Less than a week before Nicaragua’s presidential election, social media giant Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the ruling left-wing Sandinista government, a top Washington target for regime change. Perhaps even more worrying from a freedom-of-speech viewpoint is who made the decision at Facebook. The 11-page report detailing the company’s supposed evidence of inauthentic behavior has just two contributors: Luis Fernando Alonso and Ben Nimmo, individuals with deep and long-lasting ties to Western military intelligence.
Just days before Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, top social media platforms censored top Nicaraguan news outlets and hundreds of journalists and activists who support their country’s leftist Sandinista government. The politically motivated campaign of Silicon Valley censorship amounted to a massive purge of Sandinista supporters one week before the vote. It followed US government attacks on the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections, and Washington’s insistence that it will refuse to recognize the results.
Just days before nationwide elections in Nicaragua, Meta has deleted more than a thousand accounts on Facebook and Instagram it claims were part of a disinformation “troll farm” run by the ruling Sandinista party. It’s just the latest example of the social media giant taking concerted actions against US enemies alongside the US government.
On Tuesday, billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros launched Good Information Inc., a “public benefit corporation” to serve as a conduit of funds to newsrooms that “cut through the echo chambers with fact-based information.” On its website, Good Information further describes itself as a “civic incubator” aimed at fostering and financially backing projects that “counter disinformation where it spreads by increasing the flow of good information online.”
I always get people telling me, “Capitalism just means free trade.”
No it doesn’t, that’s just some stupid nonsense libertarian types started saying a few years ago. Capitalism means what the Marxists who coined and popularized the term have been saying it means since the 1800s: the owners of the means of production exploiting workers by paying them a fraction of the wealth they generate. Capitalism is a system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to sell it to the owners of the means of production, necessarily at a price that is far below the amount of value they generate and with no influence over the industries they are powering with their work. It is inherently exploitative, and leads to corporations with no human interest pursuing profit at all cost even at the expense of the ecosystem we all depend on for survival.
Even those who support capitalism understand this distinction if they’ve done a tiny bit of research outside their partisan echo chambers. You don’t get to just change someone else’s definition of words to defend your belief system from their criticisms; that’s not a thing.
By distorting this definition, supporters of capitalism can object to its critics with “This isn’t real capitalism, because trade and finance are regulated by corrupt governments.” No it’s capitalism. Real capitalism is not just entirely compatible with the corruption of capitalist governments but an unavoidable component of it. Saying “It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s crony capitalism” or “It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s corporatism” is the same as saying “It’s not my chain smoking that’s the problem, it’s my emphysema!” One inevitably leads to the other.
Only narrative says I should be able to use my socioeconomically advantaged position to hire workers who exponentially multiply my wealth for a fraction of what it costs me to pay them. Capitalist narrative, created and promulgated for generations by those who benefit from it.
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A system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to work for companies for a fraction of the value they generate is violent. It is aggression. It is simply legalized theft. The only reason this isn’t obvious to everyone is centuries of capitalist propaganda, and if people ever manage to free their minds from that indoctrination and begin moving to redistribute the wealth the capitalist class has stolen, guess what will happen? Armed forces will be deployed to kill them until they stop. This is on top of the global war on communism that has been going on for generations. The entire thing is violence, and is held in place by violence.
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Malignant narcissists don’t typically seek out therapy, partly because they’re wired to assume they’re perfect and partly because our current systems reward the tendencies of malignant narcissism. We are ruled by untreated malignant narcissists who were elevated by this system.
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It’s a pretty interesting coincidence how western news media just happen to keep discovering reasons why censorship of internet platforms is gravely necessary in a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by global narrative control.
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The most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control. All the other bullshit since then has followed from this.
This was when the belief among mainstream journalists became widespread that internet censorship is needed and that it is their duty to manipulate public opinion. Another 2016 WikiLeaks drop in 2020 would never have been reported on by the mass media, as evidenced by their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Now we’re seeing an increasing homogenization of online information as the media class cheers on censorship in the name of fighting Russia, white supremacism, Covid misinformation, and in the name of protecting US elections, while the media acts weirder and weirder. The way the entire mass media jumped right on board the Russiagate narrative instead of asking what’s true, for example, or the way many questionable claims about Covid which have since been invalidated were asserted with adamant aggression; this all followed from that moment.
And now we’re watching cold war escalations continually ramp up against Russia and China, and the mass media are forcefully and uncritically pumping all US government narratives into public consciousness. The 2016 reshaping of their values lubricated the way for this.
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“You only criticize the US and its allies, not Russia or China!”
Focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government requires no defense. It’s not weird that I do it, it’s weird more people don’t. Those who want to hear criticisms of Russia and China are advised to switch on the nearest television.
It’s such a dumb complaint.
“It’s so strange and suspicious that you only focus on the worst impulses of the globe-spanning power structure which is vastly more destructive than any other in existence instead of yelling about the same governments as every billionaire media outlet throughout the entire western world.”
Durr.
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Remember when moral panic was a specific thing that would happen once in a while instead of western civilization’s general continuous state of existence?
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Our rulers always have to choose between bread and circuses or accelerationism; they’re either choosing to keep the people mollified and distracted while stealing a little or to risk provoking revolution by stealing a lot. Right now they’re picking the latter. Interesting choice.
When you look at it that way you realize that even when something horrible is happening it could also be leading to something very healthy. They’re walking a delicate tightrope walk while trying to keep their greed from consuming them. They’re not really in control here.
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No matter which mainstream media segment you’re currently watching, I can promise you it’s not getting to the heart of any issue. By definition they only participate in surface level analysis. For example, there are three or four levels of reality we should be discussing when we talk about any United States election. And by “discussing,” I mean “screaming about,” and by “screaming about,” I mean “freaking out about.” So, let’s freak out – shall we?
Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population (4.66 billion people) uses the internet. It’s our source of instant information, entertainment, news, and social interactions.
But where in the world can citizens enjoy equal and open internet access – if anywhere?
In this exploratory study, our researchers have conducted a country-by-country comparison to see which countries impose the harshest internet restrictions and where citizens can enjoy the most online freedom. This includes restrictions or bans for torrenting, pornography, social media, and VPNs, and restrictions or heavy censorship of political media. This year, we have also added the restriction of messaging/VoIP apps.
Although the usual culprits take the top spots, a few seemingly free countries rank surprisingly high. With ongoing restrictions and pending laws, our online freedom is at more risk than ever.
We scored each country on six criteria. Each of these is worth two points aside from messaging/VoIP apps which is worth one (this is due to many countries banning or restricting certain apps but allowing ones run by the government/telecoms providers within the country). The country receives one point if the content—torrents, pornography, news media, social media, VPNs, messaging/VoIP apps—is restricted but accessible, and two points if it is banned entirely. The higher the score, the more censorship. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/IBnNS/3/
The worst countries for internet censorship
North Korea and China (11/11) – No map of online censorship would be complete without these two at the top of the list. There isn’t anything either of them doesn’t heavily censor thanks to their iron grip over the entire internet. Users are unable to use western social media, watch porn, or use torrents or VPNs*. And all of the political media published in the country is heavily censored and influenced by the government. Both also shut down messaging apps from abroad, forcing residents to use ones that have been made (and are likely controlled) within the country, e.g. WeChat in China. Not only does WeChat have no form of end-to-end encryption, the app also has backdoors that enable third parties to access messages.
Iran (10/11): Iran blocks VPNs (only government-approved ones are permitted, which renders them almost useless) but doesn’t completely ban torrenting. Pornography is also banned and social media is under increasing restrictions. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all blocked with increasing pressures to block other popular social media sites. Many messaging apps are also banned with authorities pushing domestic apps and services as an alternative. Political media is heavily censored.
Belarus, Qatar, Syria, Thailand, Turkmenistan, and the UAE (8/11): Turkmenistan, Belarus, and the UAE all featured in our “worst countries” breakdown in 2020. But this year they are joined by Qatar, Syria, and Thailand. All of these countries ban pornography, have heavily censored political media, restrict social media (bans have also been seen in Turkmenistan), and restrict the use of VPNs. Thailand saw the biggest increase in censorship, including the introduction of an online porn ban which saw 190 adult websites being taken down. This included Pornhub (which featured as one of the top 20 most visited websites in the country in 2019).
“But just because the push to stop people from talking or learning about racism, sexism, heterosexism or this country’s history of oppression has moved off the front page does not mean that it’s gone away. Legislators in some 27 states are trying to require teachers to avoid what are termed “divisive concepts” in classrooms and curricula, an extremely thinly veiled effort to force teachers to propagandize about US history rather than teach it, and to punish those that don’t toe the line.”
Time and time again, the left sites just keep pushing all those international stories, all those stories tied to this or that political party head, and while China is important, and while we know the dirty deeds of Blinken to Pompeo, all the way back, we still miss out on the common people, us, the little ones.
Sure, this is a trending story, in California, tied to the vaccine mandate, the hysteria, the fascism:
The University of California, Irvine has placed theirDirector of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, on ‘investigatory leave’ after he challenged the constitutionality of the UC’s vaccine mandate in regards to individuals who have recovered from Covid and have naturally-acquired immunity.
Last month Kheriaty, also a Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine, filed a suit in Federal court over the mandate.
“Natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity. Thus, forcing those with natural immunity to be vaccinated introduces unnecessary risks without commensurate benefits—either to individuals or to the population as a whole—and violates their equal protection rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment,” Kheriaty wrote in a Sep. 21 blog post.
“Expert witness declarations in support of our case include, among others, a declaration from distinguished UC School of Medicine faculty members from infectious disease, microbiology/immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB/Gyn, and psychiatry,” the post continues (click here to read the rest).
…there is now considerable evidence that Covid recovered individuals may be at higher risk of vaccine adverse effects compared to those not previously infected (as seen in studies here, here, and here, among others). -Dr. Aaron Kheriaty
This issue, though, is more important on a local level for schmucks like me, who are overeducated, aging in a hateful society, left of left in a centrist and capitalism hard left/right contradictory world. I am back at a job, and the pay is embarrassing, and the fact that I am in a rural county with rural thinkers and with a service economy tied to beach combing, fishing, crabbing and vacation rentals also contributes to precarity.
You think I am ready to leave to go somewhere else, to some big sophisticated city, some harbinger of high tech and military industrial complex to find more sustainable and lucrative work? Each day, my skill sets, my background, all the ground-truthing and other on the job training, all the travel, all those deep learning moments in my life in several fields, all of that is mush to the masters of academia, the masters of companies that are small and large, getting on the gravy train of city, county, state, national and international money. Tax cheats and welfare queens and kings are those in the complex, the big C for the CRC, Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment.
Yep, bad that an environmental lawyer was under ankle bracelet house arrest for more than two years and faces six months in jail for contempt as a lawyer who sued the pants off of Chevron for killing and polluting communities south of this border. Sure, the hellfire and brimstone of this rotting empire is addictive, with all these blogs and newsfeeds and whatnot tapping into the lizard part of the collective American brain.
Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.
Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”
Original illustration by Mr. Fish
So, note the “proverbial two-by-four between the eyes” comment from this judicial devil . . . . From a multimillionaire “judge.” Imagine that! If I told a pig that exact same thing, after stopping me for a dangling mud flap on my minivan, just think what might happen to me. Or if I told that she needed a proverbial two by four between the eyes to a judge during my trial or someone else’s? Or, to the boss, uh? Or to the teacher if I was an 11th grader. Or, to the drill sergeant? Or the TSA guy smelling my feet at the airport.
This judge is human scum, and while this is of national and international importance, I have been in courtrooms (local, small and midsized town) where women lost their children, where drug addicted got the book thrown at them, where homeless rough sleepers were fined and incarcerated, where people more sane than this judge were committed to mental ward. This is the truth about systems of oppression, about modern white civilization, a fucked up rule of law lawlessness. This is it in our world. But it happens every day a few ten thousand times. To we the small ass people.
Now, multiple that by a factor a ten thousand — try suing Boeing, or Pfizer or FDA, or Ford, or General Mills, or Bayer, or Trump Towers or Bank of America, or Amazon, or Google, or the manufacturer of the air bag in the minivan or the pretzel maker your kid is choking on.
Now, bring it back to a real perspective. Local, where cities have no money for infrastructure, where medical systems are threadbare at least, or missing altogether. No country for old men, for young people, for the sick, disabled, poor, mentally challenged, psychiatrically impaired. This is a country for no regular people.
Yet, we will hear the media mental midgets yammer on and on about us bumkins, us flyover fucks, deplorables, or deploying any other laundry list of pejoratives or socio-psych mumbo jumbo for their elite brains to find more ways to subjugate the many in the name of profits, and in the words of their deep alter egos — “The world of elites and beautiful and worthy and good members of society have to deal with these useless breeders, breathers and eaters. Really, all we want is what’s best for the masses, for these misbegotten, less than high IQ, and multiple-dysfunctional people who in some cases, well, don’t mean to be useless eaters, breeders, breathers, existers. But we can corral them into good deeds, and we can make so much money from their faults, chronic illnesses, their low IQ’s, their inbreeding, their constant bad bad bad decisions in life. Their mistakes and pain and dysfunction are our opportunity to make society the way we want it designed, with a few trillion of profits in greenbacks to boot. But we would never say this outright to Anderson Cooper or Oprah or NPR or what not.”
But reality is always local, no matter how much bullshit college sports and pro football teams and idiotic Republican and Democrat lying and spewing interferes with their noggins. For example, the outfit I work with, as a social services guy, doesn’t ask our clients — developmental and intellectual disabled adults — if they have had “the jab,” but rather, they ask: “If an employer asks you to provide proof of vaccination, will that be a problem?”
That is the reality now — adults barely surviving, after their whole lives have been spent in special ed programs and being evaluated, separated, roomed, housed and institutionalized, and many coming from proverbial messed up families, dysfunction being the functional word — I have to navigate more of the same systems of oppression-poverty inducing-safety net fraying eating at our communities’ very souls. The chances of getting part-time work in a field tied to the five F’s (food, fur, factory, filth, foliage — restaurants, dog cleaning, warehouses, janitorial, and landscaping) are already slim, as so much is stacked against these folk. Think about the propaganda around “those with developmental disabilities are more vulnerable to the covid so they need to be vaxxed first” ideology.
Many clients were so scared that they were more or less forced into getting the Pfizer or J & J, both mRNA biomedical experimental treatments. Most live in supported housing, and most of these in group homes, sanctioned by the state, so the vaccine mandates are not just inferred, but demanded. Boosterism (booster x, y, z, omega) will continue to run rampant. More will be sick. Some will die, or course.
The reality is I know people who are losing jobs, and they are not sitting on piles of cash like a lot of professionals you might read about that are opting out of the forced chemical jabs. These people do not have the luxury of taking a stand with unlimited credit card limits, or fully owned homes, or hobby gardens out back with the swimming pool. These are people who read up about this planned pandemic, who take precautions, who listen to experts. Their choice is to not get jabbed.
Imagine, being a teacher, PhD in physics, after 20 years, and you have 130 accrued sick days (paid) and you refuse to do the jab but accept the draconian test and mask. You are still going to be fired, or put on unpaid leave, and those PTO days you have accrued, well, forget about them.
This is reality for one of my friends. Forget about the death proclamations of the Death Cult of Fauci. This guy is criminal, and he has sold millions a bill of goods. This bill of goods is dangerous, deadly, injurious.
A bill of goods, man, the lies, the continuing criminal enterprises, and then, remade, make overs, etc. Take these middle of the road news sites: Robert Scheer is not my favorite, but this takes the cake, no, as he appears as Mister New York Times and Most About USA is Good Scheer. So, no doubts about this fellow joining up with the CIA, and then now in Holly-Dirt?
This is the very celebrity culture that Chris Hedges rails against. This is a sick little blurb here promoting Scheer’s podcast of this criminal — CIA is a criminal outfit of the highest order.
A former CIA officer and Emmy award-winning creator of the hit FX series “The Americans” about two Soviet agents living secretly in Washington during the Cold War, Weisberg offers a refreshing perspective on the tense relationship between the two countries throughout his work. He joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about his latest book, “Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War,” in which he examines how he, like so many Americans, got Russia wrong.
The author tells Scheer about his childhood growing up in a liberal Jewish household in Chicago, Ill. before studying Soviet politics at Yale University and joining the CIA, eager to do his “duty as an American” and fight what he considered then to be the “evil” Soviet empire. Now, after years of writing fiction about the Soviet Union in novels and TV scripts, Weisberg has decided to reflect on the historical events that he briefly played an active role in during his brief time at the CIA as the Soviet Union was collapsing through a more critical, factual lens. Based on both his personal experience as well as detailed research, Weisberg dispels common misconceptions about Russia that he once held to be true in “Russia Upside Down.”
Here we go: More meaningless Hollywood-CIA-millionaire stuff that the average Joe in Tucson or Portland, in Kansas or Utah has zero connection to. But we get he is Jewish (hmm, why this?) a Yale graduate (Yale being a CIA-Imperialist school), and lover of CIA and USA (when he was young — what puke). Fiction writer, and now a book writer and TV series producer, wow, what a radical. This is the upper echelons of America Putridity, and you couple that with his millions thrown at him as a Holly-Dirt thing, and we have the mini-Celebrity fawning.
I was at a hospital two weeks ago, and the nurses must have thought I wasn’t awake (I never sleep in a hospital, in jail, or on a plane). They talked about the Samaritan Hospital system they work for introducing a “no vaccine, no medical service” protocol. They did not sound happy about it. And here we have it yesterday:
Leilani Lutali, foreground, and Jaimee Fougner pose for a photo, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Lutali recently found out her hospital wouldn’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she got the COVID-19 vaccine. Even though she has stage 5 kidney disease that puts her at risk of dying without a new kidney. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) — source
A hell of a country, and a hell of a “follow the science” kind of messed up system, no? Idiots of the Biden-Obama variety, like Thom Hartman, are yammering on and on about how these hospitals have a right to refuse un-jabbed folk. This is it for the liberals — you eat junk food, you drink booze, you suck on fags, you drive recklessly, you think this or that anti-Democratic Party thought, then we, the good beautiful, Hillary-Obama-Harris have a right to cut you off, cut you down, chop you off at the knees!
