Category: Censorship

  • The Committee to Protect Journalists yesterday joined five other organizations in a joint statement calling on international policymakers and human rights institutions to condemn human rights violations in Nicaraguan and pressure authorities to protect press freedom and freedom of expression in the country.

    The statement documents Nicaraguan authorities’ most recent acts of censorship and harassment of the press, including the August 13 police raid of the offices of La Prensa, Nicaragua’s lone remaining daily newspaper, and the detention the next day of the paper’s publisher, Juan Lorenzo Holmann, as part of a criminal investigation into alleged customs fraud and money laundering.

    “It is clear that these events constitute harassment of the press and blatantly inhibit journalists from doing their jobs at a moment when their work is crucial,” the groups wrote in their statement. “In these months leading up to scheduled national elections [in November], respect for democracy, human rights and civil liberties is vitally important.”

    The organizations urged members of the Organization of American States and United Nations human rights bodies, among other groups, to publicly condemn and respond to press freedom violations in the country. The statement also calls on Nicaraguan authorities to cease their harassment of La Prensa, release journalists and government critics detained on treason charges, and allow journalists to work freely.

    The joint statement is available here in English and Spanish.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In 1989, researchers from the Salk Institute in California published a paper detailing how they developed an RNA transfection system that could “directly introduce RNA into whole tissues and embryos”. The concept of using RNA as a drug is first described in this paper, making it the seminal work that formed the foundation for decades of further research in this area. The “Discussion” section of the paper states that:

    The RNA/lipofectin method can be used to directly introduce RNA into whole tissues and embryos (R.W.M., C. Holt, and I.M.V., unpublished results), raising the possibility that liposome-mediated mRNA transfection might offer yet another option in the growing technology of eukaryotic gene delivery, one based on the concept of using RNA as a drug.

    One of the Salk Institute researchers listed on the paper is Dr. Robert W. Malone, a scientist who has recently been censored on social media for warning about the possible dangers of the covid-19 vaccines. It could be argued that there’s no expert more qualified to warn us about the dangers of mRNA injections than the man who helped pioneer the technology, nevertheless, Big Tech decided he was expounding “misinformation”, because, well, they know better apparently.

    Malone’s research, which resulted in a procedure that could be used to “efficiently transfect RNA into human cells” using a “synthetic cationic lipid” was supported by grants from the American Cancer Society and the National Institute of Health (who currently have a stake in the Moderna mRNA vaccine, showing their allegiance to the technology. More on this later).

    While Malone’s contributions to the development of mRNA technology are well-known and well-documented, Wikipedia decided to remove all mention of him from their “RNA Vaccine” entry shortly after the scientist began speaking out about the dangers of the rushed-through covid vaccines. The June 14th version of the article mentioned Malone by name 3 times and cited his work 6 times. The current version of the article mentions him 0 times and cites his work only 3 times.

    However, this is unsurprising considering Wikipedia’s documented bias towards the pharmaceutical industry. Far more interesting is the institution that produced the research in the first place — the Salk Institute. The Salk Institute, named after Jonas Salk, the creator of the Salk polio vaccine, was constructed in 1962 thanks to funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, today known as the March of the Dimes.

    The March of the Dimes (MOD) was established in 1937 with the mission of eradicating polio and during a time when the Eugenics Establishment was already a prominent, but not yet popular, feature of the American health scene. The theory of Eugenics is based on the idea that selective procreation can lead to the gradual “improvement” of the human race and that certain families are fit to lead society by virtue of their “superior” genes.

    At the time, the nation’s key eugenics organizations included the American Eugenics Society (AES) and the American Society of human Eugenics (ASHE), funded by the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harriman families, as well as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. It should be noted that the Rockefellers were instrumental in funding and promoting eugenics around the world. The Eugenics movement promoted selective mating, artificial insemination and compulsory sterilization and euthanasia as important means of weeding out so-called “inferior” human beings.

    The first sterilization law in the US was passed in 1907, in the state of Indiana, and by 1931, many more states had followed suit by enacting similar laws. According to the Indiana Historical Bureau:

    In 1907, Governor J. Frank Hanly approved first state eugenics law making sterilization mandatory for certain individuals in state custody.

    Those sterilized under eugenics law were deemed “undesirable” on account of mental or physical impairments such as epilepsy, blindness and physical disabilities, as well as “social inadequacies” such as drug addiction or criminality. According to estimates, around 60,000 individuals were sterilized under such laws, deprived of their right to have children and forever branded as “feebleminded”.

    In fact, the prominence of the American eugenics movement resulted in its adoption by the National Socialist Party of Germany, which sterilized more than 350,000 persons by the end of the second world war. After WW2, eugenics notions were dropped from public conversation, but the movement never dissipated, no, instead it was “re-branded” using more acceptable terminology such as “population control” and “reproductive health”, as we shall see later on.

    The emergence of the MOD as a major player in the American Eugenics movement can be traced back to the organization’s early association with the Rockefeller Institute from where it procured many of its key members and advisers, including professor Anton Julius Carlson, a member of the American Eugenics Society, recruited to serve on the MOD’s Medical and Research Committees and Professor Clair E. Turner, another AES member who served as assistant to then President, Basil O’Connor.

    Just before the establishment of the Salk Institute, the MOD announced it would be phasing out its polio programs and focusing its resources on “birth defects”. In 1959, the MOD funded courses in “medical genetics” at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, a genetics institute founded in 1929 by Clarence Cook Little, who, “at one time or another” served as the president of the American Eugenics Society, the American Birth Control League and the American Euthanasia Society.

    Jackson Laboratory’s claimed mission is “to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in its shared quest to improve human health.” Noteworthy is that the lab received increased funding in 2020, largely from the National Institute of Health (NIH), including a grant of $10.6 million to find treatments for rare genetic diseases by using gene-editing technologies. And at the start of the coronavirus “pandemic”, the lab worked to develop genetically modified mice for use in vaccine studies and other research related to Sars-Cov-2.

    Beginning in the 1960s, the MOD financed several “Birth Defects Prevention Centers” located at medical institutions across the US. These new centers offered prenatal testing via amniocentesis to determine whether a baby would be born with “defects” and then gave the couple the opportunity to abort the affected child.

    The MOD has also made direct donations to Planned Parenthood, a clear contradiction of their claimed mission, which is to “fight for the health of all moms and babies.” Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that provides “reproductive health care” in the US and abroad. From 2019-2020 the organization committed over 350,000 abortions and has been criticized as “steering resources away from women’s health and toward abortion.” Unsurprisingly, a look into the organization’s history reveals that Planned Parenthood has its roots in Eugenics ideals.

    Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, who, far from a “birth control activist”, as the mainstream would have you believe, was a racist eugenicist who sought to rid the world of “unfit” human stock. In her essay, “A Plan for Peace”, she describes the main objects of her proposed “Population Congress” which includes “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” She also mentions the need to “control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.”

    As mentioned earlier, these Eugenics ideals inspired the Nazis who took many of Sanger’s ideas and ran with them, so to speak. In his book, The War Against the Weak, Edwin Black details how the Nazi sterilization law of 1933 as well as subsequent euthanasia laws were based on blueprints drawn up by Sanger and other American “activists.” In fact, associates of Sanger knew about these Nazi euthanasia programs and praised them.

    Coming back to the Salk Institute, it should be noted that the mainstream account of the 20th-century polio outbreak, namely the notion that the disease is caused by a virus and that Dr. Salk’s miracle vaccine was single-handedly responsible for ending the epidemic, is dubious and likely altogether false.

    Paralytic polio appeared suddenly in the US in the early 1900s with continual, dramatic fluctuations in cases — a pattern that continued until the end of the 1950s. The introduction of the Salk vaccine in 1954 seemed to coincide with the almost instantaneous decline in cases, which continued for more than two decades.

    But prior to being called “polio,” conditions involving infirmity of the limbs were known by various other names including apoplexy, palsy and paralysis. Many historical writings refer to paralysis resulting from exposure to toxic substances and many of these accounts were documented by Dr. Ralph Scobey in his 1952 statement to the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products titled The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis and Obstructions to its Investigation.

    Scobey’s paper includes references to several investigations that seemed to indicate a link between polio outbreaks in the 20th century and the consumption of fresh fruit, providing a link between Polio and toxic pesticide exposure. One crop pesticide in widespread use at the time was DDT, a highly toxic organochlorine that was widely publicized as being “good for you”, but eventually banned in 1972. In 1953, Dr. Morton Biskind published a paper in the American Journal of Digestive Diseases pointing out that “McCormick (78), Scobey (100-101), and Goddard (57), in detailed studies, have all pointed out that factors other than infective agents are certainly involved in the etiology of polio, varying from nutritional defects to a variety of poisons which affect the nervous system.”

    The danger of toxic pesticides, including DDT, and their disastrous effects on the environment were illustrated by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book, Silent Spring.

    In more recent times, researchers, Dan Olmstead, co-founder of the Age of Autism, and Mark Blaxil conducted two brilliant investigations into the polio epidemics of the 20th century, reaching a similar conclusion to Scobey and Biskind, namely that the disease was caused by the widespread use of neurotoxic pesticides such as arsenite of soda and DDT.

    Although Salk’s vaccine was hailed as a success, the vaccine itself caused many cases of injury and paralysis. And though there does appear to be a convincing correlation between the timing of the vaccine and the reduction in polio cases, as all good scientists know, correlation doesn’t equal causation, especially considering the fact that DDT was phased out, at least in the US, over the same period.

    Interestingly, Dr Salk’s polio research was funded by the mother of Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon family banking fortune who idealized Margaret Sanger and later joined the board of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation. May’s views on immigration were radical, to say the least, and according to some, she favoured compulsory sterilization as a means to limit birth rates in developing countries. May later joined the board of the Population Council, an organization founded by John D. Rockefeller III focused on population reduction. In 1995, the Population Council collaborated with the WHO to create fertility regulating vaccines.

    It would be a mistake to think that the polio epidemic was not related to the current ‘age of vaccination’ we find ourselves in. On the contrary, claiming that polio was “eradicated in the United States” due to vaccination alone is a lie that garnered public favour for childhood vaccinations and helped to set the groundwork for the widespread belief in the safety and efficacy of all vaccines. Events such as Polio and Smallpox (another lie that is beyond the scope of this article), and the subsequent pro-vaccine propaganda, “primed” much of the population to accept, without question, an experimental jab based on poorly understood technology.

