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Category: Censorship

  • Western Civilization Is Being Organized Around Winning US Infowars

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    The US-centralized empire’s use of propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation is the single most urgent issue of our time, because it’s what prevents attention from being drawn to all other issues. And all signs indicate it’s set to get much, much worse.

    I feel the need to reiterate once again that the censorship we’re seeing about Ukraine is of a whole new kind than anything we’ve seen before. There’s no pretense that it’s done to save lives or protect democracy this time around, it’s just “We need to control the thoughts that people think about this war.”

    Once it was accepted that disinformation and misinformation must be curtailed from above, government and tech institutions took that as license to decide what’s true and false on our behalf. We know this because now they’re just openly propagandizing and censoring us about a war.

    You didn’t know that you were granting government and tech institutions authority to decide what’s true and false on your behalf when you agreed that it’s fine for them to work together to censor and sanctify Official Narratives about Covid, but it turns out that’s what was happening.

    It looks pretty obvious in retrospect now though, doesn’t it? You can’t regulate “disinformation” and “misinformation” without first determining what it is, and you can’t determine what it is without assigning someone the authority to make those distinctions. There are no benefecent, impartial and omniscient entities who can be trusted to become objective arbiters of absolute reality on our behalf. There are only flawed human beings who act in their own interest, which is why we’re now being censored and propagandized about a war.

    In literally the very next instant after being given the authority to decide what’s true and false on our behalf regarding Covid, those same government, media and tech institutions launched into World War II levels of propaganda and censorship over a war we’re not even officially in. It was like they all said “Oh good, we get to do that now, finally.” The consensus that it was fine to launch into a shocking information lockdown about Ukraine was already formed and prepped for roll-out the day Russia invaded. It was taken as a given that they had that authority.

    Over the last two years you’d get called an “anti-vaxxer” and worse if you said you didn’t think government-tied monopolistic megacorporations should be restricting speech about Covid measures that affect everyone, but it turns out those who issued these warnings were 100 percent correct.

    It is clear now, as we see what we are becoming, that granting these powerful institutions authority to sort out fact from fiction on our behalf is far more dangerous than misinformation about a virus ever was. Now here we are, with the empire setting up “disinformation” boards while it escalates aggressions with Russia by the day and prepares to do the same with China in the not-too distant future. Our whole civilization is being organized around winning US propaganda wars.

    Censorship is bad because free speech is how society orients itself toward truth, course-corrects when it’s going astray, and holds power to account. This is true whether censorship is by the government or by tech oligarchs. Only morons act like this is some weird right wing thing.

    People say, “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach!”

    And the answer to this is always, yes it does you idiot. If people who support status quo power have access to all the largest voice amplification platforms while critics of status quo power don’t, this kills the very purpose of free speech protections. Free speech protections are enshrined exactly because unrestricted speech puts a check on power. If critics of status quo power structures are being banned from the platforms where people get their voices heard, this function has been nullified.

    You can’t say your society has free speech if critics of status quo orthodoxies aren’t free to speak where they will be heard, for exactly the same reason you can’t say people have free speech in Saudi Arabia as long as nobody hears their criticisms of the government.

    Because free speech is designed to put a check on status quo power, it is exactly the voices who criticize the status quo that must be protected. Some of these voices will be unpalatable, but the alternative is permitting a Ministry of Truth to decide what dissent is permissible, an authority that’s certain to be abused.

    Speech isn’t free if it isn’t free in all the areas where people congregate to speak. If only mainstream supporters of the status quo have free access to all platforms, then free speech isn’t happening, and power has a lot more ability to do what it likes unchecked by the public. Saying it’s fine because people are still free to go to Gab or Truth Social to voice their criticisms of establishment Ukraine narratives or whatever is the same as saying it’s fine because people can still speak their criticisms of the government into a hole in the ground. Free speech is not happening.

    Consent for this was given when we allowed these powers to assume complete narrative authority over what constitutes “misinformation”. It’s never too late to revoke consent, though. It just means the fight to pry our voices out of the hands of our rulers is going to be a tough slog.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Chris Hedges Report: Hip Hop, Censorship, And Palestinian Resistance

    Legendary UK-based hip-hop artist and activist Kareem Dennis, aka Lowkey, uses his considerable talents as a musician to pay homage to the voices and struggles of the oppressed, from the plight of migrants that have fled to Europe, to the suffering of Iraqis and Palestinians in the Middle East, to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. His work, including his single “Voices of The Voiceless” with Immortal Technique, and “Long Live Palestine” (also known as “Tears to Laughter”), are hip-hop classics. His song “Terrorist?”, a searing condemnation of the hypocrisy of Washington and Western governments, was swiftly censored by many digital media platforms.

    He’s long been a target of the Israel lobby in both UK and the United States, which blocked him from receiving a visa to perform. The University of Cambridge postponed his March 8 Zoom talk, “The Israel Lobby’s War Against You.” The British press has engaged in an ongoing smear campaign against the rapper, and there is an organized effort to get his music removed from Spotify.

    The post The Chris Hedges Report: Hip Hop, Censorship, And Palestinian Resistance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Children’s Book Authors Are Fighting Back Against Censorship and Book Bans

    As the right wing continues to ban books and promote censorship, writers, publishers and free speech activists are stepping up to provide anti-racist and pro-LGBTQIA+ materials to both educators and caregivers.

    “Most U.S. teachers have not been trained to discuss white settler colonialism, white supremacy or race,” says Oriel Maria Siu, author of Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It’s Over! and Rebeldita the Fearless, books intended for elementary school readers. Her books, and an accompanying teaching guide, are meant to fill this void.

    “My books help build communities of resistance through truth telling so that our children are no longer lied to by white Eurocentric curricula,” Siu tells Truthout. What’s more, she says that her books introduce kids to the “legacy of Black, Brown and Indigenous resistance” to conquest, domination and discrimination.

    This, of course, is exactly what the U.S. right wing is trying to stop, and ongoing efforts to restrict the materials used in classrooms and available in libraries have continued to escalate.

    PEN America, a 98-year-old international organization that promotes free expression, recently issued an index of school book bans. The report covers nine months — July 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022 — and found that 86 school districts in 26 states have banned one or more books, with restrictions impacting more than 2 million kids attending nearly 3,000 schools. No literary category was spared: Banned texts include fiction, non-fiction, poetry and graphic novels.

    Not surprisingly, the themes most likely to inspire conservative ire include gender, gender identity, race and sexuality. Nonetheless PEN America did find something unexpected: 41 percent of the bans were promulgated by state officials or elected lawmakers, not parents or caregivers.

    Director of Free Expression and Education at PEN America Jonathan Friedman told Truthout that “while it is not unprecedented for people in political power to use their power, what is unprecedented is the number of demands from politicians to remove books.” Even more troubling, he says, is what he calls “the abdication of responsibility” by schools and libraries to do due diligence and investigate claims before taking books off shelves or disallowing their use.

    “Removing books as soon as a complaint is made takes away the serendipitous rifling through books on a shelf and is an impediment for lots of students who just want to explore what’s available,” Friedman said. “The right to go to school and access a library should not be sacrificed to accommodate a small minority of people who want to override others and impose their preferences on an entire community.”

    But that is exactly what is happening.

    Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, reports that queer-affirming books have been among the most challenged titles since 2018, “but efforts to conflate the idea of sexual or gender identity with pornography and pedophilia” have recently ramped up.

    “Opposing books that are queer or BIPOC-affirming has always been part of the agenda of conservative Christian groups,” Caldwell-Stone told Truthout. “These groups have been building infrastructure to deny human rights to LGBTQIA+ people for years, but there is now conservative control of many state and local governments. The right is using this control to steer the agenda and introduce legislation to limit what kids can read and learn.”

    Caldwell-Stone calls the current moment “an inflection point” in which conservatives — politicians and educators as well as faith and community leaders — are flexing their muscles to stifle public education, public libraries and the idea of diversity as a public good.

    At the same time, a raft of writers, progressive and pro-LGBTQIA+ publishers, and free speech activists are not only pushing back against book bans and censorship, but are promoting the creation of materials to elevate previously marginalized voices and perspectives.

    “Scholars of color and Indigenous writers are doing what we’ve been doing for more than 50 years,” Siu told Truthout. “We are not reactive. Instead, we persist, persist and persist. If we respond to every attack on our work, it will eat all of our time. Rather than get sidetracked, we find the stories we wish to tell and do the work of telling them. We will not let anyone impede us.”

    Jason Tharp is the author of 18 children’s books, including It’s Okay to Be a Unicorn and It’s Okay to Smell Good. “I write for the kid who wears glasses, has a lisp, who is gay or trans, or just feels different,” he told Truthout. Tharp, who says he was bullied as a child in the 1980s, hopes his writing will resonate with those who feel invisible or insecure. “All of my stories connect kids to the idea of inclusion and self-love, what it means to be kind to yourself.”

    This message, he continues, came under attack in early April when a parent objected to a scheduled reading of It’s Okay to be a Unicorn at a school in the Buckeye Valley Local School District near Columbus, Ohio. The book, which Tharp says urges kids to be themselves, includes rainbow imagery but makes no mention of LGBTQIA+ identity.

    Tharp says he was shocked when his reading was canceled. “What do you do with this kind of thing?” he asks. “For me, it’s about sticking to my message and connecting to platforms that can reach the kids who are bullied and hate themselves. I want my writing to resonate with the kid who feels alone, lost or weird.”

    Winter Miller, author of a newly released children’s book called Not a Cat, tells the story of Gato, who confides that he does not actually feel like a member of the feline community. How can he be sure that he is not a bunny, cow, dog, duck, horse or human? he wonders.

    “My sincere hope with Not a Cat is that the earlier we reach children about skipping limited tropes, the easier it will be to nurture an innate sense of self-love, freedom and empathy,” Miller told Truthout. “I want my books to show kids, and remind parents, that everyone deserves love, whether or not they fit into the narrow boxes they’ve been given.”

    That message — that everyone deserves acceptance, affection and respect — is the raison d’etre of Flamingo Rampant, a Toronto-based children’s book publisher with over 20 titles to its credit.

    S. Bear Bergman, Flamingo Rampant’s founder and co-publisher, calls the 10-year-old initiative “the project of a lifetime,” adding, “We are incredibly lucky to be connected to communities throughout the English-speaking world where people take our books into schools, libraries and communities and say, ‘This is important to our families.’”

    “Kids are not naturally inclined toward bigotry,” he says, “They are generally inclined toward living their lives.” This is why Flamingo Rampant routinely supplies books to people in areas where access is restricted; right now, he reports, the publisher is focused on getting books to people in Alabama, Florida and Texas to counter bans and removals.

    Bergman sounds incredibly proud of this, but takes a breath before continuing. “I want to stress that censorship and bans are based on a myth of childhood innocence,” he says. “The idea that we can protect kids from racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia is only true for those kids and families that are not facing these things. Everyone else has to prepare their kids for hatred before it arrives at their front door.”

    Jennifer Baumgardner, founder of the 4-year-old Dottir Press, agrees with Bergman and says that Dottir’s mission is similar to Flamingo Rampant’s. “Fifteen of the 20 books we’ve published so far have queer themes, nonbinary characters or were written by queer authors,” she told Truthout. “For me as a feminist publisher, this is imperative.”

    Dottir Press further strives to promote complicated narratives and nuanced stories. “In earlier decades, feminists tended to focus on saying that girls can do whatever boys can do and boys can do whatever girls can do. We’re now trying to puncture the idea of gender,” Baumgardner says. “The years of feeling like we need to drain misogyny from our brains to protect women, still resonate on an instinctive level, but we’re also addressing what we think it means to be a woman. It’s certainly always been more than reproductive capacity but what is it we are still protecting?”

    Books that ask these questions have made Dottir Press a target of the right. In fact, Anastasia Higginbotham’s Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, part of a six-part series, has been a favorite of censorship proponent Chris Rufo. But being in Rufo’s crosshairs has not deterred either Baumgardner or Higginbotham. “I am pro-gay rights and pro-feminist, so there was not a moment I was fearful about publishing books like this,” Baumgardner says.

    Similarly, Flamingo Rampant’s Bergman says that while the company has recently seen an uptick in hateful messages, the overriding goal of publishing books that tell kids that “it’s fine and good to be themselves and fight racism, disability injustice or bigotry” will always be front and center.

    These publishers — and others including Seven Stories Press, the Feminist Press, The New Press and Beacon — have allies in activist groups that are fighting censorship and limits on what can be taught and read. The American Federation of Teachers, for one, is doing what it can to support teachers who come under fire and is planning to send a million books to schools through its Reading Opens the World program.

    The more grassroots group Red Wine & Blue has created Book Ban Busters! to draw attention to censorship and monitor where bans have taken effect. The group also runs weekly online Troublemaker Trainings that offer instruction in the rudiments of community organizing for people living in every corner of the U.S.: from how to testify at a school board hearing, to how to write a press release, file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, or use social media to fundraise or promote diversity, equity and inclusion. To date, nearly 3,000 mostly suburban-area moms have participated, according to the grassroots group.

    “We focus on hyper-local community work,” Julie Womack, Red Wine & Blue’s organizing director, told Truthout. “The right is using scare tactics to try to win suburban voters. But suburban areas are becoming more diverse and are moving away from conservative politics.”

    Among the group’s most successful efforts: a national read-in with banned writers to promote free speech and the right to read.

    In addition, Womack says that Red Wine & Blue is educating communities about the broader agenda of the U.S. right. “The right’s censorship and book bans actually have very little to do with books,” she says. “They are a coordinated effort to get folks upset; they are using fear to win elections and consolidate power. Their ultimate goal is to undermine public education, public libraries and the public good.”

    In fact, Womack continues, many efforts to ban books are neither organic nor parent-led but are a coordinated attempt by right-wing forces to take charge. “The movement is being organized by the Heritage Action Fund, the Manhattan Institute and the Koch Foundation, and is then amplified by an echo chamber that includes Fox News, The Daily Caller, the Blaze, the Watchman, the New York Post and Breitbart.”

    Nonetheless, despite the threat from the right, Womack says that she is heartened by a recent announcement from the New York and Brooklyn Public Library systems that they will give people over the age of 13 access to many banned titles, in e-book or audio format, regardless of where they live.

    Similarly, a newly formed American Library Association project, Unite Against Book Bans, will ensure that opposition to censorship emerges as a key issue in the upcoming midterm elections.

    “We’ve found that where a community shows up to oppose bans and censorship, these efforts are defeated,” Womack said. “But we have to keep pushing back.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Oh God It’s Going To Get SO Much Worse

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    Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are doing in America, and for once it’s for a pretty good reason. The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board“, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established.

    The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth“, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border. We may be certain that the emphasis in the board’s establishment has been on the Russia angle, however.

    White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in her patented “You’re such a crazy idiot for questioning me about the White House” manner, dismissed alarmed questions about what specific functions this strange new DHS entity was going to be performing and what its authority will look like.

    “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” Psaki said. “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

    The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course “anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

    I mean, is anyone honestly more afraid of Russian disinformation than they are of their own government appointing itself the authority to decide what counts as disinformation?