Many people I speak with and communicate with are tired of the pro-pro-pro forced jab perspective we are getting from the leftist Counterpunch, and from St. Clair.
I am referencing “Roaming Charges,” Counterpunch, 10/8/2921, from the anti-science pro-some-science get-out-of-that-science’s way thinking coming from some of the articles posted on the site. Very sad in many ways, so sad that there is not a robust discussion of the vaccination that we see on DissidentVoice, even MintPress, and especially Off–Guardian and Left Skeptics. Here, bullet points, direct quoting from “Roaming Charges”:
+ I’m against any exemptions (our social contract should require either all of us to get it or that the jab be completely voluntary ), but if there’s a religious exemption there should be one for philosophy, too. “Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s worried that people resisting COVID-19 vaccine shots based on religious grounds may be confusing that with a philosophical objection.”
+ Merck is selling its high-touted new Covid pill Molnupiravir, whose development was federally financed by NIH and the Department of Defense, back to the U.S. government for 40 times what it costs to make.
+ These people, if you want to call them that, seem to have taken their “tactics” from the Westboro (“God Hates Fags”) Baptist Church which used to (and I suppose still does) scream their godly obscenities at mourners during the funerals of people who died of AIDS.
+ Anti-vaxism is itself a kind of brain-eating virus…A Cumberland, Maryland man murdered his brother and sister-in-law in their Ellicott City home last week because his brother, a local pharmacist, had administered COVID-19 vaccines.
+ Cuba began vaccinating its population 150 days ago. In that time, it has administered 192 doses per 100 people. In contrast, the US began its vaccination program 297 days ago and has managed to administer only 119 doses per 100 people. The Covid death rate in Cuba is: 684 per million. The death rate in the US is: 2190 per million. This seems to provide pretty clear evidence that the embargo has been placed on the wrong country for the last 60 years. (end quote)
And therein lies the problem with fake leftists — attacking even doctors and virologists and journalists and educated/educators who have doubts about the entire pandemic and mRNA and coronavirus multiplicity of very pro-pro Capitalist and pro-pro Authoritarian and pro-pro Government Bureaucracy rhetoric. The reality is Cuba is not jabbing its people with mRNA: “All of Cuba’s vaccine candidates—Abdala, Soberana 1, Soberana 2, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa, are subunit protein vaccines, like the Novavax vaccine. Crucially, the vaccines do not require extreme refrigeration, are cheap to produce, and are easy for the country to manufacture at scale. They are made by fermentation in mammalian cells, a process Cuba already uses for monoclonal antibodies.”
Now, we are worried about more of the celebrities, this time, a professor who was sacked —
Now, think about any criticism against any university, when you are employed by the institution. I was employed by the University of Texas at El Paso. I was an English Department faculty, part-time, a radical, and I fought like hell for adjuncts, for students, etc. I was part of a group of students as a faculty member who made a human chain to stop the group of overweight sheriff posse dudes dressed up as Conquistadors on horses strutting on campus. That was 1992, the 500th anniversary of that evil contact we call Columbus Day. The El Paso Times ran a front page photo of these undercover cops jumping out of the bushes, and wrangling students, clobbering male and female with forearms to the neck. I was right in the middle, and I had to answer for myself to the Provost and president.
This is what a university, then, in 1992, was encapsulated inside, under a rich white president, a campus that was and still is 80-plus percent Mexican-American, Latinx, now. You can’t protest without our permission and our approval of signs!
This was a campus that introduced a free speech zone out of the way of foot traffic. A state sponsored school, with a limited small postage stamp of land near dumpsters where people can gain the public square for protesting. And the campus Nazis demanded permission, permits, and full written details of the “protest” or “information gathering.” Now, sure, talk about Covid, about Nuremburg protocol, about mandates, about those who have the jab and those who do not. Talk about NIH and Fauci and the shadowy origins of the SARS-CoV2, or the doctors who have protocols to stop not only Covid patients getting on ventilators, but getting patients out of the hospital and back home in recovery zone. Not allowed.
These articles are verboten on campuses:
And, if I was still on that campus, how quickly would I be sacked for criticizing a campus– that pushes the Hispanic University of the World theme while colonizing Hispanics (mostly Mexican Americans) — for lock-step falling into the fold of the Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment? This campus is the whoring field of military, aerospace, drone and weapons makers, and even more nefarious. What ugly optics! Four Star Murder Bomber Air Force General all smiles and the PhD’s just lapping up the uniform!
So, back into that ground-truthing — try being a radical, a revolutionary, a critic of bureaucracies and corporate mandates and this sort of bullshit on a local level. UTEP is a sell-out, an embarrassment, but so are most all the colleges and universities in this shit hole. (Source) I have gone up against every single college and university I have taught in. EVERY ONE. Can you imagine bringing this into the classroom — anti-war, anti-military, anti-corporation discourse and readings and critical thinking debates? Shit! Then, this? Pfizer Exposed!
And while the big house is for us in the 80 percent, the ground-truthing in your neighborhood is littered with the poisons of that Complex, the Continuing Criminal Enterprise called capitalism.
[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
— Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, p. 324 (source)
Finally, another point from a friend: “Fishy Felonious Fraudulent Fauci: Read Whitney Webb’s latest.”
During the panel, the moderator—Michael Specter of the New Yorker—asked the question: “Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we just can’t turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say ‘Hey! everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet,’ but there must be some way.” Specter then mentioned how vaccine production is antiquated and asked how sufficient “disruption” could occur to prompt the modernization of the existing vaccination development and approval process. Hamburg responded first, saying that as a society we are behind where we need to be when it comes to moving toward a new, more technological approach and that it is now “time to act” to make that a reality.
Several minutes later, Anthony Fauci stated that the superior method of vaccine production involves “not growing the virus at all, but getting sequences, getting the appropriate protein and it sticking in on self-assembling nanoparticles,” essentially referring to mRNA vaccines. Fauci then stated: “The critical challenge . . . is that in order to make the transition from getting out of the tried and true egg-growing [method] . . . to something that has to be much better, you have to prove that this works and then you have got to go through all of the critical trials—phase 1, phase 2, phase 3—and show that this particular product is going to be good over a period of years. That alone, if it works perfectly, is going to take a decade.” Fauci later stated that there is a need to alter the public’s perception that the flu is not a serious disease in order to increase urgency and that it would be “difficult” to alter that perception along with the existing vaccine development and approval process unless the existing system takes the posture that “I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem in a disruptive way and an iterative way.”
During the panel, Bright stated that “we need to move as quickly as possible and urgently as possible to get these technologies that address speed and effectiveness of the vaccine” before discussing how the White House Council of Economic Advisers had just issued a report emphasizing that prioritizing “fast” vaccines was paramount. Bright then added that a “mediocre and fast” vaccine was better than a “mediocre and slow” vaccine. He then said that we can make “better vaccines and make them faster” and that urgency and disruption were necessary to produce the targeted and accelerated development of one such vaccine. Later in the panel, Bright said the best way to “disrupt” the vaccine field in favor of “faster” vaccines would be the emergence of “an entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive, that’s not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes.” He later very directly said that by “faster” vaccines he meant mRNA vaccines.
The Bright-led BARDA and the Fauci-led NIAID in just a few months’ time became the biggest backers of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, investing billions and co-developing the vaccine with the company, respectively. As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the NIH to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as January 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals. Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval. (Watch the 2019 Universal Flu Vaccine event here.)
As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine. That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.
However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last – that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide. Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna – and its stakeholders – cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.
Janine Jackson interviewed Stevana Sims about defending anti-racist education for the October 8, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Biden rescinded the Trump executive order that threatened efforts to address racial disparities in the workplace under the implausible guise of “combating anti-American race and sex stereotyping.”
But just because the push to stop people from talking or learning about racism, sexism, heterosexism or this country’s history of oppression has moved off the front page does not mean that it’s gone away. Legislators in some 27 states are trying to require teachers to avoid what are termed “divisive concepts” in classrooms and curricula, an extremely thinly veiled effort to force teachers to propagandize about US history rather than teach it, and to punish those that don’t toe the line.
It’s deeply disturbing. But it turns out teachers don’t take kindly to being told to underserve their students by distorting historical and present reality. A major campaign is underway to push back, and reassert the importance of critical education and the professional judgment of educators.
We’re joined now by Stevana Sims. She is a member of Black Lives Matter at School’s Steering Committee, and a school counselor in Montclair, New Jersey, public schools. Welcome to CounterSpin, Stevana Sims.
Stevana Sims: Oh, thank you so much. I am so happy to be here.
JJ: The American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, PEN America—a number of really mainstream, respected organizations are sounding the alarm that these bills around the country are an infringement on the right of faculty to teach, and students to learn. And yet here we are. So I just wanted to ask you, first, what is this looking like and feeling like for the K–12 teachers that you interact with? How is this all affecting them day to day?
SS: It is a direct attack on our K–12 teachers. It is to the point where teachers are getting fired and losing pay. It is to the point where there was a teacher who had a Black Lives Matter flag in her classroom, and was asked to take it down. And because she refused, she was then removed from her position. There was a principal in Texas who was also accused of teaching critical race theory within his school, and he was removed from his job. It’s coming to a point where threats, violent threats, are being made against teachers and educators who are teaching the truth and teaching education. It is scary, honestly. But it is necessary for what we are going to talk about really soon.
JJ: Absolutely. I think folks should know that, even if you are not in a county or a region where there’s actually a bill moving through, it still has that chilling effect.
Stevana Sims: “This is showing how important critical race theory is, because if it wasn’t that important, they wouldn’t be trying to silence it.”
SS: Absolutely. Before this bill was even passed, to think about the teachers, the Black teachers, that even I had in my school system, that were pushed out because they were teaching critical race theory within the classroom, and exposing systemic racism to juniors in high schools, and telling them to use their voice and empowering students. And so, even before this bill had been passed, there have still been attacks on teachers teaching critical race theory, and using a critical race lens within their classrooms.
So the saga continues, unfortunately. And this is showing how important critical race theory is, because if it wasn’t that important, they wouldn’t be trying to silence it.
JJ: Absolutely. And we should note, and listeners probably know, that the proponents of this campaign, this gagging campaign, they don’t know what critical race theory is.
SS: Exactly.
JJ: It’s jargon to them. Christopher Rufo, the architect of the campaign, said, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory.” They’re just throwing out there that the school systems that they’re going after may never have said the words critical race theory. It’s just about teaching about inequity.
SS: Right.
JJ: That’s why Black Lives Matter at School and African American Policy Forum, where I’m on the board, that’s what this whole #TeachTruth, #TruthBeTold, these campaigns are about.
SS: Yes.
JJ: So I just want to ask you, what are you all up to this month, and what are the goals of these actions?
SS: We are working. My, my, my, my. All the people that have been coming to these working group meetings, we’re working.
So with that being said, there are spaces where organizations can endorse the Day of Action for October 14. There are spaces where they can share on social media, they can amplify what we are trying to do. And just imagine what social media would look like if all you see is #TeachTruth, #TeachTruth, #TruthBeTold and all these hashtags. Just imagine the reverberation that is going to be.
So we have to amplify. We have to share the message. We have to let people know that on October 14, we are all mobilizing to teach the truth in our classrooms, in our conversations, in our schools. If teachers are unsure where to start, because we are all in different places in our activism—
JJ: Right.
SS: —and in our movement. And so we have to reach those fence sitters. We have to reach those who want to do something, but are not sure where to start.
And so we have a curriculum. Black Lives Matter at School has been working on curriculum, because it fits within our Year of Purpose. But within that, you can go on BlackLivesMatterAtSchool.com and you can find the curriculum. So not only do we have curriculum for this year’s Year of Purpose, but we also have archived curriculum as well that teachers can have access to.
You can also plan a virtual field trip for your students. As you know, Covid is still a real thing, unfortunately. And so there are virtual field trips that you can plan. Zinn Education Project will have access to virtual field trips, as well as Black Lives Matter at School.
And then wear your T-shirt. Put your message across your chest. Teach truth, and even if you don’t feel comfortable, and I’m speaking to those who may be under attack under this bill, and those who may not feel comfortable necessarily teaching, you can still wear your T-shirt in solidarity with us, saying that we are going to teach the truth.
JJ: October 14 is a Day of Action, and that is a focus. But this is a much bigger project.
SS: Yes.
JJ: When you talk about that Year of Purpose, what are you talking about?
SS: The reason why October 14 is so significant is because it is the birthday of George Floyd. And so Black Lives Matter at School uses the birthday of George Floyd to launch the Year of Purpose. So what that is is that we have 13 guiding principles that can also be found on our website.
We know that one hit is not going to change anything. There has to be this constant push against this critical race theory bill. And Zinn Education Project as well does have resources, but Black Lives Matter at School curriculum is on the website that can be used to guide your Year of Purpose in teaching the truth.
JJ: It seems like such classic backlash politics. Because we have social movements, and just a general recognition of the continued existence of racism and of inequity, they haven’t disappeared, we’re not a shining city on a hill….
SS: Right. Right.
JJ: And just the idea that we have to stop talking about that, and that will somehow make it untrue, it’s so regressive. And that’s why I’m concerned that I’m not sure where I’m hearing the free speech folks. It just feels like teachers are on the frontline and leading the charge here, which is terrific. But, I mean, we need some allies and support.
SS: It’s very true. And it’s funny that you say that. I was just at the last working group meeting. America is a very much an anti-history place.
JJ: Right.
SS: When we talk about slavery, and we talk about Indigenous people being taken off their land and their land being stolen, it’s like, oh, you need to forget that. That happened so many years ago. When we move in this anti-historical space of America, it really stunts us, to warp what’s actually happening now. Because, as we know, history already affected the future in which we live, right.
JJ: And I’m just thinking about students. Haven’t we gotten beyond the “empty vessel” idea of teaching, that students come in just empty and then teachers fill them up with stuff?
SS: Right.
JJ: Students are coming into school, they know their experience. They know their life.
SS: Absolutely.
JJ: So when you have a Mexican American, a Somali American, African American, to tell them, “Your people did nothing and are nothing,” that’s just a crime, it seems like to me.
SS: Absolutely. And just imagine how dehumanizing that is, and why sometimes our kids of color disconnect from education because of the messages that are being sent.
JJ: Folks may be getting tangled up, thinking it’s about critical race theory, and they don’t really know what that is. Or it’s somehow about special lesson plans. But it’s also, in a fundamental way, about power, and about who gets to decide what educators do in their classroom. I’m not sure people understand quite how radical this move is, to tell teachers what they can and cannot teach.
SS: Actually, it infringes on academic freedom. It infringes on, like you said earlier, freedom of speech. But what I think is beneficial, though, for our K–12 teachers is that the National Education Association has endorsed the Day of Action of Teach Truth, which is huge. ‘Cause our unions are our biggest advocates, at times. And so to have the National Education Association endorse the Day of Action is huge, and with that, alongside AAPF, they will be doing a Know Your Rights session. And an AAPF Teach Truth Celebration will be at 3 pm on October 14. And the NEA will be doing a Know Your Rights for K–12 educators.
JJ: And that’s something that everyone can get involved in. You don’t have to be a teacher.
SS: Absolutely.
JJ: And it affects all of us, all the time, in terms of what we’re able to talk about.
Let me just ask you, I can imagine teachers feel frightened and disturbed and threatened. But I also hear a lot of energy and a lot of positive—
SS: Yes.
JJ: —we know what we’re about here.
SS: Absolutely. And it’s uplifting for sure. And so it’s just about finding those spaces. So, once again, the resources at BlackLivesMatterAtSchool.com, ZinnEdProject.org, making sure that you join us on the Day of Action on October 14.
JJ: All right, well, onward.
SS: Onward and upward.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Stevana Sims. We will keep our eyes on this story. Thank you so much, Stevana Sims, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.
— Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)
The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new front in the biofascist assault on democracy. Businesses and government agencies that fail to enforce this mandate will potentially face draconian fines. Should the oligarchy succeed in completely weaponizing health care, vaccine passports would undoubtedly become both pervasive and mandatory, but as Tucker Carlson pointed out during one of his recent monologues, it is also likely that dissidents would be handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry. This is not an uncommon practice in police states, and the pathologization of dissent has been ongoing in the West for quite some time now.Only through knowledge, compassion, and camaraderie can the forces of neo-Nazi medicine be outflanked. The days of medical Armageddon are upon us.
As the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its European counterpart unequivocally demonstrate, the Covid vaccine program is causing tremendous harm and should have been terminated many months ago.Even the efficacy of the vaccines is very much in doubt, as evidenced by soaring Covid case numbers in some of the most vaccinated places on earth, such as the Seychelles (see here and here), Israel (see here, here, here and here), Gibraltar and Iceland. As physician assistant Deborah Conrad pointed out in her interview with The HighWire, VAERS is so dysfunctional that many doctors and nurses are only vaguely aware of its existence.
Addressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Joseph Mercola, MD, writes on Mercola.com:
In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.
As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and other experts without ties to industry have noted, coronavirus vaccines have long had a poor safety record. Indeed, when scientists attempted to create a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 the laboratory animals all died due to pathogenic priming.
The vaccine mandates are causing middle class professionals to quit their jobs in droves, from highly trained fighter pilots, to large numbers of nurses leading to maternity wards being shuttered. In what is reminiscent of the anthrax vaccine (administered to the military despite the lack of both informed consent and FDA approval), army doctors are now observing serious adverse events in formerly healthy soldiers. The Covid vaccine drive has surpassed even the psychopathy of the Nazi doctors, as it would have been inconceivable to senior physicians in the Third Reich to give all of German society an experimental vaccine.