    Twisting the Science

    In 1997, 8 years after the Salk Institute paper, the FDA approved the first ever trial of transfected RNA to develop immunity in cancer patients. The Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Health then voted to continue approval some months later, leading to the first-ever mRNA based vaccine administered to humans.

    Though mRNA is propagandized in the media as the next revolution in health, those with keen perception may be alarmed when reading excerpts such as this one, taken from an article on the history of mRNA, written by Damian Garde, a Biotech reporter for STATS:

    The concept: By making precise tweaks to synthetic mRNA and injecting people with it, any cell in the body could be transformed into an on-demand drug factory.”

    Talk of cells being turned into “on-demand drug factories” is exactly the sort of meaningless techno-rhetoric meant to impress and entice an uninformed public. mRNA vaccines are based on the following concept: a piece of synthetic mRNA is shuttled into your cells, where it is used as a template to create the viral “spike protein.” Once this protein leaves the cell, the body produces antibodies and “learns” how to fight future Sars-Cov-2 infections.

    mRNA-based vaccines are often touted as a safer alternative to DNA-based vaccines, which, according to researcher Steve Pascolo “may trigger permanent and dangerous changes in the genetic information of treated people”. However, do we know for sure that mRNA vaccines don’t permanently change the genetic makeup of our cells? A 2001 paper titled “RNA as a tumor vaccine: a review of the literature<" states that (emphasis added): “unlike DNA-based vaccines, there is little danger of incorporation of RNA sequences into the host genome.” The use of the word “little” would seem to indicate that there may be at least some danger of genome integration or more likely, researchers simply don’t know.

    In the 2004 “expert opinion” paper by Pascolo cited above, he outlines the link between mRNA vaccines and gene therapies, something which is continually denied and dismissed by the mainstream:
    A

    lthough located in the cytosol and not in the nucleus, mature mRNAs belong to the biochemical family of nucleic acids. mRNA, similarly to DNA, may be considered a gene and, consequently, it’s use as a vaccine may be viewed as ‘gene therapy’.

    Interestingly, it is purely due to a technicality of regulatory law that covid-19 gene therapies are allowed to be called “vaccines”. This is explained in a paper titled “The European Regulatory Environment of RNA-Based Vaccines,” which states that:

    The definition of a gene therapy medicinal product as outlined in Annex 1 to Directive 2001/83/EC is as follows:

    Gene therapy medicinal product means a biological medicinal product which has the following characteristics:

    (a) it contains an active substance which contains or consists of a recombinant nucleic acid used in or administered to human beings with a view to regulating, repairing, replacing, adding or deleting a genetic sequence;

    (b) its therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic effect relates directly to the recombinant nucleic acid sequence it contains, or to the product of genetic expression of this sequence.

    Gene therapy medicinal products shall not include vaccines against infectious diseases.

    As is evident, the mere act of calling a gene therapy a “vaccine against infectious disease” negates its classification as a gene therapy, the approval process for which, at least in Europe, involves going through the CAT which is the EMA’s (European Medicines Agency) “Committee for Advanced Therapies”. Evidently, this play on language would seem to constitute a “loophole” of sorts, allowing easier approval for mRNA based gene therapies planned for human use.

    Approval is certainly a contentious topic when talked about in the context of the current covid-19 vaccines, none of which have been fully FDA approved, only authorized under emergency use (EUA) and labeled as “investigational” products, a fact that many people are unaware of. However, early in the year vaccine manufacturers already set their sights on full regulatory approval, after only 6 months of trial data. On the 7th of May, Pfizer formally initiated their application to the FDA, with the aim of having the first-ever fully approved covid-19 vaccine. But with millions of vaccines already administered under EUA, what’s the rush?

    Furthermore, for the six “first in disease” vaccines approved by the FDA over the last 15 years, the median trial duration was just shy of two years. A vaccine approved after 6 months of data would constitute one of the fastest ever. The phase three clinical trials for Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen are two years in duration, but the FDA has not clearly stated their position with regards to minimum follow-up prior to consideration for approval.

    Longer, placebo-controlled trials are paramount to assessing vaccine safety. It is extremely alarming then that vaccine manufacturers, within weeks of receiving EUA, began to unblind trials by offering those in the placebo group the chance to get vaccinated. Moderna announced that “as of April 13, all placebo participants have been offered the Moderna covid-19 vaccine and 98% of those have received the vaccine,” meaning that their placebo group no longer exists and as such, they have no way to accurately measure long-term safety.

    In an article for the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi quotes the FDA, on several occasions, saying that the maintenance of a placebo group would be critical to assessing both the safety and efficacy of covid-19 vaccines, which is obvious to anyone who understands the consequences of failing to adhere to scientific rigor when testing a new medical therapy.

    In reality, there could be many reasons for manufacturers wanting FDA approval for their vaccines, but likely top of the list is the “stamp of approval” that comes with full licensure and the ability to use this as a way to convince those who remain skeptical regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. Moreover, full FDA approval would pave the way for easier vaccine mandates, putting immense pressure on those of the “awakened class” who represent a thorn in the side of the Great Reset/Great Convergence agenda pushers.

    More disturbing inconsistencies can be found in the FDA’s process for assessing and approving these experimental vaccines. For example, the FDA recently cautioned against the use of antibody tests for evaluating immunity or protection from covid-19, “especially” after a person has received a vaccination, despite their EUA being originally granted, in part, due to antibody responses. The implication for this reversal is that the EUA given for covid-19 vaccines should also be reversed, but what’s the likelihood of that happening, after millions have already been jabbed?

    Moreover, the idea that “antibodies” provide protection from so-called viral infections represents a poor understanding of the body and the immune system. The fact that antibodies play little role in viral infections has been known by medical scientists since the 1950s based on research that shows persons with the genetic inability to produce antibodies, called “agammaglobulinemia,” have normal reactions to typical viral infections and even appear to resist recurrences.

    Bill Gates, Moderna, and Eugenics 2.0

    One of the covid-19 vaccine manufactures most talked about in the media is Moderna, a biotech company co-founded by Robert Langer, a researcher and inventor at MIT. In 2013, the biotech startup received $25m in funding from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a research arm of the United States Department of Defense, and an organization well-known for ruthlessly pursuing dystopian, transhumanist technologies, such as implantable nanoparticles and bio-brain interfaces (more on this later).

    Noteworthy is that the US government, through the National Institute of Health, appears to have a financial stake in the Moderna vaccine thanks to a contract signed by both parties, giving the NIH joint ownership over Moderna’s mRNA vaccine candidates. According to Axios:

    The NIH mostly funds outside research, but it also often invents basic scientific technologies that are later licensed out and incorporated into drugs that are sold at massive profits.

    This is more than alarming considering the NIH is responsible for prioritizing promising treatments for covid-19 as well as improving clinical trial effectiveness, which, for Moderna, is impossible considering their trial no longer contains a control group. NIH’s vested interest in Moderna’s success may also provide a plausible explanation for why the biotech startup received EUA for their vaccine despite failing, for over 10 years, to bring a single product to market.

    In an interview for Economic Club, NIH director Francis Collins denied that covid-19 vaccines would be money-makers, saying that “Nobody sees this as a way to make billions of dollars”. However, evidence points to the contrary as Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sales reached $1.7 billion in the first quarter of 2021, making their CEO, Stephane Bancel, one of the many new pharma billionaires.

    “Operation Warp Speed,” the name given to a partnership between several US Federal agencies aimed at accelerating the development of a covid-19 vaccine, was also wrought with conflicts of interest. The Operation Warp Speed administration hired several “consultants” with ties to Big Pharma, including two former Pfizer executives. And in May 2020, it was reported that their chief adviser, Dr. Monsef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive himself, held $10m in GlaxoSmithKline stock, the same company that was later awarded a $2 billion contract to supply the US government with 100 million vials of covid-19 vaccine. Dr. Slaoui also held significant stock in Moderna, to whom the federal government has awarded over $2.5b in funding.

    Moderna co-founder, Robert Langer, whose net worth has also skyrocketed into the billions, is one of the world’s most cited researchers. A scientist at MIT, Langer holds over 1,400 patents and specializes in biotechnology, nanotechnology, tissue engineering and drug delivery. Furthermore, Langer holds an administrative role at the MIT Media Lab, the same institute that was the focus of a scandal after it was revealed that the lab accepted funding from convicted sex-offender, Jefferey Epstein. Epstein also happened to have a disturbing fascination with “transhumanism”, a modern-day version of eugenics (transhumanism is discussed later in this article).

    Then director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, approved two donations from Epstein of $1.75m and allowed the prolific paedophile to “direct” funds to the lab from other wealthy benefactors, including a $2m donation from Bill Gates, who also has unsettling ties to Epstein, having flown on his private jet and met with him on several occasions. When the news broke out and Joi Ito resigned from his post at the lab, Langer was one of the first people to sign a letter calling for him to stay, and as an administrator for the lab’s Director’s Office, it’s hard to believe he didn’t know about the Epstein donations in advance.

    Described as the “common denominator” in several coronavirus efforts, Robert Langer is certainly an interesting player in the transhumanist movement. In 2015, his company, Microchips Biotech, partnered with Israeli pharmaceutical giant, Teva Pharmaceutical, to commercialize its “implantable drug delivery device”. Noteworthy is that Teva Pharmaceutical has received significant investment from Warren Buffett, who, in 2006, pledged to gradually donate his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an organization whom he served as a trustee up until very recently.

    Langer also has ties to Charles Lieber, a Harvard nanotech scientist who was arrested in January on account of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his collaboration with Chinese researchers at the Wuhan University of Technology. In 2012, Langer and Lieber worked together to create a “material that merges nanoscale electronics with biological tissues”. The material was described as “a first step toward prosthetics that communicate directly with the nervous system”.

    Much of Langer’s research is backed by Bill Gates, who began funding mRNA technology in 2010 and has also invested millions into Moderna. In 2017, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored a project at Langer’s lab to create a microparticle vaccine delivery system that could generate a “novel type of drug carrying particle”, allowing multiple doses of a vaccine to be administered over an extended period of time with just one injection. Then in 2019, Gates and Langer teamed up again to create an invisible ink tattoo that “embeds immunization records into a child’s skin”. Disturbingly, the eventual goal of the project is to inject sensors that can be used to track “other aspects” of health.