    This important point has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle due to the utterly hypnotic ridiculousness of the person who has been appointed to run the Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, a carefully groomed swamp creature who has worked in Kyiv as a communications advisor to the Ukrainian government as part of a Fulbright fellowship, is being widely criticized by pundits and social media users for her virulent Russiagating and whatever the hell this is:

    Because of this person’s embarrassing cartoonishness, a lot more commentary lately has been going into discussing the fact that the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is run by a kooky liberal than the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a fucking Ministry of Truth.

    Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.

    The real issue at hand is the fact that this new institution will almost certainly play a role in bridging the ever-narrowing gap between government censorship and Silicon Valley censorship. The creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation, which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct government censorship from what had previously been considered normal.

    We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign government as well.

    Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).

    We should probably talk more about this. We should probably talk more about how insane it is that all mainstream western institutions immediately accepted it as a given that World War II levels of censorship and propaganda must be implemented over a faraway war that our governments are not even officially a part of.

    It started as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, without any public discussion whatsoever. Like the groundwork had already been laid and everyone had already agreed that that’s what would happen. The public had no say in whether we want to be propagandized and censored to help the US win some kind of weird infowar to ensure its continued unipolar domination of the planet. It just happened.

    No reason was given to the public as to why this must occur, and there was no public debate as to whether it should. This was by design, because propaganda only works when you don’t know it’s happening to you.

    The choice was made for us that information is too important to be left in the hands of the people. It became set in stone that we are to be a propaganda-based society rather than a truth-based society. No discussion was offered, and no debate was allowed.

    And as bad as it is, it’s on track to get much, much worse. They’re already setting up “disinformation” regulation in the government which presides over Silicon Valley, the proxy war between the US and Ukraine is escalating by the day, and aggressions are ramping up against China over both the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think imperial narrative management is intense now, wait until the US empire’s struggle to secure global hegemony really gets going.

    Do you consent to this? Do you? It’s something you kind of have to take a position on, because its implications have a direct effect on our lives as individuals and on our trajectory as a society. How much are we willing to sacrifice to help the US win an infowar against Russia?

    The question of whether we should abandon all hope of ever becoming a truth-based society and committing instead to winning propaganda wars for a globe-spanning empire is perhaps the most consequential decision we’ve ever had to make as a species. Which is why we weren’t given a choice. It’s just been foisted upon us.

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. By taking our control of information out of our hands without asking our permission and determining for us that we are to be a propaganda-based civilization for the foreseeable future, they have stolen something sacred from us. Something they had no right to take.

    Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly the wrong direction.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Obama Wants Censorship

    On April 21, 2022 former president Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University on the subject of social media. In typical Obamaesque fashion, he didn’t state his point plainly. He used a lot of time, more than an hour, to advocate for social media censorship. He only used that word once, in order to deny that it was in fact what he meant, but the weasel words and obfuscation couldn’t hide what Obama was talking about.

    In 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, the candidate she thought easiest to beat, Obama first presented his lament about “disinformation” and “fake news.” His real concern was that Trump’s victory proved that millions of people paid no attention to or even scorned, corporate media.

    The post Obama Wants Censorship appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives

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    In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

    Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.

    Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.

    MintPress News happens to have published critical journalism about PayPal itself in the past, like the articles it published in 2018 by Whitney Webb documenting the way shady PayPal-linked billionaires Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have advanced the interests of the US empire and facilitated imperial narrative control, or this one from 2016 on how the company blocks Palestinians from opening accounts while showing no such bias against illegal Israeli settlers.

    I asked MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley for comment on PayPal’s move. Here is her response in full:

    “Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars. 

    “In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department. 

    “It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’. 

    “We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.

    “No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.” 

    PayPal has also banned Caleb Maupin, an American speaker and journalist whose work has already seen his personal Twitter account branded “Russia state-affiliated media” by the US state-affiliated platform.

    “Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” said Maupin when asked for comment. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”

    Indeed, a very effective way to silence unauthorized media voices is to make it difficult for them to earn a living making their voices heard. Speaking from experience I know for a fact I couldn’t put out a fraction of the content I put out if I was forced to work a 9-5 job in some office rather than having the freedom to put all my time and mental energy into this work thanks to the generous support of my readers. Cutting me off from that funding would be the same as censoring me directly, because there’s no way I could continue the kind of work I do.

    We are at a profoundly dangerous and frightening point in human history. The US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is escalating by the day and the drums of war are beating ever louder against China over the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. You think censorship is bad now, wait until this global power grab really gets going.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Siding With The US Empire Is Always Wrong: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    If you get the feeling that all this Ukraine flag-waving is one more vapid mainstream propaganda initiative used to manufacture consent for an agenda that has nothing to do with what you’re being told, it’s because that’s exactly what is happening.

    ❖

    In this war Russia has killed many Ukrainians and Ukraine has killed many Russians and the US empire has killed many Ukrainians and Russians.

    ❖

    It’s nuts that there are still grown adults who think Putin invaded Ukraine for no other reason than because he is evil and hates freedom.

    ❖

    Focus less on the Azov Battalion and more on the fact that the US deliberately provoked this war with the goal of toppling Moscow and is threatening all our lives with increasingly reckless brinkmanship against a nuclear superpower.

    ❖

    People who promote a US/NATO war with Russia are more dangerous and depraved than racists, homophobes, transphobes and antisemites, and they should be treated accordingly. They are the most dangerous extremists on earth. This should be completely uncontroversial and obvious to literally everyone.

    ❖

    More Americans know Marge Simpson’s sisters’ favorite TV show than know their government is waging a deliberately provoked and profoundly dangerous proxy war against a nuclear superpower. This is because mainstream western media — all of it — is propaganda.

    ❖

    Everyone should be able to say whatever the fuck they want about a proxy war instigated by the world’s most powerful government that could very easily end up sparking a nuclear war.

    ❖

    If you’re on the side of the US empire on any issue you are on the wrong side. This doesn’t mean the other side is always necessarily in the right, it just means a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by lies, murder and tyranny will always be in the wrong. Yes, it is that simple.

    ❖

    It must be the most soul-destroying thing in the world to go to journalism school, study hard, graduate in front of your whole family, work your ass off building up a resume, get a steady job, and then find yourself writing hit pieces about disobedient Youtubers for The Daily Beast.

    ❖

    Twitter is nature’s way of dispelling the common misconception that liberals are smart.

    ❖

    If I was the world’s biggest narcissist, I’d probably try to become the richest person on earth, and do everything I can to make sure everyone’s always talking about me, and convince everyone that I’m going to save the world with my technology so I get a weird cult to worship me.

    ❖

    Twitter being biased in favor of one nation’s government is vastly more consequential than Twitter being biased in favor of one US political party. So far we’re only seeing emphasis on the latter, indicating that Twitter will continue functioning as a US propaganda/censorship apparatus. It should probably get more attention that it’s effectively impossible to have any kind of major media company in the US and not have it be absorbed into the US propaganda machine.

    ❖

    The Assange case is very simple: the most powerful government in the world is trying to criminalize journalism about its nefarious behavior anywhere in the world. You can sum it up in a breath. It’s only narrative spin and smears that make it seem like some big complicated thing.

    ❖

    Empires haven’t disappeared as the world grows more conscious of the evils of empire, they’ve just gotten sneakier and bitchier. They used to nail you to a piece of wood in public if you defied them, now they’ve got to go through this whole deceitful lawfare process just to kill one journalist.

    Empires used to just openly conquer foreign territories because they want to own them. Then it became about “civilizing” them. Now they pretend it’s about “freedom and democracy”, and they don’t even make you change your flag to theirs.

    Empires used to exterminate entire towns who dared to disobey them, now they have to launch these giant bitchy propaganda operations to psychologically manipulate populations into hating their enemies.

    Empires are just really sneaky, bitchy, gossippy, backstabby versions of what they’ve always been. They’re just as oppressive and violent, but the fact that there are more eyes on their behavior means they have to be so much more manipulative and covert about what they do.

    The more visible things become, the more hard work and cleverness is required to run an empire. That’s why they’re working so hard to make things less visible via censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the criminalization of journalism.

    ❖

    The biggest mistake you can make is to trust that your leaders’ actions would seem more sensible and appropriate if you knew what they know and understood what they understand. The wars really are as horrific and as pointless as they appear. The escalations in tyranny really are as bad as they seem. It’s not that you don’t understand what you’re looking at, it’s that you’re not a sociopath.

    ❖

    Your thoughts and opinions matter. Know how you can tell? Because every single day the world’s most powerful people pour an immense amount of wealth and energy into trying to manipulate them.

    ❖

    When a loved one is very self-destructive you can’t control their fate; at some point you’ve just got to let them make their mistakes and hope something in them wakes up before they wind up dead. That’s pretty much how you’ve got to be with the entire human species at this point.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship Of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming The New Norm

    Google has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Earlier this month, Google AdSense sent a message to a myriad of publishers, including MintPress News, informing us that, “Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.” This content, it went on to say, “includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim-blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”

    The post An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship Of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming The New Norm appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Billionaires Only Come To The Rescue In Movies And Comic Books

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Twitter has done an about-face and sold the company to the richest person in the world for $44 billion.

    Rightists are having a merry old time making fun of the melodramatic reactions from high-profile liberals who fear Elon Musk’s purchase will lead to more free speech on the platform for people who don’t align with them politically, and many of the blue-checkmarked commentariat who live on Twitter and can’t go five minutes without checking their notifications are making a big show of pretending they’re about to leave.

    Many critics on the left are responding to the news by ringing alarm bells about a powerful oligarch controlling an influential social media platform, as though Twitter was anything besides oligarch-controlled before today and as though billionaires buying up media is some shocking new development. Some anti-imperialists have expressed tentative hope that this new development may lead to some rollback of the jarring escalations in censorship we’ve been seeing on the platform in defense of US empire narratives, due to the plutocrat’s comments on the importance of free speech.

    From what I can see, though, the overwhelming majority of excitement on Twitter about Musk’s purchase is coming not from those who challenge power in any meaningful way but from those who want Donald Trump’s account restored and want to be able to say mean things to trans people. And I suspect that says a lot about what we’re looking at here.

    This important distinction was summed up by journalist Michael Tracey, who tweeted, “The biggest test for Elon Musk will not be whether he rolls back the most obvious ‘woke’ content policies — that should be a given — but whether he continues to let Twitter be used as a vehicle for the US national security state to ‘counter’ official enemies like Russia and China.”

    Speaking for myself I won’t be surprised if we do see some of the former, but I will be absolutely astonished if we see the latter.

    You don’t get to be a billionaire, much less a billionaire with massively influential media ownership, unless you collaborate with existing power structures. Musk has certainly been collaborating with the oligarchic empire very nicely up until this point, and it’s a safe bet that his purchase would not be happening if the empire felt its narrative control machine was in any way threatened by it.

    Believing Elon Musk is going to save Twitter is as naive as believing Joe Biden was going to save America. Arguing over which oligarchs should control the media is as silly and undignified as arguing over which oligarch-owned politicians should run the government.

    Billionaires coming to the rescue only happens in movies and comic books. You’re as likely to be saved by Elon Musk as you are by Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark.

    Image

    How many times are people going to fall for this “a billionaire is about to stick it to the man and save us all” schtick? It’s very sad that we’re at a point where speech is being throttled so severely that people are hoping an eccentric billionaire will swoop in and rescue them from oppression. Real life is like a dumber, more boring version of Gotham City, except Batman is working with the bad guys.

    I’ll start paying attention to Musk’s talk about free speech if and when Twitter stops censoring Russian media and unbans people like Scott Ritter who were removed from the platform for questioning official empire narratives about what’s happening in Ukraine. Until then I’m going to assume he’s at most only interested in protecting speech that doesn’t threaten the powerful like Republican partisan bullshit and hate speech against marginalized groups.

    The billionaires are not coming to save us. The idea that they might is a carefully constructed propaganda narrative that we’ve been sold for generations. The leaders of the capitalist class are not going to overturn the systems of oppression and exploitation which form the very foundation of capitalism. Superhero stories are designed to prevent us from realizing that only we the people have the power to rescue ourselves.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Alice Walker And The Price Of Conscience

    There is a steep price to pay for having a conscience and more importantly the courage to act on it. The hounds of hell pin you to the cross, hammering nails into your hands and feet as they grin like the Cheshire cat and mouth bromides about respect for human rights, freedom of expression and diversity. I have watched this happen for some time to Alice Walker, one of the most gifted and courageous writers in America. Walker, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, has felt the bitter sting of racism. She refuses to be silent about the plight of the oppressed, including the Palestinians.

    The post Alice Walker And The Price Of Conscience appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Notes from Wartorn Ethiopia, Part II

    Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is experiencing a building boom, which includes all the foreign embassies near the airport. The din of construction is non-stop on weekdays. Lots of sky high office buildings and condos underway.

    Even the Embassy of Bangladesh is building new floors right across the street from my alleyway hotel. Mercedes drive in and out, and I wonder how such a poor country affords them, but Mercedes seem to be the ambassadorial vehicle of choice. Governments like Bangladesh, which don’t maintain embassies in many other countries, no doubt maintain them here because Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union, and with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam coming online, Ethiopia is emerging as a regional powerhouse, despite how much that dismays US policymakers.

    The post Notes from Wartorn Ethiopia, Part II appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • American Commissars

    The ruling class, made up of the traditional elites that run the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, is employing draconian forms of censorship on its right-wing and left-wing critics in a desperate effort to cling to power. The traditional elites were discredited for pushing through a series of corporate assaults on workers, from deindustrialization to trade deals. They were unable to stem rising inflation, the looming economic crisis and the ecological emergency. They were incapable of carrying out significant social and political reform to ameliorate widespread suffering and refused to accept responsibility for two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East. And now they have launched a new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadow banning. De-platforming.

    The post American Commissars appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • This War Is A Propaganda Campaign Wrapped In A Psyop: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The country with the worst elections in the western world, whose government intervenes in foreign elections more than any other government on earth, is waging a dangerous proxy war to save democracy in Ukraine, a nation which is not a democracy by any reasonable definition.

    ❖

    Anyone who trusts any government is a fool. Anyone who trusts the world’s most powerful government is a damn fool. Anyone who trusts the world’s most powerful government while it runs massive propaganda ops for a dangerous proxy war should be forbidden to use the grown-up scissors.

    ❖

    It’s impossible to overstate how completely blanketed by propaganda distortion the Ukraine war is. US spooks saying they’re leaking disinfo to the press, Ukrainian war propaganda, the blackout on Ukrainian losses, the uncritical media acceptance of allegations against Russia, etc. This war is a propaganda campaign wrapped in a psyop.

    There are only two possibilities: you either (A) accept the fact that the information ecosystem around this war is too polluted to know very much of anything for certain and adjust your perceptions accordingly, or (B) you believe false things about this war. That’s it.

    Propaganda only works on people who don’t know they’re being propagandized. If you’re acutely aware that a historically unprecedented effort is going into manipulating your understanding of what’s happening in a strategically crucial war in the digital age, you’re more grounded.

    And of course the propaganda cuts both ways. Obviously it does. Uncritically believing Russia-aligned sources about this war is just as sure to give you an inaccurate picture of events as uncritically believing US/NATO/Ukraine-aligned sources (i.e. all mass media). It’s psyops all the way down.