In an incident that underscores how delusional the mass media has become, WXYZ-TV in Detroit, an ABC affiliate, reached out to people on Facebook for stories of Americans who died of Covid because they delayed getting vaccinated, but were instead inundated with thousands of stories of people who were killed or seriously injured by the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) gene therapies.
Not only has a two-tier society emerged where the unvaccinated are being denied the right to work, attend university, eat out, go to sporting events, and enjoy the performing and visual arts; but another two-tier society has also emerged, one which has been evolving for quite some time now: the mega rich – for whom none of these draconian rules will apply – and everyone else. Video from a Democratic Party fundraiser hosted by Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley has emerged showing affluent liberals rubbing shoulders unmasked while their brown servants wear masks. Masks and social distancing were apparently not required at the recent Met Gala in New York, where celebrities get to hobnob, have shallow conversations, and show off their outlandish costumes while millions of their countrymen wallow in unemployment, hopelessness, and despair.
And it would seem that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose real name incidentally is Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is not the only one who delights in imposing punitive measures on those who opt for the control group, with museums and concert halls enthusiastically embracing the heinous practice. The Guggenheim has even written on their website in conjunction with their vaccine requirement that “We focus on safety so you can immerse yourself in art.” (Thankfully, I have a lot of art books).
What will transpire if the mandates remain in place? Will our leaders order their minions to shut off the water of the unvaccinated? Will workers and students be compelled to take an experimental AIDS vaccine or submit to weekly testing? These injunctions are unethical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional, as they transform inalienable rights into privileges which must be earned by participating in a dangerous medical experiment. Restaurants in Manhattan, which have some of the highest commercial rents in the world, are naturally reluctant to enforce these regulations, yet run the risk of being snitched on by Branch Covidian undercover operatives.
Such an incestuous relationship has formed between the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry, that going to the websites for these agencies invariably yields information that mirrors what is posted on the drug company websites. There is robust science indicating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity. There is likewise compelling evidence that face masks do more harm than good, yet these facts continue to be ignored by the presstitutes – a gaggle of clowns also on industry payroll.
When reporter Emerald Robinson asked White House principal deputy secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how doctors were testing for the Delta variant, Jean-Pierre became defensive, demanding that we stop asking questions and follow “the experts.” They know best after all, who when not registering vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated and artificially inflating the Covid death toll, are busy turning the country into a nation of opioid, heroin (the two are inextricably linked), fentanyl, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, and psychotropic drug addicts. (American doctors even once prescribed cocaine and heroin). Speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, our imaginary president, Dr. Fauci, said that he was sympathetic to Brits and Americans who are accustomed to certain post-Medieval rights and freedoms, “but now is the time to do what you’re told.”
The FDA “approval” for the Pfizer Covid vaccine attempts to conflate EUA investigational agents with FDA-approved drugs, as FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which is still in use, but the Pfizer Comirnaty Covid vaccine, which isn’t even available. The FDA has argued that the two vaccines are indistinguishable from one another and that they can be used interchangeably, which is absurd. Any drug under the auspices of an EUA is by law experimental and cannot be mandated. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Woodcock requesting clarification on this preposterous state of affairs.
It is curious that Hydroxychloroquine is somehow safe as a maintenance drug for lupus, yet suddenly becomes dangerous when used to treat SARS-CoV-2, even if only taken for a very short period of time. Here is the website lupus.org:
Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]
The FDA temporarily authorized the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in March of 2020, but only with hospitalized patients. The FDA notice read as follows:
Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.
As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others have noted, Covid protocols using Hydroxychloroquine and other zinc ionophores are most efficacious early in the disease process. In other words, the FDA denied permission for doctors to use a medication for outpatient care where it has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalization and death, but allowed the drug to be used for hospitalized patients where the disease has often spiraled out of control, thereby setting the drug up to fail. Dr. Simone Gold has argued that the prevalence of Hydroxychloroquine in Africa, where it is frequently obtainable as an over-the-counter drug for malaria treatment and prophylaxis, has played a significant role in protecting the continent from Covid.
So eager were the Branch Covidians to torpedo Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that they conducted dangerous and unethical trials where patients were deliberately overdosed and given toxic quantities of the drug, likely causing some of the trial participants to die, and causing even far more deaths when public health agencies around the world advised (or in some instances, ordered) doctors to stop using a life-saving medication as a treatment for COVID-19.
Writing for The Defender, the newsletter for Children’s Health Defense, Jeremy Loffredo points out that in addition to threatening the profits of the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine posed a threat to the profits of Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir:
Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.
Having had their fill of demonizing Hydroxychloroquine, the presstitutes and pharmaceutical sock puppets turned their vitriol on another unpatentable drug, Ivermectin. Described as “a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction” by the journal New Microbes and New Infections, Ivermectinhas played a critical role in combating onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness. Writing for The Lancet, Michel Boussinesq, MD, PhD, points out that “Ivermectin has been widely used for 30 years to combat onchocerciasis and is rightly considered a wonder drug.” In African countries where Ivermectin is regularly taken as an anti-parasitic Covid deaths have been negligible. Elaborating on this point, Kenyan doctors Stephen Karanga and Wahome Ngare pointed out in a Klartext podcast that due to Ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating Covid they weren’t worried about SARS-CoV-2; their real concerns lay with car accidents, HIV, and malaria.
Meanwhile, the FDA refuses to even acknowledge that Ivermectin can be used in humans, tweeting “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (Yes, those are some of the smartest people in the world). This villainy is not without precedent, as millions of Americans were prescribed highly addictive opioids as opposed to safer and more inexpensive over-the-counter pain medications. The sacking of Canadian emergency physician Dr. Daniel Nagase, who was found guilty of saving the lives of his Covid patients with Ivermectin, underscores the fact that the elites will stop at nothing to prolong the pandemic.
In addition to fomenting the cult-like notion that a vaccine is a magical elixir for which no risk-benefit analysis is needed, the media has played a critical role in deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world into believing that Covid is equally dangerous to all patients irregardless of age and preexisting conditions. This, in turn, has led to Black Death levels of hysteria, as evidenced by unvaccinated locals in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh being forced to wear placards displaying the skull and crossbones.
Physicians who attempt to treat Covid early using Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) protocols are being vilified as quacks and snake oil salesmen, while doctors who are killing staggering numbers of people through a combination of nontreatment and dangerous experimental drugs are hailed as heroes. In many ways, this is the essence of biofascism: care patients desperately need is denied them, while dangerous care is imposed through coercion – both monstrous violations of the oath to do no harm.
It is not uncommon for physicians to prescribe FDA-approved drugs to treat conditions that are different from what the drug was initially intended for. This is referred to as “off-label use” or “off-label prescribing.” How will a high-risk patient who contracts Covid benefit from masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccines (even if they were safe and effective)? They need something that will ward off the inflammatory phase of the disease and keep the ventilator at bay. This suppression of early treatment options has failed to escape the attention of the Indian Bar Association, which has sought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for making fallacious claims about Ivermectin to protect the Church of Vaccinology.
A passage from the Rome Declaration, established at the Rome Covid Summit, and signed by over 10,000 doctors and scientists, states the following:
WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;
WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.
In the Age of Faucism, everyone who arrives at an American emergency room is being given a PCR test, and if it indicates that they have the virus (not unlikely considering the prevalence of false positives), their loved ones are summarily kicked out of the hospital, they are put into isolation, given drugs of dubious safety and efficacy, and even intubated. Dr. Jane Ruby has referred to these Covid obsessed hospitals as “the new ovens.” Furthermore, physicians are being threatened with revocation of their licenses should they be found guilty of “spreading misinformation” – a practice also commonly referred to as informed consent.
Hitler’s physicians were fond of euthanizing the mentally ill, and it would appear that their heirs are equally enamored with the practice, as the mentally handicapped have been vaccinated by force and with armed police present in Los Angeles. Children in Toronto have been given the experimental jab, without parental permission, and in exchange for free ice cream, while irate parents were prevented from entering the grounds. Not to be outdone, whistleblowers from Aegis Living, an assisted living facility for the aged, have reported that residents have been “chemically restrained” and injected with the investigational mRNA biologicals without their knowledge. As Dr. Lee Merritt said in a talk with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “We have a whole society doing what we tried the Nazi doctors for.”
As evidenced by the CDC vaccine schedule (a growing list of mandates coupled with liability protection for the manufacturer), and the fact that parents can be charged with “medical neglect” should they object to their children being placed on psychotropic drugs, the American public school system has long been in the grip of late-stage biofascism. To add insult to injury, toddlers are now being forced to wear masks and the mRNA biologicals are being injected into minors. Children’s Health Defense has reported that “Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be rolled out to babies as young as 6 months in the U.S. this winter — under plans being drawn up by the pharmaceutical giant.”
Convinced that anyone who questions the veracity of the liberal media and the public health agencies is a “conspiracy theorist” (really a euphemism for “mentally ill”), neoliberals have already crossed the Rubicon and taken up the truncheon of authoritarianism. Undoubtedly, the official Covid narrative is deranged. Yet is it any more inane than “Trump’s white supremacist insurrection,” “Russia invaded Ukraine,” “the Russians hacked the election,” “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” and NATO was compelled to bomb Libya to smithereens “to save Benghazi?”
Trapped in a vortex of amnesia and unreason, the neoliberal has been hoodwinked into believing that whatever the medical mullahs say is “the science;” and whatever the liberal media says is incontrovertible, irrefutable, and infallible; i.e., “reality.” Fauci’s contradictory statements, particularly with regard to the virulence of COVID-19 and his stance on masks, fail to diminish their fervor as they cannot even remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the tens of thousands of Americans killed by Vioxx or the over 400,000 Americans that lost their lives to the opioid epidemic.
The liberals of the 1960s, who genuinely believed in the Nuremberg Code, would have regarded the Branch Covidians with contempt. What a pity that the ranks of these medical brownshirts are dominated largely by those who once idolized the likes of Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, yet now wallow in a pitiable state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is true that conservative publications, such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are parroting similar propaganda with regard to Covid. However, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s show, the conservative media no longer speaks with one voice. Moreover, millions of conservatives no longer believe in the infallibility of the conservative media as liberals continue to believe in the infallibility of the liberal media.
Ultimately, the Branch Covidians are the offspring of a union between a corporatized health care system that has grown increasingly hostile to informed consent, and a liberal class that stopped thinking when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and has come to regard senior officials in the liberal media and the public health agencies as gods. The mass psychosis of the Branch Covidians is inextricably linked with the mass psychosis of neoliberalism. Without the latter the former would have about as much societal impact as the Hare Krishnas.
The Nazis divided humanity into the subhumans (Jews, Roma, political prisoners, and Slavs); the humans (allied European fascists and the Japanese); and the supermen (the Germans, or Aryans). For quite some time now, the American health care system has been mired in a multi-tier system which divides patients up into similar categories. In light of this boorishness, teaching hospitals have long been instructing trainees that care is to be doled out depending on what kind of insurance plan patients have. Privileged patients are granted the right to choose their own doctor while the less fortunate are confined to narrow networks. Humans are permitted to meet with an attending physician while the Untermenschen are sent to resident clinics. Unbeknownst to Nazi doctors, both past and present, there is no bioethics on-off switch. In what was foundational to the Blitzkrieg but could also explain their increasingly deranged decision making, much of the German military during World War II was regularly taking Pervitin, the predecessor to crystal meth, and doing so with the support of their own doctors.
As the forces of darkness become increasingly desperate, liberals drown in an ocean of madness and sociopathy. Hypnotized by an oligarchy they have deified, while believing that they are still marching with Martin Luther King singing “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome,” this faux-left movement bears a closer resemblance to the Democratic Party of the 1860s than the Democratic Party of the 1960s. Indeed, if the Branch Covidians succeed in destroying the citadel of informed consent, only one form of government will reign in the United States: slavery.
This week on CounterSpin: The thing about the US Postal Service: Low-income people get the same service as the rich; rural people get their prescriptions and paychecks and ballots in the same timeframe as those in big cities. The idea has always been that postal service is a public good, not to be mined for profit, and not tiered to give the wealthy yet another leg up. USPS is the second-largest employer in the country, traditionally offering opportunities for people of color—and unlike the number one employer, Walmart, it doesn’t subsidize itself by paying wages so low that employees have to also rely on public assistance. That’s why it’s so worrying that the current leaders of the Postal Service seem intent on driving it into the ground. We’ll talk about the fight for the post office with Lisa Graves, executive director and editor-in-chief at True North Research</a
Also on the show: Attorney General Merrick Garland has ordered the FBI to work with local leaders to help address the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators and school board members over mask mandates, and also interpretations of critical race theory, which has been distorted by conservatives to mean any teaching about racism or systemic inequity in US society. If you didn’t know that K–12 teachers and college professors are under visceral attack simply for teaching the unvarnished truth of US history, it might be because somehow many free speech advocates, including in the press corps, haven’t taken on this disturbing encroachment on the rights of educators and students. Teachers, however, are fighting back, and a number of groups are planning a Day of Action on October 14 to shed light on that fight and what’s at stake. We’ll hear about that from Stevana Sims, public school counselor in Montclair, New Jersey, and a member of the steering committee of the group Black Lives Matter at School.
Britain’s pro-Israel lobby gained another important scalp last week after a prolonged campaign of intimidation finally pushed a major UK university into firing one of its lecturers.
Bristol University dismissed David Miller, a political sociology professor, even though an official investigation had concluded that accusations of antisemitism against him were unfounded.
Research by Miller, a leading scholar on propaganda, had charted networks of influence in the UK in relation to Islamophobia that included the very pro-Israel lobby groups that worked to get him fired.
The decision is likely to prove a severe blow to academic freedoms in the UK that are already under growing threat from efforts to silence criticism of Israel in the wake of reports from Israeli and international human rights describing it as an apartheid state.
Bristol faced a similar campaign four years ago against another professor, Rebecca Gould, years after she wrote an article on how Israel used the memory of the Holocaust to “whitewash its crimes” against Palestinians. Despite demands that she be sacked, Gould survived, possibly in part because she is Jewish.
Lobby emboldened
But since that attack, an emboldened pro-Israel lobby has been increasingly successful in conflating criticism of Israel – and the activities of groups that seek to shield Israel from scrutiny – with antisemitism.
The lobby smelled blood with the success of its years-long campaign to vilify the previous leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights. They argued that he had presided over a plague of antisemitism in Labour. Corbyn stepped down as leader last year.
The evidence-free claims of an “antisemitism crisis” under Corbyn were amplified by the billionaire-owned media and Labour’s own right-wing bureaucracy, both of which wanted the socialist Corbyn gone.
In a sign of the lobby’s continuing hold on political discourse in the UK about Israel and antisemitism, Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, has been purging the party of Corbyn’s supporters, including Jews, smearing them as antisemites.
At Labour’s party conference last month, however, Starmer faced a backlash. Delegates voted in favor of a motion declaring Israel an apartheid state. The motion also demanded sanctions against Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land and an end to UK arms sale to Israel.
Islamophobia fomented
With Bristol’s sacking of Miller, the key battleground appears to be shifting to academia, where it is feared that the idea of Israel as an apartheid state may gain a foothold. The lobby has been noisily celebrating the professor’s dismissal, presumably in the hope that a clear message is sent to other academics to rein in their public criticisms of Israel.
The campaign against Miller started more than two years ago, after the professor published research on “five pillars of Islamophobia” in British society. One diagram illustrated the organizational ties between pro-Israel lobby groups in the UK and a set of what Israel terms “national institutions” in fomenting Islamophobia.
2. The CST claim this slide showed ‘mainstream UK Jewish orgs & individuals in a network under "Israel government". In context of a lecture about Islamophobia this echoes conspiracy & dual loyalty tropes’ pic.twitter.com/cHdiRKNcYo
Miller was bringing to light the influence of this network of transnational institutions that in Israel’s view represent a global “Jewish nation” whose homeland is Israel.
(Paradoxically, the Zionist belief that Jews form a single people who need to organize globally through a complex network of transnational and local institutions to ward off antisemitism neatly mirrors antisemitic ideas of Jews being part of a global conspiracy.)
So-called “national institutions” such as the Jewish National Fund, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency all enjoy quasi-state authority in Israel while establishing affiliated local organizations in most major western countries.
Miller’s work showed how these agencies, effectively acting as arms of the Israeli state, have deep institutional and funding ties to UK Zionist groups – the same groups that have pushed for the redefinition of antisemitism in ways designed to silence criticism of Israel and that led the campaign against Corbyn.
His research suggested that the lobby’s promotion of Islamophobia had played a part of those campaigns.
‘Civilisational divide’
Fear of Muslims and Islam has long bolstered a self-serving narrative that Israel stands with the Judeo-Christian west against a supposed Islamic barbarism and terrorism. Palestinians, despite the fact a significant proportion are Christian, have been presented as on the wrong side of that supposed civilizational divide.
Backed by establishment media, the Union of Jewish Students originally alleged that a lecture by Miller on Islamophobia had made two unnamed Bristol students “uncomfortable and intimidated”.
But far from representing all Jewish students, the UJS is an avowedly Zionist body, one affiliated through the World Union of Jewish Students to the World Zionist Organization, the “national institution” whose role includes directing Israel’s building of illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
Miller was cleared of the lobby’s initial allegations, but that served only to intensify the campaign against him. He was subjected to a follow-up investigation by Bristol University earlier this year.
In response, some 200 scholars, including prominent figures such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, both of them Jewish, petitioned the university. Their letter noted the “unrelenting and concerted efforts to publicly vilify” Miller.
The professor, they added, was “known internationally for exposing the role that powerful actors and well-resourced, coordinated networks play in manipulating and stage-managing public debates, including on racism.”
