Propaganda

Noam Chomsky has been celebrated as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century His popularity cannot be doubted. Books and lectures are bought and attended in the thousands and he has a strong influence amongst the left and anarchists. But mere anti-capitalism is not enough as it encourages reformism.

Chomsky's analysis of capitalist society broadly hits the mark and socialists could find little to disagree with generally. However, the leftist and anarchist supporters who look to Chomsky for inspiration miss the wider point. While Chomsky blames capitalism for poverty, human rights abuse, limited democracy and so on, his ranks of supporters support anarchist sects and fruitless reformist campaigns banging the capitalist table with a begging bowl, waiting for some new "right" like a dog barking for a crumb from his master's plate.

Channel 4’s sponsorship of right-wing propaganda masquerading as objective journalism hit a new low in November last year. The storm surrounding the broadcast of the widely condemned Great Global Warming Swindle had barely settled when the channel issued a new swindle, Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story, made by the same people. The previous programme was a propaganda offensive on behalf of those who deny (and profit from) climate change. This new programme aimed to achieve a similar victory (for the rich) on the economic front.

That the programme was propaganda and not journalism was signalled to the alert viewer early on when the presenter, Martin Durkin, said he wanted to put the size of Britain’s accumulated debt, £4.8 trillion, into perspective – supposedly the whole point of the documentary. How did he go about achieving this?