Nobody Sets Out To Become A War Propagandist

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(Headline abbreviated, original headline: Nobody Sets Out To Become A War Propagandist. It Just Sort Of Happens)

Senior Huffington Post UK editor Chris York has published what is by my count his twelfth smear piece against a small group of academics and independent journalists who've expressed skepticism of establishment Syria narratives.

York's obsessive deluge of hit pieces revolve around British academics Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson, as well as independent journalist Vanessa Beeley. Every word in this sentence hyperlinks to a different article smearing them.

York's twelfth such hit piece is much like the preceding eleven: it omits fundamentally crucial facts, it hides the shady nature of its sourcing, it makes outright false claims, and will only be believed by individuals who either don't research this subject very deeply or whose paychecks depend on their not thinking about it too hard. But, more importantly, it's his twelfth such hit piece.

A dozen smear articles. A dozen. Not against politicians. Not against powerful government leaders or massive celebrities. York's smears focus on two professors with some 22,000 Twitter followers between them both, and Beeley, whom York himself refers to as an "obscure blogger" while authoring smear piece after smear piece after smear piece about her.

The 'useful idiots': How these British academics helped Russia deny war crimes at the UN https://t.co/UGvquum1nm

— Chris York (@ChrisDYork) January 29, 2020

Now Beeley, Hayward and Robinson all do great work asking the important questions that no one else is asking about the many, many glaring plot holes in the narratives we're being fed about what's happening in Syria by the western political/media class. I am a fan. But only a relatively tiny number of people have ever heard of them. I don't want to minimize the importance of what they do, but they are generally unheard of outside of small esoteric internet circles which focus on deep dives into questionable government narratives about Syria.

We can take it as a given, then, that Huffington Post UK's goal with these relentless smear pieces is not to generate clicks or organic virality. No normal person is scrolling through their social media feed and going "Oh I do hope there's some fresh gossip about Piers Robinson today!"

Nor is the goal to educate the public with important pertinent information. Even if York's hit pieces contained lots of accurate information (and they don't), you wouldn't need twelve articles to say "Hey the ideas these people are sharing are harmful in the following ways." You could say it once and move on to reporting on the many, many, many important stories that are unfolding around the world as we speak. The goal is not to inform.

So what is the goal?

The goal is narrative management.

Chris York pestered me for months by DMs, and I even agreed to meet him, as he 'wanted to understand' why people have critical questions about the White Helmets; then he just smears us all, repeatedly.
This thread documents a dozen of his smear pieces:https://t.co/yldwNlcvbZ

— Tim Hayward (@Tim_Hayward_) January 30, 2020

If you look through York's smear jobs, you'll notice many of them aren't even actually addressed to the public. The ones about Robinson and Hayward are really addressed to the academic institutions which employ them, designed to pressure them into ceasing to do so (and proclaiming victory when that campaign is perceived to have succeeded). This smear piece here was clearly designed to help generate pressure for the Leeds Museum to cancel an event where all three of York's targets were scheduled to speak, and this one celebrates the Leeds City Council cancelling the event.

If you look at who's sharing York's latest smear piece on Twitter, you'll notice that a weirdly large percentage of them are blue-checkmarked accounts which pour a lot of time and energy into managing the dominant narrative about Syria. I don't know what chat groups or private message boards this article appeared in, but it generated a lot of social media firepower very quickly.

The purpose of these smear pieces is not to generate clicks, and it is not to inform the public. It's to manipulate public thought. It's to deplatform voices which are skeptical of what we're being told to believe about a nation long targeted by the western empire for regime change, it's to provide a resource that other narrative managers can circulate and cite in their own spin jobs, and it's to inoculate the mainstream herd from any potential outbreak of wrongthink.

Nobody sets out to become a propagandist. No eight year-old kid is sitting around dreaming of one day selling her integrity to help the western empire manufacture consent for the deployment of more highly profitable military equipment to yet another resource-rich geostrategic region.

It just kind of happens. You go to journalism school, you get a job, if you're clever you learn that there's some coverage which gets rewarded and some which gets you marginalized, and before you know it you're sitting at your desk typing up your twelfth smear piece about some small time teachers and bloggers and wondering what the hell happened to your life.