    One thing that helps is rather than forming hard beliefs about what’s going on in this war, assign probabilities instead. Label different narratives zero, low, moderate, high or very high confidence like a spook analyzing intelligence. Might as well, because spooks are distorting it all anyway.

    This is one of those situations where your own best guess about what’s happening is infinitely superior to what you’re told by the news media, because at least you know your own best guess is assembled in good faith while you know news media narratives are rife with propaganda distortion. If you’re genuinely interested in understanding what’s going on with this war, get as much information from as diverse an array of sources as possible, preferencing those who don’t appear aligned with any power structure and aren’t egoically or financially invested in any side.

    ❖

    ❖

    Zelensky, man. The last time a powerful empire poured this much PR and perception management into the image of a foreign Jewish leader it involved stained glass and crucifixes.

    ❖

    It was clear we’d reached a whole new level of Orwellian doublethink when it turned out liberals will call literally anyone in the world a Nazi except actual, literal Nazis.

    ❖

    You know capitalism is totally working when there are people getting paid millions to help start wars by people who make billions from wars while Silicon Valley megacorporations are censoring those who try to end wars and everyone’s praying the world’s richest man will stop this.

    ❖

    There are no “private” companies worth billions of dollars. In a corporatist system it is impossible to grow that big without becoming intertwined with ruling power structures. This is especially true for corporations of immense political consequence, like social media platforms.

    ❖

    We are surrounded by propaganda at all times. Our entire civilization is saturated with it. When you say you support internet censorship to stop “Russian propaganda”, what you are really saying is that you only want your own rulers propagandizing you.

    ❖

    The notion that some opinions are Russian is one of the most mind-destroying beliefs ever circulated in a secular society.

    ❖

    All the shitlibs yelling “Don’t listen to Chomsky!” for his comments about Ukraine will soon be yelling “Listen to Chomsky!” when it’s time to wheel him out again to tell everyone they need to vote Democrat.

    ❖

     

    The weirdest thing about interacting with Ukraine flag accounts online is how seriously they expect to be taken while saying ridiculous bullshit. No I’m not an evil demonic monster for opposing nuclear brinkmanship and online censorship and saying the US lies about wars. Shut up, idiot.

    If you look at their responses to criticisms of the establishment line on Ukraine it’s always like ten percent MSM propaganda and ninety percent empty outraged sputtering. Just vapid emoting. And they sincerely seem to expect you to take that seriously and treat them like adults.

    ❖

    A mainstream news reporter is someone who uncritically publishes information provided by government agencies like it’s news and does investigative pieces on Twitch streamers who say wrong things about Ukraine and then wins three Pulitzers for their fearless hard-nosed journalism.

    ❖

    Watching Hollywood movies is weird when you’re acutely aware that everyone on the screen loves Biden and supports internet censorship and wants a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • American Dissent On Ukraine Is Dying In Darkness

    As the death toll in Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine continues to rise, there have only been a handful of Westerners publicly questioning NATO and the West’s role in the conflict. These voices are becoming fewer and further between as a wave of feverish backlash engulfs any dissent on the subject. One of these voices belongs to Professor Michael J. Brenner, a lifelong academic, Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, as well as former Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner’s credentials also include having worked at the Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense and Westinghouse, and written several books on American foreign policy. From the vantage point of decades of experience and studies, the intellectual regularly shared his thoughts on topics of interest through a mailing list sent to thousands of readers—that is until the response to his Ukraine analysis made him question why he bothered in the first place.

    The post American Dissent On Ukraine Is Dying In Darkness appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The US Win A Propaganda War Against Putin?

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    There’s a very important question that we all need to be asking ourselves at this point in history, and that question is as follows: how much are we as a society willing to sacrifice so that the US government can win a propaganda war against Vladimir Putin?

    Let me explain.

    One severely under-discussed aspect of the latest round of escalations in Silicon Valley censorship which began at the start of the Ukraine war is the fact that it’s an entirely unprecedented order of censorship protocol. While it might look similar to all the other waves of social media purges and new categories of banned content that we’ve been experiencing since it became mainstream doctrine after the 2016 US election that tech platforms need to strictly regulate online speech, the justifications for it have taken a drastic deviation from established patterns.

    What sets this new censorship escalation apart from its predecessors is that this time nobody’s pretending that it’s being done in the interests of the people. With the censorship of racists the argument was that they were inciting hate crimes and racial harassment. With the censorship of Alex Jones and QAnon the argument was that they were inciting violence. With the censorship of Covid skeptics the argument was that they were promoting misinformation that could be deadly. Even with the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story it was argued that there was a need to protect election integrity from disinformation of potentially foreign origin.

    With censorship relating to the Ukraine war there is no argument that it’s being done to help the people. There is no case to be made that letting people say wrong things about this war kills Ukrainians, Americans, or anyone else. There is no case to be made that disputing claims about Russian war crimes will damage America’s democratic processes. It’s just, “Well we can’t have people saying wrong things about a war, can we?”

    Ask a properly brainwashed liberal why they support the censorship of someone who disputes US narratives about Russian war crimes in Bucha or Mariupol and they’ll probably tell you something like “Well, it’s disinformation!” or “Because it’s propaganda!” or “How much is Putin paying you??” But what they won’t be able to do is articulate exactly what specific harm is being done by such speech in the same way that they could when defending the censorship of Covid skeptics or the factions responsible for last year’s riot in the Capitol building.

    The one argument you’ll get, if you really press the issue, is that the United States is in a propaganda war with Russia, and it is in our society’s interests for our media institutions to help the United States win that propaganda war. Cold wars are fought between nuclear powers because hot warfare would risk annihilating both nations, leaving only other forms of war like psychological warfare available. There’s no argument that this new escalation in censorship saves lives or protects elections, but there is an argument that it can help facilitate the long-term cold war agendas of the United States.

    But what does that mean exactly? It means if we accept this argument we’re knowingly consenting to a situation where all the major news outlets, websites and apps that people look to for information about the world are geared not toward telling us true things about reality, but toward beating Vladimir Putin in some weird psywar. It means abandoning any ambitions of being a truth-based civilization that is guided by facts, and instead accepting an existence as a propaganda-based civilization geared toward making sure we all think thoughts that hurt Moscow’s long-term strategic interests.

    And it’s just absolutely freakish that this is a decision that has already been made for us, without any public discussion as to whether or not that’s the kind of society we want to live in. They jumped right from “We’re censoring speech to protect you from violence and viruses” to “We’re censoring speech to help our government conduct information warfare against a foreign adversary.” Without skipping a beat.

    The consent-manufacturing class has helped pave the way for this smooth transition with their relentless and ongoing calls for more and more censorship, and for years we’ve been seeing signs that they view it as their duty to help facilitate an information war against Russia.

    Back in 2018 we saw a BBC reporter admonish a former high-ranking British navy official for speculating that the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria was a false flag, a claim we now have mountains of evidence is likely true thanks to whistleblowers from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The reason the reporter gave for her objection to those comments was that “we’re in an information war with Russia.”

    “Given that we’re in an information war with Russia on so many fronts, do you think perhaps it’s inadvisable to be stating this so publicly given your position and your profile? Isn’t there a danger that you’re muddying the waters?” the BBC’s Annita McVeigh asked Admiral Alan West after his comments.

    We saw a similar indication in the mass media a few weeks later in an interview with former Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who was admonished by CNN’s Chris Cuomo for highlighting the completely uncontroversial fact that the US is an extremely egregious offender when it comes to interferences in foreign elections.

    “You know, that would be the case for Russia to make, not from the American perspective,” Cuomo said in response to Stein’s entirely accurate remarks. “Of course, there’s hypocrisy involved, lots of different big state actors do lots of things that they may not want people to know about. But let Russia say that the United States did it to us, and here’s how they did it, so this is fair play.”

    Which is the same as saying, “Forget what’s factually true. Don’t say true things that might help Russian interests. That’s Russia’s job. Our job here on CNN is to say things that hurt Russian interests.

    We can trace the mainstreaming of the idea that it’s the western media’s job to manipulate information in the public interest, rather than simply tell the truth, back to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win. In what was arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath, the consent-manufacturing class came to the decision that Trump’s election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control.

    In October 2020 during the Hunter Biden laptop scandal The Spectator‘s Stephen L Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton’s 2016 loss that it was their moral duty to hide facts from the public which might lead to Trump’s re-election.

    “For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the ‘but her emails’ dilemma,” Miller writes. “Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids’ table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Trump’s foibles. It’s an error no journalist wants to repeat.”

    Once “journalists” accepted that their most important job is not to tell the truth but to keep people from thinking bad thoughts about the status quo political system, it was inevitable that they’d start enthusiastically cheerleading for more internet censorship. They see it as their duty, which is why now the leading proponents of online censorship are corporate media reporters.

    But it shouldn’t be this way. There’s no legitimate reason for the Silicon Valley proxies of the most powerful government on earth to be censoring people for disagreeing with that government about a war, yet this is exactly what’s happening and it’s happening more and more. It should alarm us all that it’s becoming increasingly acceptable to silence people not because they’re circulating dangerous disinfo, nor even because they’re saying things that are in any way false, but solely because they are saying things which undermine the US infowar.

    People should absolutely be allowed to say things which disagree with the most powerful empire in history about a war. They should even be allowed to say brazenly false things about that war, because otherwise only the powerful will be allowed to say brazenly false things about it.

    Free speech is important not because it’s nice to be able to say what you want, but because the free flow of ideas and information creates a check on the powerful. It gives people the ability to hold the powerful to account. Which is exactly why the powerful work to eliminate it.

    We should see it as a huge, huge problem that so much of the world has been herded onto these giant monopolistic speech platforms that conduct censorship in complete alignment with the mightiest power structure in the world. This is the exact opposite of putting a check on power.

    How much are we as a society willing to give up for the US government and its allies to win a propaganda war against Putin? Are we willing to commit to being a civilization for which the primary consideration with any piece of data is not whether or not it’s true, but whether it helps undermine Russia?

    This is a conversation which should already have been going on in mainstream circles for some time now, but it never even started. Let’s start it.

    _________________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • More Escalations In Online Censorship

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    YouTube has been deleting videos disputing the US government narrative about Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, validating concerns we’ve discussed previously that Silicon Valley platforms would begin censoring anyone who challenges the authorized version of events in this war.

    “By the way, my video ‘Bucha: More Lies’ has been deleted [by] YouTube’s censors,” reads a recent tweet by Gonzalo Lira.

    “My stream last night on RBN was censored on Youtube after debunking the Bucha Massacre narrative,” Revolutionary Blackout Network reports.

    It would seem that this clears up what YouTube meant when it said last month, “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy.”

    There has as yet been no investigation into what happened in Bucha by any international body and there are plenty of arguments to be made questioning aspects of the Official Story that westerners are being aggressively force fed by the narrative control machine of the US-centralized empire. Which would mean that YouTube is defining “well-documented” as “unproven assertions by the US government.”

    YouTube is also demonetizing content that is more broadly critical of the US/NATO/Ukraine side of the war.

    “Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war,” a notice that’s being sent to users reads. “This pause includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”

    And can I just add here that as a survivor of rape and abuse it makes me want to scream my fucking throat out to see phrases like “victim blaming” used to suppress speech criticizing the unipolarist geostrategic agendas of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. It’s extremely obnoxious how common this disgusting power-serving line has become.

    It’s probably also worth noting at this point that YouTube is owned by Google, which is a US military contractor and which has been inseparably intertwined with US intelligence agencies from its very inception.

    The radius of what these government-tied oligarchic Silicon Valley megacorporations deem worthy of censorship has been getting wider and wider with every major news story: from eliminating Russian trolls, to thwarting domestic extremists, to protecting election integrity, to stopping Covid misinformation. Now they’re just openly saying they’re censoring those who disagree with the world’s most powerful government about a war. The excuses change from day to day, but the only constant is that we’re always told the solution is more internet censorship.

    The Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch has also jumped aboard this latest censorship escalation, banning multiple accounts for voicing wrongthink about Ukraine in response to an inquiry by Financial Times as to why it’s permitting “pro-Kremlin falsehoods” on the platform. The Financial Times inquiry followed a report tattling on those accounts by the Soros and Omidyar-funded Tech Transparency Project.

    Financial Times writes the following:

    Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Twitch said it would move to “prohibit harmful misinformation actors from using our service”. But a report from the Tech Transparency Project detailed multiple accounts pushing pro-Kremlin falsehoods, such as claims the invasion was “de-Nazifying” Ukraine and a Russian “special operation”. Other streams peddled falsehoods about “biolabs” being set up in the war-torn country.

     

    Twitch banned several accounts cited in the report and was investigating several more, it said, after being presented with the findings on Wednesday.

    Twitter, another massive platform with ties to the US government, has also seized the moment as an opportunity to ratchet up the censorship of empire critics. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has been banned from the platform for simply tweeting criticisms of the establishment Bucha narrative; his account was suspended for one such criticism, the suspension was reversed upon review by Twitter, and then his account was again shut down for another such criticism he’d made days earlier. Journalist Pepe Escobar, who has been openly sympathetic to the Russian side of the conflict, was banned for saying that Azov neo-Nazis would be be “disinfected” with a “certified highway to hell thermobaric flamethrower.”

    This dramatic uptick in censorship of political speech is happening against the backdrop of Elon Musk’s shenanigans about potentially buying Twitter in full, which has sent mainstream liberals into a tizzy over fears that speech on the platform would become less restricted due to statements Musk has made about opposing online censorship. I have a hard time imagining that the richest man in the world would actually do anything to protect free speech, but the horror with which imperial narrative managers are reacting to the faintest hint of that possibility is very revealing:

    I might not necessarily agree with everything that’s been said by everyone who’s had their voices silenced in this latest ramp-up of online censorship, but I do strongly believe that only the worst and/or most deluded among us support their silencing. Under no possible framing is suppressing criticism of the mightiest power structure of all time a reasonable or acceptable thing to do.

    I mean we’re already at a point here where the arguments for censorship don’t even make sense, when you look at them. When we were told people like Alex Jones and conspiracy circles like QAnon needed to be censored because they incite violence and harassment I didn’t agree with it, but at least the arguments about the need to prevent violence technically made sense. When we were told Covid skeptics need to be censored I didn’t agree with it, but at least the argument that people were dying as a result of being misinformed about a deadly virus technically made sense.

    But what exactly is the argument for censoring wrongthink about the Ukraine war? Even if we pretend that everything they’re saying is 100% false and completely immoral, so what? What harm is being done? Does a Ukrainian drop dead every time someone says they don’t believe Russia committed war crimes in Bucha or Mariupol? Does Putin get magic murder powers if enough social media users say they support his war? Do liberal faces melt off their skulls if they accidentally see an RT headline?

    Of course not. There’s no sensible argument that this new escalation in censorship is saving lives or that it’s being done for the good of the public. It’s being done to protect the interests of the powerful, plain and simple. It’s being done to prevent people from thinking unauthorized thoughts about a proxy war that was deliberately provoked to advance US strategic interests. And it’s being done to expand the radius of internet censorship for its own sake.

    It’s not healthy to seek control over what people say and think. Free speech is important not because it makes people sad when they don’t get to say what they want, but because the free exchange of ideas and information is how we collectively bring awareness to problems, change minds, stir the zeitgeist, and, if necessary, organize mass resistance.

