Thread by @caitoz

Tankie, Conspiracy Theorist, And Other Pejorative Tools Of Narrative Control

"Pay attention to the way imperial narrative managers try to use smears and pejoratives to file away anti-imperialists into a 'don't listen to the things this person says' box"
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/tankie-consp…

Bloomberg pundit @noahpinion had a very revealing interaction on Twitter the other day that I've been meaning to write about ever since.

It's been obvious for ages that pejoratives like "tankie" are being used by imperialists to control the narrative in a way that benefits ruling power structures, but it's not often you'll have a mainstream narrative manager come right out and admit that that's what they're doing.

Smith's admission that he trains his audience to bleat the word "tankie" at any leftist who is "obsessed" with a tiny trivial matter like US foreign policy to control the dominant foreign policy narrative is born out by the rest of his Twitter activity:
twitter.com/search?q=from%…

I wrote against anti-imperialism for years without ever being called a "tankie", but now it comes up on a near-daily basis. I haven't changed the basics of my beliefs or my approach to anti-imperialism, but the widespread use of that pejorative has definitely changed recently.

What these pejoratives accomplish is the ability to inoculate the mainstream herd from the wrongthink of anyone to whom that label has been applied. That way they never have to engage the argument or the evidence that gets laid out contradicting the official imperial line

This is a major part of an imperial narrative manager's job these days: smearing anti-imperialists and critical thinkers as untrustworthy.

The debate is never to be engaged and counter-arguments are never to be made; why engage in a debate you will probably lose when you can simply explain to everyone why nobody should listen to the other side?

A perfect example of this would be the recent smear piece the Australian Strategic Policy Institute put out on @TheGrayzoneNews with the title "Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: The CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms".
aspi.org.au/report/strange…

As explained in a thread by Grayzone's Aaron Maté, the government-funded and arms industry-funded think tank ASPI makes no effort in its report to dispute or debunk any of the reporting that The Grayzone has been putting out on China or on anything else.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1378142326204293124

As anyone who has been active in anti-imperialist online discourse knows, this is an extremely common tactic which narrative managers and their indoctrinated herd use to dismiss questions, criticisms and evidence which is inconvenient to the US-centralized imperial war machine.

Try countering their claims solid link, and they'll dismiss you with a "Ha ha, THAT outlet? That outlet is propaganda!" Because it didn't come from an outlet which never fails to support US military agendas like The New York Times.
fair.org/home/nyt-lamen…

But it's a ridiculous tactic if you think about it. All they're really saying is "You can't use that anti-imperialist outlet to substantiate your anti-imperialist position! You can only use the pro-US outlets which have helped deceive westerners into backing every US war!"

It's also logically fallacious; attacking the source instead of the argument is what people do when they can't attack the argument.
consortiumnews.com/2019/12/17/att…

Citing an empire-targeted government sharing an anti-imperialist article as evidence that that government is tied to that outlet in some way is an equally absurd argument; obviously governments are going to cite evidence and arguments which favor them,

Pay attention to the way imperial narrative managers try to use smears and pejoratives to file away anti-imperialists into a "don't listen to the things this person says" box, and help others pay attention to it too.