CHESS ON THE FARM

CHESS ON THE FARM

In modern times, propaganda is far different and much more sophisticated than it used to be. Far from the days of the patriotic recruitment poster or the poster that demonizes a national enemy, nowadays, propaganda is primarily cold, calculated, and essentially boils down to targeted advertising with a political twist. According to Jaques Ellul, author of Propaganda: The Formation Of Men’s Attitudes, “Propaganda must be total.”  Any propaganda which is to have any use needs to be entirely pervasive within the lives of the target audience. For example, the southern socialite group The Daughters of the Confederacy rewrote civil war history in the south by making history textbooks for primary and secondary schools that contained messages such as the civil war was fought over states rights. The effect of this combined with underfunded school districts in the south is the shocking number of Americans who think the civil war wasn’t fought over slavery. They have been told something which isn't true, and information proving the contrary is widely and openly available, but they refuse to acknowledge it because they can't reconcile it with their current beliefs. An example of something a little more impactful on recent cultural memory - the 2016 election. 

Now, when someone is writing about propaganda, it has become almost a clichè to mention the election. But it’s like that for a reason. Though coverage of every election is almost entirely propaganda based, the circumstances surrounding this one were extraordinary to say the least. Facebook's role in the outcome has been thoroughly explored, however they have yet to face any consequences for encouraging allowing Cambridge Analytica (a company which used AIs, bot networks, personality data and profiling) to target ads at Facebook's consumer base on a never before seen scale. Analysts say their micro-targeted political ads held outsized sway on the election. Beyond Cambridge Analytica, the Russian Internet Research Agency, or Glavset was responsible for the Foreign Interference in the election. They used trolling and bot twitter networks of fake accounts to spread false information or control the trending page via artificially inflating the number of tweets regarding a given topic. 

Just so nobody accuses me of picking on the Russians, the American government does exactly this sort of thing as well. After the recent coup in Bolivia which ousted the popular Socialist president Evo Morales, the CIA was accused of orchestrating the coup. The hashtag “#BoliviaNoHayGolpe” (spanish for “No Coup In Bolivia”) was soon trending, but if you go into the tag, the accounts using it were typically created just days after the coup and spoke perfect English, but broken at best Spanish. They had no banners, no profile pictures, and stereotypical hispanic names followed by a series of seemingly meaningless random numbers. Additionally their locations were mostly in Virginia. In case you don’t know, the headquarters of the CIA is at Langley, Virginia. I’m not saying there is a proven link between the coup, I’m not an intelligence agent, I have no right to make such claims as though I were an expert, however, all signs I have seen point to at least a base level of CIA involvement, but knowing their past history with coups, such as the Chilean 1964 Coup d’Etat that installed Augusto Pinochet into the presidency (read: dictatorship) where their involvement went much further, I doubt they were only in on it at a base level.

Now, why am I mentioning this? If you watch most mainstream news sources, such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX, or ABC, you most likely heard that Jeanine Añes was the liberator of Bolivia, if you heard about the event at all. The US Government used not only Twitter bots to falsify the story against the coup on social media, but it's official stance became BoliviaNoHayGolpe. The media just ran with that as an assumption. See, to me, I would consider this a form of censorship, however indirect it may seem. The Government forced the media to report on the liberation from the “evil dictator” Morales - a story which us Americans were all too eager to eat up - and the only people who know the truth are those who actively looked for the facts. If you asked the average American if there was a coup in Bolivia recently, few would even know what you were talking about, and even fewer would give you an honest (or at least true) answer. 

The Democratic Party has run on a split platform of Progressivism, and Centrism for years. A good analogy for the Centrist way of politics (post - Obama’s first midterm election) is a Professional chess player and a pig democratically elected to play in a tournament together. The pig is making nonsensical moves, screaming erratically and doing things clearly against the spirit of the game, but not technically against the rules. Sometimes the pig just sits there scratching its butt not even interacting with the board. Meanwhile the pro waves the rule book around at the pig, begging him to play properly. “Sit up straight! Move the pawn! No, don’t eat my queen!” The centrist sees the pig grazing and says, “Hey, listen we can compromise! If you promise not to bite my hand, I will feed you an apple, and we can get back to playing, how ‘bout that?” And when the pig bites his hand again, he acts shocked! Shocked! “Oh how could he? The pig promised not to do that! I’m appalled the american voter would elect such an impolite chess player! Still, such is democracy, that I was elected to play, so play I must. Woe is me…”

The Progressive, however, sees how stupid it is to play chess with a pig. He laughs and says “Ha ha silly centrist! Who would play chess with a pig? He can’t understand such a complex game no matter how many times you read him the rules, shame him for not fulfilling his constitutional duty to the people who elected him by playing chess, there’s no point in continuing to try and play with him!” so he sets up his own board and plays with a horse instead. 