    Gates claims he needs the data for “disease prevention”, referring to his efforts to wipe out polio, measles and other “infectious” diseases from around the world. However, Gates’ various “health-related” initiatives in developing countries are not the work of a loving philanthropist like the media would have us all believe. Instead, evidence would suggest that Gates’ involvement in public health represents the continuation of a long-standing eugenics agenda, hiding in plain sight. Gates’ links to the eugenics movement start with his father, who praised the Rockefellers for their work in “public health” and even met with them in 2000 to discuss matters relating to infectious disease, vaccines and the environment. During the meeting, Gates senior was quoted as saying:

    Taking our lead and our inspiration from work already done by The Rockefeller Foundation, our foundation actually started GAVI by pledging $750 million to something called the Global Fund for Children’s Vaccines, an instrument of GAVI.

    Interestingly, almost ten years after that meeting, Gates junior co-hosted a meeting with David Rockefeller to discuss population reduction.

    Perhaps even more telling is the fact that in 2012 Bill and Melinda Gates hosted their London Summit on Family Planning, where they announced their commitment to population control in the third world, on the 100th anniversary of the First International Eugenics Congress, also held in London.

    Gates is well-known for his obsession with vaccines, a curious pursuit considering that the 9,000,000 people who die every year from hunger would be better served by having clean water, food supplies and sanitary living environments. In 2009, Gates’ Foundation funded observational studies in India for a controversial cervical cancer vaccine that was given to thousands of young girls called “Gardasil”. Within months, many girls began to get sick and within a year, five of them had died. During a similar study for a different brand of HPV vaccine, many girls were hospitalized and a further two died. The Economic Times of India reported on this in 2014, with the shocking revelation that:

    Consent for conducting these studies, in many cases, was taken from the hostel wardens, which was a flagrant violation of norms. In many other cases, thumbprint impressions of their poor and illiterate parents were duly affixed onto the consent form. The children also had no idea about the nature of the disease or the vaccine. The authorities concerned could not furnish requisite consent forms for the vaccinated children in a huge number of cases.

    Gates has also heavily promoted the oral polio vaccine in India, after endeavouring to eradicate the disease. However, as discussed earlier in this article, toxic chemicals are involved in the etiology of polio and thus the disease cannot be eradicated by the use of vaccines. In fact, global health numbers indicate that more cases of polio are now being caused by the vaccines themselves than anything else. In 2018, a group of brave Indian researchers published a paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health showing a correlation between the oral polio vaccine drives and increased cases of “acute flaccid paralysis”, a condition described as “clinically indistinguishable” from polio.

    Ironically, Gates has a $23m investment in Monsanto, the company that markets “roundup” a glyphosate-containing pesticide that is known to cause adverse health effects, including neurological disorders and paralysis.

    While many believe Gates to be selflessly giving away his money in order to fund these vaccination campaigns, it should be noted that Gates’ investment in vaccines has netted him a massive return. By 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated just over $10b to various vaccine-related initiatives including GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization). Gates called it the “best investment he’s ever made”, estimating a 20-1 return, or around $200b over 20 years. Indeed, Gates’ net worth has more than doubled over the last 10 years.

    And lest we forget that more than half of all deaths in low to middle income countries are caused by non-communicable diseases, which the Bill and Melinda Foundation seems to have little interest in, directing less than 3% of their budget towards such conditions.

    Furthermore, Gates’ activities in public health are wrought with conflicts of interest that that would seem to undermine the notion that Gates cares about the health of the population. Many of these conflicts of interest are outlined in a study published by Harvard researcher, David Stuckler, titled “Global Health Philanthropy and Institutional Relationships: How Should Conflicts of Interest Be Addressed?,” in which he states that:

    As one example, we found that Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has substantial holdings in the Coca-Cola Corporation, and also participates in grants that encourage communities in developing countries to become business affiliates of Coca-Cola. It has been noted by some commentators that sugary drinks such as those produced by Coca-Cola are correlated with the rapid increase in obesity and diabetes in developing countries.

    Stuckler also notes that:

    Many of the Foundation’s pharmaceutical development grants may benefit leading pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline.” And that “Several grants are linked to companies that are represented on the Foundation’s board among its investments.

    The media rarely reports on these disturbing conflicts of interest, which isn’t surprising considering Gates funds all the major news outlets.

    To call the negligent, wide-spread administration of covid-19 experimental vaccines an initiative steeped in eugenicist thinking would not be amiss considering how many figures and institutions involved in the vaccine race have ties to the eugenics movement. In fact, the developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are also linked to the now renamed British Eugenics Society, founded by the father of Eugenics, Francis Galton. These connections are detailed by investigative journalist, Whitney Webb, in her article titled “Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement.”

    When it comes to protecting public health, the recklessness displayed by politicians, scientists and pharmaceutical companies is unforgivable considering the widespread impact that these experimental vaccines will have. We have already begun to see the results of unleashing a dangerous gene therapy technology on a naive and trusting public, with VAERS, (the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) showing more deaths linked with covid-19 vaccines than all other vaccines combined over the last 30 years.

    None of this is surprising though, considering the haste with which clinical trials were conducted and the question marks surrounding the reliability of the data reported. For example, vaccine manufactures reported their vaccines were “95% effective”, a number they arrived at by using a relative risk reduction as opposed to an absolute risk reduction, which was around 1% in most cases, a fact never highlighted by the mainstream media.

    Furthermore, vaccine trials were not designed to assess the vaccines’ effect on infection, transmission, hospitalizations or deaths, which is puzzling considering that, if there really was a viral pandemic, these would be the most important endpoints to test for. Though perhaps this was a calculated move by vaccine manufacturers, who knew they’d have a better chance at rigging the results using the endpoint of ‘covid-19 of any severity’. After all, the dramatic increase in the use of influenza vaccines has not been associated with a decrease in mortality.

    Peter Doshi, an editor for the British Medical Journal, has called into question numerous aspects of the controversial vaccine trials, including the potential for pain medication to mask covid-19 symptoms in trial groups and the objectivity of “primary event adjudication committees” in charge of counting covid-19 cases. In the case of Pfizer, this committee consisted of Pfizer employees.

    Recently, Doctors for Covid Ethics, a group consisting of Dr. Michael palmer MD, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi MD and Dr. Stefan Hockertz PhD, published an expert statement relating to the danger and efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine that was submitted as part of a lawsuit challenging the EU’s authorization of the use of the vaccine for children 12 years and older. The paper states that the reported efficacy of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was “most likely altogether fraudulent” and that “Pfizer, the EMA, and the FDA have systematically neglected evidence from preclinical animal trials that clearly pointed to grave dangers of adverse events.”

    But of course, none of this is ever surfaced in the mainstream. Instead, we are fed the same party lines over and over; “vaccines are safe and effective,” “follow the science,” “listen to the experts.” And by “experts” they of course mean the pharmaceutical reps like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose been lying about so-called viral infections ever since AIDS broke out in 1984. The fact that a character like Fauci has held his post for more than 30 years is rather telling of how the system works. The late Nobel prize winner and inventor of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Karry Mullis, castigated Fauci in an interview, saying that:

    He doesn’t know anything really about anything, and I’d say that to his face. Nothing.

    The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in […] Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.

    A Transhumanist Future

    Besides being gene therapies, a technology associated with eugenics and transhumanism, according to scientists, mRNA technology “allows rapid development of novel vaccines within a very short time span of weeks rather than months.” Hence, we may be faced with the possibility of a future filled with on-demand vaccines created to “protect” the public against new, invisible threats.

    Indeed, with vaccinologists already talking about “variants”, booster shots and periodic covid-19 top-up vaccines, it certainly looks like things are headed that way. And of course, thanks to intelligence-linked Big Tech conglomerates, this data will all be recorded on a “vaccine passport” linked to your smartphone, which will no-doubt form the basis for a new type of digital identity pass tied to your bank account and, eventually, your social credit.

    Indeed, in 2019, Bill Gates’ Microsoft filed a patent, aptly named Patent WO2020060606, for a “Cryptocurrency system using body-activation data,” another clue as to the true intentions of the technocratic elite who are funding and promoting the transhumanist agenda. The patent’s title alone conjures up images of a slave society in which humans are fitted with biosensors and awarded digital coins for completing tasks issued to them by the ruling elite.

    But perhaps even more alarming is the rush to get gene therapies licensed for use in young children. Pfizer are currently in the midst of a global clinical trial, where they are testing their mRNA jabs in babies as young as 6 months, despite the fact that “Covid-19”, if we suppose there is such a disease, barely affects children. In fact, according to CDC numbers, the IFR in children is 20 per 1,000,000, or 0.002%, which is likely lower than the risk of permanent injury or death from the MMR vaccine. It’s also lower than the covid-19 vaccine death rate as calculated using VAERS data at the time of writing (5,612 deaths over 165,000,000 fully vaccinated in the US = 0.003%). Furthermore, research has linked Pfizer’s vaccine to symptomatic myocarditis, with an estimated incidence rate of 1 in 3000 or 1 in 6000 in young men.

    The rush to bring mRNA vaccines into the mainstream as part of the regular childhood vaccination schedule is not about health or protection, but rather a step towards a much more sinister goal, which is to attain control over the human body itself.

    As mentioned previously in this article, DARPA, the research arm of the US Department of Defense, has been working to create nanotechnology that can interface with biological cells. In 2014, DARPA launched its “In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN)” program, with the aim of developing implantable nanoplatforms to collect biological data and provide “continuous physiologic monitoring”. The program has since helped to create injectable hydrogels that monitor physiologic responses and can sync to a smartphone.

    Furthermore, DARPA, together with the NIH, heavily funds Profusa, a Google-backed biotech company developing and marketing this very same injectable hydrogel technology, only now it is being punted as a way to detect future “pandemics”. Allegedly, Profusa’s sensors can “detect flu-like infections even before their symptoms begin to show”. While incredibly disturbing, this is only a step towards DARPA’s ultimate goal, which is to establish dominion over the mind. This goal is reflected in DARPA’s research to create “mutant-powered soldiers” using “genetic weaponry” that can “undermine people’s minds and bodies using a range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques”.

    DARPA is also looking at ways to genetically engineer the brain in order to read peoples thoughts and induce images and sounds in people’s minds. The research involves the use of “magnetic nanoparticles”, the same technology that some have speculated may be included in current or future covid-19 vaccines.

