Secret History: Charley's War - propaganda then and now

I was surprised at the end of the talk when the professor looked across at me from the wings and made a ‘self-flagellation’ gesture.

Welcome to my Secret History of Comics: my new book serialised on Substack. The first section was on Marshal Law: now it’s all about Charley’s War.

If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read the intro to the Secret History here, it’s available for everyone, and so is the intro to Charley’s War.

Every subsequent post has a free preview, but if you want access to my entire rant post, you’ll need to subscribe. Full access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release them every week (plus other perks, check them out), will set you back just £5 per month or £50 per year, and it helps me to continue giving you my best writing. I even have a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it first.

---

Last week I concluded the talk I gave at the University of Liverpool in 2014. Now I want to share with you the reaction to my talk at the time, and then to talk a bit about the insidious nature of propaganda. And then I’m going to quote Caitlin Johnston’s analysis, as she has a great grasp of the topic.

The lecture hall was full and the talk went down well. Many of the audience had grown up reading Charley’s War, so this was an excellent example of how a subversive comic strip could spread its message far beyond the pages of Battle comic. No wonder the State sought to stop it reaching a wider audience.

My talk was introduced by an Australian history professor. Before it, we had a conversation about the Dardanelles campaign. As Docherty and Macgregor make clear in their book Prolonging the Agony, the disastrous campaign was always designed to fail. It had to be  badly executed because the State could not risk it succeeding. Why? Because Czarist Russia had been secretly promised Constantinople as was revealed by the Bolsheviks when they took power. Britain could not let that happen, but it had to pretend otherwise to its autocratic ally, so it just went through the motions of the invasion with resulting deaths of thousands of soldiers, many Australians and New Zealanders. I was surprised and pleased when the professor told me she was already aware of this explanation. So people know of the British State’s perfidy, its act of mass murder in the Gallipoli campaign, although nowhere near enough.

Consequently, I was surprised, at the end of the talk, when the professor looked across at me from the wings and made a ‘self-flagellation’ gesture. Presumably she was suggesting that I was whipping myself and therefore ‘whipping my country’ for its terrible crimes. In a sense that was true, but the implication would seem to be that it is unpatriotic to do so. On this, I can’t agree – like so many others, it’s not a hatred of country that makes me write anti-war stories. It’s a hatred of the State’s ruling elite who – then and now – were responsible for or covered up the deaths of millions, and honoured mass-murderers. Helping to bring that to light is true patriotism.

But if that is the view of a distinguished history professor, what hope do we have of history in our classrooms ever telling the real truth? So today, Charley – and all those excellent films mentioned in my lecture – are more important than ever. 

HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS TODAY.

I’ve talked to friends who are history and Great War buffs and they were completely unaware – and even indifferent – of how their perception of World War One was manipulated by the State during the centenary years. They hadn’t noticed how any movie, TV series or documentary that is anti-war had been carefully removed from their tv screens. And that most new and available WW1 books were pro-war, portrayed as a conflict of British good versus German evil. When I presented them with the facts, I could see them struggling to believe me, because they had been so heavily propagandized.

The way in which we have been brainwashed to believe what the State want us to believe had been brilliantly documented by Caitlin Johnstone. She writes about today’s wars, but what she has to say applies equally to the Great War.

Here are some excerpts from her analysis of how propaganda works today – on us.

Caitlin Johnstone May 28

Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won't ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.

That's propaganda. It's propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It's not something solid that you can point to easily because it's comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people's perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It's something that doesn't stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.

Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,

1. The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.

2. The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.

3. The status quo is working basically fine.

4. Democracy is real and voting is effective.

5. This is the only way things can be.

6. Our government might have its problems, but it's basically good.

7. You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.

8. You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.

9. If you think the system is dysfunctional, you're the dysfunctional one.

10. Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.

11. Things might get better after the next election cycle.

12. Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.

By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we'll be told later on. Lies like "Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped," or "People are struggling financially right now, but it's just because times are hard and it can't be helped."

So that's what we're up against. There's a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire's propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we're swimming in it constantly, so we don't see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.

Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you've been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It's a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they're ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.

Next week: the conspiracy of silence