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How 3rd Grade Military Propaganda Turned You Into a Lunatic // Mint Press
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How 3rd-Grade Propaganda Trains Us to Cheer War
We live inside a media hall of mirrors, where countdown music, dramatic chyron clocks, and grave anchors help sell war as spectacle. That was the unflinching mood on a recent “State of Play” episode: a former U.S. Army Ranger turned journalist laid out how “objective truth” keeps getting bent to serve elite political and corporate interests—nowhere more painfully than in Gaza. His guest, conflict reporter and filmmaker Tara Sutton, has seen this cycle for two decades. Together they traced a straight line from schoolhouse mythology about “good wars” to modern audiences conditioned to rationalize the killing of doctors, mothers, and journalists.
A Strike That Wasn’t an Accident
The conversation centered on the reported assassination of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al-Sharif and colleagues. Stripped of euphemism, the hosts argued, the attack appeared intentional—enabled by modern surveillance, cell-phone tracking, and a bureaucracy that decides when the informational cost of killing a reporter is lower than the cost of letting him keep filming. In that calculus, the timing matters: silence the witness before an invasion, not after. This is the ugly logic of “kinetic” decision-making that veterans of operations centers recognize instinctively, even when public statements are wrapped in legalese or “investigations.”
Propaganda 101: Say Everything, Admit Nothing
What follows every strike is a propaganda cascade: scattershot claims, fast-moving conspiracy fog, and a constant invitation to doubt your eyes. We’ve seen this pattern before—wedding parties in Yemen, hospitals in Kunduz, and the “RPG” that turned out to be a camera in the infamous Apache video. When narratives change every few hours, the media cycle moves on before accountability can catch up. The co-hosts argued Israel’s operation in Gaza has perfected this tempo: contradict today what you asserted yesterday; never repeat the same lie twice; keep critics busy chasing phantoms.
Colonial Newsrooms and Sanitized Grief
Sutton, who reported unembedded in Fallujah, described the colonial reflex that still shapes Western newsrooms: trust the uniform and the podium, doubt the native witness. For years, editors told audiences to “change the channel” from images that felt too raw—shredded bodies, burning buildings, frantic hospital corridors. But Gaza has forced a reckoning. Local journalists—people who live the story, speak the language, and walk the cratered streets—collapsed the distance between viewer and victim. Their lenses dissolved the sterilizing filter that used to keep horror off dinner-hour broadcasts. That unmediated intimacy is precisely why they’re targeted.
The Bipartisan Machinery at Home
If foreign policy feels distant, domestic politics brings it home. The show pointed to Washington, D.C., where a “war on homelessness” and security theater sit alongside budget cuts to social supports and billion-dollar stadium deals. The point isn’t partisan; it’s structural. From policing to foreign wars, the hosts argued, a bipartisan consensus keeps the militarized status quo intact. When the same elite voices control the purse and the narrative, the acceptable range of debate narrows until it’s mostly performance—word salads about “two-state solutions” that never materialize, or vows to restore order while starvation grows.
When Journalism Becomes the Target
Reporters used to worry most about crossfire, car bombs, and sudden chaos. Gaza inverted that: media tents and known press hubs—spaces historically understood as off-limits—have become coordinates. The message travels in both directions. To journalists: your press vest is not a shield. To the public: truth itself is contraband. Sutton recalled editors who balked at showing more than a single image of dead children because it might upset diners; the ethical failure isn’t the photograph, it’s the distance that makes sanitized tragedy palatable.
The Cost of Looking Away
The most unsettling takeaway is not just that governments and militaries run information operations; it’s how eagerly audiences accept them. That’s the “third-grade propaganda” at work: heroic myths, simple binaries, and the idea that violence always protects “us” from “them.” Over time, those stories turn ordinary people into apologists for extraordinary cruelty. And once the public has been trained to dismiss images from Gaza—or Fallujah, or Rafah—as either fake or “too political,” the killings keep their bureaucratic quiet.
What It Would Take to Break the Spell
First, honor the witnesses. Support local reporters and the fixers who make foreign reporting possible; their footage is not supplementary, it is central. Second, reject euphemism. If a newsroom would not air the unvarnished aftermath of a strike, ask why. Third, widen the moral frame at home: the same logic that treats a media tent as a target also treats a homeless encampment as a battlefield. Finally, practice skepticism in the correct direction: power deserves proof; survivors deserve presumption.
Conclusion: Refusing the Lunatic Script
If there’s a single lesson from the episode, it’s that our media diet is not neutral. Every omission is a choice; every sanitized cut trains us to accept what we should resist. The antidote isn’t cynicism, but courage—of reporters who keep filming, editors who let the public see, and audiences who refuse to be lulled by familiar songs of “security” and “stability.” Break the script, and the propaganda loses its grip. Keep swallowing it, and we become what it demands: spectators who mistake silence for peace, and narrative for truth.
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