The democratic party Centrist wing is what other countries (Britain and France especially) would (and do) call conservative, and rightly so. When you boil the posturing away, all that is left to differentiate them from establishment Republicans is the corporations they take money from. But we don’t like to acknowledge how this creates an unfair advantage for candidates willing to take donations from companies, interest groups (which are primarily funded by the same companies), or people (who run the companies, and stand to make money from the election and success of their chosen candidates). Because if you do, then a sizable portion of the elected American government is made of corporate shills and the very thought that the “democracy” we are taught from birth is the “Greatest” and “truest” democracy in the world, doesn’t look so democratic now does it?

This has however, become a topic of discussion amongst the Progressive portion of the Democratic party, and interestingly enough, the alt-Right. Now, please please please do not take the previous statement to mean that I buy into horseshoe theory, quite the opposite. Just because two groups share similar ideas, doesn’t mean that they’re similar. Progressives want corporate money out of politics because they believe election finance reform can fix the American system, and by extension the country. The alt-Right wants corporate money out of politics because (((Corporations))) are donating to (((Politicians))). In case you’re not up on your neo-Nazi symbology, and are too lazy to read the wikipedia article I just linked, the triple parentheses around a name or a group name is used by the alt-Right and neo-Nazis on forums such as 4chan’s /pol/ to mean Jews. This type of subtextual in joke or euphemism is known as a dog whistle - sorry for the tangent, but I may be covering dog whistles in the future. The progressive wing of the Democratic party recognizes the unfairness of our current political system - some even recognize the inherent inequity in our economic system as well, like AOC and Bernie Sanders. But they still play chess with the horse. They recognize the absurdity of playing against an opponent who will never follow the same rules as them, or play the game in a fair and balanced way, or even has the same goals as them, but they still play the game! The horse and the pig aren’t trying to win at chess. Winning is immaterial to them - they don’t care about the democratic process that sent them to play chess with the pros, the pig just wants to eat something. When a player campaigns on peaceful democratic change within the ruleset which got a pig and a horse sent to a chess tournament, all they’re really doing is saying “Lets get pieces made from apples and carrots so the pig and horse might play with us!” when the solution is really stop sending pigs to chess tournaments! If we need to call animal control to physically drag the pigs and horses to their farms, then we should. 

One question the American voter asks every year is - Do I really care if a professional or a pig gets sent to the tournament? And many of them don’t care so they just accept whatever pig horse or professional is decided upon. They don't care who wins. So they either don’t vote or they vote for whichever pig squealed loud enough, etc., and the pigs keep winning tournaments. France, Chile, Brazil and other countries who never even let the pigs run just stare at us because we wouldn’t dare call animal control but the pig just ate the board and is wrecking the chess hall. Why should we waste time and energy trying to figure out which pig is the best? They all do the same things anyway. What reason does the american voter have to care when no matter how they vote, the outcome is the same. This alienation from the meaning of the most democratic form of labor, one’s vote, is the driving factor behind the inherent and systemic voter apathy in America. 

This leads me into my print. In Weimar Germany, voter apathy was much less of an issue. Their first election had an 80% turnout rating. In 1919 they let women vote, and the minimum age was 25. They had three main political parties: the center-left party, or the SPD, which advocated for a lot of the same stuff that the progressive democrats want today, like social and economic equality, clean democracy, education for all, etc., the further right GNVP, and the Catholic Center party. In later elections certain parties would gain prominence over the SPD and the further left KPD.  Times were different back then, but every political party had their own propaganda, just like they do now. The SPD propaganda promised they would strike a balance between the Nazis and the Communists, similar to the Centrists of today, only with neo-Nazis and social progressives (not that today's social progressives are communists, see the above example of campaign finance reform). Maybe things aren't so different after all… Anyway, they used specific symbology to communicate complex ideas in simple ways - the main goal of political propaganda. One of their symbols was the Three arrows. Though the sign has come to mean resistance to fascism, at the point of its conception, that was not the only things its supporters intended to resist. The three arrows stood for fascism, communism and monarchy. Their goal was to play chess with the horse instead of the pig. And play chess they did. But the pig won, and killed 11 million degenerate chickens as a result. Lesson being: don’t play chess with pigs, call animal control instead. But in all seriousness, the way I designed my print was I basically palette-swapped this propaganda poster  but replaced the Communist, Nazi, and Monarchy symbols with the three main enemies of the socially liberal parties of the US, Britain (I would have done Tory buy it seemed like the tree would be unclear, so the BNP will have to do), and France. I chose them because they are usually cited as the world's most prosperous (i.e. Bourgeois) countries. This is because there isn’t a major communist current which threatens to drag the pigs and horses from the chess matches, so there’s not really a well voiced opposition to true communism within the Democratic party.