    Equally distressing is the “Wellcome Leap”, a new initiative created by the eugenics-linked Wellcome Trust, the world’s richest medical research Foundation, in partnership with two former DARPA frontmen. The program’s official aim is to “Deliver breakthroughs in human health over 5 – 10 years and demonstrate seemingly impossible results on seemingly impossible timelines.” Currently, the initiative has 5 main projects, the first of which is “RNA Readiness + Response”, which seeks to (emphasis added) “create a self-sustaining network of manufacturing facilities providing globally distributed, state-of-the-art surge capacity to meet future pandemic needs”, referring to the manufacturing of RNA-based products (mRNA gene therapies). Note the seeming surety of a future pandemic.

    However, the top contender for most disturbing Wellcome Leap project is, without a doubt, “The First 1000 days” (1kD), a program which seeks to use infants as test subjects in order to monitor their brain development and create AI models that can be used to “accurately predict and improve EF [executive function] outcomes.” The project also notes the use of “mobile-sensors, wearables and home-based systems.” In a detailed article on the matter, researcher Whitney Webb writes that:

    True to the eugenicist ties of the Wellcome Trust (to be explored more in-depth in Part 2), Wellcome Leap’s 1DK notes that “of interest are improvements from underdeveloped EF to normative or from normative to well-developed EF across the population to deliver the broadest impact.” One of the goals of 1DK is thus not treating disease or addressing a “global health public challenge” but instead experimenting on the cognitive augmentation of children using means developed by AI algorithms and invasive surveillance-based technology.

    The Wellcome Leap’s timeline of 5-10 years happens to line up with elite frontman, Elon Musk’s Neuralink project, which seeks to establish “the future of brain interfaces” in order to “expand our abilities”. In an interview Musk said, “I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability”. Musk, whose wealth increased by more than 500% during the covid-19 “pandemic”, founded Neuralink in 2016. The company recently raised $205m in funding from 7 venture capital firms (including Google’s GV) and 5 Silicon Valley executives. However, Neuralink isn’t the only biotech company pursuing this technology. Recently, Synchron, a small biotech firm and Neuralink competitor, received the go-ahead from the FDA to begin testing its brain chip implants in humans.

    10 years from now would take us to 2030, a year that comes up again and again as a year in which transhumanist technologies will be commonplace in mainstream society. According to predictions made by the US National Intelligence Council, “human augmentation” (the merging of man and machine) will be a major theme in 2030. Their Global Trends 2030 report, published in 2012, states that:

    Successful prosthetics probably will be directly integrated with the user’s body. Brain-machine interfaces could provide “superhuman” abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.

    Interestingly, the report also predicts “an easily transmissible novel respiratory pathogen” that could cause a great disruptive impact. The report goes on to state that “Unlike other disruptive global events, such an outbreak would result in a global pandemic that directly causes suffering and death in every corner of the world, probably in less than six months.”

    Enslavement: A Free Will Choice

    The rollout of mRNA gene therapies and the push towards a transhumanist society represents the continuation of the eugenics movement, which was based on the pseudoscientific concept that some humans, by virtue of their genetic composition, were more “fit” to lead society than others.

    The “hero” of the Polio epidemic, Jonas Salk, had his own ties to eugenics and so does the institute named in his favour, the Salk Institute. Their mRNA research, funded by the NIH, set the foundation for the development and mass rollout of gene therapies, controversially being called “vaccines”. The danger of this experimental technology is evident, having already caused thousands of injuries and deaths worldwide.

    The role of intelligence organizations, billionaire technocrats and pharmaceutical initiatives in funding, researching and promoting mRNA vaccines, “bio-brain” interfaces, gene editing and other technologies steeped in eugenicist ideals paints the picture of a global agenda set to hit its stride fully by 2030. The current covid-19 “pandemic” has served as a means to accelerate this agenda by centralizing wealth and power, bringing transhumanist technology into the mainstream and normalizing authoritarian rule. Pfizer’s infant trials and the Wellcome Leap’s alarming “1kD” project indicate that key to this agenda is the conditioning and control of children from a young age, something that Aldous Huxley detailed extensively in his disturbingly prophetic, eugenicist novel, Brave New World.

    This agenda, though backed by some of the world’s most powerful individuals and institutions, has an obvious weakness — its success is reliant on our compliance. It will only advance if we allow it to advance. Therefore, it is up to each one of us, through compassionate, non-violent resistance, to sow the seeds of awakening in the collective consciousness of mankind.

    The post mRNA “Vaccines,” Eugenics, and the Push for Transhumanism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Some examples of this are the removal of Kindergarten history standard K.H.6.1: ‘Read or listen to Oceti Sakowin Oyate stories, such as Iktomi stories and historical lore stories,’ and of Grade 4 history standard 4.H.6.1: ‘Explain how the Oceti Sakowin and Oyate culture and other groups were affected by westward expansion, the creation of the reservation system, and the US assimilation policies and programs.’

    The post Tribal Leaders React To Removal Of Native Americans in Curriculum appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Alexander Lukashenko leading ‘vicious operation to eviscerate critical voices’ and civil society, rights groups warn

    Aleysa Ivanova wakes up each morning wondering when the knock on her door will come.

    “You understand you can be next. Every day I wake up, I think ‘maybe it’ll be tomorrow, maybe today. Maybe they’ll come for me this evening’,” said Ivanova (not her real name).

    Related: Danger escalates for Belarusian dissidents in shadow of regime

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

    ― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(

    It is time to recalibrate the government.

    For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

    This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

    These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

    That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

    “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

    Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

    There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

    The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

    So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

    It won’t be easy.

    We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

    This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

    We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

    We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

    We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

    In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

    That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

    In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

    The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

    Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

    We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

    Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

    Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

    Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

    As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

    Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.

    We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.

    What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

    In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

    These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

    This way lies madness.

    Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

    How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

    There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

    Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

    That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

    The post Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has condemned legislation proposed by home secretary Priti Patel. Her plan could see journalists, whistleblowers, and political activists jailed for several years. Should Patel have her way, it would affect every media outlet in the UK, seriously curbing press freedom.

    However, her proposal may prove technically unworkable.

    The proposal

    Patel’s proposal, Legislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity), is partly in response to the Law Commission document Protection of Official Data.

    BBC journalist John Simpson tweeted that the proposed legislation would basically criminalise journalists:

    An NUJ statement on Patel’s plan agrees:

    Existing legislation distinguishes provisions and penalties between those who leak or whistleblow, those who receive leaked information, and foreign spies. The government proposes to eliminate or blur these distinctions.

    WikiLeaks factor

    In 2017, the Open Rights Group (ORG) argued that the catalyst behind this proposed legislation was WikiLeaks‘ publication of leaked documents, as well the uploading of NSA leaked documents by Edward Snowden.

    More broadly, in an article in the Guardian it’s claimed the proposed legislation would:

    have the effect of deterring sources, editors and reporters, making them potentially subject to uncontrolled official bans not approved by a court, and punished much more severely if they do not comply. …

    the new laws would, if passed, ensnare journalists and sources whose job is reporting “unauthorised disclosures” that are in the public interest.

    Early warnings

    In a 2017 article in the Register, Duncan Campbell pointed out that if the proposal becomes law:

    Sentences would apply even if – like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning – the leaker was not British, or in Britain, or was intent on acting in the public interest.

    In July 2020, The Canary also warned of the proposal, quoting a News Media Association comment on how the proposed legislation would:

    extend and then entrench official secrecy. It would be conducive to official cover up. It would deter, prevent and punish investigation and disclosure of wrongdoing and matters of legitimate public interest… [and have a] chilling effect on investigative journalism… [It would also] make it easier for the Government to prosecute anyone involved in obtaining, gathering and disclosing information, even if no damage were caused, and irrespective of the public interest… The regime could lead to increased use of state surveillance powers against the media under the guise of suspected media involvement in offences, posing a threat to confidential sources and whistle-blowers.

    Campbell poignantly adds that:

    If the proposed law had been in force in 2013, the Cabinet Office could have thrown [Guardian editor Alan] Rusbridger in prison simply for handling copies of documents Edward Snowden passed to his reporters.

    “Onward disclosure”

    Writing for Declassified UK, investigative journalist Richard Norton-Taylor states how Patel’s proposals make it clear that:

    the government wants to claim a journalist responsible for an “onward disclosure” — a publication in a newspaper or website, for example — would be as liable and on a par in criminal law with a primary source, such as a whistleblower in a government agency.

    By “onward disclosure” Patel simply means publishing.

    Worryingly, Norton-Taylor adds:

    Leakers and journalists could be charged with disclosing information that was merely “capable” of being damaging. They could be sent to jail on a hypothesis.

    The Home Office makes clear it wants to prevent sensitive information from being disclosed in court. One way of doing this would be to lower the burden of proof prosecutors would need to secure a conviction. A jury would not need to know evidence of how damaging a disclosure of information was. Mere claims by government lawyers would be enough to convict.

    Implications

    Patel’s proposed legislation is the sort that’s more associated with authoritarian regimes. And it’s a sign of just how fearful the Tory government is of being exposed for wrongdoing. It would mean no more leaks published in UK media. And not just in the mainstream press, but also by independent media such as The Canary. UK secure drop facilities, which provide anonymity to whistleblowers, would become redundant.

    As previously commented by The Canary, the proposed legislation would basically see:

    the end of press freedom in the UK. The government can hide whatever it likes, transparency will be meaningless and whistleblowing likely to become a thing of the past.  And anyone who flouts the law and gets caught could face years in prison, just as the WikiLeaks founder is currently facing the prospect of decades‘ imprisonment in the US for publishing leaks, such as war crimes.

    Unworkable

    However, Patel’s proposal also reveals a degree of ignorance of how publishing works globally. For example, ORG commented how:

    The proposals to expand the offences to non British nationals acting outside the UK, as long as there is a “sufficient link” are difficult to establish and even harder to enforce.

    So let’s take a scenario.

    A UK citizen leaks documents that appear to prove the British government has committed wrongdoings. The whistleblower uploads the documents anonymously to a secure drop facility held by a media outlet in a country other than the UK. The documents are subsequently published by that outlet on its website. The outlet also shares links to the documents via its Twitter account and its followers retweet the tweet. Thus, the cat is well and truly out of the bag, and there’s nothing the UK government can do about it.

    Of course, this method is not perfect as not everyone is on social media and able to see the documents. But it would still make these documents far more accessible.

    Meanwhile, there are guides available on how journalists can protect themselves from such draconian legislation as that proposed by Patel. Here is one, commissioned by the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    Proving once again he doesn’t care who he has to step on to claw his way to rock bottom, fallen liberal media hero Keith Olbermann has called for the complete removal of left wing comedian and podcaster Jimmy Dore from all internet platforms.