Miller’s sacking follows the lobby’s success in pressuring major institutions, including Bristol university, into adopting a controversial new definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Of a set of 11 supposed examples of antisemitism posited by the IHRA, seven refer to Israel.
Even the lead author of the definition, a Jewish lawyer, Kenneth Stern, has urged public institutions against adopting it, warning that it has been “weaponized” to stop speech about Israel. His warnings have fallen on deaf ears.
The ruling Conservative party has joined the pressure campaign, celebrating last month the fact that the number of British universities adopting the IHRA definition had rocketed by 160 percent over the past year – from 30 to 80.
That may in part be explained by the fact that the government has threatened the funding of any universities that refuse to comply.
Paradoxically, at the same as Boris Johnson’s government has been seeking to silence criticism of Israel, it has also been demanding an end to what it calls “cancel culture” at universities – chiefly attempts by students to deny a platform to racist and transphobic speakers.
The campaign against Miller has won the backing of large numbers of politicians from all parties, even the sole Green legislator, Caroline Lucas. More than 100 members of parliament wrote to Bristol university in March, echoing the lobby groups’ claims that the professor was “inciting hatred against Jewish students”.
Cleared of antisemitism, fired anyway
Strangely, when Bristol launched its second investigation back in March, a government minister announced: “It is the responsibility of the University of Bristol to determine whether or not Prof Miller’s remarks constitute lawful free speech.”
In a statement on Miller’s dismissal last week, the university conceded that the senior lawyer it appointed had not found anything “unlawful” in Miller’s comments.
In fact, Miller told Mondoweiss, the university’s statement was itself misleading. Their lawyer’s report had, he said, “found that my comments were not antisemitic and that they did not in any way violate the Equality Act”.
Despite the lawyer finding in Miller’s favor, the university nonetheless sacked him. It said it had “a duty of care to all students and the wider University community” and that Miller had failed to “meet the standards of behaviour we expect from our staff”.
This appeared to be the university’s mealy-mouthed equivalent of “bringing the party into disrepute” – the UK Labour party’s justification for suspending and expelling members when it proved impossible to actually find evidence against them to support claims of antisemitism.
Miller has said he will appeal, either using the university’s own internal procedures or referring the case to an employment tribunal.
Bristol may have problems defending its actions. Its statement poses more questions than it answers.
Does the university not also have a duty of care to Miller himself, if nothing he did was found to be unlawful or antisemitic?
And as the university admits that “members of our community hold very different views from one another” on the issues at the heart of the investigation, does it not also have a duty of care to Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and left-wing students?
The university has sent a clear message to them that their concerns about Islamophobia, and how it is being promoted in the UK, are a very low priority – and that even academics who speak in solidarity with them risk losing their job.
And how is it possible to square the university’s claim that it is committed to preserving “the essential principles of academic freedom” when it has so flagrantly caved in to an unsubstantiated campaign of intimidation?
Miller’s sacking makes it all but impossible for any other academic to consider either research into Islamophobia or an examination of the role of an important UK lobby, leaving these fields effectively off-limits.
Causing offense
Miller’s research has proved to have predictive value – one of the yardsticks for measuring the plausibility of its thesis.
The very networks of influence he identified as seeking to silence criticism of Israel quickly got to work trumpeting their victory against Miller on social media, making sure that other academics would get the message.
ACT.IL, which if it were operating on behalf of Russia rather than Israel would be described as a troll factory, rallied its followers to denounce Miller online for “spouting antisemitism”.
The case has been similarly misrepresented in the British media, which has been leading the campaign against Miller, as it did against Corbyn.
A report in the supposedly liberal Guardian described Miller’s case as splitting “the campus between staff and students who accused him of spouting antisemitic tropes in lectures and online, and those who worried that sanctions would stifle sensitive research”.
The assumption in the Guardian and elsewhere was that Miller had indeed “spouted antisemitic tropes”, and that the only question was whether sacking him was too high a price – given the danger it might stifle research.
It never occurred to the Guardian or other media outlets that some staff and students – as well as the Queen’s Counsel investigating the case – did not actually believe Miller had “spouted antisemitic tropes”.
In truth, Miller’s research and his statements on the lobby and Islamophobia only appeared antisemitic in a new, highly politicized sense of the term – cultivated by the Israel lobby – that criticizing Israel and its lobbyists causes offense.
But that is inevitable when research challenges popular assumptions or questions systems of power. Universities either support academic research and where it leads, or they do not.
Miller noted that the lobby’s success would encourage it to “redouble it efforts” to campaign for other academics to be dismissed.
Despite its weasel statement, Bristol has shown it has absolutely no commitment to academic freedom. The danger now is that few other British universities will stand up for that principle either.
They said we need internet censorship because Russia.
They said we need internet censorship because Covid.
They said we need internet censorship because election security.
They said we need internet censorship because Capitol riot.
They said we need internet censorship because domestic extremists.
Now they say we need internet censorship because Facebook whistleblower.
Pretty sure they just want internet censorship.
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It’s so lucky how the political/media class and US intelligence agencies have been so very solemnly concerned that we have too much free speech on the internet and they just keep happening to get these viral news stories which show that internet censorship is a dire necessity.
Corporations, politicians, media, military and intelligence agencies are all the same class, and they have far better class solidarity than the rest of us.
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Crazy how we learned the CIA planned to assassinate Assange and spied on him and his lawyers and the US prosecution relied heavily on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester and we’re still like “Man I hope the extradition case gets dropped.”
That’s how bad things are.
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Really rich people are creepy and they do creepy things. Billionaires spend a lot on media influence to manufacture consent for their existence and for the status quo their kingdoms are built on, but also because they need lots of PR assistance since they’re so fucking creepy.
The richer you are the more divorced from normality you become. You don’t even know how a normal person acts. It never even occurs to you that people will think you look creepy devouring a baked lizard or buying up vast swathes of America’s farmland.
Before you know it you’re blasting off on a $5 billion carnival ride to space in a rocket that looks like a penis going “Yeah, this is fine. This is just normal stuff.”
I mean, come on.
Elon Musk says his brain technology company, Neuralink, has implanted a device in a monkey's brain, and hopes to make it play games in its own mind. https://t.co/Ig3zkSL1clpic.twitter.com/D1ULVwEwns
Just coming right out and saying you want to ship all the normal people into space to breed in giant rotating cylinders? That’s creepy. That’s really, really creepy.
Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He’s Trying To Rule
"Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space."https://t.co/Ps7iMvwfwA
As soon as the subject turns to Israel AOC always loses all linguistic faculties and transforms into this weird babbling space alien.
On Sunday, @AOC was asked about her “present” vote on a bill that allocates an extra $1 billion to Israel.
She defended her decision: “In the micro, I do believe that this created a window in our community to be able to bring all folks to the table…” pic.twitter.com/W95xxiPhZx
— Human Rights Watch Watcher (@queeralamode) October 5, 2021
Word salading is sometimes called “narc speak“, because it’s a technique often used by narcissists to confuse, overwhelm, and exert control over their target.
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The farthest-left politicians in the most powerful government on earth just believe capitalism should be a little less abusive and the empire should be a tiny bit less murderous.
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If your country’s political moderates support war, militarism, ecocide and authoritarianism, it means you are governed by violent extremists.
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Don’t defend officials from your government. Just don’t do it. Do whatever you need to do to drive that power-worshipping, propaganda-instilled impulse from your mind and flush it down the toilet where it belongs.
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Calls for civility toward government officials are always power-serving and anti-populist in nature. They’re born of an elitist fear that the common riff raff may realize their true power.
It is very revealing that western media never expose the malfeasance of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth, and this most certainly distorts people’s worldview, and this is most certainly not an accident, and it is most certainly worth talking about.
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Futurists who predict an imminent explosion of innovation enabling a human biotechnology fusion which exponentially enhances people’s brains, senses and lifespans fail to appreciate that those technologies will inevitably be under the control of sociopathic intelligence agencies.
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Make birthdays about everyone saying why they’re glad they had another year with that person. Make funerals about everyone saying why they’re sad they don’t get any more years with that person.
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This believing we’re our bodies thing is driving everyone crazier and crazier in all sorts of ways and eventually we’re just gonna have to snap out of it and wake up to our true nature.
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In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.
According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
In the repurchase agreement (repo) market, interest rates soared on 16 September. The Federal Reserve stepped in by intervening to the tune of $75 billion per day over four days, a sum not seen since the 2008 crisis.
At that time, according to Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory at Cardiff University, the Fed began an emergency monetary programme that saw hundreds of billions of dollars per week pumped into Wall Street.
Over the last 18 months or so, under the guise of a ‘pandemic’, we have seen economies closed down, small businesses being crushed, workers being made unemployed and people’s rights being destroyed. Lockdowns and restrictions have facilitated this process. The purpose of these so-called ‘public health measures’ has little to do with public health and much to do with managing a crisis of capitalism and ultimately the restructuring of the economy.
Neoliberalism has squeezed workers income and benefits, offshored key sectors of economies and has used every tool at its disposal to maintain demand and create financial Ponzi schemes in which the rich can still invest in and profit from. The bailouts to the banking sector following the 2008 crash provided only temporary respite. The crash returned with a much bigger bang pre-Covid along with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.
The dystopian ‘great reset’ that we are currently witnessing is a response to this crisis. This reset envisages a transformation of capitalism.
Fabio Vighi sheds light on the role of the ‘pandemic’ in all of this:
… some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s).
Vighi describes how, in pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown and chronicles how the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers and others worked to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.
The world economy was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were rising everywhere.
Lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation.
Vighi says:
… the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off.
It all amounted to a multi-trillion bailout for Wall Street under the guise of COVID ‘relief’ followed by an ongoing plan to fundamentally restructure capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for these predatory corporations, and the eradication of millions of jobs resulting from lockdowns and accelerated automation.
It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.
The World Economic Forum says that by 2030 the public will ‘rent’ everything they require. This means undermining the right of ownership (or possibly seizing personal assets) and restricting consumer choice underpinned by the rhetoric of reducing public debt or ‘sustainable consumption’, which will be used to legitimise impending austerity as a result of the economic meltdown. Ordinary people will foot the bill for the ‘COVID relief’ packages.
If the financial bailouts do not go according to plan, we could see further lockdowns imposed, perhaps justified under the pretext of ‘the virus’ but also ‘climate emergency’.
It is not only Big Finance that has been saved. A previously ailing pharmaceuticals industry has also received a massive bailout (public funds to develop and purchase the vaccines) and lifeline thanks to the money-making COVID jabs.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants as well and have cemented their dominance. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID government measures.
Capitalism and labour
Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms. A significant part of the working class has long been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. Since then, this section of the population has had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services or, if ‘lucky’, insecure low-paid service sector jobs.
What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. After a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK – a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs – a leading UN poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.
In another 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.
Over the past 10 years in the UK, according to the Trussell Group, there has been rising food poverty and increasing reliance on food banks.
And in a damning report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million cannot afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million are too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults are not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).
Moreover, a 2015 report by the New Policy Institute noted that the total number of people in poverty in the UK had increased by 800,000, from 13.2 to 14.0 million in just two to three years.
Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity’ years were anything but austere for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).
Just some of the cruelties of the ‘free market’ for those who live and work in the real world. And all of this hardship prior to lockdowns that have subsequently devastated lives, livelihoods and health, with cancer diagnoses and treatments and other conditions having been neglected due to the shutdown of health services.
During the current economic crisis, what we are seeing is many millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision on the immediate horizon, a mass labour force will no longer be required.
It raises fundamental questions about the need for and the future of mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.
As the economy is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. If work is a condition of the existence of the labouring classes, then, in the eyes of capitalists, why maintain a pool of (surplus) labour that is no longer needed?
A concentration of wealth power and ownership is taking place as a result of COVID-related policies: according to research by Oxfam, the world’s billionaires gained $3.9 trillion while working people lost $3.7 trillion in 2020. At the same time, as large sections of the population head into a state of permanent unemployment, the rulers are weary of mass dissent and resistance. We are witnessing an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
In 2020, World Bank Group President David Malpass stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns but such ‘help’ would be on condition that neoliberal reforms become further embedded. In other words, the de facto privatisation of states (affecting all nations, rich and poor alike), the (complete) erosion of national sovereignty and dollar-denominated debt leading to a further strengthening of US leverage and power.
In a system of top-down surveillance capitalism with an increasing section of the population deemed ‘unproductive’ and ‘useless eaters’, notions of individualism, liberal democracy and the ideology of free choice and consumerism are regarded by the elite as ‘unnecessary luxuries’ along with political and civil rights and freedoms.
We need only look at the ongoing tyranny in Australia to see where other countries could be heading. How quickly Australia was transformed from a ‘liberal democracy’ to a brutal totalitarian police state of endless lockdowns where gathering and protests are not to be tolerated.
Being beaten and thrown to the ground and fired at with rubber bullets in the name of protecting health makes as much sense as devastating entire societies through socially and economically destructive lockdowns to ‘save lives’.
It makes as much sense as mask-wearing and social-distancing mandates unsupported by science, misused and flawed PCR tests, perfectly healthy people being labelled as ‘cases’, deliberately inflated COVID death figures, pushing dangerous experimental vaccines in the name of health, ramping up fear, relying on Neil Ferguson’s bogus modelling, censoring debate about any of this and the WHO declaring a worldwide ‘pandemic’ based on a very low number of global ‘cases’ back in early 2020 (44,279 ‘cases’ and 1,440 supposed COVID deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion).
There is little if any logic to this. But of course, If we view what is happening in terms of a crisis of capitalism, it might begin to make a lot more sense.
The austerity measures that followed the 2008 crash were bad enough for ordinary people who were still reeling from the impacts when the first lockdown was imposed.
The authorities are aware that deeper, harsher impacts as well as much more wide-ranging changes will be experienced this time around and seem adamant that the masses must become more tightly controlled and conditioned to their coming servitude.
You’d think the revelation that the CIA planned to assassinate an award-winning journalist for journalistic activity would have been a bigger deal.
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Capitalism hinders progress because it ensures that all mass-scale human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit. For example, a huge global issue we have right now is cleaning up the pollution in our oceans. That is an easily solved issue if you take out the profit motive; you don’t wait for market forces to find some way to make it profitable, you just get in there and clean it up. But with the profit motive it’s almost impossible to conceive of it ever being solved.
How often have you been excited by a great idea only to feel that familiar disappointment wash over you as you realize that it will never happen because it won’t make anyone any money? That’s how the profit motive stunts innovation.
The profit motive will never find a way to leave a forest alone or minerals in the ground. There’s no business plan that makes money out of moms being paid to bring up healthy, happy, secure children. You can’t find a way to make money out of people driving less or buying less. There is no money in curing an illness, only treating it. There is no money in solving poverty, only in setting up a multi-million dollar “charity” that never actually intends to solve poverty because it’s a business and a business requires endless expansion.
People who proffer the market as a solution to our massive problems have either never really thought about the restrictions of the profit motive, or they are heavily invested in pretending those restrictions don’t exist. I don’t respect either of those positions.
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The corporations are the government. If you didn’t believe it before, believe it now that human rights lawyer Steven Donziger has effectively been sentenced to six months in prison by Chevron itself.
Human rights lawyer @SDonziger was sentenced to six months in prison today for contempt of court. For the first time in US history in such a case, he was prosecuted not by the US Justice Dept, but by a private attorney who worked for Chevron. #FreeDonzigerhttps://t.co/mm8P3jS8ZJpic.twitter.com/P5TmiChBRh
Never attribute to an elite cabal of Satanic pedovores what can be adequately explained by capitalism.
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Jeff Bezos steals $2537 per second.
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Remember when we learned that a very wealthy person can for a relatively small fee hire an army of former Mossad agents to terrorize, intimidate and subvert any private citizen?
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It’s pretty fucked up how our criminal justice systems are like a century behind our understanding of developmental psychology, trauma and addiction.
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Imagine if young people deployed to remove plastic from the ocean instead of to kill foreigners for Lockheed Martin.
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The US and its allies have every obligation to absorb the immigrants fleeing the conditions created by the imperialist warmongering and economic exploitation inflicted upon them by that power alliance. If you want people to stay in their own countries then stop destroying those countries.
It’s funny how defenders of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations often bleated “You break it, you bought it,” but they always meant “We broke their country therefore we need to continue the occupation” and not “We broke their country therefore we need to take in all the people fleeing the conditions we created.”
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Wow Australia’s such a mess, I don’t understand how a continent-sized military base with no bill of rights that was built on prison labor and genocide and apartheid could be experiencing human rights issues.
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Picture the most intrusive, Orwellian government you can possibly imagine: watching your every move, controlling everything you do. That’s the kind of power we should have over any system of government. Total transparency and accountability to the people, total control by the people.
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I just cannot understand why all these damn anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists don’t trust a government that actively works against the public interest 100 percent of the time.
I mean if you can’t trust institutions that are deliberately constructed to subvert the common good for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful at every turn, who can you trust?
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Leaving aside the horrifying normalization of worldwide online speech being controlled by Silicon Valley plutocrats, does anyone actually believe that censoring vaccine skepticism will lead to increased trust in the vaccines? Does that really sound like something that would work?
“Obviously the best way to convince conspiracy theorists to trust their institutions is to have an elite cabal of billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley coordinate the blanket censorship of their online speech.”
Yeah great idea, dipshit.
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If there are future humans on the other side of the existential hurdles our species is approaching there is a zero percent chance that they still destroy the environment to manufacture useless junk because they all need jobs to keep numbers in their bank accounts so they don’t starve.
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When you actually love someone you are intensely curious about them and fascinated by them. You want to know everything about their inner world and what makes them tick, and you delight in what’s revealed to you with profound appreciation. If this isn’t happening, it isn’t love.
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A lady in a spirituality group I used to frequent announced she was filtering the fluoride out of her water and made a really big deal about it. Every day she’d gush about her amazing third eye visions and how great she was feeling and how she pities all our poor calcified pineal glands. Then one day someone showed her that the filter she was using doesn’t actually filter out fluoride.
