I recently discovered the work of an excellent YouTuber who goes by the handle Despot of Antrim. The “Despot” is a pop culture critic who specializes in reverse engineering “woke” propaganda and is especially gifted in his commentary on entertainment, culture, and social engineering. Being that I dedicated several years to studying and reverse engineering propaganda, psychological warfare, and social engineering, I am especially appreciative of work such as his which contributes to the general public’s understanding of the theory and practice of propaganda.
In one video essay titled An Analysis of Body Positive Propaganda, Despot does an incredible job explaining the visual manipulations that go into “body positivity” propaganda. He delves into the skillful use of light and shadow to “accent” what is desired and obscure that what is “problematic” and undermines the body positivity propaganda. He coined a term for the technique of obscuring the unpalatable realities of obesity, what he calls the “hidden ugly”. This entails obscuring and (often) the total suppression of visual realities which would cause an audience to become immediately dissuaded from believing propaganda narratives by seeing actual shocking realities. In essence, by seeing the “hidden ugly” an audience would become violently aware of the undesirable realities of obesity and would be disinclined from accepting an inverted perception of reality.
I had understood for quite some time the pressing necessity of critical omission and the strategic suppression of information in propaganda; but the Despot’s video essay catalyzed a more profound understanding of the quintessential importance of omission, suppression, and censorship. Of the total war that must be declared upon the reality itself lest the “hidden ugly” alert the audience to horrific and repulsive realities. I used to be of the opinion that suppression of information was vital to propaganda, I now understand that it is foundational to the practice of propaganda and is more important than the content and strategy of propaganda itself.
The engineering propaganda begins with “excising” from the tableaux of reality all information that is inconvenient to a propaganda narrative. Of engineering a “critical ignorance” of key realities which would otherwise be common knowledge. Information which must be known in order to have a meaningful understanding of reality. Once key information is excised from the public consciousness and “critical ignorance” is engineered, then can the multitude of deceptions and a web of mendacity be properly spun on a blank canvas.
In this sense, the “hidden ugly” is a term that goes far beyond the suppression of visual reality, it is a term that can adequately applied to all that must be “hidden” in order to spin a false reality; all which (if exposed) illuminates a total reality that fully unravels the mendacity of propaganda. Because reality and truth are fundamentally the enemy of malicious fiction and deception.
In my study of propaganda, I’ve grown to fully appreciate the power of images both in propaganda and in counter-propaganda efforts. Human beings are fundamentally visual creatures and a single powerful image is often more effective than a wealth of presented information. If I state that in a genocide, over 6,000 children have been killed to date, this number is “unfelt”, it is “inhuman”, and is theoretical in a wholly detached manner.
It is both understood and completely misunderstood. The human mind understands a reality on a theoretical level but does not “feel” the quintessence of that reality, the depth and implications of that reality. Conversely, if a person saw the bodies of each and every single one of those victims, saw the corpses of those that had been killed and in seeing hundreds upon hundreds of the fallen, their mind would soon truly grasp the inhumanity and the magnitude of that crime. Reality would be deeply and profoundly understood.
And in a great many ways, propaganda dedicates itself from preventing people from seeing, understanding, and “feeling” the essence of reality. To gaze upon the “hidden ugly” is to violently “wake up”, to become viscerally cognizant of certain immutable realities which irreversibly shatter the sickly sweet deceptions of propaganda.
In many ways, my awakening process was defined by a dogged pursuit of the “hidden ugly” of the American empire. This was fueled by my insatiable desire for knowledge and my extremely high valuation of the truth. And this was not an easy process. The American empire is the undisputed world champion in propaganda, psychological warfare, information warfare, and social engineering. Trying to wrestle “problematic” information from the internet which is actively being suppressed is like pulling teeth from an unanesthetized and particularly uncooperative crocodile. But as the information is slowly squeezed from the uncooperative stone that is the internet, the discovery of that “hidden ugly” unravels the web of fictions and shatters the malicious illusions which imprison the mind.
And I should note, the deceptions and narratives spun by the American empire and the collective West are so profound and numerous that to accept them is to live what can only be described as an engineered delusional state.
One in which everything that one thinks one knows is in fact wrong. This “Great American Delusion” is one which I will delve into in my later works; it is one of the “modern marvels of the world”. An intangible marvel of incredible magnitude on par with physical marvels such as the Great Wall of China or the Egyptian pyramids.
One of the aspects of the “hidden ugly” that should also be understood is that the suppression of the “hidden ugly” has powerful effects on the reasoning process. Strategic suppression essentially cripples logic while exposure to the “hidden ugly” strongly potentiates logic and reasoning.
Reasoning is only as good as the information that is available. If one wishes to “guide” (i.e. manipulate) reasoning, it is important not merely to provide certain very specific information (whether it be true or false) but to suppress information which would derail the controlled reasoning process from reaching the unnaturally small and rigid “box” of conclusions which are the intent of propaganda.
In this sense, reality which undermines deceptions leads the rational mind on paths which are organic and the “spectrum” of possible reasoning conclusions is more natural than the extremely limited engineered opinion box produced by the combination of censorship and propaganda.