    “Time to ban this feral succubus Jimmy Dore from Twitter and other platforms,” Olbermann told his one million Twitter followers on Friday.

    Olbermann’s wrath was incurred by a short video clip bizarrely described as “misogynistic” in which Dore portrayed out of touch liberal elitist Emma Vigeland as an out of touch liberal elitist, saying that if people like her ever tried to bring their esoteric university Marxist wankery around actual working class people they’d get punched in the face and told to go back to their cul-de-sac. It probably also didn’t help that Dore has done multiple segments on Olbermann’s slide into flag-draped gibbering lunacy following the election of Donald Trump, including his public apology to war criminals George W Bush and John McCain, his demented Russia hysteria, and his support for NSA surveillance of US media figures.

    “Someone got their feels feels hurt and now they wanna censor their critics like a regular authoritarian fascist,” Dore responded to Olbermann’s post.

    You can always count on the less reality-anchored pundits to say out loud what the rest are thinking in private. Support for internet censorship is now a mainstream position among the so-called “moderates” of the warmongering corporatist Democratic Party, not just for people to their right but for people to their left as well. If it were up to these freaks the entire internet would just be a bunch of Wall Street liberals agreeing with each other that Trump is bad and Jen Psaki is a strong yet sensual warrior princess.

    The Emma Vigeland tweet that Dore was riffing on in the clip was more hand-wringing about a “red-brown alliance” that all grown adults should realize by now was never anything other than a narrative management campaign to keep leftists from moving too far from the establishment-authorized Overton window of acceptable opinion. For years a strain of western leftist thought has been shrieking hysterically about an impending alliance between socialists and fascists, and yet the only evidence they’ve been able to produce in all that time that this is happening are things like Glenn Greenwald going on Tucker Carlson, Dore interviewing an antiwar Boogaloo Boy one time, and me making some mistakes early on in my writing career. Only by the most determined mental gymnastics is this anywhere remotely close to the same universe as the Night of the Long Knives Strasserism fantasy that “red-brown alliance” fearmongers have been masturbating to, and it’s time for everyone to admit that they were wrong about this imaginary threat.

    And while everyone was freaking out about the idea of imaginary fascism sneaking in through the back window, actual fascism strolled through the front door. More and more excuses are being invented to censor, deplatform and marginalize everyone outside the Overton window of war, oligarchy, ecocide and oppression, and more and more people within that window are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea. Internet censorship, jailing journalists for telling the truth about the powerful, mind-warping mass propaganda campaigns and rapidly escalating authoritarianism are all becoming normalized throughout our society, and it can’t lead anywhere good.

    ___________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Once upon a time a new class of people emerged. They were scholars and elitists, ‘special people,’ well ensconced in academia, politics, economics and military intelligence. They righteously demanded eradication of current norms and established ways of being. They insisted that prevailing antiquated inferior practices be replaced with new better ways of living. This required a purging of the old system by any means necessary. Accordingly, those who dissented were either re-indoctrinated, thrown in jail, exiled to other lands or done away with.

    These notable visionaries pontificated a whole new outlook on life. Society will prosper! The masses will flourish! There will be no class! We are one!

    Eventually, with reluctance or zeal everyone got on board with all the life affirming rhetoric. Well, except for those few unsavory stragglers who were always throwing in a wrench by daring to question the ruling thought system. To adequately manage these problematic skeptics a committee of the purest of the pure, the moral gatekeepers if you will, devised a game plan.

    Appealing to the collective quest for power and belonging, the committee ventured forth with teasing out who was aligned and who deviated from partisan loyalty. Some good old fashioned spying would do the trick! Most important, they had to concoct a strategy to nullify those pesky beliefs that sullied right thinking.

    To diminish ideological impurities the committee established an auxiliary sub-committee. In charge of assembling and broadcasting interesting and distracting stuff that would encourage agreement amongst the multitudes, the sub-committee culled and re-culled all sorts of stories! With unified intent they agreed that by playing to the collective instinctual need for tribal belonging and highlighting the ethos of upward mobility while simultaneously igniting fear, all-encompassing compliance would be ensured.

    Harking back to unconscious reminders of the ‘primal horde’ and raising hopes and fears, proved to be a revolutionary form of thought control. The committee and sub-committee were very pleased. The campaign was so persuasive that without a hitch, it incited the common folk to evince an onslaught of aggression towards those who persisted in thinking for themselves. In fact, it was recognized as their moral and civic duty!

    Indeed, this ‘us versus them’ strategy worked beautifully, but there was still more to be done to guarantee complacency. To offset the irritating concerns with the recent unavoidable interruption of economic activity, needs had to be gratified. Hence, with the sanction of Executive Order everyone in the land received monetary incentives. These social safety nets allowed folks to stay home, insulated from the dangers in the world while being entertained in the comfort of their living rooms!

    Naturally just in case, a contingency plan was devised.

    “Should all else fail,” the committee members concurred, “we will simply raise taxes or go to war to pillage the resources of some unsuspecting nation… for the purpose of humanitarian intervention of course!”

    Hence, with the populace sufficiently dutiful and distracted, the rulers in charge got to the important work of brainstorming and changing the world.

    Of course, this Kafkaesque allegory is a simplified account of historical trends. It is a repetitive reality that all forms of government irrespective of ideology, are ultimately reducible to the rule of a few global elitists. Likewise, the mass dissemination of a collectively revered ideology accompanied by the manipulation of information has always been standard procedure whenever power has been transferred from one elite class to another.

    For instance, when we examine the French revolution, and the Bolshevik’s Russian revolution it’s clear how goals of reform formulated by select elites, drove the movements. These elitist intellectuals introduced a new doctrine that appealed to the people and catalyzed rebellion against the monarchy and the aristocracy.

    Revisiting the onset of the French Revolution (1789), reveals the emergence of a new class which had great wealth but no political power. This new class wanted wealth and power, but the monarch class (royalty) refused to share power because of the historic notion that it was their inherent Divine right to rule. This dilemma ignited mutiny.

    The monarchy was brought down and a new ruling class known as the Bourgeoisie (middle class) was established. We see a similar trajectory (1917) during the first World War when the Russian Monarch was also brought down by the elite class known as the Bolsheviks.

    In both revolutions the violent seizure of power required the support, or at the very least the compliance of the citizenry. Naturally this meant that the throngs were seduced with proclamations of unbridled freedoms. Eventually however, public opinion was policed and injurious speech became a criminal offense subject to execution. Traitors were to be exposed and annihilated.

    Accordingly, the Reign of Terror, under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, achieved their political goals through executing enemies of the revolution. Euphemistically referred to as the Committee of Public Safety, this powerful war council leveled extreme measures to protect the security of the new regime.

    Similarly, the Bolshevik’s Red Terror emulated the Reign of Terror. The removal of state enemies entailed the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of suspected subversives, many who were tortured and executed. Any hint of opposition signified guilt.

    Like their predecessors, contemporary elites who possess comparatively greater power and influence within institutions, organizations, and movements engineer decisive political outcomes. In this age of advanced technology, these architects of group indoctrination are members of a powerful superclass. They determine foreign policy, run the government, industry, and the worlds of finance and media. How they mobilize their influence has tremendous bearing not just on the collective mindset, but also on morality.

    Charismatic leaders and celebrities are enlisted by these global elitists to promote prescriptive beliefs and agendas. Our susceptibility to aggrandizing and mythologizing of high-ranking people and eminent personalities, who by the way are no more capable than the average person of assuming a political role or declaring scientific expertise, sways us to adapt and conform.

    Social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1895 / The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) explained how the collective group mind yields to instincts, resulting in a singular mindset. This phenomenon eradicates individual critical thought and makes ‘subordinate’ members of the group malleable to indoctrination and suggestion by powerful leaders.

    Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, who achieved acclaim as the “father of public relations” due to his masterful understanding of the psychological workings of propaganda, expanded on Le Bon’s ideas. His writings about how collective collusion with a dominant ideology encapsulated the principle, “if you are not for us, then you must be against us.”

    Le Bon and Bernays analysis of the mob mentality is evidenced in the aggressive posturing of political correctness and cancel culture. Through the daily utilization of identification with race, class, gender, religion, nationality and political ideology, special interest groups and the elite corporate media shape the group mind. Carefully crafted campaigns uphold imperialist values, state sponsored violence and incontestable lockdowns.

    By championing shaming and cruelty, under the guise of moral superiority, folks submit to the will of the group. This incites boycotts, marred reputations, social ostracism and destroyed livelihoods. In the spirit of moral relativism, it’s all chalked up to ‘the greater good’.

    Consequently, we are distracted by what we are instructed to align with, oblivious to the machinations of corporate interests and motives disguised as humanitarian intervention.

    Attempts to think for oneself in accordance with a personal moral code, or even factual information is met with an onslaught of aggression.

    Still, there will always be those few non-conformists who oppose the ruling thought system. They are the subversives, the whistle-blowers, the conspiracy theorists. (Julian Assange, Martin Luther King, Karen Silkwood, Frank Serpico, Kathryn Bolkovac, Edward Snowden, Gary Webb, Berta Cáceres. The list goes on.) As freedom of expression is restricted to the overriding popular opinion, their controversial views are squelched and the Orwellian corruption of language and thought ensues.

    As Edward Snowden endeavored to reveal, the National Security Agency (NSA) in direct violation of the 4th amendment, engages in warrantless surveillance of large volumes of Americans’ phone content and e-mail messages. Agents within the National Security Agency (NSA), have anonymously told the New York Times that the spy agency monitors millions of e-mail communications and telephone calls made by Americans.

    This infringement on private communication continues to take on new meaning as government officials are working directly with Facebook to limit the spread of “misinformation.” The escalation of censorship under another name (i.e., managing domestic terrorism and disinformation) appears virtuous. Even while the Biden administration recently moved to shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, it was spun as security protection, not an obvious attack on the 1st amendment.

    Nevertheless, being spoon fed questionable narratives through mass deception campaigns dubbed as journalism is nothing new. Instituted in the early 1950s, the Mockingbird Project revealed the CIA’s involvement with major US news media. Through bribing journalists and publishers, propaganda was peddled to the masses. Acclaimed Watergate Reporter Carl Bernstein wrote a piece in 1977 for Rolling Stone magazine, “The CIA and the Media” in which he imparted, that since the early 1950’s the CIA “secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers, both English and foreign language which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.”

