Propaganda: the relentless demand for conformity

By Richard North - November 16, 2021

Of late, we’ve seen the actions of the Liverpool terrorist bomber – who turns out to have been a failed asylum seeker of Syrian origin – the continued flow of illegal immigrants across the Channel, and the situation on the Poland Belarus border.

These events may be close enough in time and have sufficient commonalities for them to be linked by many observers and raise in them their already high level of unease at the conduct of the UK’s immigration policy.

On the other hand, others appear to be content with the way things are developing or, in the context of this blog’s comment facility, are so dedicated to offering contrarian views that they will automatically disagree with any line taken by its authors.

There are even those who, for reasons best-known to themselves, will dispute the veracity of fundamental details such as the entirely correct use of the term “illegal immigrant” to describe the dinghy people who are crossing the Channel in ever-increasing numbers.

But immigration is but one subject of many where it is increasingly difficult to offer any useful contribution without attracting dogmatic intervention from the naysayers. Climate change is another and the basic fare of this site – Brexit – continues to attract a cascade of tedious, mind-numbing commentary.

More recently, I did not help myself with yesterday’s post, wrongly labelling the title “climate change”. In fact, it wasn’t really about that subject – it was more about the use of propaganda in the promotion of a particular view on that subject, in the context where one is increasingly under pressure not to deviate from the received wisdom.

The point I sought to make was that proponents of climate change Armageddon consistently seek out data which support their view, neglecting or ignoring material which does not support their increasingly lurid claims – as well as displaying a distressing propensity of some advocates simply to lie.

To illustrate my point, I drew attention to how multiple media sources had in 2009 completely misrepresented the passage of two ships through the Northern Sea Route, falsely claiming that these were the first to complete the commercial navigation of the route, thereby supposedly illustrating the effect of climate change.

I also drew attention to the tendency to highlight “bad” news, such as record low levels of ice cover, and the relative silence when the news does not support the desired narrative. Ships sailing in clear water get the headlines – many ships trapped in unexpectedly severe ice get no coverage at all in the UK media.

Then, there is the ongoing determination of some pundits to exaggerate already fragile data, typified by the one example I gave of a pundit claiming that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2020. Oddly enough, another example of this tendency came to light yesterday, via a post in Twitter, which lined to an archived piece from the AP news agency dated 30 June 1989, headed: “UN predicts disaster if global warming not checked”.

This had Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) claim that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels” if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Not only this, coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees”, threatening “political chaos”, while melting polar icecaps would cause ocean levels to rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations.

Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply.

Brown said that governments had “a 10-year window of opportunity” to solve the greenhouse effect before it went beyond human control, citing “the most conservative scientific estimate” that the Earth’s temperature would rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years.

This, of courses, was pure, unsupported alarmism, but the only real difference between then and now is that protagonists have become more canny- they no longer forecast a mere 30 years ahead – within a timespan where failed predictions might be remembered.

Instead, they have settled on the date of 2050 for implementation of their plans, in order to save the planet at the beginning of the 22nd Century – a period so far in the future as to render predictions conveniently unfalsifiable.

Returning to my original point, the issue at hand is not that there may or may not be some outliers in weather events, which seem to contradict the climate change narrative, but that such events are so rarely publicised by a media besotted with warmist dogma.

Interestingly, we have another example of that in a current report from the online Chinese newspaper Xinhuanet which records record snowfall in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, telling us that its Tongliao City has been “walloped” by the strongest snowstorm ever recorded, after a “powerful cold wave” that began on 9 November.

Actually, extreme snowfall is not that rare in the wider region: I recall in February 2010 reporting that disaster areas had been declared in Mongolia proper, where in 19 out of 21 of the country’s provinces there had been heavy and continuous snowfall, blizzards and a sharp fall in daily temperatures – dropping below minus 40 degrees Celsius.

This, incidentally, was at a time when the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was predicting that “a rise in surface air temperature and decline in precipitation is estimated to reduce pasture productivity in the Mongolian steppe by about 10 to 30 percent”.

Thus, three years after Mongolia was projected to be “dry and hot,” while winters would be “milder with more snowfall”, the country experienced its worst winter in 30 years.

And therein lies our real problem. News reporting, politics and even (or especially) science are about agendas these days. Objective reporting and factual evidence is not allowed, errors are never corrected and false statements become the prevailing currency.

Thus we see with the current situation on the Polish/Belarussian border, the BBC report focusing on the “humanitarian crisis” affecting “vulnerable migrants”. But the fact is that thousands of mainly young men are intent on forcing entry into Poland, in what is plainly an illegal act tantamount to invasion.

Such thoughts, though, are not allowed to percolate the minds of the BBC audience. Nor is it remarked upon that the small minority of women and children are placed strategically to the fore, in the confrontation between the migrants and Polish police and troops.

Yet, however distorted the agenda, there are always plenty of weak minds willing to leap to the defence of the established viewpoint, demanding conformity with whatever received wisdom is on offer, across a wide range of subjects. Immigration, climate change and Brexit are just a few of the front-line issues.

To conform to this orthodoxy, one must resist calling for border controls to be imposed, and for illegal immigrants to be refused entry and returned whence they came. We must accept, without demur, the bogus and constantly changing “science” of climate change. And, of course, Brexit is a horror perpetrated on the nation by malign xenophobes who briefly managed to take control of an unwilling nation.

The thing is, there are many outlets for this mindless conformity of view. One wonders, therefore, why this small reservoir of independent thought has to be brought into line. There are plenty of other places to go.