As an example, what kind of information suppression is required for a propagandized Westerner to fully and uncritically support NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine? What is the “hidden ugly” that must be ruthlessly suppressed in order to “guide” reasoning towards a desired pro-NATO opinion?
The amount of information that must be suppressed is absolutely massive, an ocean of pertinent and critical information has to be made to never “exist” in the minds of the audiences. A great library of reality must be concealed in order to engineer an absurd opinion divorced from objective reality. A reality in which the systematic provocations and aggressions on the part of NATO are made to disappear and the hope of peace undermined at every turn. Inconvenient realities such such as: the NATO subversion of Ukrainian democracy in the Maidan color revolution, the subservient puppet “client” regime that was installed by the US in 2015, the massacring of dissident Ukrainian civilians in Odessa, the support and cultivation by NATO of Ukrainian neo-Nazis,
NATO bioweapons laboratories on Ukrainian territory built after the 2015 coup, the bombing by the Ukrainian military of civilian populations in Donetsk and Luhansk for years preceding the Russian intervention, the suppression of the Russian language and culture in Ukraine, the suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the complete failure by Ukraine to abide by the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements (which were roadmaps to peace),
the sabotage by Britain of the Istanbul peace process between Ukraine and Russia, and on, and on, and on, and on.
To hold a blindly “pro-NATO” stance that is delusional when compared to objective reality requires a “critical ignorance” of massive proportions which ignores a wealth of highly pertinent information which is vitally necessary to have a meaningful understanding of the conflict. A meaningful conversation cannot even begin until an audience has been fully exposed to the “hidden ugly” of what has transpired.
Or if one were to uncritically support with an almost religious fanaticism the false religion that is American militarism, what is the “hidden ugly” that must be ruthlessly eliminated in order to engineer support for this system?
Things such as the war crimes committed in each military action,
the ruthless exploitation of other countries’ resources which is the purpose of these military actions, the ruthless exploitation of the domestic American population to support this behemoth of a system,
the jaw-dropping and obscene profiteering of the military industrial complex which has turned American taxation into a wealth redistribution scheme from average Americans to American oligarchs, the 22 veterans per day that commit suicide, the swathes of homeless veterans which litter American streets, and on, and on, and on, and on.
When I began studying the “hidden ugly” of the American empire, one of the things that greatly surprised me is how effectively the imperial apparatus has been able to completely purge the voices of its victims from the international press and from history itself. This is not new a new phenomenon and dates back at least as far back as World War 2. But the ability of this institution to suppress reality on a grand scale, warp reality, and rewrite history is especially impressive for anyone who studies this attribute of the institution.
To put it into perspective, the US killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in their illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam war, where are the voices of these millions of victims?
In the modern era, the US is currently conducting a dirty war on Syria through its terrorist proxies which have killed thousands of civilians. Many of these civilians have tried to raise their voices to denounce the crimes of the terrorists and to expose American complicity in these crimes. And those thousands of voices are scrubbed from existence. And valiant journalists such as Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlet get viciously attacked, denounced, and censored across the internet for trying to give a voice to the voiceless.
I had always been very impressed with the way the US military has been able to sanitize its image. The US military is fundamentally the instrument with which the US empire dominates and subjugates large swathes of the planet via organized violence of unimaginable scale. Sanitizing the US military and inverting its perception is akin to whitewashing the crimes of Ted Bundy and making him appear as a women’s rights advocate or inverting the perception of Jeffrey Dahmer and making him appear as a folk hero of ethnic minorities and a champion of LGBTQ rights. These are obscene inversions which are especially cruel and are intended to block people from correctly perceiving a violent and disturbing reality.
When I was investigating for myself the darker aspects of the American military, by happenstance I met a female veteran who had left the service. I asked her about her experiences in regard to the darker side of the US military and she told me a story. There was a young woman who was being pressured by her superior into having sex with him. She was married and she refused his requests. He sent two female underlings to beat her up. He then raped her. She fell into depression and ended up taking her own life. This is the kind of story that I expected but I was shocked nonetheless. This is just one of thousands upon thousands of rapes that have been performed by US military personnel to their own servicewomen as well as to the women of the countries that have been illegally invaded and occupied. A silent epidemic aided by the dogged suppression of the “hidden ugly” which has allowed this epidemic to fester. Both due to shielding the perpetrators and viciously attacking the victims. And I’ve thought often of this story over the years for two reasons. How this nameless woman’s voice, her story, will be lost to time as have millions of victims before her. And how epidemic levels of these inconvenient “hidden ugly” can be so effectively disappeared from the tapestry of reality.
There is one final issue as it concerns the “hidden ugly” and that is the engineering of aversion in audiences to truthful information. There are simple ways that this is engineered, the “hidden ugly” is “Chinese propaganda”, “Russian propaganda” or its “un-American”. This does much to dissuade audiences from gazing upon the “hidden ugly” and in so doing the individual acts as their own personal enforcer.
Engaging in voluntary self-censorship and being an active participant in engineering their own “critical ignorance”.
However, sometimes the discomfort of cognitive dissonance is too great, and the individual may simply wish to avoid the “hidden ugly” because accepting it would destabilize their psychology. Regardless of why a person willfully would avoid the “hidden ugly”, there is one immutable truth: that there is no worst blind man than the man who doesn’t wish to see.