    Now with six corporations controlling 90 per cent of media outlets in the U.S. (AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, News Corp and Viacom) it’s not a huge surprise that the press has acclimated to the expectations of these corporatized media giants.

    In fact, a survey by the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review in 2000 found, “Self-censorship is commonplace in the news media today…. About one-quarter of the local and national journalists say they have purposely avoided newsworthy stories, while nearly as many acknowledge they have softened the tone of stories to benefit the interests of their news organizations. Fully four in ten (41%) admit they have engaged in either or both of these practices.”

    Capitalizing on survival fears the government sponsored corporatized media bans, persecutes and censors those who deviate from popular opinion. Oppositional views are vilified, in effect muzzling those who question popular narratives. Regrettably many take the bait and participate in random emotionally charged exchanges that culminate in a mob mentality and a snitch culture. Aggressive social norms quickly take hold as hateful communication infiltrates a throng of followers. Competitive rancor and righteous indignation usurps the possibility of rational discourse when group shaming is exalted as a noble feat.

    Ironically the proverbial silver lining is that eventually it all self destructs. Elitists and the masses end up fighting amongst themselves, maligning each other for not measuring up to fanatical purity tests.

    As Plato conveyed in The Republic, mediocrity is our hubris and our demise. It is what brings down all systems.

    Plato also imparted that those who know how to govern, ‘The Philosopher Kings’, are the wise, just elders who through debating and resolving with dialogue and intellect, contribute to mankind’s evolution. They are capable of upholding George Orwell’s interpretation of liberty as “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

    Indeed it is only when we have the freedom to choose and think for oneself that true morality can flourish. Until then forbidden perspectives will continue to go underground. Regrettably, that which could benefit from examination will not only remain hidden, it is destined to quietly foment into backlash and dissent waiting to erupt.

  • First published at Dialogue & Discourse.
  • The post When Questioning Popular Opinion is Prohibited first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • — Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary

    This is what real education looks like — Evo Organizes Anti-Imperialist Day School For Youth

    Iris Varela spoke about the history of the Bolivarian Revolution and explained in detail how the economic blockade in her country works. The PSUV lawmaker concluded with an invitation for participants to visit Venezuela for the inauguration of a similar project in Caracas; “we’re opening a university to teach people reporting and social media skills, we’re cordially inviting the youth of the union federations in Chapare to come and coordinate an exchange with the Juventud PSUV, maybe in August a group can come here, and a group from here can go there. Our Bolivian brothers will always be welcome to the country of father liberator, Simon Bolivar. We need to strengthen education and build cadres who can defend revolutionary processes.”

    Nieves Colque, one of the young members at the school today said of the classes, “This school of ideology and anti-imperialism helps us to grow, it’s nourishing. The economics session was especially important, learning and analyzing the principles of Bolivia’s social communitarian economic model so we can work in this new term to recover the country’s GDP”.

    Go to any of the corporate Un-News outlets, like Bing, and this is what fascism looks like —

    Chief of staff Helge Braun told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that he doesn’t expect another coronavirus-related lockdown in Germany. But Braun said that unvaccinated people may be barred from entering venues like restaurants, movie theaters or sports stadiums “because the residual risk is too high.”

    Braun said getting vaccinated is important to protect against severe disease and because “vaccinated people will definitely have more freedoms than unvaccinated people.” He said such policies would be legal because “the state has the responsibility to protect the health of its citizens.”

    More of the same dirty White Western Culture (sic), AKA, White Civilization (Sic) —Report: UK military failing to protect women from abuse

    British soldiers evaluate coordinates at the Tapa Training Grounds, Estonia.

    Around two-thirds of female veterans in the British armed forces have experienced bullying, harassment or discrimination in their careers, a parliamentary report said Sunday.

    The report also said that women who reported serious sexual offences are “denied justice” by an inadequate military court system and complaints process.

    And, the pigs trained and outfitted in “Israel,” for the most part, treating citizens like Palestinians — 9 arrested in violent clashes between Paris police, anti-vaccine protesters

    a group of people wearing military uniforms: 9 arrested in violent clashes between Paris police, anti-vaccine protesters

    Ah, the Aussies too, having their pig moments — Anti-lockdown protest: two men charged with allegedly striking police horse in Sydney

    A police strike force has been established after an anti-lockdown rally on Saturday.

    Ahh, islands on fire, Sardinia — Fires ravage Italian island of Sardinia, forcing evacuations

    Cars are parked by the road as fires have been raging through the countryside in Cuglieri, near Oristano, Sardinia, Italy, early Sunday, July 25, 2021. Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes in many small towns in the province of Oristano

    Then, of course, water, fire, flood, death by a million safety net cuts, and then the Olympians are the networks, getting — how many billions does NBCV get for these absurdities, the Olympics, by 2023? $7.7 BILLION!

    What we’re witnessing right now play out in Tokyo is unparalleled in the political history of the Olympics. And you’re pointing the finger in the right direction, when we think about the International Olympic Committee. The saga in Tokyo has exposed an International Olympic Committee that openly disrespects the will of locals, that brushes off inconvenient facts from experts, like medical experts, who have long been saying these games are a terrible idea. And the IOC tends to prioritize its profits over all else.

    Meanwhile, the Olympics tend to kneecap democracy, undercut democracy, in ways that you describe, with the very prime minister essentially reduced to a contractual supplicant to the International Olympic Committee, with no power to decide whether to cancel or not. And you’re seeing also that everything is very vulnerable to things like COVID-19 and also, I think, climate change. So, when the International Olympic Committee arrives in the host city, it’s this parastate-type organization. But what we’ve seen time and time again, and now in Technicolor in Tokyo, is that it’s also a parasite on the host city.

    There is a lot of money sloshing through the Olympic system. It just tends to slosh upwards into pockets that are already filled. NBC gives about 40% of the International Olympic Committee’s revenues. And overall, in terms of the Olympics, 73% of the revenues for the International Olympic Committee come from broadcaster fees. And I think that helps explain why they’re perfectly content to have a made-for-TV event without all those people in the stands. Of course, they’d prefer to have them in the stands, but even if they don’t, the money continues to flow into their coffers. NBC has announced that even though these games are hit with the pandemic and people won’t be in the seats, this could well be the most profitable Olympics ever for NBC because of ad sales and other measures.

    The corporate sponsors provide another 18% of the revenues for the International Olympic Committee. And I think we’re seeing a really interesting divide between the corporate sponsors right now. On one hand, the sort of long-term, worldwide partners that fork over these nine-figure fees to be associated with the five rings, they’re basically playing the long game, with the exception of Toyota, which of course has strong base in Japan. The local sponsors, domestic sponsors — by which, by the way, they raised more than $3 billion from local corporate sponsors in Japan, more than ever before — they’re in a much trickier position. And I think that’s why you’re seeing Toyota basically say out loud that the Olympics have become a toxic property inside of Japan.

    So, there’s plenty of money to be had. It just tends to shuffle to the International Olympic Committee, to broadcasters, to the corporate partners, as well as to real estate interests in the Olympic city. — Jules Boykoff

     

    PHOTO: Water levels at Great Salt Lake are shown at its record in 1986, average in 2000 and new record low this weekend. (Utah Department of Natural Resources)

    Oh, the great dysfunctional USA, Capitalism, etc. Think: Nazi Merkel and others in her cabinet blame the deaths of hundreds in Germany as a result of recent flooding on, oh well, “climate change and climate unpredictability . . . .”

    Imagine that, the mayor of the town said:

    We have had floods in this area for centuries. We have asked for help to mitigate the floods. We have had governments not responsive to the needs of people. Blaming climate change on incompetent and heartless neoliberal governments, on the excessive hording of money, the waste and corruption of trillions, stolen, given to billionaires, to the military complex, and other Corporate and Financial Complexes, then stating these German lives could not be saved because ‘climate change is so unpredictable, and just get used to it” serves the people the words from which to raise pitchforks, juice up the Molotov cocktails, grease the shotguns, tie the ropes and sharpen the guillotines for hanging and beheading deservedly so against the elite and their bed-fellows, the Eichmann Mentality, and the fascist leanings of Capitalism. This is the response of these people who go to climate change talks, who shuttling around the world in jets for Davos and World Economic Forums, for the bootlicking foisted upon us all to the murderers, the BlackRocks’s and Blackstone’s and World Bank and Goldman Sachs. You dictate those who did not get the chemical jab of Corona Capitalism will have lesser value in society, and then those smug ones who have succumbed to the pressure for yearly or twice-yearly boosters, they too will allow the rich and fascistic governments to make excuse after excuse as governments and towns go bankrupt, and all life saving services and community rights, vanish.

    Well, he didn’t say that, of course, because I made it up and politicians do not speak about capitalism as the ultimate evil. However, one German mayor was in tears about the loss of life, and said it could have been prevented with a government and localities working together to mitigate floods. Whether once in a hundred years, or otherwise.

    a person that is on fire

    Dixie Fire rips through Sierra communities, with ‘extreme’ conditions likely to worsen

    Hochwasser Dresden

    Then, more of the 80-year-olds drilling down on destroying the young, the unborn, the middle aged — Some Americans could need COVID-19 vaccine booster – Fauci

    a group of people walking down the street: People wear masks around Times Square, as cases of the infectious coronavirus Delta variant continue to rise in New York City, New York

    So, we follow the way of “Israel” — We have given up as people, this unending multi-billions in profits, mercenary, war profiteering profits these companies are stealing from the taxpayers. Like the Military industrial complex, the Big Pharma and Private Medicine industrial complexes are eating our souls. And the rot-gut corporate media and those that echo the prevailing narratives, well, they too eat our souls.

    “It’s a dynamic situation. It’s a work in progress, it evolves like in so many other areas of the pandemic,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You’ve got to look at the data.”

    Last week, Israel’s health ministry reported a decrease in the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine in preventing infections and symptomatic illness. But it added that the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer with partner BioNTech still remained highly effective in preventing severe illness.

    The decline in efficacy coincided with the spread of the Delta variant, now the dominant strain in Israel.

    Israel is administering third doses of the vaccine to immunocompromised people, including those who have had heart, lung, kidney or liver transplants and cancer patients receiving chemotherapy.

    Pfizer and BioNTech said on Friday that the United States had purchased 200 million more doses of their vaccine to help with pediatric vaccination as well as possible booster shots.

