US President Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally-funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being “anti-Trump” and “radical”.
A White House statement said the order would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”, and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the “leftist”, “partisan” VOA.
Per CNN (per US Agency for Global Media), number of regular listeners, in millions, of VoA…
- Indonesia 64.8
- Nigeria 37.4
- Mexico 37.1
- India 29.1
- Iran 12.2
- Peru 11.9
- Russia 10.1
- Ukraine 9.8
- Iraq 9.3
- Egypt 9.0
Isn’t Voice of America like the USA’s equivalent of Deutsche Welle?
Basically a vehicle for internationally transporting news from the US American perspective?
Trump really hates any and all soft power the USA have available.
Soft is a no-no word around Trump. He wants rock hard power, gay porn hard power.
Yes, it’s one of the US’s propaganda presses
They put out plenty of content about the US’s flaws and failures
yeah totally him and not some other dipshit trying to get back to superpower status.
Sooo… Weakening US influence around the world in order for Putin to fill the vacuum? What is Trump’s Russian codename again?
Krasnov
Pee tape kovnik
I don’t understand the naysayers here.
This is hilarious. Trump wants to simultaneously expand the American empire, while he dismantles the tools of it that he’s too stupid to understand the importance of.
No matter their mission statement, or any tangible benefits they might have provided, both USAID and VOA, were tools of empire. These aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.
See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.
We’re talking about a guy whose business accumen is so poor he managed to run multiple casinos into the ground. His “successful businessman” schtick has always been propped up by a mountain of debt and crime. If he had so much as two brain cells to rub together, he would have stuck with Ivana because she was the only member of the Trump family to have even a shred of sense.
Not sure he could have kept Ivana anyway given she said at the time he raped her.
This isn’t fundamentally changing anything. It’s about using different tools for the same goal.
America cannot dominate the world militarily, nor could that even serve the goals of its contemporary brand of neoimperialism.
Soft power i.e. culture, propaganda, and diplomatic/idealogical relationships, are the foundation upon which it’s built.
Yes, military hard power plays a critical role, but it cannot replace soft power.
This isn’t empire for the sake of raw nationalism, and nothing would accelerate the American collapse faster than dismantling the state’s soft power tools. The end result will be attempts to maintain power by spending its military resources on peer, or near peer conflicts.
In Trump’s brain, soft power isn’t properly deferential to him personally. That’s what it amounts to.
It all comes down to his raging narcissism; soft power is done with tact and diplomacy in whispers. For Trump, that’s weakness. It’s not true power unless people/countries/organizations proclaim his power with effusive thank-yous and obsequious shows of capitulation.
It’s not enough to lead the free world; the rest of the world needs to be properly thankful for it in a way that he himself finds acceptable. (namely by making a big show of bending the knee)
It’s not really about changing it for cold hard power, but changing how their soft power will be projected. I’ve seen some theories that the rethoric is going to change from being about freedom of expression and LGBT rights and similar to ideas about traditional family values or something, and I think it’s very plausible.
…and how will that be disseminated? That’s what organizations like VOA and USAID were for.
Trump has the capacity to destroy organizations, but I find it doubtful he could recreate them out of whole cloth.
That’s my point.
He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.
Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)
Trump’s mission is to weaken the US, NATO, and the EU. Eliminating VoA helps do that. Notice how he isn’t threatening China with invasion, but Canada and Denmark instead.
Because Trump knows that China can and will fight back.
Canada and Denmark are friends of ours that Trump is now throwing salt in their eyes and saying “neener neener” while showing them his ass.
Because of our history, they aren’t fighting back.
If they do, Russia wins.
In what world isn’t Canada fighting back?
Which isn’t to say they shouldn’t, but they are pushing back to all the shit Trump is throwing at them. Just because they’re not launching missiles doesn’t mean they’re not fighting back.
