Listen live Fridays noon to 2pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio later archived at KevinBarrett.Substack.com
First hour: 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.
Second hour: Mahmood OD, a native Palestinian born in Haifa, is the author of 2048: A Manifesto for the One State Solution in Israel Palestine. In it, he considers the underlying causes of the violence and instability in the region, and proposes a simple and sensible solution, starting with: “The whole conflict can be solved with one thing: Equality. But to reach the stage of equality, one must establish basic understanding about the other side…”