    And that’s exactly why the powerful work to prevent the free exchange of ideas and information. If people are permitted to stand at the center of a digital public square and send an unauthorized idea or piece of information viral if it resonates with others, that is a direct threat to status quo power structures. It’s not about saving Ukrainians, ending Covid misinformation, preventing violence, or any of the other excuses they’ve been rolling out since 2016. It’s about censoring the internet.

    The advent of the internet gave the powerful the ability to propagandize the public far more rapidly and efficiently than they previously could, but it also brought on the risk of a democratized information space where the public can collectively figure out together that they’re being subjected to tyranny and deceit and decide to put an end to it. Herding the public onto these giant monopolistic platforms that are working in greater and greater intimacy with the empire is how our rulers have chosen to address this dilemma.

    The idea is to keep the vast propagandizing power of the internet open while forcing its democratizing power closed, thereby keeping the balance of power tilted far toward the empire managers while manipulating us into believing this is all happening for our own good. But that’s all it is: manipulation. Psychological manipulation at mass scale, for the benefit of the powerful. That’s all this has ever been.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Western Dissent From US/NATO Policy On Ukraine Is Small, Yet The Censorship Campaign Is Extreme

    On a virtually daily basis, any off-key news agency, independent platform or individual citizen is liable to be banished from the internet. In early March, barely a week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the twenty-seven nation European Union — citing “disinformation” and “public order and security” — officially banned the Russian state-news outlets RT and Sputnik from being heard anywhere in Europe. In what Reuters called “an unprecedented move,” all television and online platforms were barred by force of law from airing content from those two outlets. Even prior to that censorship order from the state, Facebook and Google were already banning those outlets, and Twitter immediately announced they would as well, in compliance with the new EU law.

    The post Western Dissent From US/NATO Policy On Ukraine Is Small, Yet The Censorship Campaign Is Extreme appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Assange Case Invalidates US Criticisms Of Russia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you’ve been following the news about Ukraine but still don’t understand that it’s the single most aggressively narrative managed and psyop-intensive war in human history, there is a 100 percent chance you believe false things about what’s happening there.

    ❖

    It’s not a question of if the US played a role in Imran Khan’s removal but how and to what extent.

    ❖

    We’re about to see a judge sign off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for exposing the empire’s war crimes while that same empire blasts us all in the face with an unprecedented war propaganda campaign about rescuing Ukraine’s freedom and democracy.

    “Russia must be held accountable for its war crimes,” said the empire while imprisoning a journalist for trying to hold it accountable for war crimes.

    Just the fact that the US and UK are imprisoning a journalist for exposing the war crimes of a war criminal president—just that one fact by itself—completely invalidates all criticisms of Russia from Washington and its allies.

    Fun little factoid: if you subtract all the narratives being used to justify it, the Assange case looks exactly the same as the world’s most powerful government imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth.

    ❖

    ❖

    “Opinion” segments and articles in mainstream news media exist not to give you an idea of what opinions are out there but to define what opinions are permissible. The front page teaches you what to think, the opinion section teaches you how to think.

    ❖

    Once you figure out that corporations are part of the government it becomes clear what corporate media propaganda and corporate internet censorship really are.

    ❖

    The Russiagate psyop got “liberals” okay with internet censorship, cold war brinkmanship, and being lied to by the mass media day after day for the greater good, and now the US empire just so happens to be ramping up all three of those things to facilitate agendas against Russia.

    ❖

     

    Public consent for Silicon Valley censorship has been used to justify a wider and wider radius of speech suppression to the point that we’re now seeing the hammer dropped on people whose only crime is criticizing the most dangerous agendas of the world’s most powerful government.

    Many of us warned from the beginning that protocols to silence figures like Alex Jones would be expanded to include things like anti-imperialists being purged en masse for their political speech. The only ones who disputed this are idiots who now regret their position and those who wanted to suppress dissent all along.

    Are you listening now, assholes? Do you still think our opposition to this was about “supporting Alex Jones,” or do you now see that it was always about resisting government-tied monopolistic megacorporations being given the authority to censor worldwide speech for the US empire?

     

     

    Free speech is important not because it’s nice to be able to say what you want, but because it creates a check on the powerful. The ability to freely share ideas and information is what makes it possible to bring attention to problems, change minds, stir the zeitgeist, and organize mass resistance.

    For this reason there should be no speech restrictions on the platforms where people have come to congregate to share ideas and information besides illegal activities like child pornography. Not because it makes Johnny Proudboy sad if he can’t speak, but to put a check on power.

    That’s why it’s a moot point whether censorship on those giant platforms technically violates free speech laws or not; it violates the spirit behind the very reason those legal speech protections were created in the first place, namely to move power from the government to the people. And for this spirit to be upheld it’s necessary that all ideas and information are allowed to be shared freely, not just some of them. Because there’s no institution you could trust as an official arbiter of what ideas and information are valid without creating a power imbalance.

    People should be allowed to scrutinize any and all narratives of the powerful. They should be allowed to share unauthorized ideas and information. They should even be allowed to lie, because otherwise the only people allowed to lie will be the powerful. Democratizing information sharing is democratizing power.

    ❖

    Remember after 9/11 when Republicans got it into their heads that you need to torture people all the time to prevent terrorism, and then a TV series started on Fox where the hero tortures people all the time to stop terrorists? Propaganda was way more ham-fisted back then.

    ❖

    Oh yeah well what about the RUSSIAN empire, huh?? What about CHINESE imperialism? What about the IRANIAN unipolar world hegemon? How come you never criticize CUBA for circling the planet with hundreds of military bases?? What about VENEZUELAN nuclear brinkmanship, you hypocrite?

    ❖

    My haters are a fun mix of uninformed imperialists who think I’m crazy for saying the US is trying to rule the world and informed imperialists who think I’m naive for saying the US shouldn’t try to rule the world.

    ❖

    Never let anyone shame you for focusing your criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government. It’s not strange and suspicious that you do that, it’s strange and suspicious that more people don’t.

    ❖

    Humanity will either extinguish itself in a cataclysm of its own making or awaken from its delusion-based conditioning and become a conscious species. And whichever one happens, all our partisan bickering and sectarian spats will look pretty ridiculous in retrospect when it does.

    ____________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Withering of human rights? The heckler’s veto and norm-creation through film censorship in India

    We define censorship as the striking out of free expression from the public record for state security, removing hate speech and other objectionable content. It is also an act of convenience.

    India exercises ‘prior restraint’ on films. The national Censor Board examines films’ suitability before exhibition. The Supreme Court of India once stated that film is a separate class of expression; it registers more emphatically with the audience than, say, a radio broadcast or newspaper editorial. Therefore, if it is likely to incite violence — risking ‘public order’ — it can be censored, following Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution. Needless to say, censorship on these grounds has become problematically arbitrary.

    There is a pattern of public-state interaction around allegedly disorder-inciting films: a) a group feels wronged by some films, and threatens/commits violence, b) the State palliates, often completely censoring films. This State behaviour is supposedly premised on maintaining public order. Consequently, it is severely flawed.

    Capability to ban films on grounds of “public order”, a vague term, gives the State near-absolute, unaccountable freedom to censor media, often resulting in a violation of the freedom of expression, and provocatively also of other human rights. Importantly, it conveys that public discourse, including human-rights discourse, can be violently subverted with impunity. In this blogpost, I suggest that censorship due to fear of oppositional violence (called ‘hecklers’ veto’) is a violation of human rights on two counts: a) the violation of the human right to freedom of expression and b) the duty to facilitate the realization of human rights.

    Violation of the right to free expression

    In Freemuse Organization’s independent survey on media censorship, India ranked fourth among 89 countries, reportedly detaining 11 artists in 2019-2020. India’s mottled history with film censorship has seen several bans due to such actual or predicted risks to ‘public order’. Most cases feature groups finding certain films inadequate, ahistorical, or misleading. In the past, small public, yet vocal groups have advocated violence, destroyed sets, and vandalized cinemas. Examples include Jodhaa Akbar (2008), a film about the Mughal emperor (faced protests for allegedly distorting history),  The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Vishwaroopam (2013) (banned due to opposition from religious organizations).

    Recent examples include Final Solution (an enquiry into the 2002 Gujarat riots—severe intercommunal violence in the Indian state), War and Peace (an anti-war documentary that criticized the Indian nuclear program),  and Udta Punjab (depicted drug-abuse problems in Punjab (India) and was censored for fear of heckling). That these films sought to present counterpoints on important public topics is obvious. Final Solution, for instance, explored the state government’s involvement in the violence at Gujarat which saw deaths on a massive scale. It levelled the charge that the State government had not done “enough” to prevent the violence. The film was banned on grounds that it could cause communal tension, but political undertones have been suggested.

    War and Peace broke away from the glorification of nuclear armoury. It elicited strong disapproval for a quoted reference to the nuclear stocks as Hindu bombs, for India, and Muslim bombs, for Pakistan — hinting at nuclear nationalism, and Pakistan’s and the BJP’s apparently religious-nationalist tendencies, which was the ruling party then and was again voted to power in 2014 and 2019. The Board suggested deleting the allegedly incendiary speech, as it might compel the audience to breach public order.  Observations in the court judgment, which reversed the deletion, are universally applicable to films: the Indian Constitution recognizes the importance of contrarian views for the furtherance of society, and, the audience is expected to have autonomy over their reactions to film, and the State shall not infantilize them.

    When violence is directed at films, the State should protect films and not ban them. This is the oft-noted positive obligation of the State, and its active responsibility to protect free speech and expression. The court explicitly mentioned heckler’s veto while chastising the State’s easy submission to opposition, in the form of imminent religious violence in the Da Vinci Code (2006) episode. This obligation has been emphasized in political censorship cases, too. Adherence to the positive obligation protects expression, and maintains public order, by preventing assault on filmmakers and the destruction of sets. It is in consonance with the Constitution as well as the ICCPR. Hence, the State is wrong in resorting to censorship as a stopgap measure to protect public order.

    Pummeling human-rights discourse

    A State banning films solely for ‘maintaining public order’, is in violation of this positive obligation. This feeds the creation of certain norms, which Robert C Post defines as the State choosing which public narrative, and for our purpose, which human-rights narrative, is deemed acceptable.

    For example, banning a film depicting “female desire” sets a precedent laced with misogyny; banning War and Peace tacitly censors critical views on crucial topics like nuclear warfare. Thus, censorship based on a fear of opposition to ‘contrarian’ messages risks another human rights violation: the intercommunity duty to promote human rights by contributing to a democratic, “free and full development” of a person (Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)). Here, it is important to borrow an observation from the Rangarajan judgment: by “continual exposure to films of a similar character” the attitude of a large community could be altered. By censoring contrary voices on topics of human rights, the State tacitly delegitimizes the counterviews, effectively discouraging rights discourse as the State continues to support, irrespective of intention, a particular notion on crucial subjects through active censorship, however harmful or regressive these notions may be. This is visible in the case of films depicting LGBTQ+ interests; many have been banned due to heckling. It is against the EHRC advisory of “talking about human rights positively”. Article 7, Declaration on Human Right Defenders, mentions the right to develop ideas on new human rights, including providing “a conducive environment for defenders’ work”, which is at serious risk in the present climate of convenience-based censorship.

    Films do play a crucial role in creating this human rights-positive environment and perceiving  human-rights crises, as did Schindler’s List (1993) or Bombay (1995) — which depicted the 1992 communal riots in Bombay, and served a reminder that communal strife, rife during India’s partition, was still occurring. It was censored because of the possibility of communal disharmony and violence. It is a case of catch-22 when a film cautioning about flaring religious tension is banned for fear of flaring religious tension. The way out is pursuing the positive obligation, which would protect human-rights messages and conserve public order.

    Other conjectures have been made, such as a State-heckler political nexus with possibilities of enforcing certain norms. Ban on films dealing with religion, such as Bombay (1995) or Vishwaroopam (2013), have received patronage from sundry Indian states, with implications for state-level vote-bank politics.

    These examples essentialize the ailing discourse around human rights, beset by political and ideological motivations under the garb of maintaining order. The Supreme Court of India’s aforementioned observation regarding films’ more impactful nature can very easily be turned on its head (as was done in the War and Peace case):  if a strong depiction of violence is likely to lead viewers to violence, a similarly potent depiction of human rights perspectives can have an equal and opposite effect. In the larger rights-based discourse, this is a crucial link between its theory and practice. If the State fulfils its positive obligation to secure freedom of expression, for which this blog vehemently argues, it would strengthen this link and help the conversation, and consequently policymaking, take a  beneficial turn.

     

     

    Bibliography:

    Gautam Bhatia, Film censorship and the courts, Live Mint, May 7, 2016, https://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/6ZZM8m9pHkZ2ECPvOee1jN/Film-censorship-and-the-courts.html

    KA Abbas vs The Union of India & Anr., 1971 AIR 481, 1971 SCR (2) 446

    RS Chauhan, Clamping down on creativity, The Hindu, Mar. 30, 2017, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/clamping-down-on-creativity/article62113427.ece

    Freedom of expression gagged, The Hindu Business Line, Feb. 13, 2013, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/freedom-of-expression-gagged/article22996184.ece

    Patrick Schmidt, Heckler’s Veto, The First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/968/heckler-s-veto

    Freemuse, The State of Artistic Freedom Report, 2021, https://freemuse.org/media/ck5fvaze/the-state-of-artistic-freedom-2021.pdf

    Uday Bhatia, 100 years of film censorship in India, The Mint, Jul. 14, 2018, https://lifestyle.livemint.com/how-to-lounge/movies-tv/100-years-of-film-censorship-in-india-111644473960098.html

    Tamil Nadu bans screening of Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam after protests from Muslim organisations, India Today, Jan. 24, 2013, https://www.indiatoday.in/movies/story/kamal-haasan-vishwaroopam-banned-by-tamil-nadu-152383-2013-01-24

    Kerala: Right-wing groups vandalise film set of church, CM says ‘communal forces cannot thrive’, Scroll, May 25, 2020, https://scroll.in/latest/962871/kerala-right-wing-groups-vandalise-church-film-set-cm-says-communal-forces-cannot-thrive

    Zia Mian, Nuclear Nationalism, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, May 5, 1999, https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-nationalism/

    Shri Anand Patwardhan vs The Central Board Of Film, 2003 (5) BomCR 58, 2004 (1) MhLj 856

    1. Rangarajan Etc vs P. Jagjivan Ram, 1989 SCR (2) 204, 1989 SCC (2) 574

    Robert C Post, Community and the First Amendment, (inaugural Willard Pedrick Lecture) 29 Arizona State Law Journal 473 1997, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/1236/Community_and_the_First_Amendment.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

    Abhijnan Rej & Rahul Sagar, The BJP and Indian Grand Strategy, Apr. 4, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/bjp-and-indian-grand-strategy-pub-78686

    Sonia Tascon, Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics: Whose Face?, Human Rights Quarterly (2012), https://www.corteidh.or.cr/tablas/r29358.pdf

    Julian Garritzmann, Why does public opinion (only) sometimes affect policy-making? The example of education policy, The LSE Social Policy Blog, Apr. 12, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/socialpolicy/2021/04/12/why-does-public-opinion-only-sometimes-affect-policy-making-the-example-of-education-policy/

    This post was originally published on LSE Human Rights.

  • Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Book Banning to Take Hold in US Schools

    The growing movement to ban books, install surveillance cameras in classrooms, and delimit the boundaries of acceptable language and ideas in schools across the United States aims to limit the intellectual autonomy of teachers, suppress critical thought and outlaw dissent, offering a glimpse of a future of fascist miseducation.

    Many of the efforts to ban books in local school districts are either astroturfed — seemingly grassroots movements that are in fact funded by wealthy organizations — or knee-jerk reactions to the increasingly fascist politics of the far right, an authoritarian slide steered by the sensationalism and fearmongering of conservative media. Fascism, as political theorists have taught us, desperately needs a spectacle laden with emotional appeals, generating fear, distraction, paranoid conspiracy and xenophobic senses of encroaching threat.

    Yet, at the same time, the fascist politics pursued through the current assault on education has no future, only nostalgia for uncomplicated pasts of unity and purity that never existed. Advocates of book banning and other repressive education legislation are acting out fantasies of control over those who are unable to reckon with the overlapping crises of the era, the prospect of progressive change, or even the notion of a future that is better than the present. Their politics are strictly reactionary, evincing a desire for the stability of inequality, hierarchy, and oppression as a world promised to them by centuries of theft and violence slips through their fingers.

    However, to say that fascist miseducation has no future is not to claim it could not ultimately come to pass. The groundwork for fascist miseducation is being laid ideologically, and through what Yale Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley calls “fascism’s legal phase.” And though the foundations for meaningful, critical education have been weakened by decades of privatization, the inability to offer a positive vision of the future indicates a significant vulnerability at the heart of the far right’s fascist politics.

    Among the immediate threats in the movement to ban books that foster critical thought concerning various histories of oppression, and progressive achievements concerning matters of class, race, gender and sexuality, is the repressive assault on the capacity of educators to function as intellectuals. Almost universal among historical analyses of fascist politics is the well-documented lesson that fascism first targets intellectuals and the left. There is no reason to discern the current movement to ban books and instill fear in teachers, already precarious in the wake of decades of neoliberal austerity and union-busting, as anything other than the leading edge of a growing fascist political movement. The aim of this movement is to neutralize education, and to purge schools of critical educators, who are among the few public workers whose job is to inspire curiosity, expose youth to the art of social criticism and cultivate a collective spirit of dissent in the face of injustice. Fascism has no need for intellectuals, only ideologues and enforcers.

    For those who perceive the truth that critical thinking is intrinsic to freedom, the banning of books, lists of which grow by the day, along with the outlawing of specific words and ideas, and the repression of teachers’ autonomy, is obviously distressing, a dangerous turn not without its own long history in U.S. schools. These acts threaten an already threadbare social fabric, auguring a future of fascist miseducation, in which the act of teaching itself — but not ideological enforcement, the very fear projected by the right — becomes an increasingly dangerous endeavor.

    The fascist arm of the right wing, which has in recent decades sought to abandon public education to austerity and privatization (though not without the compliance of many liberals), now returns with a vengeance, aiming to control schools through draconian legislation, neo-McCarthyist surveillance and authoritarian imposition of fear. In this grim portrait of the future of education, those left in positions of authority in schools will be lathered up for fascist collaboration, ready and willing to evade all intellectual or moral responsibility to become agents of miseducation.

    The conditions are ripe for fascist miseducation in the U.S., where public educators have been slowly stripped of an intellectual role since the Reagan administration, deskilled and depoliticized by high-stakes testing, curricular standardization, corporate profiteering and the instrumentalization of teacher education programs, which increasingly avoid exposing aspiring educators to pedagogical approaches that foster inquiry, curiosity and empathy in students, favoring instead reductive approaches to socially decontextualized fads that do not question or challenge established systems of domination. Education, in this neoliberal formulation, constitutes a “dead zone of the imagination,” where the flourishing of ideas is a threat, not the aim.

    The conservative movement to ban books has the potential to be effective because the neoliberal approach to educational reform has been so successful in reframing public education as a private good to be consumed, and subsequently transformed into “human capital,” which supposedly allows individuals to seek their own success in capitalism’s supposedly meritocratic but empirically unequal and alienating labor markets. Within the prevailing ideology of this reform movement, schooling must be reconstructed in the image of a marketplace, an atomized realm of consumer choice (for individuals and families but not for society as a collective body) that is evacuated of egalitarian political, social or cultural purpose.

    Of course, the economization of schooling has historical roots that pre-date neoliberalism’s rise, but in the face of resurgent fascist politics, its neoliberal articulation has proven largely compatible with the advance of and entrenchment of white supremacy, ethnonationalism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. When parents view themselves strictly as proxy consumers of education for their children, and legislatures, the state and school administrators, in turn, tolerate such views, public education’s democratic potential is thwarted, falling to individualism that is designed to preclude the ability to comprehend the social, environmental and political forces that produce social conditions, an analytic ineptitude that paves the way for fascist politics to spread.

    In opposition to conservative calls to depoliticize education, it is crucial to recognize that education is inherently political, a mode of cultural activity through which different visions of society and the future are imagined, explored, subjected to moral scrutiny and challenged. The perceived value of depoliticizing education, for most conservatives but for many liberals too, lies in the supposed necessity of its neutrality and the idealization of objective facts that are devoid of moral or political referents. Nevertheless, it is imperative to understand that reckoning with the assertion that education is fundamentally political does not threaten the objectivity or critical faculties of interpretation that should inhere within scientific and humanistic inquiry alike. Conversely, the denial of education’s political character neutralizes its ability to foster critical thought, or to generate new ideas, cultural and aesthetic forms, and visions of alternative futures.

    It is only by recognizing education’s inherently political nature that societies can imbue it with democratic force and, in turn, cultivate the agency of populations to act transformatively. In the withering paradigm of fascist miseducation, history is eviscerated through the pernicious imposition of social amnesia, what public intellectual and McMaster University Professor Henry A. Giroux calls organized forgetting. This is a process by which the prospect of the future is foreclosed by destroying the capacity of reason and the suppression of knowledge concerning the origins of social problems that produce suffering. The society that fascist miseducation renders is snatched out of history, incarcerated in a prison house of tradition where hierarchy and authority prevail, and opposition to dominant ideas is met with violence. Cast in this light, fascism truly has no future.

    It is indicative of the perverse psychology of fascist consciousness that its advocates rail against the supposed authoritarianism lurking behind the idea that freedom is an indelibly collective concept that must be held across difference rather than imposed via exclusion. Within the schema of fascist politics driving the book-banning efforts, it is not merely the abstract threat of ideas but the concrete threat of thinking itself — conceived as critical engagement with the ideas of others, especially those that challenge established forms of power, tradition, authority and hierarchy — that must be neutralized. The good society, in fascist consciousness, is one populated exclusively by a unified, undifferentiated people inoculated against critical thought, marching destructively backward toward a mythic past that never was. Within fascist politics there is only the prospect of achieving and maintaining stasis, foreclosing the prospect of the future.

    While there is some hope to be found in the notion that fascist miseducation’s repressive tactics bear the seeds of its undoing, the immediate and long-term violence it portends must not be underestimated. Book banning, educational surveillance and the pursuit of historical erasure, are together the leading edge of a concerted push toward fascist miseducation, riding a wave of momentum that has gained speed over decades of the privatizing assault on public education.

    Collective resistance to the rising tide of fascist miseducation must reckon with the insidious ideological support right-wing fascist politics have garnered from the economized language of neoliberalism. When conservatives declare “parental choice” regarding what their kids study in school, they lay unjust claim to the right to strip education of its role in social, cultural and democratic life. Choice, cast economically as the ability and decision to acquire not only commodities, but what were previously public services as well, parades as a quintessential marker of freedom, veiling the fact that consumer choice in the privatized realm of public goods and institutions becomes an elemental force in producing inequality and curtailing democracy.

    In this neoliberal logic, when individuals make “educational choices,” such as refusing to allow their kids to be exposed to curricula that interrogate the sources of inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, or ecological crisis, their decisions are presumed to be beyond reproach because they are perceived (falsely) as democratic acts. Similarly, when a reactionary groundswell in any given municipality, school district or state issues calls to ban specific books, regardless of their relevance or humanistic value, the merging of neoliberal ideas with populist rationality accords dangerous legitimacy to what are, in fact, fascist acts of erasure. In the relative absence of faculties of interpretation or a shared language of critique, social and cultural analysis are left adrift. Here fascist politics can advance swiftly, but they are also able to plants seeds that may prove difficult to uproot once they begin to grow.

    Fascism’s absence of a vision of the future offers a compelling reason to resist it immediately because any society without viable visions of the future is doomed. Key to resistance efforts is recognizing that education has a unique relationship to the future, the importance of which is augmented by the looming threats facing the left, marginalized groups and humanity itself as a planetary community. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt grasped this notion with the concept of natality, which she defined in The Human Condition as the “central category of political thought.” For Arendt, natality signals humanity’s inherent capacity to create novelty in the world through conscious action that could yield futures free of domination.

    Education is fundamental to developing the potential that inheres within natality, but the fascist miseducation pursued currently by the far right aims instead to snuff out its relationship to natality, offering instead only dystopian repetition as we careen toward destruction and collapse.

    Thus, the moment to resist fascism always precedes its emergence. As the radical historian Daniel Guérin explained long ago, the moment any society “allows the fascist wave to sweep over it, a long period of slavery and impotence begins — a long period during which socialist, even democratic, ideas are not merely erased from the base of public monuments and libraries, but, what is more serious, are rooted out of human brains.” This is no less true of fascism’s efforts to miseducate an entire generation in its quest to establish totalitarian rule, the potential fallout of which is difficult to calculate in both the short and long term.

    The task ahead is surely one of radical opposition to the enforcement of fascist miseducation, but it must be also apprehended as a struggle to imagine and enact an alternative future. This task requires sustained, collective engagement with history, culture, politics and power. Against the dystopian cynicism behind the ardent pursuit of fascist miseducation, the left must maintain an unwavering commitment to fostering critical thought, further integrating that capacity into institutional and movement struggles, as well as modes of counter-education.

    To borrow from German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s utopian classic The Principle of Hope, the creation of something new can “begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being…. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his [sic], without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been.”

    Protecting education’s role in fostering critical thinking and democratic capacities must be at the heart of efforts to counter the far right’s slide toward fascist politics and to articulate liberated visions of the future if we are to have any future at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Twitter IS “State-Affiliated Media”

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    British politician and broadcaster George Galloway has made headlines in the UK with his threat to press legal action against Twitter for designating his account “Russia state-affiliated media”, a label which will now show up under his name every time he posts anything on the platform.

    “Dear @TwitterSupport I am not ‘Russian State Affiliated media’,” reads a viral tweet by Galloway. “I work for NO Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”

    Galloway argues that while his broadcasts have previously been aired by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, because those outlets have been shut down in the UK by Ofcom and by European Union sanctions he can no longer be platformed by them even if he wants to. If you accept this argument, then it looks like Twitter is essentially using the “state-affiliated media” designation as a marker of who Galloway is as a person, rather than as a marker of what he actually does.

    Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.

    In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.

    “ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

    Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”

    It has been an established pattern for years that whenever Twitter reports that it has purged thousands of accounts which it suspects of inauthentic behavior on behalf of foreign governments, you know it’s never going to be accounts from US-aligned countries like the UK, Israel or Australia, but consistently from US-targeted nations like Russia, China, Venezuela or Iran. You can choose to believe that’s because the US only aligns with saintly governments who would never dream of engaging in unethical online behavior, but that would be an infantile position which defies all known evidence.

    Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Twitter has been aggressively boosting US narratives about the war by frequently showing users a Twitter Topic without their having subscribed to it which is full of imperial spinmeisters, including The Kyiv Independent with all its shady CIA-affiliated origins.

    Twitter also promotes US narratives about the war by keeping a “War in Ukraine” section perpetually on the right-hand side of the screen for desktop users, which runs stories that are wildly biased toward the US/NATO/Ukraine alliance. There was a full day last month where any time I checked Twitter on my laptop I was informed that “Russia continues to strike civilian targets in Kyiv and across Ukraine.” The claim that Russia had been “targeting” civilians during that time was dismissed as nonsense shortly thereafter by US military experts speaking to Newsweek.

    When the invasion began Twitter also started actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. It also began placing warning labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform.

    Twitter also began placing the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of Russian media platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. This labeling has led to complaints of online harassment as propaganda-addled dupes seek out targets to act out their media-instilled hatred of all things Russian.

    As more and more people find themselves branded with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label, Twitter has concurrently announced that it will be hiding the visibility of any account that wears it, announcing on Tuesday that the platform “will not amplify or recommend government accounts belonging to states that limit access to free information and are engaged in armed interstate conflict.” Which is a bit rich, considering the fact that the US does both of those things.

    “This means these accounts won’t be amplified or recommended to people on Twitter, including across the Home Timeline, Explore, Search, and other places on the service. We will first apply this policy to government accounts belonging to Russia,” Twitter said.

    This diminished visibility has been verified by people who’ve been slapped with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label. So you can understand why imperial narrative managers whose job is to quash dissent want that designation applied to as many critics of the US empire as possible.

    If you are curious why the “state-affiliated media” label has not been applied to Twitter accounts associated with government-funded outlets of the US and its allies like NPR and the BBC, it’s because Twitter has explicitly created a loophole to exclude those outlets from such a designation.

    “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” Twitter’s rules say.

    Which is of course an absurd and arbitrary distinction. Whether you like George Galloway or not, I think anyone who’s familiar with his personality would agree that if anyone ever tried to take away his editorial independence and tell him what he is or isn’t permitted to say, it would take an entire team of surgeons to remove Galloway’s footwear from their personal anatomy. Many people who’ve worked with Russian media have said they’ve never been told what to say, and Galloway is surely one of them.

    The audacity of a social media company which works hand-in-glove with the most powerful government on earth to go around branding people “state-affiliated media” is appalling. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It is an instrument of imperial narrative control, just like all the other billionaire Silicon Valley megacorporations of immense influence. Putin could only dream of having state media that effective.

    _____________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Google Censorship! Now Your Private Email is under Threat!

    Previously, intercepts like the one below, only happened when you clicked on a link in your Browser but Google have taken censorship onto an entirely new level. Google now intercepts your PRIVATE EMAIL, allegedly to protect you against phishing and other online scams.

    This is how it works:

    The email in question arrives in your Inbox and looks normal until you click on it to open it when this message appears, replacing the content of the email!

    Mr intercept

    There are two live links in the offending message, one asks you to report the ‘offending’ site by saying “This isn’t a web forgery…” and when you click on it, you arrive at this Google page:

    Google intercept

    There’s a box at the bottom of this intercept that asks you to report the ‘offending’ page and if you reply, which I did, cursing the bastards for interfering with my right to information, you see the page above, ‘Google Safe Browsing’ [sic] but not safe from Google! The algorithm even intercepts mail from Google!

    If you click on the link, “Ignore this warning”, the message disappears and the original Email message is revealed but Google have another trick up their sleeve, as any links in the message, DON’T WORK! There is however, a workaround as the actual link is there it just doesn’t work! If you can, copy the link and paste it directly into your browser (Windows and Macs use a different method to reveal the link) and you’ll get to the site in question.