I think about this often.
❖
So much of what we call spirituality is just the mind searching for things that are already the case. Peace. Freedom. Presence. Boundlessness. Unconditional love. These things are already here, are already you. Just obscured by the mind’s flailing around trying to create them.
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In a day when America is ruling over a global Empire maintained with violent enforcement to insure universal subordination to its will; and in a day when a military-style domestic police state relentlessly makes sure anti-government protest and dissent is contained, the patriarchal part of that America has been enhanced and strengthened.
Feminist movements have launched long, fierce struggles to undermine patriarchal culture: to ensure female power, to assert woman’s image as showing woman’s strength, to refute women’s inferiority to men, to establish female equality, politically, economically, and personally. In my own work, I’ve analyzed those struggles: first, the National Woman’s Party’s heroic campaign for woman’s suffrage, which included jail, beatings and forced feeding; second, the uphill battle of women athletes, from the late 19th century on, striving to rid themselves of the necessity to have an image of “sex appeal” and just play ball. And last, I’ve written of the amazing courage of American women political prisoners, women who challenged a government and society which refused to recognize their right to be dissenters against imperialism—racism—capitalist inequality and ecocide—and sexism.
The Patriarchy, in spite of all the movements, campaigns and struggles, is not dead yet. The problems come from many directions, but they circle back to age-old conditions. We feminists of the 1960s-70s thought we might have won some of the battles. I almost got out of my car to object when I drove through a town near where I live to challenge workers sporting “men working” signs. My Saratoga NOW chapter succeeded in eliminating separate sections for male and female in the local paper’s help wanted section in the 70s. What happened to that?! We feminists must continue to stubbornly insist on our equality, on woman’s image not being sexualized, and on changing women’s lack of power. We must keep on insisting that women are not inferior to men, should be believed, should be listened to.
American sports, still a stubbornly male-dominated institution, has largely held the line against real female equality. All this was very evident last March when NCAA women’s basketball was not accorded anywhere near balanced attention, or its needs met in a comparable way to the men’s. More ominously, the NCAA has shown their (lack of) concern for women athletes, especially vis-à-vis some criminally violent male athletes, when it decided, as Jessica Luther wrote in the LA Times, that “rape is not an NCAA violation.” Between 2011 and 2016, 17 women reported assaults by Baylor University football players, including four gang rapes.
In the spring of 2012 a woman volleyball player reported being assaulted by “multiple football players” at a party. After her mother spoke to the athletic director and football coach Art Briles, nothing was done. A player was convicted of sexual assault in 2015, but in 2016 and 2017 lawsuits against Baylor accused the school of continuing to ignore its “culture of sexual violence.” Coach Briles was finally fired in 2016, and college president Ken Starr, who had belatedly started an investigation, also resigned. Recently, citing pandemic delays, the NCAA finally ruled on Baylor’s culture of violence by deciding it “did not break NCAA rules.” Although the NCAA panel punished them for an academic infraction, they did not find Baylor guilty for not reporting or addressing “sexual and interpersonal violence.” They declared it was a failure of the coaching and athletic staff, but not an NCAA problem. They who supposedly wanted (women) athletes to be safe, offered no assistance in the case of “gendered violence.” Numerous attempts to get the NCAA to change this policy have not succeeded. Remember Michigan State was cleared of blame for allowing gymnastics’ doctor Larry Nasser’s unspeakable sexual crimes against young women!
The NFL also does not do well dealing with sexual violence. Player violence against women has been commonplace, with few repercussions. The recent case of accused multiple sexual assaulter DeShaun Watson is illustrative of valuable player versus serious female complaints about him. The Houston quarterback has had a number of licensed massage therapists accuse him of unwanted sexual acts and assault. At this time, Watson is facing 22 civil law suits and 10 criminal complaints, and is thus on the NFL’s “inactive” list. The victims were interviewed by NFL investigators who treated them—said the women—in a “patronizing” and “victim-blaming” manner. The NFL placed no restrictions on Watson during the investigation, who, according to his accuser Ashley Solis, not only assaulted her but threatened her career when she got upset. When the investigator questioned what she wore for their massage sessions, she asked: “What did they think I should wear to suggest that I don’t want you to put your penis in my hand?” She has said that “the NFL is taking a stand against women and survivors of sexual assault.” The NFL is also not so great in other areas regarding women’s worth and dignity.
Cheerleading is a (predominantly) female sport which has encountered all kinds of indignities. The NFL teams Buffalo, Cincinnati, Jets, Tampa Bay and Oakland all faced lawsuits from cheerleaders in 2014. Two Buffalo Jills told HBO’s Real Sports they receive $125 a game, and nothing for ads, photo shoots or practices. Some of these lawsuits were successful, but today there are still NFL cheerleaders making less than $1,000 a year. The interviewed Jills also said they were rejected as dancers if they didn’t pass “the jiggle test” while doing jumping jacks. First female Jet football coach Collette Smith said on “Real Sports” that it does not seem right for cheerleaders, “athletes,” to just have to “shake with no clothes on, like sex kittens!” There’s a new documentary film called “A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem,” about which Director Yu Gu says, that in a culture with “toxic masculinity… men feel entitled to women’s bodies.” An even darker situation took place with youth cheerleaders. In an unregulated sport, except by its own million-dollar profit-making organizations, abuses have been many. Male cheerleading “coaches” supposedly training cheerleaders, instead sexually assaulted them—and continued to participate in the sport. Two were even featured on the Netflix “Cheer” show, before finally being arrested and scheduled for trial. Not much protection there, when, as usual, it might interfere with image and therefore profit.
Image is also an issue regarding this year’s Tokyo Olympics. I watched with admiration as silver medalist shot putter Raven Saunders demonstrated for human rights and against racism on the Olympic podium by crossing her arms over her head to show their intersection. The IOC’s (International Olympic Committee) restrictions on protests held quite well, although hammer thrower Gwen Berry and the US women’s soccer team took a knee before competing. Women Olympic athletes have not been afraid to speak out. Track and field athlete Sara Goucher, with several other women, accused former champion marathoner and prominent track coach Alberto Salazar of “doping violations” and of abuse. He is banned, at least for now.
A problem which has always resonated with me is the way female athletes dress to do their sport. It’s not new: female baseball players had to wear short skirts and female basketball players sported red wigs in the 40s, but now it is beyond absurd. Women have to wear (it’s mandatory) very revealing outfits as skaters, runners, beach volleyball players and gymnasts. But some women are protesting this. Norway’s women’s beach handball team (not yet an Olympic sport) were fined after they wore shorts instead of bikinis at EURO2021. And at the Olympics, the German women’s gymnastics team wore unitards covering their whole body from the neck down. They said they wanted to “push back against the sexualization of women in gymnastics.” Male gymnasts wear shorts and loose pants. It’s the Olympic women who wear revealing outfits to run, and bikinis to play beach volleyball. It’s an extreme demonstration of “sexualization,” of a patriarchal culture limiting woman’s image to a sexual one, rather than one of a competent, strong athlete.
In a patriarchal culture, male power attempts to supersede women’s. In such an environment, women have little value and receive little respect. And when powerful male politicians do this (and there are so many of them), it becomes very public. (Former) Governor Andrew Cuomo is the latest to fall from grace after many years of getting away with sexual misconduct toward his staff, campaign organizers, and even a female state trooper. Some of his fellow Democratic politicians have called him “a lecherous tyrant” who empowered his staff “to threaten and intimidate.” Cuomo collected young, good-looking women to work for him and they were expected to always dress well, including makeup and high heels. If a woman decided she didn’t like his demands and cruel work environment, it was made clear she’d have a hard time getting another job. Inappropriate comments and touching were his trademarks. He was able to maintain this extremely harmful situation for women in his employ until on August 3rd, New York Attorney General Letitia James, after taking on the growing complaints (which had gotten nowhere with senior staff), issued her thorough and well-investigated report which accused the governor of “sexually harassing 11 women in violation of the law.” The report detailed “unwanted groping, kissing, hugging and inappropriate comments.” Some were worse, such as the Albany staffers who reported that he grabbed their breasts. And so the media darling who supposedly handled the COVID crisis so well (except for that pesky problem with covering up nursing home deaths), had to resign. Most Democratic politicians abandoned him in the end: but two who held out a long time were President Biden and Vice President Harris.
President Trump’s sexual misadventures were numerous, as such things are very much bipartisan. Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct got him impeached. He admitted to relations with Monica Lewinsky, but faced more serious allegations of rape from Juanita Broaddrick. Last March Kamala Harris held a discussion about “empowering women and girls”—something the Clinton Foundation states that it does around the world—which included Mr. Clinton. Broaddrick asked in a tweet if conference host Howard University might “like to include me in their empowering event with Bill Clinton?” Harris had no comment on that, nor, at that point, on the accusations surrounding Governor Cuomo. The President also did not feel Cuomo should resign, until after the Letitia James report was revealed. Funnily enough, Joe Biden has been accused of the self-same thing as Cuomo, for years. During Biden’s presidential campaign, these proclivities were brought up, especially by Tara Reade, his former staffer. Reade accused Biden of serious sexual assault, including pressing her against a Capitol corridor wall and digitally penetrating her. She reported this incident to friends and family, and senior staff (to no avail), at the time. Other women have complained of similar incidents of inappropriate touching, up to and including on the 2020 campaign trail. Reade’s May 2020 interview with Megyn Kelly tells of her experience, but she also talks about the overwhelming hate she has received from the media and the utter disbelief from Democratic women protecting their candidate. As Reade said to Kelly: “Do we want [as president] someone who thinks of women as objects, who thinks that they can just take what they want in that moment for their pleasure and that’s it?” She was not believed, an experience common to so many women who have undergone abuse by powerful men, from Dylan Farrow (re Woody Allen), to Ambra Gutierrez (re Harvey Weinstein), to Andrea Costand (re Bill Cosby), and to women aides and staff of important and powerful men. #Me Too has been a good thing, to a point. Women still shy away from believing accusations against certain men.
Not believing women is inherent to patriarchal culture. I remember going to the hospital when I was teaching in Fargo, where I was eventually admitted for severe dehydration and a bad case of the flu. The male doctor who first saw me talked of “the so-called pain in my chest.” He apparently didn’t believe me. The value of women’s bodies certainly seems to be in question when yet another struggle supposedly won in the 70s—a woman’s right to choose abortion—is, thanks to the rise in power of Christian right fascists who are (!) patriarchal, again in jeopardy. Women’s lives are in jeopardy on many fronts. Attorney and John Jay professor Marcie Smith Parenti wrote a piece for the Grayzone, entitled “Why Won’t the US Medical Establishment Believe Women?” She outlines a serious situation where the CDC and FDA, in their rush to vaccinate everyone (only 23% of pregnant women have at least one dose), have seriously downplayed and dismissed evidence that thousands of women have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 vaccines (most related to the mRNA vaccines). Large numbers of vaccinated women have had their menstrual cycle disrupted: extreme cramping, passing golf-ball size blood clots, and having “hemorrhagic bleeding.” Parenti has several friends with such symptoms. But beyond possibly anecdotal experience, by July of this year, the UK had 13,000 reports of “menstruation disruption,” with similar reports in Canada and India.
The US, with its “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), had thousands of reports (they admit VAERS only catches a low percentage of adverse events) by July as well: such reports included 88 “fetal deaths” and 25 “stillbirths” along with the hemorrhagic bleeding. Although the FDA and CDC quickly warned of the myocarditis threat (a heart ailment) to young men posed by the vaccine, no warnings have been issued regarding menstrual disruption. Parenti argues that menstruation is a central issue for women’s health and there are many incidents revealing that cycle’s disruption in myriad and very serious ways, including possible infertility. She says that women deserve an investigation into these reports, with explanations and medical information, and “non-punitive accommodations if they decline a vaccine at this time.” But no: they can be barred from school and public places, and lose their jobs. And if women are showing too much concern publicly, Parenti says they are “subjected to 1950s-style dismissal and demonization.” After all, such concerns could “stoke unwarranted vaccine fears.” And about such trivial health issues as menstruation, just “woman troubles.”
Last June the National Institute of Health called for proposals to study a possible link between the vaccine and menstruation disruption. And now, the NIH has at last ordered a study about that possible link, $1.67 million worth, with a half million (!) participants. But Diana Bianchi, NIH head of child health and human development says the FDA should not be faulted for the investigation’s delay. And the (of course, justifiable) reason for the delay has been echoed in every single item of media coverage I’ve read over the last few days. The FDA was “worried this was contributing to vaccine hesitancy in reproductive-age women.” Bianchi says the vaccine certainly does not cause infertility. And (again echoing all the news reports on it), “really [menstruation} is not a life and death issue.” Women should simply do what they’re told and ignore their “so-called bleeding.”
Another area where there is a lack of confidence in what women say is when they warn of wider environmental dangers. Traditionally women have tried to prevent harm and bring healing to the environment. Women whistleblowers have suffered repercussions for warning against corporate entities’ disastrous policies; while indigenous women have sacrificed to try to protect Mother Earth from corporate disregard for the Earth’s destruction. African-American women are all too familiar with environmental racism, from the drinking water of Flint, Michigan to the waters of Hurricane Katrina (and now Ida). When Mississippi environmental analyst Tennie White, a Black woman, brought to light highly toxic wastes produced by Kerr-McGee endangering the people of Columbus, Mississippi, she was railroaded by the EPA’s “Green Enforcement” Unit and went to jail. And recently, another woman whistleblower was ignored and punished. Ruth Etzel was hired by the EPA as an expert in children’s health; a pediatrician and epidemiologist she has done stints at the WHO and CDC. Etzel was to investigate lead poisoning in the chemical industry. She found herself put on leave, demoted and then became a victim of an EPA smear campaign. Etzel and other fellow scientists found that the EPA’s biggest concern is protecting chemical companies. Her suggested policy to help children avoid lead poisoning, formed after she found industries were doing “irreparable harm,” has yet to be put into effect. Neither Obama, nor Trump, nor now Biden has changed the trend to protect corporations, and not the environment, humans, or even children.
Native-American women fighting fiercely against the terrible poisons of oil pipelines are harassed and jailed. Winona LaDuke, Green Party VP candidate and head of environmental advocacy group “Honor the Earth,” was arrested and jailed repeatedly last July for protesting against construction of a new Enbridge oil pipeline in northern Minnesota. Minnesota recently granted Enbridge the right to displace five billion instead of the former half billion gallons of water. Such a disastrous situation leads LaDuke to protest and thus be charged with trespassing, harassment, unlawful assembly and public nuisance charges. She charges Minnesota governor Tim Walz with giving “the water, the land and our civil rights to a Canadian multinational.”
The incomparable LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, died last April, fighting to the very end against the Dakota Access Pipeline. As of a month ago, federal regulators had fined DAPL for safety violations like not doing necessary repairs and insufficient oil spill impact studies. But Biden’s Army Corps of Engineers is still allowing the pipeline to operate. The women of Standing Rock and Honor the Earth will never stop their campaigns against corporate poisoning of their lands. As LaDonna Allard said, the movement is not just about a pipeline. “To save the water, we must break the cycle of colonial trauma.” And: “We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Mako, Mother Earth.” Women fight to protect the Earth from the American corporate state and women fight to protect people from the violence of the American police state.
The penalties can be dire for those who dare challenge police violence. Lillian House and Eliza Lucero of the Denver area’s Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) helped lead a persistent protest against the police and paramedics’ killing of the unarmed and unresisting young man, Elijah McClain. Lucero and House faced felony charges of incitement to riot and kidnapping (of police) which could have meant sentences of 48 years. Thanks to public pressure and a new district attorney, all charges were dropped on September 13th. Earlier in the month, three police officers and two paramedics were indicted for McClain’s murder. PSL’s Lillian House stated that “the indictments are a major victory, but they’re not convictions yet. This is just the beginning of the people here taking power.” And this is what these women activists want: a dismantling of the police state in favor of “the people” being in charge.
This is the goal of the movement, bringing huge numbers of people into the streets after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s executions. But these demonstrations, gradually called “riots” by the corporate media, have been hard-pressed to continue. A report by the Movement for Black Lives found there has been a major crackdown on dissenters against police violence. Charges against protesters were made into more serious federal crimes, with harsher penalties. Surveillance, violence, and intimidation, in a coordinated vast federal enterprise, has been the usual response to potentially viable movements to change the corporate police state. Because Rev. Joy Powell tried to curb police violence in Rochester, NY, she’s served 14 years inside, framed for crimes she didn’t commit. But she is never cowed, despite solitary, COVID, and all the harassment they dish out. She recently wrote me (and I get some of her letters, but she gets very few of mine) that she “made it to an interview” with Essence magazine, which did a great job of gaining her deserved attention. The Police State is an entrenched corporate/capitalist/patriarchal institution, as is the American Empire.
The Empire is not feminist. It is dangerously extreme in its macho Patriarchy. The military, particularly one which has for years fed on death and destruction against helpless civilians, many of them women and children, is not feminist in its aims. Expecting an occupying army to initiate and protect women’s rights is insane. The women of Afghanistan have been tortured and murdered by US forces for over 20 years. Perhaps a few elite women were helped and protected under American occupation, but their numbers are few.
Aafia Siddiqui, Muslim woman prisoner of the Empire is serving her 86 years in a Texas maximum security prison—or not, it’s not clear if she’s still alive. Siddiqui was raped, mutilated and tortured in American black sites, including Bagram (US) Air Force Base, Afghanistan, and was grievously shot in Ghazni, Afghanistan by American soldiers who needed her to be seen as a “terrorist” and so staged what was supposed to be her attack on the soldiers. This is women’s rights in Afghanistan.
