The US State Department’s new program The Clean Network, launched in August, offers a masterclass in propaganda. It makes the now-deleted UK Home Office tweet drawing on Dad’s Army graphics and associating ‘activist lawyers’ with abuses of the asylum system look like an amateur business.
In its own words the Network is: a comprehensive approach to safeguarding the nation’s assets including citizens’ privacy and companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party.
It is a seamlessly interlocking sequence of gestures, steps and stated intentions, signaling severally and jointly a complex system of ideas. It is both the act of the chemical bonding of these things with each other and the state, and its completed embodiment designed to set things and people in motion.