    This is insidious censorship masquerading as protecting the user and it reveals the true nature of Google because it means that Google is not only scanning your PRIVATE EMAIL for ‘questionable’ links but of course, for ‘questionable’ content, which means Google is actually reading the contents of your formally, private Email!

    Given the ubiquitous nature of Google’s role in ALL electronic communications, short of returning to actual, physical letters, I’m not sure what can be done about this outrage but at least let’s make the world aware that this kind of outrageous interception of our communications is going on. Frankly it’s the final nail in coffin of any kind of democratic control over communications.

    The post Google Censorship! Now Your Private Email is under Threat! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Twitter Think – Russia Very Bad – China No Problem!

    What a state this world has been driven into by the political, commercial and military interests of governments and corporations. Once it was possible for citizens to rail against injustice human rights violations and tyranny on social media platforms, but all that has changed. Following in the wake of censorship, character assassination and exclusion; to those who dissented and questioned on the Covid narrative, and efficacy and safety of experimental medicines injected into the public. A worrying new orthodoxy is taking root. In this dark new chapter there exists only one source of truth, fact can be assured solely through government agency or it’s approved corporate media partners. Any genuinely independent or critical voice is censored, dismissed, questioned or publicly smeared as unreliable, biased and misleading. All very Orwellian, including the operation of double-think.

    Because the same authorities imposing such totalitarianism and censorship are doing so to ‘protect freedom, democracy and individuals’. Free-speech is under a vicious assault, particularly across the internet and social media, which Governments are striving to dominate. They have been helped in that objective by a number of compliant and ethically corrupt platforms, including Twitter, whose previous position on open debate and opposition to censorship has been replaced by an unquestioning obedience to the dictate of Governments and corporate interests. We saw this during the past two years, blocking people who dissented or questioned the drugs corporations and safety of their Covid products. Affirming only the narrative of health authorities and the political elite, to the banishment of any opposing view.

    Sad to see such a venal decline, but here we are, having been psychologically groomed into an unthinking and servile condition by our own authorities. Hypocrisy now rules. While a media, which would have us believe they uphold the values of freedom-of-speech, objective reportage and balanced, independent journalism are little more than corporate and governmental whores. Too extreme? Not really. Take the current psychological warfare being conducted to sway and control public opinion on the situation in Ukraine, with only one version of events being allowed. Western media regurgitating word-for-word, without critical examination, every assertion and claim from the Ukrainian authorities. As governments and media corporations are banning Russian broadcasters, denigrating their output as lies and biased.

    Now Twitter has announced it would no longer recommend tweets from Russian state-controlled media outlets for amplification. This means they would not be featured in the home timeline, notifications, or anywhere else on the platform. The reason offered to justify such censorship is interesting:

    “When a government that’s engaged in armed conflict is blocking or limiting access to online services within their country, while they themselves continue to use those same services to advance their positions and viewpoints – that creates a harmful information imbalance,” Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth said.

    Convinced? Reasonable? But hang on a minute what about imposing similar restrictions on China? After all it’s engaged in a war of cultural genocide against Tibetans and Uyghurs, operates forced labor-camps. Torture, forced sterilizations and executions are widespread. The Chinese regime has blocked Twitter from operating in China. While at the same time the platform’s timeline and various feeds are full of Chinese government orchestrated propaganda concealing such atrocities and misleading public opinion. Surely if Twitter held as a core principle its opposition to regimes exploiting their platform for purposes of disinformation while engaged in human rights crimes and imposing a violent tyranny it would have no objection in launching restrictions against Chinese government Twitter accounts and effectively block their output and visibility in the same way it is doing so against the Russian authority?

    Of course it hasn’t done so and is unlikely to do so, demonstrating the nauseating hypocrisy at work and exposing the hollowness of such posturing. Like other social-media platforms Twitter is conforming to the double-standards and geo-political agenda of western states, who while condemning Russia’s actions are suffering a specific and acute amnesia on their blood-drenched invasions and roles in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen!

    This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.

  • IFEX at Canadian parliament: do more to protect human rights defenders

    IFEX Deputy Executive Director Rachael Kay delivered a presentation on the situation of human rights defenders, journalists, and media organisations to the Canadian House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights.

    —

    …Like everyone, we see the expansion of authoritarianism in all its forms. Information is being weaponized in ways that has a profound impact on people and is creating a kind of information chaos. In our network alone, we’ve seen how misuse of access to information legislation, internet shutdowns, misinformation, attacks on media and of course the murder of journalists is becoming routine. When those targeted directly with online disinformation and smear campaigns are women, the form the attacks take is usually gendered and often results in self-censorship.

    The aim is to silence these voices, and it is doing just that.

    We can see this played out in the current context. Immediate action is required in the most urgent situations, Ukraine/Russia, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nicaragua and Sudan, just to name a few. It is imperative that coordinated systems of emergency support for journalists at risk and their families are created, something where we see Canada is already moving in the right direction. But we must continue to increase our effectiveness.

    And to be effective, these systems should include providing emergency visas that have simple and secure methods of submission and, in the absence of such, they must expedite the processing of visas for journalists and their families, as well as ensure safe passage. Key to the success of any intervention is effective coordination with local and international civil society organisations working to protect and evacuate journalists.

    We see that media freedom has never been more crucial. Democracies cannot survive and flourish without free, independent and pluralistic media. We need to reverse engineer the current branding of the media as fake news and the enemy of the people as normal. It has been the lexicon adopted around the world – language mimicked and acted upon that includes continued verbal and physical attacks on the media with total impunity. This has had a profound impact on press freedom and journalists in particular. And be sure, no country, including Canada, is exempt from this trend.

    The narrative needs to be countered forcefully with words and actions. Outside of intervening in urgent situations, the government must play a significant, ongoing role in reinforcing the need for press freedom and respect for journalists in its own national context.

    There is also the need for accountability. The criminalisation of journalism and abuse of law by state actors has to end and we call on multilateral relationships and institutions to ensure that those who attack the media face real consequences for their actions – otherwise attacks against the press will continue to escalate and any standards championed by Canada will remain empty.

    …..

    At IFEX our network of over 100 member organisations in more than 70 countries actively advocate for freedom of expression and information as a fundamental human right – many do so in very dangerous circumstances. The targeted repression of press freedom advocates and journalists, and attacks on communities and institutions, see accepted norms being increasingly undermined and weakened.

    We have been called on to do more direct support for our members, across all regions, who find themselves increasingly under attack by authoritarian states focused on shutting down the voices of civil society and threatening dissent at any price.

    Organisations whose offices and staff are targeted and harassed with no other aim but closure and erasure need to be supported, funded and engaged with – because these are the voices that call for accountability and if these voices are shuttered it will leave a vacuum for democracy.

    We know these issues are complex. IFEX’s members and allies around the world have been working on them, doing grassroots advocacy, publishing reports, indexes and offering solutions and campaigning for years. They are a rich pool of knowledge that could inform Canada’s policies and discussions with nuance and a national and global perspective. As part of your efforts in focusing on press freedom we would welcome being a conduit to these sources.

    Governments and civil society groups need to continue to find ways to collaborate, to be at the table together.

    Human Rights in Repressive States: The situation of human rights defenders, journalists and media organisations

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Right-Wing Book Censorship Is an Attack on the Minds of Children

    A favorite quote from Stanley Kunitz, two-time poet laureate of the United States, hangs on a wall in my classroom: “Poets,” he writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.”

    Poets, yes, by all means, and teachers and students too, along with citizens and community members, researchers and artists, residents of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy — everyone, yes, and with a special duty and burden for teachers.

    I’ve taught for more than 50 years, and my students today are all studying to become teachers themselves. They’re an idealistic bunch: They all want to do meaningful work, they all want to do good, and mostly they want to unleash the dreams of youth and change the world — step by step, one student at a time.

    The idealism Kunitz describes is a vision most of my students aspire to — not a submissive naïveté nor the willful abandonment of reality, but rather a kind of leaning toward an ideal, embarking on the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights and understandings, and that complex, fugitive concept called “truth.” Of course, they fall short — falling short is guaranteed, for enlightenment is always partial, and the truth, in any finished sense, always elusive — but that in no way diminishes the significance of their labor.

    This immense journey asks these teachers to reject dogma, orthodoxy and superstition; to unstick themselves from a fantasized past when everything was settled and putatively perfect; and to dismiss the idea that the present moment is in any sense a point of arrival with nothing much up ahead. It encourages them to disregard notions of a fixed, preordained future with every conflict resolved, every synthesis achieved, every mystery explained. It urges them to get busy in projects of repair and renewal, posing new questions, struggling with unique problems. They feel — mostly — up to the challenge.

    But, of course, this is not an easy time to become a teacher: The perennial problems of too few resources and too little support are now joined by a weaponized opposition to curiosity and inquiry itself. When Texas State Representative Matt Krause released a list of 850 books and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. When the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, a Tennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences,” including Harry Potter and Twilight, were fed to the flames. When Florida passed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary made its bigoted subtext explicit, calling it an “anti-grooming” law.

    As governors and senators join the troglodyte chorus, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning authors like Art Spiegelman is in itself, the main targets are my idealistic students and English teachers anywhere in the country.

    The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policy. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: You need no one’s permission to interrogate the world.

    We’re reading The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht in my class now, and the drama, the tensions and the contradictions feel eerily contemporary. Galileo’s breath-taking discoveries about the movement of the planets and the stars ignite in him the desire to pursue a particularly radical idealism: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares boldly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves, my friend.” Galileo seems at first unstoppable: “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so they could not fall,” he says. “Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, they are embarked on a great voyage — like us, who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.”

    Here Galileo ups the ante, questioning Church orthodoxy and challenging the establishment in the realm of its own authority. For the Church, the great voyage is a sanctioned and planned journey, the steps mapped out with precision and certainty, and with all the support we will ever need in the institution of the Church itself.

    Clearly more than theories of astronomy are at stake. The findings of his research, surely, but also the joy, the excitement, the reckless hope, all mark Galileo as a radical visionary — he wanted to open people’s minds and change the world.

    Galileo’s struggle is punctuated with joy and grief, hope and despair, pain and torment and pressure, but when he finally capitulates and denounces what he knows to be true, when he is received back “into the ranks of the faithful” by the Church, he is exiled from humanity — by his own words. In the end, he is confronted by a former student, one of his crestfallen disciples: “Many on all sides followed you with their eyes and ears,” he says, “believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching — in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

    The liberty of teaching and the right to think at all is a right that is in deep dispute in our schools now, and in the larger society.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Naomi Klein Join Academics Denouncing Attempt To Cancel Lowkey

    United Kingdom – In recent weeks Lowkey – a tireless campaigner for Palestinian human rights – has been the target of a disingenuous attempt to destroy his career, led by pro-Israeli groups, many of whom are either directly funded or staffed by individuals from the Israeli Embassy in London. Following their pressure campaign, his talks and performances at universities have been postponed or canceled. Meanwhile, the lobbying group “We Believe In Israel” is trying to remove his music from streaming platform Spotify. Even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has involved himself in the affair, seemingly fully supporting the witch hunt against him and signaling this could be the first of many similar efforts to silence pro-Palestinian voices.

    The post Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Naomi Klein Join Academics Denouncing Attempt To Cancel Lowkey appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Censorship: Donbass Insider in the Crosshairs of Newsguard, an Agency Linked to the CIA, NATO and the White House

    On 18 March 2022, I received a letter in my e-mail box from a certain Edward O’Reilly, an analyst for NewsGuard, a sort of international Decodex (which awards green or red stickers to news sites, i.e. justifies the censorship of such and such a site), linked to the CIA, NATO and the White House, concerning their analysis of the Donbass Insider site. After having sent them packing when they saw the obvious bias of this site, they insisted and sent me a week later a series of questions, which contradict each other, and written in such a way that one has the impression that the author is writing to a 10 year old girl. Since they are so keen to have me answer them, while giving themselves the right to publish only part of my answers in their analysis (as they indicate in their e-mail), I will do so publicly, so that all my readers can have the whole of the information, and not just the part that would suit NewsGuard.

    NewsGuard, a site linked to the CIA, NATO and the White House.

    Let’s start by analyzing who is behind NewsGuard, a site that claims to analyse and rate news sites according to nine criteria to determine whether or not they are reliable.

    As with the French Decodex, there is a good old system of green or red dots, plus an orange one for satirical sites and a grey one for simple platforms that let anyone publish on them. One might think that such ratings are harmless, but this is not the case. For as we discover on their website, the aim of NewsGuard is to “give platforms and moderation teams the data and information to protect their users from online risks, and to control the spread of misinformation”.

    Clearly, NewsGuard provides companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter with data to justify their censorship of bad media that misinform (or in fact that do not follow the Washington narrative, as we will see right away).

    Indeed, when we look at the profile of the NewsGuard team, and especially of its advisory board, we immediately understand that there is a problem, a big problem even, in terms of impartiality and neutrality. Indeed, the NewsGuard advisory board includes :

    – Don Baer, former White House communications director during the Clinton administration;

    – Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education under the Obama administration;

    – Retired General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, and former director of the National Security Agency (NSA);

    – Elise Jordan, former pen of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice;

    – Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Secretary General of NATO;

    – Tom Ridge, former first Secretary of State for Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration;

    – Gianni Riotta, editorial writer for La Stampa (you know the Italian newspaper that used a photo of the massacre of civilians in Donetsk by the Ukrainian army to illustrate an article on the situation in Kiev);

    – Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Obama administration;

    – Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, whose presence on this strongly biased committee (to put it mildly) indicates that the famous encyclopaedia is not neutral.

    Add to this the fact that the “analyst” writing to me, Edward O’Reilly, is a former member of the US Marine Corps, and that Newsguard regularly cites Bellingcat (whose links to the British Foreign Office’s secret programmes have been proven) as a reliable source, and it soon becomes clear that this site is just another showcase for the US intelligence services, led by the CIA, the White House and NATO, to impose the US narrative.

    Why does this site decide to attack Donbass Insider only now (we have been in existence since 2018 I remind you)? Well, simply because with the brutal heating up of the conflict in Donbass, then the launch of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, and following the violent censorship of international Russian media such as Sputnik or RT, our little website has seen its audience multiplied extremely significantly. Enough to attract the attention of NewsGuard. Clearly, Donbass Insider has reached a large enough audience to begin to panic Washington, and the site must be quickly discredited or even censored, to prevent its information from totally destroying the narrative about the situation in Ukraine.

    When NewsGuard contradicts itself from one question to the next

    So let’s move on to the questions Edward O’Reilly sent me, and the answers I have to give. I am publishing them here in the order in which they were sent to me, as you can see from the full screenshot of his e-mail, available here.

    1. Your site does not indicate who owns it, which does not meet our criterion of providing information about the owner of the site. Can you explain this choice? Also, are you the owner of Donbass-Insider.com? If so, why not say so on the site?