China has nukes, a gargantuan military with no other purpose than to fight back, and the internal cohesion to resist the pressure. Canada has a much smaller military spread out much further, a much higher dependence on US specific trade simply by nature of physical infrastructure, and an unfortunately not insignificant percent of the population in the central provinces who would probably side with the US. It’s not anbout fighting back, it’s all about who is easier to bully, where friends mean nothing because everyone’s worth is determined by how much he can exploit them and the leverage the us has over them.
an unfortunately not insignificant percent of the population in the central provinces who would probably side with the US
As someone from the prairies (Saskatchewan), I can assure you that while, yes, we do have our fair share of pretty hard-right leaning individuals, most of even THEM are anti-trump because of the sovereignty issue. Even the ones who agree with what he is doing and would like to see Poppinfresh in power to do similar up here, would never side them militarily in an annexation attempt for the same reason that American MAGA flies the US flag…sovereignty is their identity; CANADIAN sovereignty.
There is a TINY number (some dipshits in Alberta) who actually want Alberta to join the US. But they are fractionally insignificant.
Canada needs a plan in case launching missiles becomes necessary.
Trump doesn’t want to expand the American empire though. He makes noises about it, but words are cheap. Judging by his actions he wants to create chaos so oligarchs can profit.
The ultrawealthy have no national allegience.
I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.
Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.
Trump may be narcissistic and senile but he still obeys his oligarch masters, probably from the usual motives of greed and fear.
I don’t know what your local children will learn at school but he’s fast earning himself a footnote in the international history books as the epoch that marks the tipping point into waning US power.
I may be wrong but I think the problem with the US cult of presidents/“great man of history” theory is that people like Trump keep the US populace speculating what he “wants” or “thinks” instead of on what his function is and what is actually happening.
The kleptocrats run every nation, afaict. There may be a few small exceptions, we will see, and see if they can keep it that way.
The difference is the kind of kleptocrat. For a long time most of the west has had Establishment capitalists, people who have organized the status quo to benefit themselves and protect their wealth.
What we are witnessing now is the displacement of the old Establishment by a new breed, Disaster capitalists, who don’t care about the status quo and thrive on social and regulatory chaos.
Russia has had this breed ever since the fall of the USSR. America is getting a taste of it now.
Everything Trump does – everything – suddenly makes sense when viewed through the lens of “how does Putin benefit?”
How does Netanyahu benefit as well.
That’s an incredibly myopic take that confuses correlation with causation.
These moves may benefit Putin, but Russia isn’t the only county to benefit. Infact, Russia is in a historically weak position to fill gaps left by a receding American empire.
I’d wager that China is likely to see much more geopolitical gains because they have the resources and capacity to take advantage of the situation.
I’m not saying Putin won’t benefit, just pointing out how limiting it is to view Trump through a singular lens.
Trump has had close business and personal ties with Russia since the 1980s. He very clearly admires dictators in general but Putin in particular, and has praised him on numerous occasions. In Trump’s infamous public call for election interference, it was “Russia, if you’re listening.” Not China, not some other country, Russia.
If you can’t see the obvious signs of causation – not just correlation – you’re the one who needs some coke-bottle specs!
I’m not saying Putin won’t benefit, just pointing out how limiting it is to view Trump through a singular lens.
It’s the explanation – and the only one, to boot – that fits all the pieces. It may be a “singular lens,” bit it is singularly useful!
That’s why we call him JDPON Don - this dumbass is going to dismantle the empire and usher in global proletarian revolution.
That’s why we call him JDPON Don - this dumbass is going to dismantle the empire and usher in global proletarian revolution.
Accelerationist fascists simping for oligarchs under the belief that THIS time it will work out for them. How surprising.
If we’re lucky, we might avoid the World Wars which made many other revolutions possible.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll move against the nuclear arsenal and the Army will finally give him the boot.
Is this sarcasm? They fired 350+ workers in charge of overseeing the nuclear stockpile before they even knew who they were firing, and nothing happened. To pretend that there is some line in the sand is, at this point, naive.