    No deep stories on that, uh? How and why so much money is being thrown at companies with histories of felonies? Here, this headline, censored everywhere — CDC “Panel Signals Support for Booster Shots, as Reports of Injuries, Deaths After COVID Vaccines Near 500,000

    Oh, they salute the money makers, and we are a society going down down down because of the rich, the millionaires, the billionaires, and these fascists, saluting what?

    FILE PHOTO: Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on federal government coronavirus disease (COVID-19) response in Washington

    Here a local older woman, trying to make sense of the lock-step pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-anticivil liberties mentality of Oregonians, and their editorial boards:

    Copy of my Letter to the Editor of the Eugene Register-Guard; it has been received but not published — I usually get pleasure from wordsmith Don Kahle’s clever articles. However, in his July 16 column he encouraged incentives to get more citizens injected with an unlicensed, unapproved experimental gene procedure to lessen symptoms from a viral disease with a better than 99% recovery rate for most age groups.

    A review of history is needed. In 1986, Congress passed a law that allowed pharmaceutical companies ZERO liability from damages from their vaccine products. The PREP act is the latest iteration which gives drug companies immunity from damages caused by their vaccines.

    The Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System was established in 1990 by the CDC and FDA to monitor damages and deaths caused by vaccines. Although the system is voluntary and underreported, as of this writing, VAERS data showed a total of 463,457 adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 10,991 deaths and 48,385 serious injuries since Dec. 14, 2020. Serious injuries include myocarditis, pericarditis, paralysis, neurological disorders, blood clots, irregular menstrual bleeding, and more.

    Drug companies are poised to earn billions of dollars from vaccine sales, mostly paid for by our taxes. “Safe and effective” is a marketing slogan and is inaccurate. Mr. Kahle, I urge you to do investigative journalism regarding germ theory vs. terrain theory. Rather than promoting pills and injections, it makes sense that public health funds should be spent on improved sanitation, hygiene, nutrition and exercise guidance for individuals and communities and to promote decentralized, regenerative, organic agriculture on a global scale.

    It’s easy to say to this person that this opinion letter to the editor will not be published since the newspaper (sic) will deem the information as faux, false, and dangerous. This is the way of the present, and no matter how “alternative” or “left” the rag, those old hippies are indeed fascists, one and all, in many cases, in this case, with the Corona Capitalism. Sick stuff, capitalism crunched all up in Big Media, Big Lies, Big Propaganda:

    Fireworks explode during the opening ceremony in the Olympic Stadium at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Friday, July 23, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
    [The opening ceremony is being held in Tokyo’s National Stadium, but the 80,000-seat arena, built for this purpose, is largely empty. Fewer than 1,000 VIP guests have been invited to attend. Spectators have also been barred from sporting events throughout the games. The 2020 Olympic Games were originally scheduled to take place a year ago but were postponed due to the pandemic.]

    Ahh, we can go on and on about how we got here, 2021, but a great thing is we saw it in the history books.

    [The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life.]

    Chandler Davis — 1995 talk!

    “Shooting Rats in a Barrel”: Did the Red-hunt Win?

    These years, 1947-1950, established the ground rules that remained in force for the decade that followed. Most institutions, from the government through the unions and universities to the American Civil Liberties Union (yes, I said the American Civil Liberties Union), declared Communists unwelcome. Among the means used to exclude them were loyalty oaths, often including the phrase “I am not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which…” It became glaringly obvious, that employers, in particular universities, would shy away from hiring anyone who might be attacked as a Communist; a reputation as a student radical was thus enough to make one a bad bet for an academic job; so student radicals became (in a few short years) very scarce. University administrators would occasionally say, if asked, that there were no Communists on the staff; but they hoped they wouldn’t be asked. The FBI and the Red Squads of state and some local police forces kept files on thousands. They had a reputation for exceeding legal restraints in interrogation and for keeping very dubious material in their files; later research bears this out. They cooperated (when it suited their own agenda) with employers who were cleansing their staffs. This put them in an ambivalent relation to the federal government in particular. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, while nominally responsible to the Attorney General, sometimes cooperated covertly with Congressional exposés of government agencies.

    Most universities wouldn’t even let left-wingers speak on campus under auspices of a student group! Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, and Dirk J. Struik are among those banned by administrations in the early 50s. By the late 50s, the invitations had dried up.

    It was further established that one could be imprisoned for Communist Party activity itself, at least if one were a leader: the Supreme Court upheld in 1951 the conspiracy convictions against the CP officers under the Smith Act. The government maintained concentration camps in which it could incarcerate thousands of dangerous people if it declared a national emergency to exist, and everyone knew whom they considered dangerous. (These camps were invented by the “liberal” senators in 1952 in an attempt to show voters that they were just as security-conscious as the Right. But though they originated as a mere tactic, they were not merely on paper, they existed physically. I was told this in casual conversation in 1955 by an acquaintance who was employed at a federal prison — a prison, it happens, where I became an inmate five years later. The story would be better if the guard had looked me up and said hello to me then, but — sorry — we were no longer in touch.)

    These words from Davis to Chris Hedges are just the same today, for MANY of us, who have been marginalized, Google Searched into the Poor House:

    Though you see the remnants of the former academic left still, though some of us were never fired, though I return to the United States from my exile frequently, we are gone,” he said. “We did not survive as we were. Some of us saved our skins without betraying others or ourselves. But almost all of the targets either did crumble or were fired and blacklisted. David Bohm and Moses Finley and Jules Dassin and many less celebrated people were forced into exile. Most of the rest had to leave the academic world. A few suffered suicide or other premature death. There weren’t the sort of wholesale casualties you saw in Argentina or El Salvador, but the Red-hunt did succeed in axing a lot of those it went after, and cowing most of the rest. We were out, and we were kept out. — “The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum”

    See the source image
    See the source image

    Finally, read David Rovics’ blog, and he is now in Denmark playing live crowds. I feel badly for him, he being accused of antisemitism, and he is being doxxed, and his Wikipedia has been changed but “crowd-souring” folk.

    Blog —

    Confessions of an Ecumenical Leftist

    It seems a ridiculous thing to have to say, but I think intellectual discourse is generally a very good thing, rather than something to be stopped at all costs.

    I’m realizing that most people who come across something I wrote don’t seem to have read anything else I’ve ever written, and haven’t listened to my music.  This post is going to be especially personal, so it’s important that you have some idea who I am first.

    I’m 54 years old, and I’ve been some kind of an activist since I was 12.  I learn a little more with each passing year on Earth, but lately the pace has accelerated, along with everything else.  I was raised by musicians, and I became one myself early on.  When I started writing songs about different social movement activities and notable moments in history from around the US and the world, I started meeting more and more people from everywhere, and touring everywhere, too.  As a songwriter and performer I’ve been able to participate in social movements on an ongoing basis in a dozen or so countries, spending most of my adult life on the road, doing that.

    Although the campaigners may be few, I have seen these campaigns work again and again.  You spread enough rumors, they dominate the narrative.  There are already people updating my Wikipedia entry to inform people that accusations of my alleged antisemitism are “in the news.”  Of course, they’re “in the news” because there have been news stories written about the campaign against me — not because any serious person has ever accused me of antisemitism, with any basis for their claim, aside from failing to find the anti-Semitic bits in a book, and wanting to talk to people with disparate viewpoints who may have deep insight into how we might prevent a fascist future in America, regardless of anything else.

    Of course, Wikipedia and Google and the rest are propaganda and government run and ZIonist outfits, for sure:

    Indeed, already in 2007, researchers found that CIA and FBI employees were editing Wikipedia articles on controversial topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo military prison.

    Also in 2007, researchers found that one of the most active and influential English Wikipedia administrators, called “Slim Virgin”, was in fact a former British intelligence informer.

    More recently, another highly prolific Wikipedia editor going by the false name of “Philip Cross” turned out to be linked to UK intelligence as well as several mainstream media journalists.

    In Germany, one of the most aggressive Wikipedia editors was exposed, after a two-year legal battle, as a political operative formerly serving in the Israeli army as a foreign volunteer.

    Even in Switzerland, unidentified government employees were caught whitewashing Wikipedia entries about the Swiss secret service just prior to a public referendum about the agency.

    Many of these Wikipedia personae are editing articles almost all day and every day, indicating that they are either highly dedicated individuals, or in fact, operated by a group of people.

    In addition, articles edited by these personae cannot easily be revised, since the above-mentioned administrators can always revert changes or simply block disagreeing users altogether. (Source)

    There you have it, on a Sunday, just cruising through the shit-storm news of the shit-hole Mass Murdering Media!

    See the source image
    The post Out to Lunch: The Atrophying of Western Minds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • RNZ Pacific

    Fiji’s opposition MPs who were arrested after their criticism of a government land bill say they will not be intimidated or silenced.

    Police have since released several leaders of the opposition who were arrested late Sunday.

    One of those arrested, the National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad, said he was wanted in relation to his party’s criticism of government moves to amend the iTaukei Land Trust Act in Parliament in recent days.

    After two hours of questioning, he was later released, telling RNZ Pacific that it felt like an attack on Fiji’s democracy.

    “We don’t blame the police. This is coming from the government. They are using police to oppress the opposition’s political leaders, and that’s not the way democracy works.”

    Prasad said the government failed to consult the public properly over the bill, and there are now calls to withdraw it because it is seen as abusing the rights of indigenous landowners.

    “We are elected members of Parliament. Our job is to continue to speak and we are not going to be intimidated by such tactics by the government to silence the opposition who have an important contribution to make in the process of any lawmaking in the country.”

    Accused of ‘malicious act’
    Another leading opposition MP, Lynda Tabuya, was also taken into custody and accused of a “malicious act” by police for her social media posts about the Land Bill.

    She said she was accused of a malicious act by police for criticising the government’s moves to push through an indigenous Land Bill.

    Critics claim that an amendment removes a protection provided via the iTaukei Land Trust Board which was set up to protect indigenous landowners’ rights.

    Tabuya had given a blunt message to Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama via social media:

    “We are sick and tired of all the bullying and fear mongering. We are sick and tired of all the death and destruction allowed on your watch because of your recklessness,” she said.

    “We are sick and tired because you don’t give a damn. You don’t give a damn about iTaukei, you don’t give a damn about human rights.”

    Fiji's Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.
    Fiji’s Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama … criticised on social media for “not giving a damn about iTaukei”. Image: RNZ/Facebook/Fiji govt

    The Fiji government and police have been approached for comment, but there has been no response for an interview.