    Because if your criteria are justifiable for a news site working in a democratic country where there is peace, when you are working in a civil war zone (because that’s what the Donbass war is which has been going on since 2014), where one of the parties (Ukraine) spends its time imposing sanctions against any person or media giving information other than the official narrative, and where children and journalists can have their personal data published on a site of Ukrainian neo-Nazis (you know the ones that are not that dangerous according to NewsGuard) like Mirotvorets, so that they become a target, your criteria becomes a source of risk.

    We are not going to put our team members in danger just to please you and tick the right box in your list of bogus criteria. I remind you that in Ukraine journalists like Oles Bouzina and Anatoli Chary have received death threats, and that Bouzina was murdered outside his home shortly after his personal data was published on Mirotvorets. People have been murdered or abducted in the DPR and LPR (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) by Ukrainian secret services (the same services you cite as a source later on). Do you really believe that the lives of our team members are worth less than your rating criteria? If you come to tell me that you don’t know about the existence of Mirotvorets, then how can you judge the veracity of information about Ukraine and the ongoing conflict if you don’t even know this simple fact?

    I know very well what is behind your question about domain name ownership. You’re looking for someone to put on the sanctions list so you can do what you did with other news sites that had their .com domain names taken away. Save yourself the trouble, we’ve already anticipated this, censoring Donbass Insider won’t get you anything. Even when hackers working for the West (and therefore for your bosses) attacked our site, taking it down, our content continued to be available.

    2. Your site also does not indicate who is responsible for the content (such as an editor-in-chief or a director of publication, for example), which does not meet our criterion in this respect. Do you have a comment on this? Are you responsible for the content of Donbass-Insider.com?

    Because there is no editor-in-chief on our site, nor a director of publication. Each contributor is free to write his or her own articles without review or censorship.

    3. We could not find any corrections published on your site. Have you corrected any articles, and if so, could you send me a recent example of a correction on the site? If not, can you explain why no corrections have been published recently?

    Why are there no corrections on our site? Well, because unlike other media, we check the information as much as possible before publishing it, instead of quickly coming up with racy headlines or unsubstantiated rumors to create a buzz. Our articles are factual, sourced, and substantiated, which avoids the humiliating exercise of retraction or correction.

    4. After analysis, we believe that your site does not meet our criterion of clearly distinguishing between news and opinion. Indeed, we have noticed that many news articles contain opinions. This is the case for the articles below.

    a. The noose is tightening around the Ukrainian neo-Nazis entrenched in Mariupol, and the Western media is wallowing in abjection

    b. Despite Russophobia in Ukraine, Russia continues to welcome Ukrainians with open arms

    c. Ukraine goes into hysterics after Russia signs a gas supply contract with Hungary

    After analysis you think… Well, we’re well on our way with that.. No details as to why these articles are opinions. Because in fact, if you look at the articles concerned, everything is sourced and based on facts. There is only one where I give my opinion at the very end, and that is my right. A journalist has the right to give his opinion, to comment on a piece of information, or to analyse a situation. A journalist is not just a copyist barely able to adapt Reuters or AFP dispatches.

    Moreover, your demand to make a clear distinction between information and opinion is something that you brandish only when it suits you, and you sit on it at other times (we’ll come back to that later). Our readers know the difference between information and opinion. It’s nice that you care about them, but they are not mentally retarded or five-year-olds. They are adults and capable of reading and understanding what they read. They don’t need you to explain it to them. This mania for infantilising people by putting coloured stickers on sites like the school teacher in class is frankly revolting.

    No, what bothers you is that I call a spade a spade. Abjection is a perfectly deserved term for the Western media denounced in the first article. I call Ukrainian neo-Nazis neo-Nazis and not nationalists, or whatever other euphemism. And Russophobia in Ukraine is more than proven (if you don’t see it, I think you need to change jobs).

    The following question is very long and I will answer each sub-question individually.

    5. We also believe that your site does not meet our criteria of not publishing false content, collecting and presenting information responsibly and not publishing misleading headlines. Indeed, we found many articles containing false information in their titles and texts:

    a. For example, a March 2022 article entitled “Russia gets hold of documents on US biological laboratories in Ukraine” states that “for Kirillov, the haste with which Ukraine launched the destruction of all strains of pathogens in these US biological laboratories could indicate that they were working on strengthening the pathogenic properties of microbes there, which is a violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. This would also explain why the US has set up these laboratories in Ukraine, instead of conducting such research on its own territory: to avoid being held accountable for what is happening there! And the ultimate proof that these US biological laboratories in Ukraine are hiding something was provided by Victoria Nuland, the US Secretary of State, herself during a Senate hearing!”

    However, while the US has provided assistance to Ukrainian laboratories since 2005, and has contributed to the construction and modernisation of Ukrainian laboratories, the laboratories themselves are managed and mainly funded by the Ukrainian government. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) clarified the terms of this agreement in a May 2020 press release, in which it stated that ‘there are no foreign biological laboratories in Ukraine’.

    Moreover, there is no evidence that these laboratories were working on strengthening the pathogenic properties of microbes. An April 2020 statement on the website of the US Embassy in Ukraine said that the joint projects in Ukrainian laboratories were aimed at “strengthening and securing pathogens and toxins of security concern in Ukrainian government facilities”.

    Also, when Victoria Nuland referred to these laboratories, she was referring to Ukrainian “diagnostic and biodefense” laboratories, not to biological weapons facilities.

    Can you explain why you chose to publish this article on your website?

    Why did you publish it? Because what you claim as facts are not facts. Your sources are simple statements from the SBU and the US embassy. That is to say, the Ukrainian secret services whose use of torture in a systemic way since the Maïdan is proven, and who were caught with both hands in the pot of false information concerning MH17… And the other source is the American government, that is to say, a government that did not hesitate for a second to lie before the UN (!!!) to justify its illegal war against Iraq by brandishing stories of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Now that’s a reliable source…

    For our part, we have published internal Ukrainian documents, not just statements, as evidence of US involvement in the work of the biological laboratories in Ukraine! Like these documents showing that in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych tried to regain control of these biological research laboratories, since contrary to what you claim, the management of what was happening in these laboratories was beyond the control of the Ukrainian authorities! And what was happening there was, I quote from an SBU report (since you seem to consider this source as reliable):

    “… These actions of the US side are considered by national experts as the formation of their own database of pathogen strains that are stored at Ukrainian sites, their storage system, as well as the control and study by military doctors of the effectiveness of the use of particularly dangerous infection pathogens in specific regions of Ukraine to create or improve new types of selectively acting biological weapons (against a particular race, genotype, territory of birth or residence).”

    More recent documents released by Russia show that these laboratories, based in Ukraine but funded and supervised by the US, were studying diseases that can be transmitted to humans by migratory birds or bats. And if these labs mentioned by Victoria Nuland were, as you claim, only “diagnostic and biodefense” labs, why worry that they might fall into Russian hands? If these labs were only doing what you say, then there is nothing dangerous there.

    And just to rub salt in the wound of your arguments, the DailyMail (hardly a Kremlin-friendly media outlet) published an article stating, with sources (in this case, emails found in the famous laptop Joe Biden’s son left at the repair shop), that “Hunter Biden helped secure millions of dollars in funding for a US subcontractor in Ukraine specializing in researching deadly pathogens, according to laptop emails. Oops. I think you’re good to review the ratings of all the news sites that had reported on this, and swallow your certainties about what’s true or not.

    b. In February 2022, Donbass Insider published a French translation of Vladimir Putin’s speech justifying his decision to recognize the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic. The speech was published in full, without comment or context in the news section of the site, and stated that “modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia, or more precisely, by Bolshevik and communist Russia”. Putin also lamented that the communists had ‘given the republics the right to separate from the unified state without any conditions’ and added that ‘Ukraine has never had a stable tradition of a real state’.

    Contrary to Putin’s claim that ‘the Bolsheviks invented Ukraine’ and that Ukraine ‘never had a stable tradition of a real state’, Ukraine fought for independence in 1918, a status that lasted only a few years. In 1921, the Russian Bolsheviks defeated the national government of Ukraine and established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukraine spent the next 69 years as part of the Soviet Union.

    As for the claim that a weakened Moscow “gave” Ukraine the right to become independent from the Soviet Union “without any conditions”, it was the Ukrainians who chose independence in a democratic referendum. In 1991, as the Soviet Union dissolved, 84% of eligible Ukrainian voters went to the polls and over 92% voted to leave the Soviet Union. Moscow even promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty on the condition that it gave up its nuclear weapons – a fact commemorated in 1994 in an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum.

    Can you explain why you chose to publish this speech on your website without commentary or context?

    Why did you publish the translation of Vladimir Putin’s speech without commentary or context? Well, because it was to provide 100% pure information without any personal opinions, which should be fine with you since you criticized me in question 4 for mixing information and opinions. And when I provide an article that is pure information, in this case the complete translation into French of Vladimir Putin’s speech so that my readers can make up their own minds about the Russian President’s view of events by having the entire text in their own language, that doesn’t suit you either. You should know, guys, that either we are only allowed to provide pure and cold information, or we have to systematically make comments. But it can’t be both at the same time.

    As for your arguments, Ukraine in its current borders is indeed a product of the USSR. The short-lived Ukrainian state that emerged after the 1917 revolution was not at all within the current borders of Ukraine, it was the USSR that gave it most of its territory. And three years of existence yes is not a “stable tradition of a real state”, don’t get me wrong.

    Concerning the referendum held in Ukraine in 1991, this has nothing to do with the content of Vladimir Putin’s speech. He is talking about the Soviet constitution adopted in 1924, which allowed the republics the right to separate from the USSR unconditionally… You are mixing up everything.

    Moreover, the nuclear weapons deployed in Ukraine did not belong to Ukraine, but to the USSR, as stated in the Lisbon Protocol, which predates the Budapest Memorandum (which was the result of Ukraine’s desire to monetise the application of what it had already signed in 1992). It was therefore normal for them to be sent back to Russia, which is the official successor state of the USSR. So this cannot be called a “condition”. Russia did not demand anything from independent Ukraine other than to return what belonged to it in order to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    c. A June 2021 article entitled “Protassevich allegedly framed by his own side and handed over to Belarus to serve as a sacrificial victim” claims that the Belarusian authorities did not force the pilots of Ryanair flight 4978 to land in Minsk in order to detain Belarusian dissident journalist Roman Protasevich. The article says that “on May 23, 2021, at 12:25, while the Ryanair plane is still over the Volyn region of Ukraine, a first bomb threat e-mail arrives at Minsk airport” and that “after receiving the bomb threat e-mail, and despite its incongruities (such as the requests made) the airport authorities apply the international procedure foreseen in such cases and consider the threat to be real”.

    In reality, the Ryanair plane was not diverted because of a bomb threat. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary called the hijacking a “case of state-sponsored hijacking” and confirmed to Politico in May 2021 that the Belarusian target was Roman Protasevich.

    Can you explain why you chose to publish this article on your website?

    I chose to publish it because the facts stated in the article, such as proof that the Belarusian airport did receive bomb threat emails, and that the authorities did not know Protassevich was on board until his “friends” were screaming all over the internet that he was there, are worth more than the opinion of the Ryanair CEO!!! Are you serious when you say you assess whether my article is telling the truth or not, simply based on the opinion of the airline CEO? My article contains all the evidence to back up what I said, but for you O’Leary’s opinion is worth more than facts? Is that your criteria for evaluating the information published by the sites you analyse? Your evaluation “criteria” are truly appalling in their partiality.

    More generally, would you comment on your editorial process?

    Yes, we report facts and testimonies from the field, and our articles are sourced and substantiated. We consider facts to be more valuable than the opinion or unproven statement of some official or CEO approved by your site. We have done this since the beginning of Donbass Insider, and we will continue to do so.

    Christelle Néant

    The post Censorship: Donbass Insider in the Crosshairs of Newsguard, an Agency Linked to the CIA, NATO and the White House first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Being Disappeared

    The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin.

    The post On Being Disappeared appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • They’re Enslaving Our Minds And Driving Us Toward Destruction

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross.

    The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away from it. Because if you don’t compartmentalize away from it, the implications of this are very frightening. It means pretty much everything you’ve been told your whole life about the government, about your nation, about the news media, and about the way the world works, has been a lie.

    But that is the basic reality. If you’ve already seen this, you won’t experience cognitive dissonance when you observe it in the unprecedented imperial narrative management campaign we’re seeing with Ukraine. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll likely experience a lot of cognitive dissonance if you try to square your gut feeling that you’re being propagandized about Ukraine with your belief that your favorite politicians and news sources always tell you the objective truth. And you will compartmentalize accordingly.

    That’s just how we’re wired. Our minds are wired to select for cognitive ease and forcefully reject information which challenges our present worldview. Pushing past the cognitive discomfort and facing reality is the only way to come to real understanding.

    Look at this picture:

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    3/2/2022- President Zelensky #UkraineUnderAttaсk #Zelensky #Zelenskyy #PresidentZelensky #russianinvasion https://t.co/qW8LL36nRq pic.twitter.com/klwqPp9PjH

    — Clay Bennett (@BennettCartoons) March 2, 2022

    If this picture was printed out and framed, and then used as a bludgeon to bash you in the face whenever you looked at an electronic screen, it would feel how all this Ukraine war propaganda feels when you haven’t swallowed the official narrative.

    People get outraged when I say we are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine, but this fact is not seriously in dispute. The mass media have been relatively straightforward about it, though of course they fail to mention their own role in the propaganda campaign.

    It seems like those who are new to the concept think that “propaganda” means making up fictional stories whole cloth, so they mistakenly assume that this is a claim that Russia never invaded and Ukrainians aren’t dying and suffering. But all it really means is that the narrative framing is manipulated. They’re not lying that there’s a war, they’re just manipulating the way people think about the war. How it’s happening, who’s to blame for it, whose agendas are served by getting it started and keeping it going, etc.

    No good liar lies all the time. The best liars very seldom tell full-blown lies, always preferring to lie by omission, by distortion, by half-truth, by disproportionate focus, and by uncritically reporting other people’s lies in a way that suggests they’re true.

    It’s all moving so fast now. Censorship and propaganda, the two arms of imperial narrative control, are escalating like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The doors on information control are being slammed and bolted shut all around the world as fast as the empire managers can get away with it.

    And of course Australia is on the front line of this war against mental sovereignty:

    Image

    And it’s because of all this intrusive perception management that we’re somehow simultaneously the closest we’ve been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet still collectively focused more on talking about sports and celebrity gossip as though everything is fine and normal.

    This is something we could actually oppose, if enough of us had enough unpolluted information about what’s happening. This threat is not some inevitable force of nature that is happening to us, it’s something that is being done to us. By people. People with names and government offices.

    If the nukes do start flying and we find ourselves in our final moments, will we really feel okay about having done nothing about it? About failing to mobilize in favor of de-escalation and detente? About being the first species in history to go extinct due to psychological compartmentalization and a reluctance to annoy government officials?

    The only thing sadder than watching the world die would be watching it die without having done anything to try to save it.

    The saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism is directly related to people’s inability to imagine anything other than increasingly aggressive escalations between nuclear powers in the competition-based systems we live under. People literally cannot imagine any deviation from this power struggle between nations, even if continuing along this trajectory means our complete annihilation.