This is the same country that classified its nukes so hard that the engineers couldn’t find non-redacted procedures for making a critical component of fusion bombs.
We’ve always been incompetent, now it’s just partnered with enhanced stupidity.
Haha, ahh Fogbank, we hardly knew ye
America. Its institutions are fairly tales.
How is everything that is “anti-Trump” radical? You fucking dictator.
“If you smell shit everywhere you go it’s probably because you’re covered in it” Anon
It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.
The equivalent of “Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes”
Oh no, his people will keep their jobs. He isn’t getting rid of it, he’s just firing anyone who does anything, and his people will come in and get paid to do nothing. It’s very likely that he can’t just do away with it, but he can just fire the people working there.
Under $300 million a year to spread US propaganda to over 300 million people. That’s a fucking bargain man.
This is going to give up so, SO much soft power because of a snowflake’s ego. This is a bad deal.
I guess this is better than making VoA voice of trump.
I’m wondering if it’s going to be “rebuilt”, personally.
As an American, I would like to apologize that the idiots of this country re-elected Mango Mussolini. And I’m sorry that the rest of the world has to suffer because of this idiot and his cronies.
You don’t have to self-identify as “American” if you don’t want. You don’t need to apologize for a system over which you have virtually no control. The first step to resisting an evil system is probably disavowal.
Waiting for you guys to actually use your second amendment.
Well, there was an attempt but unfortunately he wasn’t a very good shot.
When they send their time travelers, they aren’t sending their best.
I’m not American but from what I understand about the country, that guy may not have been the only one with a gun.
He was wearing a gun youtuber’s tee shirt. The channel is worth a gawk if you enjoy rubbernecking at America’s crumpled wreckage.
It’s a pretty scary idea when the odds are very high that we would just get murdered by police or secret service. And in this hypothetical, if we were to fail, Trump would just bring them hammer down even harder on everyone else, making future attempts much more difficult if not impossible. Until the people are organized on a large scale and collectively convinced this is the only option we have left, we have too much to lose with very little chance of success.
Sure, you’re 100% right here, but he’s coming for guns as well, so waiting might not be an option either. Let’s just hope everyone gets pissed sooner than later
Hell, most of them aren’t even using their first ammendment yet.
Or the 25th?
I thank you for the sentiment, but save your words and don’t spare the ammunition.
What will the shills on Lemmy post now?
I would imagine it would be something along the lines of:
“What will the shills on Lemmy post now?”
usagm is an independent agency. it and its predecessors, and voa, were created by congress. only congress can eliminate them
Yeah, those checks and balances will kick in any day now!
Yeap, any day now.
Yeah, the managers were told to limit programming to the minimum required by law
As someone who used to listen to a lot of shortwave radio, this just bums me out.
I know foreign people who listened to VoA, and now it won’t be there anymore for them.
Makes me wonder who they’ll listen to, who will fill the void, with the VoA being gone.
I know foreign people who listened to VoA, and now it won’t be there anymore for them.
Stuff like this is a perfect example of how little Trump understands soft power. That was an outlet for American ideals (ok, propaganda) and American culture to diffuse across the world. Seeing how power abhors a vacuum, I won’t be surprised when China increasingly fills this void.
Remember, Trump isn’t dancing by his own tune. Who stands to benefit the most from the US undoing their relationships, contracts, defense agreements, and soft power agendas?
Then also remember that at the rate we’re moving, the 1st amendment is or will be dead very soon. Even this comment could end up with me being blacked bagged after not too long.
Right wingers are generally too stupid to think that abstractly.
I won’t be surprised when China increasingly fills this void.
The language barrier makes that unlikely. I think this one is going to remain empty for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Languages
Though they have less immigration, a bunch of those languages originate closer to China than the USA, I bet they can find staff equally well, if they really aim for a 1-to-1 replacement.
Fair enough. Now the question is whether China can get their foot in the door in the same way America did, but if they play up the anti-imperialism aspect it should ve possible.
