Imperial propaganda works by packaging genuine truths to serve empire

Evidence

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, comprador intellectuals were actively sought out by the militant ideologues of the US Empire. Their task was to feign authority, authenticity, and native knowledge by informing the American public of the atrocities taking place in the region of their birth, thereby justifying the imperial designs of the United States as a liberation. Nafisi’s book appeared precisely at a time when President George W. Bush had initiated his planetary imperial project by launching a global War on Terror and grouped Iran, Iraq, and North Korea together as an Axis of Evil. As in so many instances of propaganda and disinformation, Reading Lolita in Tehran is predicated on an element of truth. The Islamic Republic of Iran has an atrocious record of stifling, silencing, and murdering oppositional intellectuals. But the function of the comprador intellectual is less to expose such atrocities than to package them in a manner that best serves the empire they help to sustain. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 374

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that effective disinformation is predicated on an element of truth — propaganda packages, not fabricates — is a genuinely unsettling and durable analytical point.