As the incredible Caitlin Johnstone has written: “If the US empire hadn’t manufactured consent for the invasion by aggressive narrative management about Taliban oppression westerners would give 0 fucks about women in Afghanistan, just like they give 0 fucks about women in all the other oppressive patriarchal nations.” Was it worse for women to have a Taliban government, or to endure a 20-year occupation which has brought untold death and destruction to Afghan women and their families? Occupying and controlling Afghanistan is not a feminist undertaking. And so-called American feminist leaders should know better than to support it. But NOW leaders urge you to write your Congress people to protect Afghan women (from the Taliban). The “advances in [Afghan] women’s rights of the last 20 years are in jeopardy.” The Feminist Majority web page asks for money for the same purpose, telling us that in 2009 Obama showed concern for “Afghans’ security” and the Americans “have brought much progress for women there,” in the last 20 years. With all Obama’s drone killings? Are you people serious? This is not feminism.
“Feminists” are also proud to see female warmongers as part of President Joe Biden’s Team. There is Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who helped engineer the Iran deal (not a great one for them) and spent her early days in office busily scolding China to ramp up our newest Cold War. Or Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, who famously helped arrange the neo-Nazi takeover of Ukraine in a power play vs. Russia, with her also famous leaked diplomatic conversation where she said “fuck the EU” re involving American allies. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth has a strong police/Homeland Security background; and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks will oversee a “modernization of our nuclear triad.” Avril Haines, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, from the CIA, directed the drones program for Obama, sometimes having to get up in the middle of the night to decide who should be killed by a drone next. Of course, there was never “collateral damage,” as we’ve seen just recently in our Afghanistan drone hit which killed an entire family (they were not ISIS K). Wonderful to have such feminist examples! As commentator Richard Medhurst (half Syrian, half British) has said: isn’t it great for Biden to have all these women involved? Will they drop pink bombs—rainbow bombs?—on my country?
The real feminists are the stalwart anti-war women who fight the very real threats of Empire. The women to be truly admired are women like Elizabeth McAlister, Martha Hennesy (Dorothy Day’s granddaughter) and Clare Grady. In 2018 they entered Kings Bay, Georgia naval base to bear witness against the Empire’s potential for nuclear war. They have all now served time, 10 to 12 months, for trying to, as McAlister said, “slow the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.” They too would save Mother Earth. They too, like the tortured and ruined Julian Assange, are truth-tellers against the Empire. Dismissed, ignored, not believed, imprisoned. These are what 1980s political prisoner Marilyn Buck called “noncompliant women”—women who the patriarchal authorities believe should be put back into subordinate, quiet and compliant status. Such authorities believe women should wear bikinis and makeup as athletes, not question if a vaccine has deleterious side effects on them, and overlook a governor’s inappropriate behavior. Let’s not be compliant. Let the struggle continue.
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.
Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.
This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.
There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.
I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.
However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.
That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.
College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.
Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.
Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.
Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.
Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
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All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.
When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)
Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.
To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.
Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.
The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.
The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.
Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.
It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.
Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.
So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon.
I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.
The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.
Bad habits die hard, or long.
We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.
Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.
While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.
Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:
Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.
They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.
HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.
Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?
Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:
A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.
WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.
In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.
A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)
UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.
This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?
…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
George by Alex Gino
Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller
Reasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis
Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole
Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content
And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.
Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.
Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.
This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.
There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.
I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.
However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.
That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.
College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.
Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.
Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.
Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.
Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
+–+
All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.
When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)
Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.
To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.
Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.
The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.
The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.
Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.
It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.
Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.
So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon.
I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.
The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.
Bad habits die hard, or long.
We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.
Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.
While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.
Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:
Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.
They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.
HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.
Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?
Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:
A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.
WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.
In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.
A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)
UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.
This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?
…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
George by Alex Gino
Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller
Reasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis
Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole
Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content
And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.
Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!
The Guardian (9/7/21) said that a section of an interview with philosopher Judith Butler was cut out of fear of “misleading readers.”
An interview in the Guardian (9/7/21) made waves—not because of something it said, but because of something it didn’t say.
A Q&A with renowned academic Judith Butler by Vienna-based writer and scholar Jules Gleeson included a scathing critique of anti-trans feminists—or Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), those who believe that gender is biologically determined and that transgender people’s existence is a threat to women—that was later removed from the paper’s website (Vice, 9/8/21).
Jezebel (9/8/21) noted that the paper “deleted an entire section of the interview on the relationship between the far-right and TERFs,” where Butler said that “anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times,” and thus the trans exclusionary feminists, who are allying with the right-wing attacks on gender, are not part of the political left.
The paper took down this part of the interview, telling Jezebel that the question Gleeson posed “failed to take account of new facts” that emerged after the interview was conducted. Gleeson’s original question:
It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. This year’s furor around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organized by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?
Jezebel explained the Guardian’s response:
The “new facts” to which the paper is referring is the arrest of Darren Agee Merager on five counts of indecent exposure in connection with the events that transpired at Wi Spa. Yet the “furor” to which Gleeson is referring is the fact that far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys organized at protests outside the spa, resulting in 40 arrests and the assault of one journalist with a bat, a facet of the story that has not been refuted.
According to a statement Gleeson provided to Jezebel, after the interview’s publication, editors at the Guardian suggested that the interview include details of the arrest in connection to Wi Spa be included as a “correction” to the story, or look for another solution.
Butler’s response made no reference to the spa controversy, which involved not only whether a trans woman was behaving inappropriately in a spa, but also whether one individual’s behavior was being used to impugn trans people in general; the New Republic (7/21/21) noted how a “right-wing outrage machine” used its “bat signal” to rile up a network of culture warriors. Butler did, however, note that the anti-gender ideology movement seeks to “censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education—a topic so important for young people to discuss.”
‘Pattern’ of transphobic content
As Gleeson told FAIR and other outlets, a “correction” to the piece wasn’t the right response, as there was nothing factually incorrect in her question. One could even suggest that the paper’s decision to cut out the question and answer makes a blanket assumption that nothing about the spa protest was transphobic. A simple solution to the emergence of new facts in the case, Gleeson said, could have been a clarifying editorial note, leaving Butler’s comments to stand. Whether one agrees with Butler’s comments or the assumptions of the question, there’s no doubt that the issue could have been handled better than simply censoring it.
“It’s very irregular, and I was very surprised by the situation,” Gleeson told FAIR in a phone interview, noting that she was asking Butler “generally about the overall convergence of gender critical perspectives…. The response was in generalities.”
Guardian staff circulated a letter critical of the paper’s trans coverage after “the resignation of a transgender member of staff who said they’d received anti-trans comments from ‘influential editorial staff’” (BuzzFeed, 3/6/20).
This incident with Butler, Gleeson and the Guardian doesn’t exist in isolation, as many LGBTQ activists have rung the alarm bell about the Guardian’s editorial treatment of trans issues. The paper issued an editorial (10/17/18) in support of reforming the United Kingdom’s Gender Recognition Act, which allows British citizens to legally change their gender. “Women’s oppression by men has a physical basis, and to deny the relevance of biology when considering sexual inequality is a mistake,” the paper argued, citing as an example: “Women’s concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with ‘male-bodied’ people must be taken seriously.”
Some of the Guardian‘s own journalists (11/2/18) saw this as an anti-trans stance, as rights groups claimed that the law would “make it more complicated for trans people to transition and access facilities such as toilets and changing rooms” (BBC, 6/20/20). Hundreds of Guardian staffers criticized the editorial leadership generally over a “pattern” of transphobic content (BuzzFeed, 3/6/20).
In that context, the Guardian would appear to be not just enforcing some strict editorial standard, but taking a distinct position that there are limits on how much criticism of anti-trans politics will be allowed in the paper—particularly accusations of transphobia directed at people who see themselves on the left. “My speculation would entirely be that there are some senior figures” at the Guardian, Gleeson said, who felt they “were being politically identified, and they took objection to that.”
Transphobia and ‘cancel culture’
The movement for transgender rights is a major issue for critics of “cancel culture,” who contend that expressing a viewpoint counter to the one espoused by Butler is considered so toxic as to be career-ending. Author J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have sold over 225 million copies, is often heralded as the poster child of writers who get “canceled” for their transphobia (NBC, 12/19/19; Daily Mail, 4/16/21).
Conservative academic Jordan Peterson (BBC, 11/4/16), speaking out against “legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression,” justified his stance with this: “Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.” This is a common tactic for anti-trans activists, who drove around a “free speech bus” advocating gender essentialism (Washington Post, 3/31/17), the take-away being that to be offended by their position was to be offended by free expression.
And in the world of journalism, the New York Times (11/2/19) noted that two journalists—Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal—had either been “canceled” or received “scorn” for their writing on trans issues. The right-wing outlet Quillette (3/18/21) also issued a long piece about what it has perceived as persecution of Singal.
Herzog recently took heat for seeing a threat to the cisgender lesbian population: “They’re coming out as nonbinary or as men,” reads the deck of her piece on the subject on Substack (11/27/20). Herzog, according to her critics, draws a “direct line from disappearing lesbian bars to the extinction of lesbians themselves, even as she admits that her evidence is far from conclusive” (Washington Post, 3/19/21).
Evoking ‘cultural anxieties’
Jesse Singal (photo: Jennifer Lee)
Outlets like Jezebel (6/27/18) have been critical of Singal’s reporting on trans youth (Atlantic, 7–8/18). Libertarian writer Cathy Young (Newsday, 9/6/18) lambasted the “backlash on social media and in left-of-center publications” against Singal and the Atlantic, but Jezebel‘s Harron Walker said:
His work often evokes a contradictory pair of broader cultural anxieties that trans people are both over-medicalized (hormones and surgery are dangerously accessible) and under-medicalized (the supposed harms of an increasing number of trans people self-identifying as trans without an official gender dysphoria diagnosis) at the same time.
And:
The fact that Singal is cis does not disqualify him from covering these issues, but the success he has achieved in doing so—often posing loaded questions and answering them using misinterpreted data, while adopting the posture of someone simply exploring issues no one else is brave enough to touch—has compounded the frustration I’ve felt while reading his work. The opportunities he has been given—an Atlantic cover story about trans issues; a three-year editing stint for New York magazine’s website; a book deal with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux—are unthinkable to the vast majority of trans journalists working today.
Singal—love him, hate him or never heard of him—has hardly been canceled. As FAIR (10/23/20) has previously noted, he and Herzog host a popular podcast that serves as a “guided tour of what’s upsetting the woke” (Reason, 8/7/20). He also recently reviewed for the New York Times (9/7/21) the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, by Helen Joyce. An Economist journalist, Joyce takes a similar tone as the Guardian stance on the Gender Recognition Act: She asserts, according to Singal, “biological sex matters, that females have a right to truly sex-segregated spaces.” Singal wrote in his review:
The zeal for self-ID extends to trusted medical and mental-health organizations, too: As I was working on this review, the American Medical Association called for sex to no longer be listed on publicly available birth certificates in the United States, since (the thinking goes) this unfairly impinges on people’s right to declare it for themselves. Trans is unapologetically opposed to all of this.
Singal gave the book a mixed review, saying that while the author’s “arguments are convincing,” he found himself “wishing for a bit more nuance,” calling the book “very thin on citations.”
Meanwhile, Butler and Gleeson have had their anti-TERF views redacted by a newspaper whose editorial position stands in opposition to the now-censored answer Butler gave.
Anti-trans slants
Butler and Gleeson’s censorship is hardly an isolated example; trans advocates see anti-trans slants in corporate media in both the US and UK all the time. Jeffrey Ingold, one of Britain’s most prominent LGBTQ advocates, resigned from his position after what he called a “tsunami” of anti-trans hate (openDemocracy, 5/21/21), adding that “trans people are facing an unprecedented, coordinated campaign of vitriol and misinformation driven by large swathes of the UK media.”
GLAAD (3/3/21) reported that “Newsweek ran three articles (two opinion, one news) that focused entirely on transphobic, anti-LGBTQ views of the Equality Act.”
In the US, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) (Twitter, 5/23/21) lambasted a piece 60 Minutes (5/23/21) ran on laws that would “limit care for transgender youth”; GLAAD called it a “shameful segment fearmongering about trans youth,” promoting “the false belief that young people are being rushed into medical transition.”
GLAAD (3/3/21) also issued “failing grades” to several US news outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, for their coverage of the Equality Act, which would offer federal anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ people. The group said the Times coverage offered “zero quotes from LGBTQ community or advocates,” while generously citing “inaccurate, transphobic rhetoric from several elected officials without countering or contextualizing [them] as false.”
GLAAD pointed out that Newsweek (2/24/21) ran a hyperbolic opinion piece against the act, stating that it would be the “end of females,” because it was scientifically “ludicrous” to consider gender outside the gender binary. The magazine even dismissed intersex people as people with “disorders.”
As FAIR’s Justin Pilgreen (3/3/21) argued in his survey of Equality Act coverage:
Rather than hearing about the content of the bill and how it could codify millions of Americans’ civil liberties and concretely impact their lives, readers were treated to largely unchallenged reprintings of the GOP’s hateful and dangerous rhetoric on the issue.
Using AP‘s coverage (4/29/18) of the Trump administration’s move to overturn protections for LGBTQ people in medical discrimination as a case study, the Daily Beast (5/5/18) outlined how “both sides” journalism fails by giving the same weight to anti-trans commentators who use faulty science as to people fighting for equal rights.
‘Anti-gender ideology’
A look at conservative media gives insight into what the usual “anti-gender ideology” arguments are. They often involve the ideas that trans identity is an affront to biological sex, and therefore to women’s rights (Fox News, 6/24/21; Breitbart, 9/9/21), and that anti-trans critics face public hostility (Federalist, 7/30/21).
Spiked (9/9/21) claimed that the Guardian (“the Pravda” of “the modern woke movement”) had censored Butler’s interview to hide the fact that the target of the Wi Spa protest had been charged with indecent exposure—a fact that the Guardian (9/2/21) had covered prominently five days before the interview was published.
Some anti-trans right-wing media have joyously responded to the Guardian redaction. Spiked! (9/9/21) used the opportunity to red-bait the paper (likening it to the Soviet Union’s Pravda), saying that the redaction wasn’t even enough, because the paper issued no apology for what is said was a “dishonestly framed question.” The outlet also misgendered Gleeson, a trans woman, and said she has “cast iron balls” for objecting to press censorship.
Unherd (9/10/21) framed Butler’s views not just as distasteful, but a very physical threat to public health: “So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasizes…. It weakens and debilitates us.”
Quillette (9/12/21) also pounced on Butler’s interview saying that their theory is an “elite” one that they defend “in an obscurantist way,” while indirectly condoning censorship of their views, saying that Butler should “desist from giving interviews to journalists.” Transgender people are sort of like Captain Ahab’s white whale for Quillette, as the publication recently ran a three-part series (9/21/21) on fighting so-called “gender extremists,” because they “have created an artificial reality” that has “gained ground thanks to extremists’ capture of academic, activist and media organizations.”
‘An established career path’
Given that places like Spiked! and Unherd aren’t shy about defending censorship of pro-trans viewpoints or attacking trans writers and gender theory, the Guardian redaction has some trans activists wondering if the rhetoric of the far-right media is bleeding into the mainstream, and into newer outlets.
For example, writer Nathan Tankus earlier this year quit using the popular self-publishing platform Substack (4/6/20) over what he saw as an uptick in “gender critical” users on the site: “I can’t ignore that Substack is particularly benefiting from and encouraging a culture of anti-trans bigotry.”
Gleeson said of Substack and of the success and openness of anti-trans writers: “It’s an institutionalizing example, you can make good enough money if you do this stuff in a certain way…. It’s now an established career path of its own kind.”
Butler’s statement about anti-gender ideology wasn’t just that it was politically reactionary—a statement that anyone is free to debate—but that its mission was also to stifle mere discussion that questions the gender binary. Butler’s position, in the case, was validated when Guardian editors successfully purged it from the paper’s record.
Critics of “cancel culture” are right that free speech is a value that’s worth preserving. Yet it’s not those who promote anti-gender ideology in the mass media—like Peterson, Rowling or Singal—whose views are shaking the foundations of free expression. Rather, the Guardian instance shows that people like Butler and Gleeson have to worry about their free speech rights when speaking out. As Gleeson put it: “These conversations are difficult to have, and people prefer not to have them.”
The mess in the Central York School District, which includes several suburban townships just north of York, in a county where Donald Trump won 62% of the vote, started after some parents and teachers had hoped to bolster the curriculum around anti-racism in the wake of the George Floyd protest marches in spring 2020. The move backfired when some parents started complaining about the reading list proposed by a committee. “I don’t want my daughter growing up feeling guilty because she’s white,” one parent, Matt Weyant, told a recent school board meeting. Then, panicked school board members imposed “a freeze” on students using the books. To critics, it sure looked like a school book ban — with a chilling effect on teachers hoping to teach lessons against racism.
I released a song called Rome is Burning to most streaming platforms on March 1, 2021. The next day the video of the song was posted on YouTube. The song and accompanying video are based on the mass protests that took place in 2020 against state organized racist violence and oppression triggered by a bystander’s filming of the brutal police killing of George Floyd.
To send the song/video to activists and organizations in the forefront of resistance, I signed up a Facebook account, which previously I did not have. My accompanying message on Facebook with the link to the video said: “We need to build a new society fit for human beings! I hope my new song/video contributes to this movement!”
After sending the message and link on Facebook to just five Black Lives Matter chapters a popup appeared on my screen saying my Facebook account was suspended and I was required to provide my phone number. I complied and received a text with a code that I had to enter into the Facebook message box to reactivate my account.
After sending four more messages to BLM chapters another popup from Facebook said I needed to provide a clear picture of myself for purposes of verifying my account, which I did. However, this made me wonder how Facebook could possibly verify the person in the picture was me. Another Facebook message quickly arrived confirming receipt of my information with the warning that if my account activities did not follow “Community Standards” the account would remain disabled. No further information was provided as to how long the account would remain suspended, who was reviewing the account and what action, if any, had to be taken to reactivate the account.
