The quintessential guilty pleasure of the 21st century may be binge watching shows on platforms like Netflix. Guilty, because your favorite series was probably designed to serve as a smoothly effective soft propaganda vehicle for policing, military funding, and war. Take the case of the BBC's Call the Midwife one of my all time favorites as it combines socialized medicine, public health, disability rights, and the womanly art of midwifery in a setting that has evolved over seasons to resemble my now vintage childhood.
That Midwife has been doing hasbara for Israel for a few years will probably not surprise you. To be fair, the show also portrays London's Muslim immigrant community sympathetically, but the Holocaust industry is on full display in more than one episode where the word "Israel" is uttered with a reverence that again is reminiscent of my youth. And of course it is the mighty U.S. and the plucky UK that vanquished Hitler. (Red Army? What Red Army?)
So I was more disgusted than surprised when the new season devoted an entire episode plus bits of a few others to glorifying the U.S. space program.
I'm already surrounded by soft propaganda for the "warfighting domain" undergoing the most rapid expansion in funding and mission at the moment.
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Getting students pumped about space begins in preschool
and runs right through post graduate research at universities on behalf of aerospace profiteers.
That this is an Anglicized effort is revealed by Australian educators sick of their government injecting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curricula with pro-U.S., pro-militarized space content. Also revealed by the rubber bullets fired at resisters to AUKUS and other manifestations of the vassal status of Australia vis a vis the U.S./NATO war machine.
We see Hollywood and professional sports and corporate media and corporate public education work in concert to promote positive views of the military, including Space Force, and the never-admit-it's-military NASA.
All NASA programs are military in nature, no matter what pr they put out to the contrary. You remember how NASA was founded by Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, right? He was one of many who knew that the next world war would undoubtedly be fought using outer space and that space therefore needed to be dominated by the U.S. before Russia or China could gain a toehold.
So it is that the fictional residents of the East End of London gather around the television for breathless witness of the moon landing. Perennial child Sister Monica Joan is the most rapt (and, incidentally, the character most addicted to what we'd now call screen time), her blissed out wrinkled face lit up by the light emanating from the boob tube.
Some might call it coincidence but the context of U.S. Space Force presently supporting construction of multiple rocket launch sites in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia seems relevant. RAND think tankers noted that militarizing outer space would be the largest industrial undertaking in the history of the human race. Thus, very expensive. How to get citizens to willingly give up pensions, health care, public transit and other necessities that their corporate overlords have decided they can no longer afford?
Russian President Putin today made crystal clear the role that space technology plays in the current NATO proxy war escalations when he observed that long-range, precision-guided missiles can only be controlled via satellites Ukraine lacks. So, Russia would consider such strikes as evidence of NATO attacking Russia. WWIII immediately began trending on Twitter.
It's what the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space has been saying all along. The GN's latest video "US/NATO Dangerous Alliances" gives the details and invites concerned citizens of the world to join in with Keep Space for Peace activities October 5-12.
Religion was once the opiate of the masses. Television and other forms of digitized entertainment have long since surpassed it. As we face down a potential nuclear Armageddon, keep a clear head if you can.
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