A Memorable Event from my Childhood

In 1948, at the age of 6, I started school in Soviet controlled Hungary, where my family had lived for generations.  Every morning our teacher showed us propaganda movies featuring the personality cult of our ‘much beloved’ Hungarian Communist Party dictator, Mátyás Rákosi.  After a few days of these movies I came home and enthusiastically told my parents how lucky we were to have Mr. Rákosi as our leader.  Dad hesitated instead of responding. Mom, sitting next to him, looked unnerved by my question. Finally, Dad agreed that yes, we were lucky.  But I had a vague sense of unease, as his slow praise seemed less than sincere.   

Ten years later, after our family had escaped from Hungary and emigrated to Canada, I had a flashback to those propaganda movies and that conversation, and asked my father about it.  He explained that under the communist system schools instructed pupils to report to their teachers anyone – even parents – who said anything contrary to what the school taught about the government.  If my father had told me his real opinion and I had told my teacher, within days he and my mother would have disappeared for “re-education”, and I would have been given to a loyal communist family to bring up as a good communist.  Ever since then I have been sensitive to governments’ practices of thought control through emotional manipulation.

When a totalitarian government is so obsessed with thought control that parents have to lie to their children for self-preservation something is seriously wrong.  The government fears the people it rules, and for good reason. It is undemocratic, unpopular, and needs thought control (and the military) to stay in power. 

The Growing Threat to Democracy

My family and I have had a good life in Canada for more than seven decades. Fortunately, Canada, like the USA, is a constitutional democracy. Canada has constitutional protection of freedom of expression, similar to the USA’s constitutional protection of freedom of speech. But now I have concerns, for my children and grandchildren, about the quality and durability of our democracy.

My déjà vu about communist Hungary is triggered by the increasing government authoritarianism in Western countries.  That is evident, among other places, in government-imposed censorship of social media: that is the first step towards thought control. Governments in democracies are using a new, self-serving vocabulary to justify censorship.  They call it ‘protecting the public from misinformation, disinformation and malinformation’. 

Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, in an article in Discourse titled  Disinformation Is the Word I Use When I Want You To Shut Up, wrote that US elites are using the threat of “disinformation” to stifle debate and curtail freedom.

“The Biden White House is on record demanding that social media be held “accountable.” Accountable to whom, you ask—and for what? Well, accountable to them, naturally, for the spreading of disinformation. In 2022, Biden appointed Nina Jankowicz to lead an ambitious new Disinformation Governance Board that aimed to hold all of us accountable.”

Similarly, environmental journalist Michael Shellenberger has been exposing, for years, what he calls “The Censorship Industrial Complex”, particularly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter.  Musk showed selected journalists, including Shellenberger, Twitter’s files describing its active censorship of its users, under pressure from numerous government agencies.  Shellenberger, together with other journalists, testified in March, 2023 before a U.S. Congressional committee about US government support for domestic censorship and disinformation campaigns, 2016-2022.  He detailed how the FBI, the White House, and other government agencies have successfully pressured social media to block, hide or otherwise censor proponents of views with which the government disagreed. 

This governmental pressure was used to turn the Internet, originally a facilitator of democratic openness, into an invisible instrument of government’s social control.  In his September 2023 testimony Shellenberger revealed that emails he saw showed White House staff demanding that Facebook executives censor “often-true” information about COVID-19 vaccine side effects, using “explicit or implicit financial threats ….”.  While none of this would have surprised me if it had occurred in a communist dictatorship, I did not expect it in a democracy.  This has made me more concerned that such censorship is a new, and accelerating trend in Western democracies. 

I learned from my childhood lesson under communism to be skeptical about information from any government.  More recently, I am also wary of some of the media, uncritically reporting what Western government officials want reported, favourably. 

Uncritical Acceptance of the False and the Unverifiable

Democracy depends on a free, vigilant and only moderately politically partisan media.  Journalists are usually generalists, with a lay person’s understanding of complex scientific and economic issues, and they are often spread thin, covering numerous stories on short time limits. This increases the risk of being taken in by shocking stories, especially when fake photos and videos can be created with AI.

A recent example of the media being conned by a hoax was the widespread story from Hamas that Israeli jets had bombed the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, killing 500 civilians. The New York Times, the BBC and most other media immediately published this claim without any fact checking.  But I was skeptical. Why would it make sense for the Israeli military to do this?  It would have been unnecessary and would immediately turn the world against Israel.    

A few days later the truth came out.  Israel did not do it.  Nothing hit the hospital, just its parking lot. 500 people weren’t killed, and the cause of the explosion in the parking lot was a misfired rocket, fired by another Palestinian jihadist group, intended to hit Israel.  Having been lied to so dramatically and successfully, this should have made the media cautious about taking as true any subsequent casualty figures from Hamas. Yet they are still making the same mistake.

Almost daily I see accounts that 12,000 (and more) Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel, about half of them children.  Yet we don’t see any numbers for any Hamas soldiers being killed.  So the Hamas soldier casualties have become civilian casualties just by hiding among them and wearing civilian clothing.  And these civilian casualty numbers, from the very same source as the false 500 killed at the Al Ahli hospital, are still treated as true.  No one calls them “unverified casualty claims made by Hamas”.  Yet Hamas is the oppressive dictatorship in Gaza, financed and supported by Iran.    

What Can We Do About Emotional Manipulation?

Most of what we may read or see on TV and the internet as “news” is presented to be dramatic and frightening, to get your attention and keep it there.  The stories are intended to push our fearful or angry emotional buttons.  This is manipulative.  I resist having my emotional buttons being pushed. I don’t want to become anyone’s hand puppet.

However, we can’t always disbelieve everything.  Nihilism doesn’t work either.  All we can do is be cautious, and try to remember the origin of the claim and the likelihood that it has been verified.  Thus, when the New York Times tell us that Hamas’ civilian casualty reports have usually been reliable in the past I would ask: how can it know that without counting bodies?

The Gaza Health Ministry, which provides these statistics, is part of Hamas, which has run the territory since 2007 without any elections.  In the past, the UN, WHO and Human Rights Watch had considered the ministry’s numbers reliable, although it is not clear whether they will do so in future. Note that the ministry’s casualty figures neither distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters nor provide the cause of death.  Thus all deaths, whether from Israeli attacks or errant Palestinian rocket strikes are attributed to “Israeli aggression”.

For journalists to report unverifiable casualty claims as reliable, when Hamas’ incentive is to overstate civilian casualties, just invites scepticism.  I would only dispense with that scepticism if such high profile journalists as the New York Times clearly stated, whenever reporting Gazan casualty numbers, that the numbers were from Hamas, and that the Times had no way of verifying them. But that was not the Al Ahli story, and has not yet become common practise.

Conclusion

The Berlin Wall has gone, as has the Soviet Union, both manifestations of the old style of dictatorships. But the impulse to dictatorship remains part of the human condition., so new styles of dictatorship will always arise, with new types of thought control.

A free life requires freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The crude communist propaganda used in my childhood was intended to deny these freedoms.  But their methods were far less sophisticated than today’s stories in our mainstream and social media.  Today, the danger of thought control is much greater because it is more subtle and better hidden.

Governments no longer need to make their critics disappear physically.  All they need to do is make their critics’ alleged “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation” disappear through censorship.  Then these governments can flood their citizenry with their own “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation”.  Be skeptical of statements by governments and their agencies.  If their story is too good to be true, or, more likely, too bad to be true, it probably isn’t true.