The following day when I tried to sign in to Facebook, a new popup message said my account was permanently disabled because I did not follow “Community Standards.” The message also stated the decision could not be reversed. No reason was given for canceling my account other than providing a link to Facebook’s “Community Standards,” which lists everything under the sun as a potential violation of terms of use. Facebook offered no possibility to discuss the specifics surrounding what it deemed to be a violation of its standards or to enter into any dialogue with whoever made this decision.
Monopoly censorship parading as “Community Standards”
In my view Facebook’s action qualifies as monopoly censorship and suppression of speech and culture. Not for one second do I agree with the argument that Facebook is a private company, therefore it has the right to decide whatever it wants. Facebook is a company operating as a public utility in Canada and therefore must answer to Canadians and modern-day principles of freedom of speech, culture and conscience. Canadians and all citizens of this world cannot allow arbitrary decisions of private interests made behind closed doors to decide whether or not someone can participate in social and political communications.
Community standards are for the community to decide not some faceless individuals parading as dictators. Forms have to be developed to allow the people to decide community standards that serve the common good both in the general sense and particular cases. Faceless individuals in positions of privilege and power defending their private interests, wealth, world view and outlook must not have the right to decide for the people.
At no point did I receive any indication of violation of any given rule or practice for which discussion, debate and argument could be made. No justification was provided when my account was banned other than Facebook has the right to do so. No one, including myself, was given an opportunity to defend and discuss the views presented on the site and video or the reasons Facebook dismissed them as contrary to community standards. I am confident that the broad Canadian and American public would not find my message, song or video to be out of line with modern day principles of freedom of speech, culture and conscience and acceptable moral standards. Increasingly there are public outcries which find the practices of Facebook and other Big Tech companies undemocratic and reminiscent of medieval autocracy and its imposition of religious obscurantism as the only acceptable thinking, speech, culture and conscience.
Facebook banning of my account is part of a trend that activists concerned with the direction of the world face on all social media platforms, which includes algorithms for “throttling” and “shadow banning” to limit communication and the sharing of opinions with others. These practices amount to suppression of speech and are a form of thought control by those in charge of these global tech cartels.
Progressive voices are not alone in being silenced. Conservatives have had their opinions eliminated as well. The most famous case involving the suspension of the Twitter account of the former President of the United States can be summarized as in-fighting between factions of the rich and powerful.
Freedom of speech and conscience
If someone is to be banned or suspended from having their voice heard for violating “community standards” on a public platform then according to modern principles of freedom of speech and conscience, a public hearing or trial must be held on both the particular alleged violation and on the validity of the so-called community standards.
Community standards set by oligarchs are unacceptable as the final word and verdict, as if from their privileged positions of wealth and power they have the medieval right to decide what can be said and thought. Community standards are developed in practice as people engage to defend their rights and develop forms to ensure the rights of all are not violated without exception. The defence of freedom of speech, culture and conscience lies in the fight to defend the rights of all. I believe my song Rome Is Burning is a contribution to that fight and banning of it or limiting its promotion is an attack on the rights of all.
Social and political forms must be developed to encourage broad discussion involving the people to decide important decisions including the potential banning of individuals or groups. If countries such as Canada and the United States are to be considered modern and just, the control over such decisions must be in the hands of the people not a privileged few gathered in some government or private backroom who declare they can decide and exercise control simply because they own or control some institution or won an election. New social and political forms must also present the facts detailing how certain actions have caused harm and in the case of banning give the accused an opportunity to explain themselves and debate and challenge the decision. All of this must be open and aboveboard and not be taken lightly unlike the practice of Facebook and others.
Freedom of conscience and the right to freedom of speech and culture especially in ideological form go to the very core of what it means to be a modern human where people have rights by virtue of being human. Violation of these rights point to the dubious position the people find themselves in with regard to mass communication and social media. Powerful monopolies and cartels of Big Tech own and control these public utilities and forms of communication; they have given themselves the right to decide and control how they are used and what is said. This control by rich and powerful private interests violates the right of the people to decide and control those things that affect their lives and these crucial matters involving freedom of speech, culture and conscience, the exchange of ideas and discussion, how to develop their relations with others and with nature and to solve problems nationally and internationally without violence.
At this point in history people expect and demand as a public right instant mass communications without interference. Clearly, private determinations using the excuse of ownership of means of communication to define community standards and declare what is acceptable thought, speech and culture are not an objective or legitimate way to oversee mass communications.
Facebook and other tech companies may be privately owned but they cannot and should not be considered private companies. They are public utilities operating globally and accountable to the people. Facebook and others must conduct themselves with the permission of Canadians and in accordance with Canadian standards and regulations decided and established by Canadians not by arbitrary dictate coming from some distant head office representing private interests.
Facebook is said to employ 60,000 workers whose work built the public utility and means of communication and allow it to operate. Those thousands of skilled workers were trained and educated within schools and institutions that can only be considered public and products of the people’s collective thought material handed down from thousands of years of work and struggle to produce, live and develop. Facebook is part of an infrastructure of means of mass communication that belongs to all the people not a select and privileged few.
Another disturbing aspect of Big Tech’s control of speech is its connection to the political police of the U.S.-led imperialist system of states and the surveillance of citizens, including the collecting and tracking of personal information and data. Many are familiar with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to activities of the U.S.-led “Five Eyes” in spying and interfering in the political affairs of the peoples and nation states.
If certain individuals in Facebook object to the song and video and want to censure them, they should present their views openly and in debate with the people. Their position of ownership and control of a public utility does not give them the right to act with impunity as dictators and censors. Denial of freedom of speech, culture and conscience are aspects of condemning people to civil death. Opposition to this practice is a central theme of the song Rome is Burning. People of African descent, Indigenous peoples, political activists and others have long suffered civil death in North America from the state structures that have been established and entrenched by a small ruling elite over the past hundreds of years to protect their right of property ownership to exploit the work of others. Police violence, mass incarceration, and killing of Black and vulnerable people reflect the continuing civil death of many; resistance to this is both important and necessary. State-organized inequality, racism, poverty and wars cannot continue and the people must link their arms in resistance to open a path to build the New as the song indicates.
Public utilities and platforms of mass communication must be accountable to the people. They must allow and encourage free exchange of ideas and debate over what has to be done to move the world forward. They must come under the control of the people and not the other way around; the problem posed is how to bring this about. The people cannot be silent on this and must raise their voices to make it happen.
My and others’ banning from Facebook are aspects of continuing the autocratic practice of condemning people to civil death and blocking a path forward to peace, equality and justice. If Facebook maintains its stance as the privileged arbiter of free speech, culture and conscience, then the people will condemn it to the dustbin of history faster than it hit the scene. I am certain the people will not tolerate its arrogance and dictate because freedom of speech, culture and conscience are rights that belong to human beings and are a matter of life and death to build a new society which leaves behind the old world of inequality, violence, denial of rights, poverty and war.
• Editor’s Note: Subsequent to being banned by Facebook, Mistahi’s Twitter account was banned and his video was demonetized and restricted on YT.
Yesterday, NDN Collective’s Education Equity team led hundreds of Indigenous people and allies from across the state in the Oceti Sakowin March for Our Children, demanding the resignation of numerous SD Public Officials for their roles in the newly proposed social studies standards that blatantly erase Oceti Sakowin history.
A mural on the eastern side of the Wirobrajan intersection in Central Java city of Yogyakarta was covered over with black paint before President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s weekend visit.
It was known that President Widodo would be passing through this stretch of road during a working visit to Yogyakarta on Saturday. The mural was painted over in Friday.
The mural was critical of Indonesian censorship under the Widodo administration.
Yogyakarta Mayor Haryadi Suyuti asked people not to pre-judge the removal of the mural, saying it was done as part of a routine weekly cleanup — not just because of the mural.
“We were doing a routine cleanup right, not [just] cleaning off the mural,” he told journalists.
Quoting from the Gejayan Calling (Gejayan Memanggil) Instagram account, which immortalised the mural before it was painted over, the picture was of a figure whose eyes were covered with the internet tab “404 Not Found” with the message “The regime is afraid of pictures”.
During his working visit to Yogyakarta on Friday, Widodo asked Yogyakarta Governor Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono X to accelerate the covid-19 vaccination programme for the region.
The request was made during an internal meeting with the provincial and regency regional leadership coordinating forum at the Pracimasono Building at the Kepatihan complex in Danurejan.
“[We are] accelerating vaccinations in concert with the gradual reopening (of public places)”, said the Sultan following the meeting, although he said that Widodo did not give any specific vaccine targets for Yogyakarta.
“Vaccinations must be done as widely as possible even if it’s only the first dose”, he added.
Abridged translation by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The second part of the article which was not translated detailed the covid-19 situation in Yogyakarta, vaccination rates and comments by Widodo. The original title of the article was “Jokowi Mau Lewat, Coretan Kritikan di Yogya Dihapus”.
When I arrived at my office at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji on the morning of 12 September 2001 (9/11, NY Time), I was oblivious to reality.
I had dragged myself home to bed a few hours earlier at 2am as usual, after another long day working on our students’ Wansolwara Online website providing coverage of the Fiji general election.
One day after being sworn in as the country’s fifth real (elected) prime minister, it seemed that Laisenia Qarase was playing another dirty trick on Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour Party, which had earned the constitutional right to be included in the multi-party government supposed to lead the country back to democracy.
Stepping into my office, I encountered a colleague. He looked wild-eyed and said: “It’s the end of the world.”
Naively, I replied, thinking of the 1987 military coups, “Yes, how can legality and constitutionality be cast aside so blatantly yet again?”
“No, not Fiji politics,” he said. “That’s nothing. I mean New York. Terrorists have destroyed the financial heart of the Western world.”
It was a chilling moment, comparable to how I had felt as a 17-year-old forestry science trainee in a logging camp at Kaingaroa Forest the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — 22 November 1963.
Wansolwara newsroom
Over the next few hours, it seemed that half the Laucala campus descended on our Wansolwara newsroom to watch the latest BBC, TVNZ one and Fiji TV One coverage of the shocking and devastating tragedy.
While a handful of student journalists struggled to provide coverage of local angles — such as the tightening of security around the US Embassy in Suva and shock among the Laucala intelligentsia — most students remained glued to the TV, stunned into immobility by the suicide jetliner terrorists.
Inevitably, global jingoism and xenophobia followed, the assaults on Sikhs merely because they an “Arab look”, the attacks on mosques — in Fiji copies of the Koran were burned — and the abuse directed towards Afghan refugees were par for the course.
Freedom of speech in the United States also quickly became a casualty of this new “war on terrorism”. Columnists were fired for their critical views, television host Bill Maher was denounced by the White House, Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau dropped his “featherweight Bush” cartoons and so-called “unpatriotic” songs were dropped from radio playlists. Wrote Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:
Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practising intolerance, signalling that anyone who challenges the leaders of embattled America is cynical, political and – isn’t this the subtext? – unpatriotic.
But while much of the West lined up as political parrots alongside the United States, ready to exact a terrible vengeance, contrasting perspectives were apparent in many developing nations.
In the Pacific, for example, while people empathised with the survivors of the terrible toll — 2977 people were killed (including the 125 at the Pentagon), 19 hijackers committed murder-suicide, and more than 6000 people injured — there was often a more critical view of the consequences of American foreign policy and a sense of dread about the future.
Twin Towers reflections
Less than a week after the Twin Towers tragedy, I asked my final-year students to compile some notes recalling the circumstances of when they heard the news of the four aircraft slamming into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and the Pentagon (one plane was taken over by the passengers and it dived into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) and their responses.
One, a mature age student from Fiji who had worked for several years as a radio journalist, said:
I was in bed and woke up about 2.30am. I have a habit of having the BBC running on radio and, half-asleep, I caught the news being broadcast. I pulled myself out of bed and tuned into BBC on Sky TV. The second plane had just hit the second tower, and I ended staying up the rest of the night to watch the unfolding events.
On his impressions, he warned about scapegoats and the media:
The relevance to us here in the Pacific is that terrorists can strike anywhere to get revenge. This conflict could evolve into war, and wars affect everyone. Americans already think Osama bin Laden is the terrorist. Where is the evidence? Americans are looking to get someone quickly, and the media is leading the way.
Another student wrote:
Good, they [US] paid dearly for trying to intervene in Muslim countries … Bin Laden is portrayed as the culprit even though it is not clear who did it. The media is portraying the whole Muslim world as responsible, but actually this is not the case.
A practical joke?
Recalled one:
I was sleeping and my mother woke me up at 6.30am to tell me the news. I was shocked and, still sleepy, I thought my mother was doing one of her practical jokes to get me out of bed … If there is World War Three, it will have a big impact on the Pacific.
America still has some form of control over various Pacific Island countries, and once again it will recruit Pacific Islanders. Pacific Islands are relatively weak and still trying to be developed. Another hiccup could send our economies t the dogs.
Yet another:
I was at home having breakfast, listening to the news on Bula 100FM. My first reaction was disbelief, horror … Ethically, there is a need to remember the people involved and the amount of bloodshed and death. It would be necessary to censor material that would be emotionally upsetting.
One student was
really surprised to see TVNZ instead of the usual Chinese CCTV. The sound was mute so I couldn’t really get what was being said. I was about to turn it off when they showed the South Tower of the World Trade Centre collapse. I thought it was a short piece from the movie Independence Day.
Sad, it may seem, but the first thing I thought about as a journalist was that reporters will have a field day … Phrases such as “historical day the world over” and “America under siege” popped up in my head as possible headlines.
I got out my notebook and began writing down the number of people estimated to have died, the extent of the damage, an excerpts from President Bush’s speech. Practically anything that involves the US also affects many people throughout the world.
Inevitably, some commentators began drawing parallels between the terrorism in New York in mid-September 2001 at one end of the continuum of hate and rogue businessman and George Speight’s brief terrorist rule in Fiji during mid-2000 at the other end.
Terrorism as a political tool
Politics associate professor Scott MacWilliam, for example, highlighted how terrorism becomes a political tool deployed by a nation state to support its foreign and domestic policy objectives. He pointed out that many of the fundamentalist groups which now carried out terrorism were “nurtured, trained, financed and incorporated” into the Western security apparatus.
One might ask what had this terrible urban graveyard created by fanaticism got to do with the South Pacific. In a sense, there is a disturbing relationship.
Politics in the region, especially at that time, was increasingly being determined by terrorism, particularly in Melanesia, and much of it by the state. And with this situation comes a greater demand on the region’s media and journalists, for more training and professionalism.
At the time of the 9/11 tragedy, Dr David Robie was head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific. This article has been extracted from a keynote speech that he made at the inaugural conference of the Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), “Navigating the Future”, at Auckland University of Technology on 5-6 October 2001. The full address was published by Pacific Journalism Review, No. 8.
US news outlets have reported stories about civilian casualties in Afghanistan with caution, often noting that claims from the Taliban had not been independently verified. But many outlets showed no inclination to be equally careful when evaluating the Pentagon’s line on casualties.
CNN, for example, ordered reporters to frame reports of civilian deaths with reminders that “the Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize” such casualties, and that “the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are connected to the September 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent lives in the US” (Washington Post, 10/31/01).
Brit Hume, host of Fox News Channel’s Special Report (11/5/01), wondered whether civilian deaths were getting too much attention, with or without disclaimers. “The question I have,” said Hume, “is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they’ve been?”
The premise that civilian casualties have been “big news” in the US is dubious. The Fox discussion seemed motivated in part by a study of network news broadcasts done by the conservative Media Research Center; the group criticized ABC World News Tonight in particular for apparently giving civilian deaths too much airtime—nearly twice as much as NBC Nightly News and almost four times as much as the CBS Evening News. A close look at ABC’s reporting, however, turns up only three segments during the MRC’s three-week study period (10/8/01–10/31/01) that were primarily about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The subject was mentioned in passing a few other times, sometimes to stress the Pentagon’s claim that civilians were not being targeted. ABC reporters in general emphasized the difficulties in assessing claims made by the Taliban.
Nonetheless, Fox pundit Mara Liasson from National Public Radio seemed to feel that this was too much coverage: “No,” she said in response to Hume’s question. “Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable.” Liasson added that she thought what was missing from television coverage was “a message from the US government that says we are trying to minimize them, but the Taliban isn’t, and is putting their tanks in mosques, and themselves among women and children.” (The Pentagon’s assertions that it was avoiding civilian casualties were routinely featured in network newscasts; the uncorroborated claims that the Taliban were employing civilians as human shields were also featured in TV news.)
Fox commentator and US News & World Report columnist Michael Barone echoed Hume’s earlier remarks: “I think the real problem here is that this is poor news judgment on the part of some of these news organizations. Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is that they accompany wars.”
If journalists shouldn’t cover civilian deaths because they are a normal part of war, does that principle apply to all war coverage? Since dropping bombs is also standard procedure in a war, will Fox stop reporting airstrikes?
Fox’s marketing slogan is “We report, you decide,” but these Fox pundits have decided for you that some deaths aren’t worth reporting. Then again, being impartial journalists might not be the first order of business. As Hume told the New York Times (11/7/01), “Look, neutrality as a general principle is an appropriate concept for journalists who are covering institutions of some comparable quality. . . . This is a conflict between the United States and murdering barbarians.”
With both Fox and CNN trying to marginalize or minimize coverage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, it’s little wonder that self-censorship is taking place at smaller outlets. A memo circulated at the Panama City (Fla.) News Herald and leaked to Jim Romenesko’s Media News (10/31/01) warned editors:
DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the US war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like…. DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the US war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the US hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children.
This policy of consistently burying the facts about the impact of the war on Afghanistan must make the pundits at Fox proud. But journalists who care about the principles of the profession should be embarrassed.
The CIA just casually discussed sinking a boat full of Cuban refugees and planting bombs in Miami and blaming Castro, but you’re bat shit crazy if you suspect such agencies may have had similar discussions about other geostrategic situations and decided to go through with it.