    And it really doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no good reason nations can’t cooperate with each other for the good of everyone without trying to dominate each other. There’s no good reason we can’t move from competition-based models of domination to collaboration-based models of human thriving.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    If the US empire truly believed its own role in this war was just, it wouldn't be unleashing unprecedented levels of censorship, blacking out Russian media, and propagandizing like it's already World War 3. https://t.co/BAbsGOFFyS

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 22, 2022

    Michael Parenti said years ago that the ultimate neocon plan (which today has become simply the mainstream orthodoxy on US foreign policy) is a confrontation with disobedient governments, the ultimate target being China, to ensure the supremacy of American global capitalism. There’s no good reason this needs to happen. There’s no good reason the defensive Russia-China tandem described years ago by Gilbert Doctorow needs to be targeted in the way it’s currently being targeted by this war that was deliberately provoked by western powers.

    They are lying to you. They are lying when they say they tried to prevent this war. They are lying when they say de-escalation is impossible. They are lying when they say World War 3 is inevitable, or is upon us already. Peace and detente are very possible. All that would need to happen is the dropping away of this notion that this planet of ours needs to be dominated by a single power structure. That’s all we’d need for the threat of nuclear armageddon to go away. That’s all we’d need to ensure humanity’s progress into the future.

    We can simply move from endless escalation to diplomacy, from diplomacy to de-escalation, from de-escalation to detente, from detente to true peace, and from true peace to collaboration and human thriving. The only thing stopping that from happening is this insane drive to dominate.

    Don’t believe the liars.

    ________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • Endless Wars and Failed States: The Tragedy of Neoliberalism

    Then all cried with one accord,
    ‘Thou art King, and God and Lord;
    Anarchy, to thee we bow,
    Be thy name made holy now!’

    — “The Mask of Anarchy,” Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819

    Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the American ruling establishment embarked on a policy of backing radical anti-nation state ideologies (henceforth to be referred to as ANSIs) with the goal of dismantling national identities and leaving failed states in their wake. Only through acknowledging both the extraordinary dangers that this entails, and the fact that the process emanates from powerful transnational capitalist forces rather than from “the left” (which once referenced a Marxist or social democratic position), can the chaos within the West as well as US foreign policy in the post-Soviet era be understood.

    If left unchecked, an ANSI will act as a cancer and metastasize, until the national identity it has infiltrated has reached the point of dissolution. Indeed, it will either eradicate or be eradicated; there is no other alternative. A curious phenomenon in the panoply of neoliberal barbarities is that those who reject extremism are inevitably labeled as extremists themselves. For instance, the American and Canadian truckers who are defending the informed consent ethic, the principle of bodily autonomy, and the Nuremberg Code, without which a democracy cannot survive, are guilty of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia,” to quote Canada’s puerile prime minister – i.e., it is they who are the extremists.

    Serbs that endured over seventy days of NATO bombing, and who suffered genocidal attacks at the hands of Croatian neo-Ustasha soldiers and Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists were also “extremists;” their oppressors, “freedom fighters.”

    Identity politics, a deranged yet powerful ANSI which has cataclysmically destabilized American society, and is likewise being used as a battering ram to turn much of the West into a Tower of Babel while dismantling the rule of law, is predicated on the notion that any opposition to unrestricted immigration and the jettisoning of the American canon is indicative of “white supremacy.” This zealotry has been taken to its inescapable conclusion in the New York City public schools, where non-native speakers of English are hanging from the chandeliers, and a curriculum which demonizes American letters, British literature, classics of Western Civilization, civics, and the history of Western art – the foundational pillars of our civilization – is hegemonic.

    Not only has this brought about a collapse of the society, but those for whom this curriculum purports to help – Americans of color and immigrant youth – are rendered illiterate, both culturally and intellectually. What better time than the 21st century to use one’s knowledge of the Nuremberg Code, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War (particularly prior to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan), and the role played by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War? The ignorance, alienation, tribalism, atomization, and dehumanization fomented by the multicultural society (essentially the inversion of white supremacy), has spawned a younger generation drowning in amnesia and amorality – a zombie class which is extremely amenable to brainwashing by the presstitutes.

    Another example of an ANSI is the problem of Sunni fundamentalism in Syria, as Syria is comprised of not only Sunnis, but Alawites, Jews, Christians, Kurds, as well as other religious and ethnic minorities, all of which would be regarded as nonpersons by the jihadis should they sack Damascus. There are also considerable numbers of Sunnis in Syria that reject the radicalism of ISIS, Jaysh al-Islam, and Jabhat al-Nusra. In other words, the Syrian government had no choice but to outlaw these groups, as there is no way that they could peacefully coexist with a modern and secular Syrian state.

    Multiple ANSIs were introduced into Iraq during the US military occupation. In commenting on the animus between the Baath Party and the Dawa Party, The Oklahoman writes:

    The parties’ rivalry dates back more than four decades. The two groups have traditionally held opposing views on how Iraq should be run, with Dawa calling for an Islamic Shiite state, and the Baath party having a secular, pan-Arab ideology.

    Unlike Iran, Iraq is not a predominantly Shiite state. Consequently, the rise of the Dawa Party, which was dominant in Iraq from 2003 to 2018, disenfranchised Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians, thereby facilitating Kurdish separatism as well as the birth of ISIS. In a similar vein, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India undermines a cohesive national identity and poses a threat to democratic institutions. Democracy demands freedom of speech, yet cannot become a synonym for dogmatism, sectarianism, and tribalism.

    The Branch Covidian coup d’état has facilitated the emergence of a global cult which is anchored in a contempt for informed consent and which poses an existential threat to democracy. This contempt for the informed consent ethic is rooted in the notion that human beings are the property of the state, and that the state has a right to do whatever it wants to its subjects medically. Hence, this is a totalitarian position. Once a totalitarian position has been embraced, its acolytes invariably abandon the world of reason. This explains why you can send your indoctrinated relatives countless links to articles showing that masks and lockdowns don’t work, that the mRNA vaccines are dangerous and do not confer immunity, and that Covid can be treated with repurposed drugs, all to no avail. They have turned their backs, not only on democracy, but on logic, and are operating on a purely primordial emotion. Indeed, the irrationality of totalitarianism is tied to the fact that those who seek to destroy vital democratic pillars, such as the First Amendment and informed consent, are not only fighting to destroy the freedom of their adversaries but are fighting to destroy their own freedoms as well.

    One might argue that the polarization that has ensued following the imposition of medical mandates was an unforeseen consequence of the Branch Covidian response, yet this phenomenon is fundamentally no different than inciting internecine strife within a country that has fallen into Washington’s crosshairs. Alas, it is another mechanism of the age-old divide and conquer strategy.

    The Western elites’ post-Soviet love affair with smashing civilizations to the wall came to Ukraine in the winter of 2014, when the US-backed Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” saw the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, which precipitated the disintegration of Ukraine’s constitutional order. In the Western part of the country there has long been a considerable amount of support for Ukrainian nationalism, whose disciples regard themselves as “Aryans” and who romanticize Stepan Bandera, a fanatical leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, rabid Russophobe and Nazi collaborator. This putsch allowed the heirs to the Ukrainian nationalists that collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War to seize power in Kiev. As there are millions of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, this could only lead to the country becoming a failed state.

    Consider this extravaganza of ludicrousness: we have been told that truckers protesting medical mandates are “Nazis,” while the Western elites have been supporting a neo-Nazi government in Ukraine for eight years. No less galling, the Branch Covidian contempt for informed consent has its roots in the Nazi medical ethos.

    On May 2, 2014, Banderite pogromists set fire to the Odessa Trade Union House, where locals who were protesting the nationalist coup were holed up, savagely beating and shooting those who attempted to escape. This incident, which led to the loss of over forty lives, was deeply symbolic of the new regime, its lawlessness and savagery, and its visceral hatred of Russians. In the West it would be unthinkable for there to be statues and monuments honoring prominent Nazis and Nazi collaborators. However, in Ukraine this is all too common. That Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, and Zelensky have proven adroit in speaking in the language of neoliberalism fails to alter the fact that the real power in post-Maidan Ukraine lies unequivocally with the Banderites.

    A recent Bloomberg article titled “Russian Fleet Approach has Ukraine’s Port City Odessa Bracing” embodies the pervasive ignorance of the Western media, as Odessa is a Russian speaking city whose civilian inhabitants would mostly be delighted should the Russian military turn up. Not to be outdone, the BBC laments the fact that the residents of Kiev have been forced to spend a couple of nights in basements and metro stations. Where have the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other esteemed institutes of skulduggery been when Donbass residents were forced by a genocidal NATO-backed regime to live in basements for eight years? Incredibly, the songs and music videos of the Russian singer Artem Grishanov offer better journalistic coverage of post-Maidan Ukraine than all the Pentagon storytellers put together (see here, here, here and here). Note the total absence of any context in the mass media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: do we discuss the Invasion of Normandy in this way?

    This coup, which brought a bloodthirsty ultranationalist cabal to power, proceeded to ban the formerly influential pro-Russian Party of Regions as well as the Communist Party, and has taken steps to undermine the language rights of Russian speakers. When the oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk refused to recognize the new junta, the Ukrainian military, backed by neo-Nazi units such as the Azov Battalion and the Aidar Battalion, and supported by the no less loathsome Right Sector and Svoboda Party, placed the Donbass under a medieval siege, a siege that has caused terrible suffering, but was doomed to fail militarily due to the fact that Donetsk and Lugansk share a border with Russia. These paramilitary groups have committed crimes against humanity, operate with minimal oversight, and have, together with regular Ukrainian forces, long been attempting to “ethnically cleanse” the Donbass of its ethnically Russian inhabitants in the same way that the Croatian government of Franjo Tudjman forcibly expelled 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region in 1995 (see here, here, and here). Many thousands of Donbass residents have lost their lives at the hands of these Western-backed gangs, which delight in shelling residential neighborhoods, and which have been green-lighted to commit atrocities with impunity. Videos of neo-Nazis boasting of how they are abusing and torturing captured Russian soldiers, and how they will hunt down and punish Ukrainians accepting Russian aid, is yet another sad reminder of who invariably benefits from US government largesse.

    Putting Ukraine, a country that has long-standing cultural, linguistic, and civilizational ties to Russia that go back centuries in the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, has served to weaken Russia and transformed the country into a dangerous Western proxy. The mass media’s histrionics over the Russian military’s alleged targeting of residential neighborhoods is preposterous indeed, as this has long been an integral part of US imperial policy, as evidenced by relentless and indiscriminate US bombing campaigns conducted over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, and even when conducting air raids in the heart of Europe during the Second World War. Many Russians, in fact, have family in Ukraine – hence their genuine desire to not do this. Moreover, the Russian military has made a concerted effort to help civilians evacuate the war zone via humanitarian corridors, avenues of escape which have been repeatedly cut off by nationalists who have been accused by refugees of holding them hostage and even firing on those attempting to flee the fighting.

    A substantial percentage of the Ukrainian population was hoodwinked into believing that for eight years they have been at war with Russia when they have been massacring their fellow countrymen in the Donbass. This underscores the mass hysteria that has gripped a vast swath of the country following the Maidan coup, and is indicative of how a mass psychosis can seize hold of a population once an ANSI has been imposed through the use of a hijacked media and education system.

    Perhaps forgetting that Russia has nuclear weapons, Adam Kinzinger has called for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Ukraine, a country whose airspace is controlled by Russia. Elaborating on the there-is-no-difference-between-Russia-and-Somalia theme, Sean Hannity has called for drone strikes to be carried out against Russian military convoys, arguing that the Russians wouldn’t be able to figure out who did it; which leads one to wonder which country has more lunatics per capita: Ukraine or the United States? Perhaps Nietzsche was correct when he wrote in Beyond Good And Evil that “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

    Following the onset of the Russian intervention, the freedom-loving government in Kiev opened the doors to its prisons, granting convicts an early release should they agree to fight “the Moskal.” Empowered by this maelstrom of anarchy, heavily armed bandits are free to join their Banderite brethren, embrace “democracy,” and terrorize the locals at will. Fittingly, the new draconian sanctions directed at Russia are being called “the Halting Enrichment of Russian Oligarchs and Industry Allies of Moscow’s Schemes to Leverage its Abject Villainy Abroad Act;” a strange name, yet one which happens to form the acronym HEROIAM SLAVA, a Ukrainian fascist greeting meaning “Glory to the Heroes,” and which is comparable to “Sieg Heil.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Russophobia in the US is starting to resemble the Russophobia in Ukraine itself, with Lindsey Graham openly calling for Putin to be assassinated (which doesn’t constitute “hate speech,” incidentally, according to Twitter).

    The government in Kiev has recently spoken of reconsidering its commitments under the Budapest Memorandum and obtaining nuclear weapons, a threat that undoubtedly contributed to Moscow’s recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. There has also been speculation that one of the objectives of the denazification campaign is the elimination of biowarfare labs, as the Russian government has been accusing the US of operating these facilities near its borders for quite some time (a claim not denied by Maidan architect Victoria Nuland). A false flag chemical weapons attack à la the White Helmets is a real and present danger.

    The Kremlin has been trying for decades to have a respectful dialogue with the West about NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, and has repeatedly attempted to come to terms with its “Western partners” on establishing a new European security architecture which would take into account Moscow’s legitimate security concerns. The Kremlin’s attempts at getting Washington to cease its deliveries of arms to the murderers and sociopaths in Kiev, coupled with Putin’s tireless attempts at getting the Banderite regime to implement the Minsk agreements, have proven no less futile. Moscow will not permit the Banderite regime to obtain nuclear weapons, it will not permit the Donbass to be overrun, and it will not allow Ukraine to join NATO – each constitutes a non-negotiable red line.

    In many ways it was inevitable that the Russian military would be sent into the Donbass, as the position of Donetsk and Lugansk has grown increasingly precarious due to the relentless influx of NATO weaponry, and they have been pleading with Moscow for protection ever since the commencement of hostilities. The decision to execute a reverse regime change operation is likely due to the Russian elite concluding that if they were to leave the Banderite junta in place, it would grow increasingly dangerous over time as its military capabilities expand exponentially – a kind of illiterate Russophobic Israel at one’s doorstep, if you will. If thousands of Americans were being killed and tortured at the hands of a tyrannical Moscow-backed puppet government in Mexico, would Washington have the patience to pursue diplomacy for the greater part of a decade?

    The Russian military needs to get in and out of Kiev, a hornet’s nest of Banderivtsi, as efficiently as possible. The longer they remain, the greater the likelihood that the CIA will entrap them in an Afghan-style quagmire, as Western intelligence agencies are working around the clock to flood Ukraine with as many private military contractors, jihadis, and neo-Nazi volunteers as possible. Should Ukraine cease to exist, balkanization would certainly be preferable to the country being pulled inexorably into a never-ending vortex of violence as transpired in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It is difficult to see how the country could be put back together, with one half comprised of Russophobes; and the other, of Russophiles.

    The Western elites’ growing reliance on the use of ANSIs as a form of unconventional warfare threatens civilization both at home and abroad, and if directed at Russia or China, could unleash a nuclear war from which there would be no survivors. Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton, Washington has worked long and hard to smoke a hibernating bear out of its den. Through the resurrection of the ghost of Bandera, at long last, they have succeeded.

    The post Endless Wars and Failed States: The Tragedy of Neoliberalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.