BBC Deception and Propaganda

The BBC is the propaganda arm of the British state, although, as the Lineker affair shows, the close relation of its top executives and presenters with the Tory Party, also means it is an arena for the war going on between, the conflicting interests of the ruling class and the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie.  The presenters, as I have set out before, are paid an average of around £150,000 a year, which, with the other incomes such positions generate, means, more often, around half a million. Its no surprise, therefore, that its reporting reflects the interests of those petty-bourgeois and bourgeois elements, and, after more than a century of experience, it is able to do it subtly.  An example of which I was immediately struck by this morning.

One of its presenters in reading the headlines talked about Israeli air strikes on the "Palestinian militant group Hamas, in Gaza".  Now, as I have written many times before, I have no time for the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist, and clerical-fascist Hamas, or its equivalents across the Middle-East.  However, to present things in this way, was deceptive, because Hamas is also the government of Gaza.  What the Israeli state was actually striking, therefore, was the government and state apparatus of Gaza.  Why does this matter?

By presenting things in this way, what the BBC was doing was legitimising the actions of the Israeli state, by basically saying it was just dealing with terrorists, not conducting a war against another state, albeit another state that is not allowed to become fully fledged, because of the actions of Israel itself, and its supporters in western imperialist countries/NATO that provide it with large amounts of advanced weapons, and finance, and, as with this instance, blanket ideological support.  Compare that with the attitude of the same western imperialism and its propaganda machine with its attitude towards Ukraine, and you can see the significance of why the BBC presents this attack, and everything surrounding it, resulting from the occupation of Palestinian territory, its attacks on the Al Aqsa Mosque, and so on, in the way it did.

A lot of the West's propaganda against Russia is based upon the fascistic nature of Putin's regime, and, indeed, there are many fascistic features of that regime that any decent socialist must abhor.  Yet, western imperialism is highly selective in pointing out the fascistic or undemocratic features of states, depending upon whether it is currently in alliance with them or not, and the social-imperialists in the labour movement follow a similar course.  The Israeli state came into existence, as with all states, by an act of violence.  Usually, that violence is by natives of the country, in a dominant region or principality, exerting that dominance over other regions and principalities, as happened with the creation of the British, French, German and Italian nation states, for example.  But colonial states come into existence, as a result of some external nation settling its colons on the territory of other nations, and mobilising violence behind them to establish their dominance over the native population, as with European settlement in the Americas, Australasia, Asia and Africa.

The creation of the Israeli state was of this latter type, and differs from the other examples in that it was created only in 1947, at a time when the idea of colonialism was in disrepute, and imperialism was breaking up the old colonial empires that had been created from the 16th century onwards.  Moreover, it reflected the worst examples of that earlier colonialism.  In the Americas, and Australasia, the colonists carried out policies of genocide against the native populations, some of which were wiped out, and others of whom were reduced to living in the concentration camps of reservations, and so on.  That was the strategy that the Zionists also adopted in Palestine, in order to remove the existing Palestinian population from the land, and as with the continued policy of stealing Palestinian land, and establishing settler communities, it continues today, with western imperialism limply protesting, whilst doing nothing, and the social imperialists, respond, as with Starmer, by claiming that anyone who points out the inherently racist and colonialist nature of Zionism is an anti-Semite!

From the start Zionism, as an ideology was racist, and colonialist, and as is always the case with such ideology, closely tied to the need for authoritarianism, and violent suppression of effective opposition.  In other words, it looks very much like, fascism.  Its no surprise that many of the leaders of Zionism involved in setting up the Israeli state, therefore, embraced the ideas of fascism and Nazism.  The Lehi group members were trained in Mussolini's Italy, and sought support from both fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, to fight against Britain in Palestine.  As Wikpedia says,

"Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on "nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance".

And, reflecting the underlying authoritarian and fascistic ideology, after the defeat of Nazism, its leaders turned their attention to the other National Socialist regime, the USSR.  Today, the Zionist dictator Netanyahu, follows a similar course, playing off the US, where he looks to a return of his old friend Trump, against Russia, and his current friend Putin.  Netanyahu has followed the playbook of other such fascists.  He has been faced by a challenge in the courts, so he seeks to pass new laws so as to control the judiciary, sections of the armed forces rebelled against him, and so he has given the go ahead for the creation of a private army of stormtroopers under the control of the fascist Minister Ben-Gvir.

Western imperialism and its social-imperialist apologists frequently bleat about a "Two-State Solution" in Israel and Palestine, knowing all the while that no such solution is possible, because Israel will never allow it to happen, unless it was forced to do so by its imperialist backers, and those backers will do no such thing.  They will not even propose the kind of economic sanctions imposed on Russia, and instead, continue to pour billions of dollars of military and financial assistance into the country.  The Two-State Solution mantra is just code for let Palestine literally bleed to death.

For the propaganda arm of British imperialism, therefore, to honestly report what is going on in Israel/Palestine, is, then, utopian.  That does not mean, as I have set out before, that the BBC and other western media do not report things that are uncomfortable for the Zionist regime.  They are far more subtle and nuanced, and so more effective than the crude, bureaucratic propaganda machines of authoritarian states.  But, such reporting is used to rein in the excesses of the Zionist regime, when they threaten the interests of imperialism itself, and its need to maintain general public support for its policy of backing Israel and its war crimes.

No one generally notices the subtle difference between talking about striking against the militant group Hamas, as against striking against Gaza, and the comparison then with the reporting of Russian strikes on Ukraine.  The fact that Israel came into existence by violently seizing Palestinian land, and throwing tens of thousands of Palestinians off it into refugee camps and reservations, like the North American Indians, or Australian aborigines, whereas, Ukraine came into existence by a voluntary separation from Russia in 1991, would be uncomfortable comparison for western imperialism, at the present time.  The fact that before the current war in Ukraine, western media pointedly reported on the nature of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector as being Nazis, and their links with US and other white supremacists, would equally be an inconvenient truth, at the present time, when matched with the nature of the Zionist regime, and its fascistic nature.  And, such comparisons are uncomfortable for the social-imperialists and Zionist apologists in the labour movement too, which is why Starmer's authoritarian regime inside Labour expels people for drawing attention to these facts.

Imperialism, the social-imperialists and the propaganda arms of the state cannot point to the colonialist, racist nature of the Israeli state, and its occupation of Palestinian lands, and attempts to colonise even more of them, nor can they point to the fascistic nature of that regime, because to do so would draw attention to their support for that state, as against its opposition to Russia's actions of the same type in Ukraine.  Socialists oppose the actions of the reactionary fascistic regimes in both Russia and Israel, but that does not mean we have to settle for simply a policy of "less-evilism", or "my enemy's enemy is my friend", by instead supporting the clerical fascists of Hamas, or Hezbollah on the one hand, or the reactionary nationalist regime of Zelensky and its Nazi backers in the Azov Battalion/Right Sector, along with its imperialist backers in NATO.

Socialists say a plague on all their houses, butchers one and all of them.  We look instead to the independent, revolutionary third camp of the world proletariat, and its class war against the lot of them, starting with their representatives in our own countries.   Our motto as with that of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky is, Workers of The World Unite, The Main Enemy Is At Home.