John Pilger is peddling a subtle theory of ideological enslavement. It kicks off with the question and answer:
What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state.
From this it is sure to follow that modern propaganda is something else, and what that turns out to be is based upon the 'submissive void' of the contemporary public - just like in Nazi Germany. Today's freedom to broadcast and imbibe opinion in and from every direction is merely 'digital slavery'; out of the profundity of the Pilgerian void comes this wonderful observation:
It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
Oh, and there's also - thrown in as a quote from Norman Pollack - 'liberal fascism', and everybody bad from the CIA to Ben Affleck. Pilger has 'never known a time when dissenting voices in the visual arts are so few and silent'. He needs to elect himself a new public.
Except for the fact that he was a serious thinker and Pilger isn't, this is a low-grade re-run of Herbert Marcuse's repressive tolerance. Continuing to spout his stuff at will, and even have people read it and (some of them) think it worth something, Pilger simply erases the difference between the kind of polity that would lock him up and/or kill him and the kind that doesn't. (Via @portraitinflesh.)