Relevant: [source]
These big propaganda stations broadcast in dozens of languages.
DW still does very limited shortwave in Africa, I guess they’ll be happy to take over time/frequency slots but let’s face it the amount of people that you can only reach via short wave is dwindling, they mostly switched to satellite. They rather feed into the local FM broadcast network, and of course you can stream over the internet.
but let’s face it the amount of people that you can only reach via short wave is dwindling, they mostly switched to satellite. They rather feed into the local FM broadcast network, and of course you can stream over the internet.
You would actually be surprised how many poor regions in Central and South America as well as in Africa and Central Asia actually rely on shortwave still.
A lot of it is Christian and right-wing broadcasts, but still, it’s used more than you would think. Not everyone can afford expensive satellite rigs to receive.
The point is rather if you’re operating an FM transmitter, you not only have the money for a satellite dish and DVB-S decoder you already have one, and FM radios are dirt cheap. The electronics for short wave certainly aren’t more expensive but you’ll need a proper antenna. Meanwhile, much of Africa actually has quite decent mobile phone coverage, there’s some piss-poor countries and large areas of nothing, generally desert, but overall, if there’s people, there’s probably reception. Their whole banking system works via mobile phone.
The point is rather if you’re operating an FM transmitter, you not only have the money for a satellite dish
Talking about people who listen, receive, not transmit, and who do not have ready funds available.
Also, FM reception distances is much shorter than shortwave, something you didn’t mention.
Point being FM coverage is almost universal in any area where there’s a significant number of people, not just lone homesteaders, uncontacted tribes, suchlike. Yes there may be people there that could be reached but the total number is small and if they want any news, they’re getting them from the town over once a month.
Contrast that to the situation when those shortwave broadcasts were originally set up where you had whole cities with actual population that had no electricity, no radio, and certainly no internet. You’ll still find settlements like that, but, as said, not a large amount of people. Alternatively, people behind the iron curtain: You don’t need short-wave to get into North Korea and any Chinese or Russian who cares can access any western media, anyway.
The purpose of these broadcasts isn’t “play some music to 20 evangelical homesteaders 100km away from the next road”. Those people aren’t the kind of people who might, one day, protest in front of the president’s palace.
Point being FM coverage is almost universal in any area where there’s a significant number of people, not just lone homesteaders, uncontacted tribes, suchlike. Yes there may be people there that could be reached but the total number is small and if they want any news, they’re getting them from the town over once a month.
[Citation required]
There’s no need for us to keep arguing this point, I totally agree that the coverage of listeners of shortwave radio today is a lot less than what it was in the past, but my point is that it’s a lot more still than you’re imagining.
RT
RT
?
Russia Today.
It’s basically the Russian Voice of AmericaRussia Today
It was mostly a propaganda machine against socialist movements. I’m glad it is gone, but it should have been gone way before Trump. Because he doesn’t deserve credit for shit.
What socialist movements?
“Socialist” movements like:
checks notes
People’s Republic of China with its draconian:
- One Child Policy that almost got me killed because they were trying for force my mother to have an abortion against her will (since I was the second child)
- Rich people and high-ranking party members get away with crimes (as long as they do not go against the paramount leader)
- If you want treatment, you have to wait a long time, and you have to pre-pay, even if its an Emergency Room life and death situation
- 户口 (Hukou, Household Registration) System that confines you to where you’re born, and you cant even to move to other parts of your own country, and if you tried you are treated as a second-class citizen, essentially Casteism
Such “Socialism” aka: State-Capitalism
The communist party of China.
The least communist communist party on the planet.
Every single one of them since the end of World War 2. Voice of America, Radio for Europe, Radio Free Asia they’re all arms of US imperialist propaganda.
Does this mean Kari Lake is out of a job? As an Arizonian, I hope she come back here claiming to be our governor again.
Broken clock strikes again.
Glad to see US propaganda go away, sad it was Trump to do it.
