There is also a more ideologically oriented component of the left composed mostly of Trotskyists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, "libertarian socialists" and others who will not figure in this discussion given their small numbers and intense sectarian immersion. What they all have in common is an obsessional anti-communism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of "Stalinists" whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties. In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals... It wasn't the leftists or rightists who waged a war against Yugoslavia, with its repeated bombings of civilian populations and its military assistance to ex-Nazi Croatian and Muslim Bosnian separatists. It was that paragon of centrism Bill Clinton and all the centrists and moderate liberals who stood shoulder to shoulder with him and with NATO and the CIA (along with a gaggle of those anarchists and Trotskists I mentioned earlier who convinced themselves that the destruction of the Yugoslavian social democracy was a blow against Stalinist communism).
As is still the case, these anti-Leninist ideological factions within the left aren't the ones facilitating the war efforts against communist countries, but they are fulfilling an important role in the sabotage of revolutionary energy within the U.S. This is the role of ideologically policing the class struggle so that it doesn't gain an accurate understanding of geopolitics, and therefore doesn't oppose the CIA regime-change narratives designed to prevent proletarian revolution. If people think China is an equivalent to the Third Reich, they won't join with the Chinese masses in embracing the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism. The same consequences come from the proliferation of the fabricated reports about the DPRK, or the demagogic media narratives that paint Cuba as undemocratic. As well as the endlessly recycled Cold War-era myths about Stalin and Mao having "killed millions."
All of these CIA lies are proliferated by rightists, liberals, and anti-Leninist leftists alike, and all of them serve the same goal: to keep the proletariat powerless and demobilized while the capitalist class continues to loot and economically deprive the population. Our hyper-militaristic, neoliberal dystopia is preserved through propagating the belief that the examples of existing socialism are tyrannical, and that the system we live under therefore isn't worth replacing because it might simply lead to something even worse. As the Marxist writer Andre Vltchek has observed, nihilism is the essence of this worldview:
All this is not just propaganda anymore; it is the true art of indoctrination. It hardly ever misses its target. And even if it fails to convince some strong individuals completely, it always leaves a mark on the psyche of even those who are struggling to be different and 'independent.'... The most powerful and repulsive weapon, so far, has been constant injections of lies, contradictions, and nihilism. Just look at Hong Kong! Nihilism is deadly. It destroys enthusiasm, and it robs countries of confidence and courage. And that is precisely what the West is trying to achieve: to derail progressive socialist countries from marching forward and prevent nations oppressed by neo-colonialism from dreaming, hoping, resisting.
The arbiters of today's anti-communist propaganda campaign want to snuff out the revolution before it even begins, to preemptively fill the people's heads with emotionally charged outrage stories about communist countries so that they'll refuse to join up with the revolutionary socialists.
The question is, will this campaign succeed?
Tightening the domestic grip of the imperialist thought police
In the face of capitalist collapse and rising class struggle, the bourgeois propagandists have sought to stoke zeal among the established anti-communist ideological groups (the reactionaries, the liberals, the anti-Leninist leftists) while inculcating the less ideologically inclined individuals with a uniform set of false beliefs about socialist countries ("China is committing genocide," "north Korea is a human rights abuser," etc). It's an operation to make the U.S. population police itself at a time when our ruling class seeks to impose unprecedented austerity and state control.
The CIA is very conscious of what it's doing with this tactic. As The Art of War says, "All warfare is based on deception," and the U.S. national-security state's goal for the coming years and decades is to wage an ever-intensifying internal class war. This will entail importing the approaches towards propaganda and disinformation that the CIA has utilized in imperialist interventions abroad, similarly to how Israeli-style repressive tactics are being normalized among U.S. police forces or to how Pinochet-style extrajudicial imprisonments have been normalized within the War on Terror. In every sense, U.S. imperialism's means for exerting control around the globe are in the process of being brought home.
In 2016, the U.S. Army War College as much as expressed this in a report, stating that the growing unemployment and natural disasters of the next few decades will result in "class conflict" within the U.S. that must be crushed through domestic military occupations. According to the war college's report, these invasions of the country's urban areas will entail not just mass surveillance of the occupied population, heavy censorship potentially to the point where the internet in the occupied zones gets shut off, and warfare tactics that parallel Israel's approaches towards suppressing Palestinian uprisings, but a careful narrative-management campaign. As the report says:
Presenting compelling narratives can enhance legitimacy and authority in the eyes of many stakeholders (such as the urban population). Understanding the utility and power of digital media, therefore, allows for enormous reach and breadth that can indirectly alter the battlefield. The user-friendliness of mass media and mobile technology allows adversaries to manipulate and garner favorable public opinion and recruit support. For these reasons and more, civilian and military leaders cannot afford to ignore the requirement for compelling narratives... In the final analysis, the battle of narratives and the contradictions of security are likely to be at the forefront, especially as the most likely contingencies will be humanitarian or stabilization operations. Moreover, such operations could even take place within the continental United States, as demonstrated by the Los Angeles riots and the responses to Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. Presenting a positive image of the military to the American public is indispensable for continued support.
Such is the task that the capitalist state needs to take on: maximize the exposure that the U.S. population has to the propaganda narratives of the imperialist war machine, and make these narratives as emotionally manipulative as possible. Since the 2013 lifting of a law that made it (officially) illegal for the CIA to covertly target American citizens with propaganda, this need for a ubiquitous mind-influencing network within our society has been fulfilled. There's no longer even the semblance of a check on the internal powers of the U.S. government's propaganda organs. As journalist Whitney Webb has observed about the consequences of this propaganda free-up:
Since 2013, newsrooms across the country, of both the mainstream and "alternative" variety, have been notably skewed towards the official government narrative, with few outside a handful of independently-funded media outlets bothering to question those narratives' veracity. While this has long been a reality for the Western media (see John Pilger's 2011 documentary "The War You Don't See"), the use of government-approved narratives and sources from government-funded groups have become much more overt than in years past... state-crafted information originally intended for a foreign audience is now being used domestically. [Filmmaker Robbie Martin] noted that this has become particularly common at some "pseudo-alternative" media organizations--i.e., formerly independent media outlets that now enjoy corporate funding. Among these, Martin made the case that VICE News stands out.
And right on schedule with the development of Washington's geopolitical rivalries, in recent years VICE has been amplifying disinformation about the DPRK. Disinformation that perfectly fits the vein of strategic deceptive tactics in wartime; convincing the population that the leader of a socialist workers' state has died is a good way to try to demoralize and confuse the members of the revolutionary socialist movement. I won't be surprised if the CIA puts out an equivalent story when the U.S. is undergoing the internal class revolt that the war college predicts.
These disinformation campaigns of the country's near-future are going to be as calculated and strategically targeted as the CIA's operations to elect pro-U.S. Latin American candidates through fabricated media stories, or the foreign U.S. propaganda network's efforts to confuse Asia's population through alarming made-up news reports during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. They seek to sabotage the fighters in the class war, making us unable to garner sufficient support for the revolutionary socialist cause or operate based on an objective picture of our conditions.
The extreme censorship measures and online shutdowns outlined in the war college's report are some parts of this. Another part is the micro-targeting approach of the country's cybersecurity system, which keeps growing more sophisticated as AI and quantum computing get perfected. As journalist Raul Diego wrote earlier this month, the U.S. national-security state aims to establish an all-encompassing online apparatus where people's thoughts can be steered away from disfavored opinions:
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