Are Ceasefires at Thanksgiving an Attempt to Manage the Public Mind?

Obscured reality. Via Ramy Abdu of Euro-Med Monitor: “Dr. Ahmed Ziad Al-Kahlout, Head of the ICU at Kamal Adwan Hospital, was killed in an Israeli drone strike.”

Thanksgiving for many in the US is a time of families and friends gathering, talking and sharing. It’s part of the reason I posted my “The Need for a Radical Center Party” on Thanksgiving; hoping that it would prompt conversations at tables.

So much “information” is managed. Through screens. TVs. Computers. Gizmos in pockets. People talk directly for a prolonged period of time without structure too rarely.

The establishment goes to incredible lengths to manage what PR huckster Edward Bernays called in his 1928 book Propaganda “the public mind”.

I suspect there are special cases of this management and Thanksgiving is one of them. The establishment certainly doesn’t want the discussion to drift off into talk of Genocide Joe, of the history of imperialism from the settlement of what would be the US to Israel’s daily war crimes.

On Tuesday afternoon, just before Thanksgiving, Biden announced a “Cessation of Hostilities Between Israel and Hezbollah.”

On Thanksgiving, as I started seeing reports of Israel’s violations, I tweeted: “It’s possible that the entire ‘ceasefire’ was in substantial part a farce to manage the US public’s Thanksgiving gatherings. So the pro Biden people could say, at least Biden stopped the fighting in Lebanon. File under interesting timing.”

Manal E. responded to me: “The short ceasefire in Gaza last year happened at the same time.”

Turns out, they were right.

On Nov. 22, 2023, the day before Thanksgiving, major media announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire.

Blinken would pretend to try to keep the ceasefire going into December, and would predictably blame Hamas for that not happening. There were doubtlessly dynamics related to the conflict itself, but part of the double-dealing from the US government’s perspective is that they got over the Thanksgiving hump. Any conversations about the slaughter being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza was likely to focus on the hope around the ceasefire rather than the horror of the US government backing crimes against humanity and how people might feel an obligation to stop it.

For all I know, negotiators from other countries may have been mystified by the US government's shifting stances.

There are doubtlessly lots of reasons that things happen and lots of reasons why they happen at a particular time. Both are often insidious and manipulated. And in this case, it seems that managing the public mind during Thanksgiving gatherings may have been a primary motive.

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