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There’s more public criticism of ordinary people taking ivermectin than there is of planet-dominating power structures driving humanity to armageddon.
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Nobody who supports internet censorship does so because they’re worried they themselves might consume dangerous words and believe them, it’s always to protect other people from dangerous words. It’s about the most megalomaniacal, emotionally stunted desire anyone could possibly have.
They see themselves as responsible adults who can be trusted to independently sort out truth from falsehood, but see other people as infants who cannot be trusted to do this. This is nothing other than garden variety narcissism.
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Internet censorship via monopolistic government-tied tech corporations isn’t just a problem because of free speech issues, it’s a problem because the way it’s applied is completely uneven and power-serving: politicians and the mass media circulate disinformation constantly without ever being censored. It’s not just silencing people, it’s actually shifting power upwards.
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There is no path forward for humanity on this planet without complete female reproductive sovereignty.
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Imagine if the world’s deadliest terrorist group got their hands on drones and cruise missiles and nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers and circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and began waging wars and destroying any country which disobeyed their dictates.
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No, Texas conservatives aren’t like the Taliban. No, US government authoritarianism isn’t like China or North Korea. You know what it’s like? It’s like America. It says so much that the most corrupt and destructive nation on earth keeps comparing its homegrown depravity to foreign nations.
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It’s crazy how there are guys whose whole entire job is trying to get large number of people killed by mass military violence and we just let that be a thing like it’s a perfectly legitimate way for someone to be.
“Hey why does that mustache guy keep trying to get large numbers of people violently killed?”
“Oh he’s just one of those war starty guys.”
“What?? Why are there war starty guys??”
“I dunno. Isn’t that normal? I just assumed it was normal to have war starty guys.”
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Every single soldier who died in Afghanistan died in vain. Don’t make up sugary fairy tales about it, just stop letting it happen.
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Are soldiers working under the US empire the worst people in the world? No. But in terms of moral standing you’d have to rank someone who murders foreigners on behalf of imperialists and war profiteers below most of the people in your average prison.
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“If it wasn’t us waging all these wars and killing all those people it’d be someone else” sounds very much like the sort of thing an abusive tyrant would say.
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There’s no good reason to respect the analysis of anyone who thinks China’s behavior on the world stage is worse than or equally as bad as America’s.
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Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no bill of rights of any kind. Most people are unaware of this, including most Australians. What you’re seeing in Australia is simply what happens when you add a pandemic response on top of a nation with no foundational legal protection from government overreach. That’s why our Covid measures are so notoriously harsh relative to other western countries.
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Modern gods are corporations and banks, faceless inhuman entities whose agendas of growth and conquest supercede even the wishes of their own executives. Our gods are insatiable devourers controlled by no one. Our gods have no heads.
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At a time when our species is hurtling toward its own demise we ought to be coming together and working in unison to avert disaster, and it says so much about the power of propaganda that we are instead doing the exact opposite.
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All of humanity’s problems are ultimately due to a misperception of the way things are.
Propaganda causes us to misperceive reality in a way that benefits establishment power structures, so we don’t rise up and use the power of our numbers to put an end to the ecocidal, omnicidal status quo which oppresses and exploits us.
Advertising causes us to misperceive our own bodies and the source of real contentment, leading to the obsessive consumption habits necessary for turning the gears of capitalism.
Ego causes us to misperceive our own experience of consciousness and the information which enters our minds through the senses, leading to the suffering and dysfunction which ultimately underlies all abuses in our world.
What we need, then, is clear seeing, both outwardly and inwardly. An end to government secrecy and the mass-scale manipulations which distort our perception of reality. An end to restrictions on psychedelic tools which help people behold their inner processes with lucidity. A greatly elevated prioritization of self-honesty and self-reflection to help us see through the ego’s illusions.
We can’t move toward health until we can see where we’re going.
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The military’s brutality is a daily reality for all the people of Myanmar. As Myanmar’s army prepares to deploy and reinforce its bases with hundreds of extra troops, the country’s media workers remain exposed to Covid-19 and under extreme threat, writes Phil Thornton.
Myanmar’s military leaders used its armed forces to launch its coup and take control of the country from its elected government on 1 February 2021. In protest, millions of people took to the streets.
The military responded to these protests by sending armed soldiers and police into residential areas to arrest defiant civilians, workers, students, doctors and nurses.
In March, martial law was enforced in Yangon, snipers were used, and protesters were shot on sight.
To restrict news coverage of their crimes and to impede the organisatiojn of protests, the military ordered telecommunication companies to restrict internet and mobile phone coverage. Independent media outlets had their licences withdrawn, offices were raided and trashed.
Journalists were targeted and hunted by soldiers and police. Obscure laws were added to the penal code and used to restrict freedom of speech and expression. State-controlled media published pages of arrest warrants and photographs of the wanted, including journalists.
To avoid arrest, independent journalists went underground or sought refuge with border based ethnic armed organisations.
Myanmar journalists are well aware that being “arrested” and held in detention by the military doesn’t come with respect for their legal or human rights. The military uses a wide range of obscure laws, some dating back to colonial times, to detain, intimidate and silence its critics — academics, medics, journalists, students and workers.
95 journalists arrested
Independent website, Reporting ASEAN, recorded that, as of August 18, 95 journalists had been arrested and 42 were being held in detention.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) estimated by August 29 that the military has now killed at least 1026 people, arrested 7627, issued warrants for 1984 and are still holding 6025 in detention.
Journalists Sithu Aung Myint and Htet Htet Khine pictured in a newspaper clipping. Image: Global New Light of Myanmar
They want names Those arrested are taken to interrogation centres and held indefinitely without contact with family or legal representation. Torture is used to extort names and contacts from the detained to be added to the military’s long list of those to be hunted down and suppressed into silence.
One of those names on the military’s wanted list is that of journalist Nyan Linn Htet, now in hiding, after a warrant under Section 505 (a) was issued for his arrest.
Nyan Linn Htet, managing editor of Mekong News, in an interview with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) explains the impact of being hunted has had on both him and his family.
“If I’m arrested it means I lose everything. When we had to run and go into hiding, we lost our home and our possessions. You lose your income. Your equipment. You never feel safe when hiding. Living like this affects all of us. If the military does not find me, they will pressure and threaten my family with arrest.”
Nyan Linn Htet said he is still working despite the risk of arrest.
“Losing a journalist is a big loss for our struggle for democracy. We’re only doing our job as reporters, but our news coverage exposes the military and its abuses – this is why we’re the enemy.”
Despite the danger to him and his family, Nyan Linn Htet worries about the safety of those who helped him avoid arrest.
‘Caught in hiding’
“If I’m caught in hiding, the SAC (military-appointed State Administration Council) will persecute the people who gave me a place to live. I’m afraid they [the military] will arrest those who helped me.”
His fears are well founded.
Journalist and political analyst Sithu Aung Myint was high on the military’s wanted list for his political commentary and published opposition to the coup.
On Sunday, August 15, the military raided the home of his colleague, BBC freelance producer, Htet Htet Khine, and arrested both of them.
A week later, in its Sunday, August 21, edition, the military-run newspaper, Global New Light of Myanmar, said Sithu Aung Myint had been charged with sedition, spreading “fake news” and being critical of the military coup leaders and its State Administration Council under Sections 505 (a) and 124 (a) of the Penal Code.
He could be sentenced to life in jail under Section 124 (a) of the penal code.
Htet Htet Khine was arrested for giving shelter to Sithu Aung Myint, and charged under section 17(1) of the Unlawful Association Act for working with the recently formed National Union Government’s radio station, Federal FM.
Held in interrogation centre
Friends and colleagues of Sithu Aung Myint and Htet Htet Khine told IFJ they are concerned both journalists were held at an interrogation centre for more than a week before having access to either legal help or contact with colleagues or family.
Nyan Linn Htet told IFJ he is aware his legal and human rights will not be respected if he is arrested.
“They will not let us get legal help until they’ve got what they want from us. The military amended 505 (a) of the Penal Code to prevent giving us bail. We know they will jail us even if we have legal representation.
“We know SAC is torturing journalists because of the work we do.”
Reports by local and international humanitarian groups have detailed the severe beatings — hours of maintaining stressed positions, use of sexual violence — and killing of people while held in detention.
Nyan Linn Htet said if arrested, he knows it will come with beatings. He admits that the thought of being tortured keeps him awake at night.
“They will jail me, but only after they torture me. I will not be released until I sign a statement that I will never criticise them. I’m not afraid of being arrested, but torture scares me. There are nights when I’m too afraid to sleep.”
International media drop Myanmar He and other local journalists told the IFJ it was disappointing that international media has dropped Myanmar from its news agenda and moved on to cover other stories.
Nyan Linn Htets said despite access difficulties, the international media can use local reporters who are willing to help.
“We know the difficulties media has getting ground access to Myanmar. Covid-19 restrictions also make it impossible to legally cross borders from neighboring countries, but we are already here in the country and are capable of doing the job.”
Despite the fear of arrest and torture, he is still reporting and urged local journalists to keep doing the same.
“It’s important we use what we can to still work and report news events of interest to people. People are accessing news and information in many different ways now.”
The military, while trashing local and international laws and ignoring its constitution, is quick to use and amend laws to jail its opponents for being critical of the coup and for reporting military violence, abuse and corruption.
We have no rights
Nan Paw Gay, editor-in-chief at the Karen Information Center, says the military council has no respect for journalists or their right to publish information in the public interest.
“There is no freedom of the press. If journalists try to report news or seek information from the military’s opponents — CRPH, NUG, CDM, G-Z and PDF — the State Administration Council prosecutes them under Section 17/1 of the Illegal Association Act.
“Since the military launched its coup, sources we use have had their freedom of speech and expression made illegal and they now risk arrest for talking to us and… we can be arrested for speaking with them.
“Independent media groups have been outlawed and totally lost their right to speak freely or write about news events.”
Nan Paw Gay points out if journalists are “critical of the military, its appointed State Administration Council or its lack of a public health plan to tackle the covid-19 pandemic now ravaging the country, section 505 (a) is used to arrest journalists for spreading false news.”
Essentially torture is used to terrorise journalists, he says.
“When the military council arrests and detains journalists, the torture is both physical and psychological. Even before being detained threats are issued and then during the arrest the violence becomes real – shootings, people being kicked and dragged from homes by their hair and beaten.”
Women journalists tortured
Nan Paw Gay says women journalists are more likely to be “tortured using psychological abuse – kept in a dark room and constantly told that they will be killed tomorrow – to mess and generate fear with their thoughts. You can see the effects of the tortured on some journalists when they appear in court – shaking hands and body spasms.”
Military brutality is a daily reality for Myanmar’s people. At the time of writing, the army is preparing to deploy and reinforce its bases with hundreds of extra troops into areas of the Karen National Union-controlled territory and where anti-coup protesters, striking doctors and politicians have been offered refuge and safety.
A senior ethnic Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldier told the IFJ that army drones and helicopters have been surveying the area in recent months.
“We know they’ve sent munitions and large troop numbers to our area… last time we had drones flying over our area, they later attacked villages and our positions with airstrikes. They’re already fighting in our Brigade 5 and 1 and have started in 6 and 2.”
Since the military launched its coup on February 1, there has been at least 500 armed battles between the KNU and the military regime and 70,000 Karen civilians have been displaced and are hiding in makeshift camps as a direct result of these attacks.
Fighter jets have flown into Karen National Union-controlled areas 27 times and dropped at least 47 bombs, killing 14 civilians and wounding 28.
Burning rice stores in Myanmar. Image: KIC
Naw K’nyaw Paw, general secretary of the Karen Women Organisation, in an interview with Karen News, said villagers displaced by the Myanmar Army attacks are now in desperate need of humanitarian aid.
‘Shoot at villagers’
“They shoot at villagers if they see them on their farms, burning down their rice barns and killing the livestock left behind. The Burma Army also arrests people when they see them and use them as human shields to protect them when attacked by Karen soldiers.”
Naw K’nyaw Paw said accessing the displaced villagers is difficult, especially during the wet season.
“The only accessible way in is on foot, supplies have to be carried through jungle. Given the restrictions due to covid-19 as well as the increasing Burma Army military operations, villagers are unable to return to their homes and they will need food, clothing and medicine, especially the young and old.”
Nan Paw Gay says the military’s strategy to muzzle the media is a familiar tactic that has been used before.
“Stop international media getting access to conflict areas, shut down independent media, hunt local journalists and when there’s no one to left to report, launch attacks in ethnic regions, displacing thousands of villagers.”
Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in South East Asia. This article was first published by the IFJ Asia-Pacific blog and is republished with the author’s permission. Thornton is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
CODEPINK’s letter, with nearly 4,000 signatures, calls on PBS to stop censoring Peter Getzels’ and Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s documentary film Voices from the Frontlines: China’s War on Poverty. The letter addresses how PBS is depriving its viewers of opportunities for learning about collective harmony and equality by censoring this documentary and its insight into China’s life-saving policies, which took 100 million citizens out of poverty, at a time when poverty, food insecurity, and houselessness are all at record levels in the United States.
Israel again illegally bombed Syria last week, violating Lebanese airspace to do so and putting at risk the lives of untold numbers of civilians. And following this, crickets in the media, again.
On Thursday, just after 11pm, Israeli missiles targeted the vicinities of Damascus and Homs, according to a statement from the Syrian army. Russia’s Reconciliation Center for Syria said Israel did so via six planes which fired 24 guided missiles at Syria.
In its attack on Syria, Israeli missiles put two passenger airplanes in Syrian and in Lebanese airspace at risk, particularly the 130 civilians and flight crew on a Middle East Airlines flight coming from Abu Dhabi to Beirut. Flight trackers show the plane abruptly changed course to avoid being targeted.
Flashback to 2018, when Israel attacked Syria using the cover of a Russian plane – whose presence was legal in Syria, having been invited by the Syrian government, contrary to the invading Israeli plane. Syrian air defense missiles responded to the threat, downing the Russian plane.
Just last month, Israel attacked Syria on multiple occasions, including during Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest times for Muslims.
The reality is that Israel’s bombings of Syria are so routine that this latest attack is hardly ‘news’ and it is hard to make it newsworthy to write about. I’ve written about such attacks before, including noting (February 2021): “Israel’s military chief of staff boasted earlier about hitting over 500 targets in just 2020 alone.”
But each attack is, in my opinion, newsworthy, because each of them affects, if not kills, civilians.
Surely, it would be newsworthy if the routine bombings of a neighboring sovereign country were committed by, say, Russia or China. The entirety of Western media and all of the internet would be livid and demanding accountability.
Israel’s pretext when bombing Syria is usually that it is, “targeting Iranian-backed fighters,” a charge gleefully reprinted in media and by sources supporting the fall of the Syrian government.
I usually ignore the dishonest claims made by the Britain-based 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights'
It claims the apartheid regime's strikes killed "4 pro-Iranian fighters"
In reality, reports claim, Thursday’s bombings killed four Syrian civilians, including at least one youth.
The psychological terror
British journalist Vanessa Beeley, who lives in a heavily populated suburb on the outskirts of Damascus, tweeted of feeling the impacts of the bombings.
Now imagine all of the people in the vicinity feeling that impact, not knowing if that night they would finally be struck. That’s the thing we don’t hear much of if these attacks even make any media coverage: how they impact on civilians, even those not directly injured but terrorized by them.
I know very well of the terror of being near a site Israel has just bombed. And although I have many anecdotes from my three years of living in Gaza, one rather poignant incident involved me sleeplessly musing on the rooftop of the simple central Gazan home I lived in on a hot August 2011 night. I wrote:
I am watching sporadic shooting stars when the first F-16 appeared from the direction of the sea. Three more follow. The roar is normal, F-16s are normal, and reading in the news the next day that some part of Gaza was bombed is normal. They continue eastward and a bombing seems imminent. It is. A thick cloud of black smoke blots the dim lights of houses in eastern Deir al Balah where the F-16s have struck.
I went on to write about the planes attacking the city of Khan Younis to the south, and suddenly, bombing close to me.
Two massive blasts, the house shakes. They’ve bombed somewhere near the sea, which is only a few hundred meters away. Concrete dust flutters down upon us. There is a sustained honking in Gaza that everyone recognizes as make way, we’ve got another victim here.
And, if I may dwell on this one simple anecdote, I remarked on how the men in the house tried to appear calm and cool but, while we were all accustomed to such random bombings and either put on a brave face or genuinely stop flinching, they do still affect you deeply.
Every time one of those f***ing F-16s flies over us, it’s a reminder of the last war, or of previous attacks, or of random bombings, or of friends and family martyred in their sleep, cars, homes… Every time those F-16s intentionally break the sound barrier to create a bomb-like sonic boom, everyone within range instinctively remembers their own personal horror at whichever Israeli war or attacks.
I have more terrifying, all night long bombing memories, with massive bombs landing nearby, including just tens of meters away. Those were during the 2008/9 war on Gaza. With the above account, I want to emphasize how these terrors occur on any random day, but will never be heard of in the media.
But it isn’t just the already bad enough bombings. The psychological terror aspect includes the near-continuous presence of drones overhead.
All day, you can hear them [Israeli drones]. It causes a nervous breakdown for any human to keep listening to this all day. I can’t even imagine what they feel in Gaza when they have them all the time overhead.
If you haven’t ever been under one, much less tens, of military drones, you won’t know how deeply disturbing hearing them is. It is hard to concentrate with such an ominous cacophony constantly overhead.
When in early August, in what the Israel army claimed was a “retaliation” attack, Israel fired artillery shells at the Khiam region of southern Lebanon, Osman was at her home less than one kilometer from the bombings. She spoke of the terror of her children. “I found one of them hiding under the sink, I found two of them hiding in my bedroom near the closet because they thought this was the safest place to be.”
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
(@Syria_Protector)