Piers Robinson on Engineered Catastrophes, Propaganda, Academic Unfreedom, and More

Piers Robinson of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies has noticed that propagandists don’t like it when scholars study and analyze their propaganda. His latest ruminations on “The Perils of Studying Propaganda” begins with the observation:“Acknowledging that powerful actors pour huge resources into managing the ‘information environment’, in order to manipulate perceptions, attitudes and behaviours, tends to play havoc with assumptions underpinning much of liberal political science.” The propaganda-saturated COVID era, he argues, made it even more obvious that such is indeed the case. But even absent COVID, people who annoy the biggest propagandists, from Julian Assange (thorn in the side of the US empire) to Prof. David Miller (who had the temerity to notice the Zionist role in promoting Islamophobia) have been known to experience severe pushback. So…does academic freedom protect the rights of scholars to study and critique Establishment propaganda? Piers Robinson is the right man to try to answer that question.Excerpt from the interview:Kevin Barrett: Okay, well, you know, regarding the biosecurity regime that is coming into place, there's sort of, you know, two different ways of looking at that and of looking at the COVID crisis. And I guess it depends sort of, you know, whether you analyze it as a globalist conspiracy in which people who are pushing for a one world order are using this medical pretext to establish international institutions that will override the sovereignty of nation states as a step towards world government that many fear will be totalitarian. That seems to be the majority view among the COVID dissidents.The other view, and I actually lean towards it more regarding COVID, is that the whole COVID crisis was the product not so much of globalists who are trying to give power to the WHO to erode national sovereignties, but rather, I believe it was a neoconservative American military biological attack on China and Iran. It was designed to slow China's economic growth or reduce the growth differential between the U.S. and the West versus China. And, of course, also to hit Iran.And it did mysteriously jump from Wuhan, where it hit at exactly the worst possible place and time for China. It was just spreading big time in advance of the Chinese New Year, when virtually the entire nation of China is crossing through Wuhan, the national transportation hub. And if it hadn't been for their very quick reaction, it probably would have hit initially much harder in China.And then, where did it jump to? Of all places, Qom, Iran, where there are no Chinese people. And it knocked out a whole bunch of high-level Iranian mullahs. So, given that and lots of other things, including proven foreknowledge by the Defense Intelligence Agency……So I think it's the neocons and the militarists who are the problem. I know that's a minority take among the COVID skeptics. What do you think?Piers Robinson: No, I'm completely with you on keeping an open mind as to exactly where the power axes lie with COVID-19. And I'm actually, interestingly enough, writing a piece at the moment with Vanessa Beely on this issue.Essentially the Western military industrial complex and its penetration into global organizations, is part of a projection of power As you know I'm pretty open-minded—I think where I sit on this is I try to take a kind of strictly sociological empirical view that until we've got the power network analyses done we need to be relatively open-minded and not sign up to one particular theory or thesis about exactly what's going on.But I am inclined at the moment with everything I'm looking at with COVID-19 to think that this seems to be quite strongly rooted in the West. And I think when you locate that in terms of what we know about the Western Empire, distributions of power, both economic and military, changing across the international system, it starts to make, I think, a little bit more sense to think of COVID in those terms.I'm not ruling out any of the possibilities at the moment. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com