Note) who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions. These people have one faith, one language, one history and the same aspirations. No natural barriers can isolate these people from one another … if, perchance, this nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and would separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body [ISRAEL] should be planted in the heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars. It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain its coveted objects.”
Campbell-Bannerman report, Imperial Conference 1907
https://www.hizb.org.uk/palestine/britains-bitter-legacy-
I followed your link, Archonblatter, and arrived in a black-green-white and red-hot website dedicated to the Palestinian cause. Got as far as “the Zionist entity” – i.e. Israel – and gave up.
I would, however, advise against taking any “quotations” from British – or any other statesmen – at face value. These are, after all, “journalists” who refuse to acknowledge that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is a work of antisemitic propaganda.
@Chris Trotter: So have the Palestinians in your opinion no right to a cause, a website of protest or even the use of their flag’s colours on such a site?
As for Zionism maybe listen to this very recent address by the Jewish writer Ilan Pappe at Berkley university
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OcjOP8iUCU
Or refresh your memory with this:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/text-of-the-balfour-declaration-
Or even take time to read this:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf
Is any of the above anti-semitic propaganda because they all discuss Zionism?
Superb, Chris
Surafend – If you mess with the bull you get the horns.
You do the same as Pere does.
You use one case to tar a whole political spectrum by dubious association.
Feeble effort of both-sides-ism.
Yes, agree with you Stephen and he (CT) is not the only one, the mainstream media ran havoc on radio and TV they were literally campaigning for national.
No, Geoff Fischer. “Cowards and murderers” is only a tongue-lashing.
Allenby took no other action.
In a sense you are right. My point is that Allenby called it for what it was – murder – and then the powers-that-be in the colonialist Anzac forces allowed the murders to go unpunished. That is par for the colonialist course.
As an unashamed colonialist, Trotter has now become an apologist for murder. In a cynical and totally amoral attempt to justify Israeli bombing of Gaza he notes that Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur Harris “spoke the brutal language of military necessity. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Germany without killing Germans, he point-blank refused to indulge in moral humbug”.
Harris actually set out to kill as many Germans as possible arguing that “the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany … the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.”
Harris also had a connection to Palestine, laying the groundwork for the military strategy of the State of Israel, saying that “the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand” and that “one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn” would solve the problem of the Palestinian resistance.
Harris was wrong about that, and his armchair acolyte, Christopher Trotter is wrong about nearly everything.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from all this it is that the vicious colonial regime in New Zealand can no longer be tolerated, and its murder-inciting spokespeople, such as Christopher Marshall Trotter, must be called to account.
Like Harris, Trotter argues for the “brutal.. military necessity”, as he sees it, of the actions of the colonial regime versus what he regards as the “moral humbug” of our people, and thus far TDB has given him a platform on which to wage that campaign.
Would TDB allow Pere Huriwai-Seger right of reply? Would any of the blogs which publish Trotter’s increasingly nasty tirades against resistance movements amongst colonized peoples?
I will believe it when I see it.
Thinking of Pere it is an example of ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. But thinking again it also seems that a lot of knowledge can smother the truth and the facts as well. If we all remembered that it is unwise to trust anybody’s opinions, even your own, till relatively unbiased or determinedly cool, factual people have been listened to, and then their facts checked with others’.
And then measure the conflicting opinions one is observing, what will be the outcomes of carrying forward their message and activity? How can the ‘war’ be contained by diplomacy and a better and healing response be implemented? Well it may require some sacrifice on one’s own part or of country, so that is difficult, hmm. Set up a committee soonish, say next year to discuss.
There is inherent ingrained racism at play here. Arabs are neither white nor Christian. They are not like us, their belief system is different and their religion is unfathomable to western democratic values.
This is the very meaning of racism.
Muslims generally have little or no tolerance for the rights of women / alphabet people / non-Muslims etc but of course to mention it would be discriminatory . .
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