How Intelligence Services Captured Academia and Journalism

This is from a transcript of an informative podcast about how the media and academics are used as instruments to spread the line of governments and secret services, especially when it comes to foreign policy.

GLENN DIESEN: I was wondering, have you seen academics and journalists emulate the language of the state? I find it interesting — Orwell wrote very much about how propaganda creates a separate language for “us” and “them.” I see this in academia as well, especially in political science. For example, we have “policies,” but our opponents have “behavior.” There’s this pedagogic framing where our job is to socialize them. This was very much built into the idea of the EU and NATO after the Cold War — that the role of the West was to socialize everyone else, like a new civilizing mission.

I noticed in academia all the language is organized accordingly, the way politicians speak — they argue that others will threaten us, but we don’t threaten, we punish or reward, like a teacher would. That’s NATO: it will reward good behavior, it will punish bad behavior. This whole assumption of a socializing role gets incorporated into the language, and it’s used very uncritically by many academics as well. If the Chinese refuse to compromise — when we refuse to compromise, we’re principled. Others interfere in domestic affairs; we promote democracy. They go to war; we intervene. The Russians seek influence in neighboring states; we’re just promoting the “European path.” You have this kind of language where you don’t have to make arguments anymore — the wording replaces arguments, which is strange, because the whole point for academics should be to unpack these words, to discuss them.



DAVID N. GIBBS: Another one I’d add is “humanitarian intervention,” something I’ve been especially interested in. The claim is that when the United States intervenes, it’s for humanitarian purposes, and when it doesn’t intervene somewhere, that shows cynical realpolitik. Intervention is humanitarian because it seeks to protect the weak, protect minorities from persecution, prevent genocide, prevent the abuse of women, and so on. This is the language governments might use as propaganda, but academics are promoting it. There’s a whole industry in academia around humanitarian intervention — a huge topic — and pretty much they’re using the language of government agencies and NGOs closely connected to government agencies. It’s the language of political propaganda, not analysis. But that’s where academia is.