On Capitalist-Imperialist Propaganda in the US

A Communist’s Response to the Release of Call of Duty: Cold War

Most Americans do not believe they have been exposed to propaganda to make them support their rulers. They suppose that other countries have propaganda, but that theirs is free of it or at least does not create it. This, however, is in reality a belief which has been cultivated by US propaganda. The truth is that the US is one of the most propaganda-saturated societies in the world, and has been for decades. American media is entirely saturated with capitalist propaganda, with media and messaging that deifies American capitalist-imperialism and demonizes every form of resistance, most especially the one truly functional form of resistance: revolutionary communism.

This fact is easily proven. It is widely known that the Pentagon funds action films (as well as other films, such as Iron Man) with pro-US military messages(1), and it is further observable that essentially all mainstream American-made action films have pro-US military messages. Through these two facts, it becomes clear that the entire industry of mainstream American film has been co-opted into a mechanism to propagandize and build support for the US’s profitmongering imperialist wars. Much the same situation exists in the mainstream video game industry, what those in the field call the “AAA” games industry. The imperialist military has directly propagandized through gaming in the form of the America’s Army series and through the Army-sponsored Army Esports brand, and it has further propagandized indirectly by through some mysterious financial witchcraft managing to convince all other military-themed games to carry pro-US messages. When a US faction appears they are always the heroes, when anti-US forces appear they are always the villains. The AAA industry has even gone as far as to conveniently teach players falsified history in order to glorify US imperialism, blaming a very slightly fictionalized version of the bombardment of Iraq’s infamous Highway 80 (the “Highway of Death”) on Russian forces in CoD: Modern Warfare when it was in reality carried out by the US. Yet again, mainstream American media proves to be utterly saturated with propagandist messages.

And now we have the trailer for the new CoD: Cold War. What have the geniuses at Activision chosen as the perfect thing to advertise their creation? Perhaps some footage of the game? Perhaps a review of the game from a noted individual in the field of gaming? No, they have chosen instead to release as a “trailer” a video of former KGB agent, later rightwing conspiracy grifter, Yuri Bezmenov ranting about the supposed use by the USSR of support for subversive social movements abroad in order to destabilize its opponents(2). The function of this absurdity is clear: the fascist chuckleheads at Activision wish to convince their audience of impressionable and generally politically unaware young people that the current tide of rebellion against the injustices of the US bourgeois state is a campaign by some foreign enemy, probably a socialist one (although the logistics of this are confusing, as there are currently no socialist countries), to destabilize the supposed Land of the Free. They are seeking to prevent their audience from rising up against the state and ruling class by convincing them such uprisings are a nefarious plot by a nonexistent enemy. There is only one word for this: propaganda. This is propaganda against progress and against the cause of liberty and justice for oppressed working people like the Black proletariat in America, and it is propaganda on behalf of the system of white-supremacist fascist capitalist-imperialism that governs American political economy.

The fact that major companies propagandize for the imperialist military and vice versa is not really surprising. It is no secret, after all, that the two serve the same masters: the big bourgeoisie of American society, the major capitalists who own the massive sums of American capital that control much of the global economy. What is surprising is that the powers that be have managed to dupe the masses into utterly ignoring this hegemonic propagandist nature of the media they consume, and into believing the singular opinion of dogmatic pro-US and pro-capitalist-imperialist rhetoric forced down their throats is somehow a manifestation of the beloved neoliberal idol of “free speech.” The ruling caste of big capitalists and Pentagon oligarchs have done this is by dividing up their propagandist efforts into many little cells of propagandists that appear to be separate. Instead of one ministry of propaganda trumpeting out the ideology of the bourgeoisie to all the masses, each little clique of capitalists- each media corporation, each trust, each equity fund, each investment bank, each investors’ group- has its own ministry of propaganda. Thusly, by dividing up the hegemonic pro-capitalist messaging of the bourgeois superstructure into segments, the hegemony has been maintained (as the output of propaganda is no lower than it would be from a single source, perhaps higher) but it has been disguised as many different perspectives from many different “people” and so it does not appear to be the hegemonic propaganda-culture that it is. But companies are not people. They are not human, they are merely sums of inanimate capital guided by the actions of human owners, and so they have no claim to the human right to freely speak their opinions. The repetition of the positions of the state and ruling class by countless corporate mouthpieces paid by the Pentagon is not “free speech,” it is nothing more than a massive monolithic propaganda apparatus of the ruling class, and that is what pop culture in the US essentially functions as. Let us be clear, companies like Activision are not expressing their opinions as “people” with a right to “free speech.” They are performing their role as parts of an overarching structure of pro-status quo propaganda that is decidedly impersonal and unfree.

This is the reality we must reveal to the masses: media like CoD: CW is nothing more than propaganda churned out by the oppressors to keep us in line. We must boycott such media, must encourage the masses at large to do the same, and must actively propagate and popularize the idea such propaganda tries to stamp out: the idea that it is right to rebel against the capitalist class and their bourgeois puppet state!

SOURCES:

(1) “Hollywood Films Funded by the Pentagon”, LiveAbout entertainment magazine, 2019 (https://www.liveabout.com/pentagon-support-for-war-films-3438458)

(2) “Know Your History | Official Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War trailer,” Activision youtube account, 2020