Opinion丨Struggle Against U.S. Mind colonization in the Global South

Editor's note：This month, Xinhua News Agency's Think Tank released a report titled "Colonization of the Mind: The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare." In early September, Indian scholar and geopolitical analyst S.L. Kanthan was invited to attend the Global South Media and Think Tank Forum held in Kunming, China, where he took note of this think tank report. In the context of India's reality, Kanthan shared his perspective on American ideological colonization.

China has released a seminal report on a consequential but largely ignored topic: colonization of the mind by the U.S., whose strategies are too sophisticated and pervasive to be noticed by most people. The repercussions have far-reaching and detrimental impacts on the politics, economy, society and foreign policy of especially the Global South countries. This article will expand on the themes of the report to shed light on the extent and methods of U.S.'s thought control, which includes the dual instruments of propaganda and censorship deployed with a whole-of-society approach that includes the U.S. government, media, NGOs, universities, activist groups, tech companies and more.

The primary challenge in discussing American colonization of the mind is the people's inability to see it, analogous to how fish cannot see water. Much of the world is so saturated with American or American-influenced narrative that people cannot see the propaganda and biased narratives.

Everyone is good at noticing "foreign" influence. For example, a social media post that reveals something positive about North Korea will be quickly labeled as propaganda by many people. However, the same folks will fail to see American propaganda. Personal observation in India indicates that this phenomenon occurs even among the well-educated, including foreign policy experts.

Thus, it is no wonder that the leading English TV channel in India is CNN, which has a staggering 70% market share. Obviously, nobody is worried because the U.S. is not seen as a hostile power or, more importantly, as an alien power. Here, American corporations play a major role.

Consider that almost everyone in India uses Gmail for email, and nearly 500 million Indians use WhatsApp. Amazingly, there is no concern about the U.S. spying and surveillance, even after revelations by a former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, about the extraordinary reach of the CIA and NSA, along with the collusion of American tech firms.

What drives this cognitive dissonance?

When a person's everyday life is filled with Apple，Coca Cola, Nike, KFC, Starbucks, Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and other countless American brands – many of which are associated with pleasure or prestige – the brain stops questioning other American things such as news and technology. Thus, American mind-colonizing tools such as CNN, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, etc., are meekly accepted as factual and objective.

Another potent reason that Indians view America as an ally or a benevolent nation is employment at American companies in India as well as the United States. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Indians, including the children of Indian politicians and businessmen, go and study in U.S. colleges.

Needless to say, immigration is a source of immense soft power for the U.S., especially when Indians can achieve significant success in the United States. The result is that the Indian mind cannot comprehend how Google Search or AI can provide false information when the company's CEO himself is an Indian-American.

Similarly, how can the American prescription for neoliberal capitalism be wrong when the head of the World Bank is an Indian American and one of the chief economists at the IMF is an Indian?

In summary, the U.S. is not perceived as a foreign entity in India or much of the Global South, and hence does not create a primordial fight-or-flight response. This is the core phenomenon that enables the U.S. Empire to quietly and effectively colonize the mind.

The American influence is also pervasive in Indian schools, media and think tanks, which shape the opinion of the masses. For starters, English is the language of success in India. When I was a kid, I read British and American novels; and in my twenties, I viewed the NY Times and other American publications as the ultimate sources of truth. It took a long time to get rid of the brainwashing.

As for the understanding of the world, I never came across the phrase "American Empire" throughout my education in India. The mainstream media or the think tanks here do not ever talk about the U.S. as an imperialist force. When it comes to foreign news and analyses, most Indian mainstream media simply copy-paste articles from Reuters and AP.

Sadly, there is no independent reporting of global events other than those directly impacting India. For example, only very few Indians understand how NATO expansion played a key role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and even fewer know about the Color Revolutions – in 2004 and 2014 – that the U.S. staged in Ukraine.

I have talked to Indian "foreign policy experts" who knew nothing about the CIA. Operation Mockingbird that controls newspapers? Operation Gladio in Europe? Operation Northwoods that tried to stage false flag attacks in Miami to start a war with Cuba? The CIA's involvement in heroin and cocaine trafficking? The CIA rigging elections or assassinating leaders around the world? The CIA recruiting Nazis after World War II or arming Islamic terrorists for decades? All these topics are taboos for the Indian mainstream media and think tanks, which consciously or subconsciously engage in self-censorship or what is known as "propaganda through omission."

To give another example, the Indian mainstream media would regurgitate American propaganda about the so-called "forced labor" in Xinjiang, without any skepticism about the U.S. government funding or arming extremists and terrorists to destabilize China.

Such naivety is dangerous for India's national security, since the U.S. has now started containing India in multiple dimensions.

By the way, I have also met people from Latin America who knew nothing about the infamous School of the Americas (in the U.S. state of Georgia) that trained future dictators on coups, torture, surveillance, psychological operations, and even death squads. A significant portion of Latin Americans believe that, during the Cold War, the U.S. simply fought communism and tried to spread freedom and democracy – the Disney version of U.S. foreign policy.

If Americans have mastered colonizing the mind, they also excel in invisible censorship, which is essential for any propaganda to succeed.

Most people in the Global South don't perceive American censorship, since it is targeted. The U.S. social media gives enough latitude – large enough an Overton Window – to satisfy most people. Thus, there is vigorous but meaningless debate in a spectrum of topics that do not bother the American ruling class. However, once you step out of the sandbox and are a bit too influential, you would be targeted by the mercenaries of censorship or the AI algorithm.

Some U.S. social media such as Facebook and YouTube are quite ruthless in censorship. They delete tens of thousands of accounts and videos every year for the crime of being pro-China or pro-Russia. How can the U.S. be great if its rivals are not evil? And how can the rivals be evil if positive things can be said about them?

While X, under Elon Musk, is relatively more open, it is also subjected to a sophisticated censorship known as throttling. If your account is targeted, your posts would get fewer impressions. The clever logic goes like this: "Free speech does not mean free reach." (In Europe, there is much less pretension – they have simply banned all Russian media now).

The censorship industry in the U.S. is in fact vast and involves the deep state alphabet soup (FBI, NSA, DHS etc.) working with universities, NGOs, activist groups, non-profits, media and tech companies. Billions of dollars are spent to monitor every social media post in real time to track trends, hotspots, and people. All that is done in the Orwellian abuse of “countering disinformation or misinformation.”

A few days ago, the Australian think tank ASPI wrote an article in which I was specifically mentioned and attacked as a “pro-China account” for talking about possible U.S.-led color revolution in Indonesia.

The Twitter Files exposé revealed that the U.S. government agencies send lists of specific accounts to social media companies to be banned. Many social media platforms simply provide a backdoor to the U.S. agencies, who can then censor topics and accounts themselves. How is that for free speech and First Amendment?

The U.S. spends billions of dollars to spread propaganda as well as to eliminate competition in the world of information, narratives and perspectives.

To conclude, countering the U.S. colonization of the mind in the Global South is a formidable challenge. We need to recruit intellectuals across the Global South (and perhaps Europe, which is also a victim of the U.S. Empire) to educate people every day through every channel – newspapers, TV, social media, podcasts, books, documentaries and so on. I would suggest that the report on mind colonization released by China can be expanded into a book, translated into multiple languages, and made available for high school and college students worldwide. The paradigm shift must happen, and it's our responsibility to manifest it.

Wrote by S.L. Kanthan

Posters丨Li Jiewen