The technology of Subterfuge and Subversion in Modern Propaganda
The artistic fake is doubly mimetic. It embodies the genre or form that it mimics. It further plays on circumstances of production or reception—although the game only becomes apparent once it is set up and the fake revealed. Mimesis is essential to the range of deceptions spanning fiction to forgery, such as pastiche, practical jokes, farces and attrapes, philosophical and ludic mystifications, persiflage, and fraud.[i]
There is no doubt that the way the western media on the whole have been
reporting on the Gazan Crisis of 2014, particularly treating Israel’s Operation
Defensive Edge, belongs within the category of fraud; but the other categories
can also provide apt insights to the way a new genre of false or phoney
journalism has been created. In regard to
the staged and manipulated images emanating from the media in what purports to
be true and objective videos of how the Palestinians in Gaza—not least young
children, mothers, and old men and women—are innocent victims of Israeli
aggression, disproportion, and Jewish evil—the phenomenon has been called Pallywood (that is, Palestinian perfidy
matched with Hollywood superficial cinematic trumpery). The Pallywoodization
of television news includes staged events, manipulated and expropriated images
of other conflicts, airbrushing out of Hamas fighters, trivilialization of the
use of human shields, booby-trapped structures, and elaborate and extensive
tunnels, the builders of which, by the way, are now known to have been executed
to maintain the secret.
In the last section of this essay I discussed the notion of the attrape, particularly that form of
entrapment in which a seemingly innocent but sincere person is hoodwinked into
confession to crimes he never committed or a self-deluded criminal is lured
into a snare where his cover is b lown and he stands revealed in all his
idiotic guilt. I want now to deepen and
broaden that discussion to include the concepts of pastiche, farces, and
philosophical and ludic mystifications, listed by Julia Abramson in her review
of a collection of essays on supercheries
littéraires et visuelles, literary and visual trickery in French
culture.
Pastiche imitates
the style of others and then mixes typical generic markers into shocking
matrixes of characters, situations, actions and atmospheres, usually for the
sake of parody or satire, but sometimes to create interesting insights into the
nature of the various elements imitated.
These borrowings often form exercises for budding writers to learn the
craft of fiction and provide entertainment for readers who seek to disentangle
the knot of subterfuge generating the game being played. In terms of what is happening to the mass
propaganda war emanating from Gaza, the reporters, academics and enemy agents
circulate their covert messages of genocide against Israel by mixing truths
with half-truths, insinuating the images of other wars into this current
operation, adopting the discourses of peace, tolerance and liberalism into
texts that derive originally from appeals to kill all Jews, to destroy the
Zionist entity, and to voluntarily offer oneself as a human shield by standing
on the roof of a targeted home of a top terrorist leader. Allusions are made to
situations in which Jews themselves have been the victims of genocide, women
and children murdered for the sake of frightening their families, and where
innocent members of a despised faith are crucified or beheaded for the sake of
heaven. This kind of a stylistic
hodgepodge is grotesque in tis twisted logic.
Farces are short
plays in which too many characters take part in too many uncoordinated actions
in too confined a space. Unlike satire
or satura, which it resembles
superficially, where everything is saturated with excessive pride, arrogance,
egotism and self-righteousness so that some unexpected and shocking event explodes
the pretentiousness of the whole and exposes the rotten core of hypocrisy and
self-delusion, farce is like a farced chicken or other bird stuffed with
breadcrumbs or chopped giblets to be cooked into a flavoursome meal, that is,
enhanced beyond measure: but this gilding of the lily, unlike the excesses of
satire, usually has no other purpose than fun.
In a bedroom farce, for instance, there are couples galore scurrying
from bedroom to bedroom, hiding behind drapes, slithering under beds: while in
a satire their pretentiousness would be revealed, their speeches of love seen
to fall apart against reality and logic, and the whole game of courting or
seduction stripped down to mere lust and selfishness. In the media’s version of Gaza, that small
enclave of tyrannical fanaticism, where a little more than a million people are
forced to endure the consequences of their so-called government’s rapacious and
egregious desire to annihilate Israel at any cost, is presented as a prison
created by a blockade imposed from without or a cage of madness induced by mythical
enemies across the line and then compared to real acts of genocide, carpet
bombing, or atomic attack. Every young
man killed while shooting rockets into Israel or running through a tunnel with
an explosive belt meant to be ignited upon entry into a Jewish kindergarten or
hospital is called an innocent child or civilian.
Mystifications are discourses or collections of visual evidence
so manipulated, retouched and voiced-over as to confuse their true meaning,
submitted as proof of precisely what they are not, and constructed in a tangle
of emotional pleading to defy rational analysis. Rather than providing a dense language of
encoded mystical events, such as the sacrifice of young martyrs in the glorious
service of God, the news reports from the ministries of misinformation and
journalistic jargon are wilful (or at best inadvertent) mistakes. Men and women who elsewhere, under slightly
different circumstances, can immediately see the difference between truth and
falsity, reality and illusion, as in Syria or Iraq, and thus feel abhorrence at
the sight of barrel bombs exploding in family neighbourhoods or gas attacks in
mosques and hospitals and who rage against ISIS shooting to death long lines of
humiliated resistance fighters or men, women and children being decapitated for
refusing to convert to Islam, lose their bearings when it comes to evaluating
what they see and hear—or think they see and hear—in Israel and Gaza.
Persiflage mocks and rails, transforms ordinary
conversation and discussion into whistles and jabbering, as in double-talk or
double-think: whoever hears this stream of verbiage emanating from the mouths
of official speakers, small children asked to describe their reasons for hating
Israel and the Jews, and ordinary men and women on the street who have no other
access to the news other than the mass-circulation newspapers and the
mainstream television networks, cannot follow the convoluted twists of
reasoning, do not have the critical skills to tease apart real words from
nonsense neologisms, are swept along by the natural empathy for they assume to
be actual scenes of targeted killing of children, breathlessly misunderstand the
way full images are cropped and pictures spliced together. Yet for those intellectuals in the
universities, the literary professions, and the ministries of government who
have all those skills, training and experience to fall into the trap—what can
we call them? How can we ever again
trust anything they ever say or do? This,
after the real dead bodies and disrupted lives are toted up, is the real
tragedy of Gaza today.
[i] Julia Abramson, review of
Catherine Emerson and Maria Scott, eds., Artful Deceptions: Verbal and
Visual Trickery in French Culture/ Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles:
La trumperies dans la culture française (Berne, Switz.: Peter Lang, 2006)
in South Central Review 24:2 (2007)
105-107.
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