    However, over the weekend – before the arrests were made – Bainimarama did speak out for the first time condemning his opposition leaders on Facebook.

    “These are a bunch of urban elite who are nothing but stirrers. Only a few control the show, and they become the gatekeepers of what is right and what is wrong.”

    Bainimarama defended the government’s planned amendment to land legislation.

    “Even this amendment makes ultimately iTaukei land a lot more attractive. It removes bureaucracy without undermining any of the protections. We should not be concerned about a piddly thing such as this when we should all be happy about it.”

    Meanwhile, Acting Police Commissioner, Rusiate Tudravu said his officers were not questioning the politicians for the purpose of intimidation, but as a pro-active means to find out the truth.

    He was reported in local media as saying not everyone who was brought in for questioning would be charged.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nearly 50 years ago one of us was arrested under the Official Secrets Act for working on a story for Time Out magazine, where the other one of us was the news editor. This led to the so-called ABC case, named after fellow reporter Crispin Aubrey, a brave ex-soldier whistleblower called John Berry, and the aforesaid Campbell. A lengthy Old Bailey trial followed in 1978 and, with it, a major discrediting of the use of the act against the press.

    The post How A Proposed Secrecy Law Would Recast Journalism As Spying appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • It’s not unusual for politically minded people on Facebook to claim that they’re being targeted and censored. They all think they’re “too radical” in one way or another and thus, must be silenced by the authorities. Hey, in my activist days, I’d even get insulted if I wasn’t pulled off the line to board a plane. Don’t they know who I am? These delusions of grandeur, however, are based on real, longstanding policies. The Land of the Free™ has always spied on, manipulated, and controlled its population. They usually don’t talk openly about it but, last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki let loose with this truth bomb:

    We are in regular touch with the social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 Team. Given as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation specifically on the pandemic. In terms of actions that we have taken or we’re working to take, I should say, from the Federal Government, we’ve increased disinformation research and tracking. Within the Surgeon General’s Office, we are flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.

    Here’s about 45 seconds of her public admission:

    The “Dr. Murthy” she mentions is US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy — and here’s a recent tweet of his:

    When faced with criticism for this unconstitutional stance, Psaki doubled down the next day with a call for bannings to cross all platforms. She mocked comparisons to “Big Brother” and again called for Facebook to step up its efforts. Interesting timing as the government is also threatening Facebook over possibly illegal monopolization. Could it be that the puppet masters behind Biden are offering Zuckerberg a deal in advance? Consider this, also from Psaki’s press conference:

    It’s important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms. Sometimes it’s not accurate, and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts. Posts that would be within their policies for removal often remain up for days. That’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.

    What would The Home of the Brave™ prefer Facebook do? Psaki said The White House is already pressuring the company to use the government’s preferred sources of “quality information” via the newsfeed and its algorithms. Let that one sink in for a while, comrades. 

    Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park (Photo Credit: Mickey Z., September 30, 2011)

    Will this totalitarian salvo stand? I don’t know but I feel certain that it’ll have plenty of help. The majority of Facebook users will be more than happy to “turn in” anyone who dares to challenges their beloved brand of groupthink. With these unpaid spies doing their work for them, the government (and the corporations that own it) can just sit back and watch all the democracy (sic) in action. Question: What role will YOU play in this scenario?

    The post The White House and Facebook vs. Freedom of Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.

    If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.

    The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.

    Getting people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which function independently from one another, instead of member states within a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international stage.

    Getting people believing they control the fate of their nation via the democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.

    Getting people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates.

    And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.

    It’s not the big, famous lies like those which preceded the invasion of Iraq that make up the bulk of the adhesive holding the empire together, it’s the small, mundane lies we’re fed every single day by the plutocratic media. The ones which distort our worldview by half-truths, spins and omissions designed to normalize a status quo of murder, theft and ecocide.

    This normalization happens in the way pundits and politicians treat any attempt to end wars or redress income inequality as freakish extremism and unrealistic fantasy, when in reality it’s the most sane and normal thing in the world and the only thing unrealistic about it is the fact that attempts to advance those agendas are always sabotaged by those same pundits and politicians.

    The normalization also happens in the way endless wars, starvation deaths by US sanctions, the looming threat of total extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war, rapidly exacerbating income inequality and increasing tyranny at home and abroad are not treated as newsworthy stories, while celebrity gossip and partisan bickering between AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene makes headline news. Every day the news media fail to report on the greatest horrors that the empire has unleashed on our world while focusing on vapid trivialities, they help normalize the horrors.

    If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the US-backed genocide in Yemen would be front-page news every day instead of something which gets a marginal mention once every few weeks. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

    If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that Americans are getting poorer and poorer while billionaires multiply their wealth during the pandemic would be brought front and center to everyone’s attention. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

    If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that the US military just spent trillions of dollars on a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing besides making horrible people rich would have been a national scandal. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

    But the mass media do not exist to share important information about the world. They exist to share important disinformation about the world. If they did not do this, the same US empire which is decrying the spread of disinformation today would collapse into its own footprint.

    The US empire is without exception the single most corrupt and destructive force on this planet, and it’s not even close. It is the very last institution on earth that should be in charge of deciding what online content is true and what is “disinformation”. Absolute dead last, without exaggeration.

    Depraved institutions which lie constantly and have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century should not be the Ministry of Truth for the world’s online communication systems. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.

    _______________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    The elephant in the room with the ongoing controversy about the Biden administration’s push for more internet censorship is the fact that both the US government and the Silicon Valley tech companies who are being pushed to censor are acutely aware that those companies can be brought to their knees by antitrust cases and other regulation if they don’t censor people’s voices in accordance with the government’s wishes.

    After Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted on Thursday that the administration has given Facebook a list of accounts to ban for spreading “misinformation” about the Covid vaccine, she has now doubled down saying that people who circulate such materials online should be banned from not just one but all social media platforms.

    “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” Psaki told the press on Friday.

    When asked by the press for his thoughts on companies like Facebook, President Biden said the failure of those platforms to adequately censor posts about the vaccine makes them guilty of “killing people”.

    When confronted about the extremely serious implications of a US presidential administration telling social media platforms who to censor, Psaki said the administration wasn’t censoring people but merely raising the issue with the tech companies.

    “We don’t take anything down,” said Psaki. “We don’t block anything. Facebook and any private-sector company makes decisions about what information should be on their platform. Our point is that there is information that is leading to people not taking the vaccine, and people are dying as a result. And we have a responsibility, as a public health matter, to raise that issue.”

    Psaki is not technically lying, but she isn’t telling the truth either. While it’s true that the Biden administration is not directly blocking or taking down social media posts, it is also making social media companies a Godfather-style offer they can’t refuse.

    For years the US government has been making it abundantly clear to the giants of Silicon Valley that if they do not greatly escalate censorship of undesirable content per Washington’s instructions, there will be consequences.

    In 2017 Senator Dianne Feinstein threatened social media platforms that, because of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, they need to start utilizing more censorship or else face consequences, saying, “You created these platforms, and they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it—or we will.”

    In 2019 Louisiana Representative Cedric Richmond issued a similar threat, saying social media platforms had “better” start regulating what he considers harmful content on their own, or the government will take matters into its own hands.

    “They better go do it because what they don’t want is for us to do it, because we’re not going to get it right,” Richmond said. “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong and we’re going to hold them very accountable.”

    “We have the First Amendment, and we’re very reluctant to pass speech laws,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler told The Washington Post in 2019. “But there’s a problem, and we have to deal with it.”

    “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them first,” Nadler added. “I’m reluctant to have regulation of speech. It usually goes too far. I don’t know we have to get there yet.”

    As Glenn Greenwald noted on Twitter following the latest admissions from the Biden administration, executives from these tech companies are being regularly hauled before congress and “threatened with legislative and regulatory retaliation” if they don’t conduct censorship in alignment with the will of the US government. We saw this in 2017 when representatives from top internet platforms were brought before congress and told they needed to adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord,” and we continue to see it through 2021.

    The reasons change, but the agenda remains the same. Sometimes it’s foreign election meddling, sometimes it’s the Capitol riot, sometimes it’s domestic extremism and white supremacy, sometimes it’s misinformation about a virus and vaccines, but for every reason given the instruction is the same: censor online communications in accordance with the wishes of the US government. Or else.

    These threats have been explicitly made, but really they did not need to be. Everyone involved in this dance is acutely aware that the US government has the ability to make things much harder and far less lucrative for these Silicon Valley tech companies. This could mean actions ranging from fines and minor regulations all the way up to the revocation of Section 230 protections or full-scale antitrust cases which can go as far as breaking up online platforms in the same way the government broke up AT&T and Standard Oil.

    The stage is already set for massive antitrust measures to be implemented, with the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust finding last year that corporations like Facebook and Google are guilty of monopolistic practices, and some less severe antitrust cases are already underway.

    So now we’ve got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms, and the government forcing those platforms with increasing brazenness to censor that speech in alignment with its dictates under threat of total destruction. The effect being, of course, US government control of a vast swathe of public speech, not just within the US but around the world. Which means an ungodly amount of narrative control, the ultimate prize for anyone who understands real power.

    The primary factor in determining what will happen in our world is not control of capital, nor control of government, nor control of resources, nor control of weapons, but control of narrative. All the others follow from narrative control. Control the narrative and you control where the weapons will go, where the capital will go, where the resources will go, what the government will do. Real power begins with narrative control. Understand this and you’ll understand why governments, plutocrats and media behave the way they do.

    So while antitrust laws ostensibly exist to protect the citizenry from corporate power, here they are being leveraged to ensure the union of corporate power and state power. The carrot is billions of dollars, and the stick is the threat of painful government intervention.

    Obviously the US government would prefer to simply have monopolistic corporations voluntarily censoring content in accordance with government interests, but for them the only thing worse than having no monopolistic companies serving the empire would be having monopolistic companies which refuse to serve the empire. So the threat being issued here is, “Censor the way we tell you to censor, or your company will be broken down and replaced with one that will.”

    And that’s exactly what could easily happen. Facebook, Google/Youtube or Twitter could easily be regulated into dysfunction or broken up into smaller companies, and then some other more government-aligned corporation could be allowed to take their place. Silicon Valley billionaires are hardly known for being the most principled people in existence to begin with, so that threat is all it would take to ensure they conduct themselves in alignment with the will of the empire.

    This is just one of the many, many types of glue that keeps power structures aligned with one another’s interests within the US-centralized empire. If you want to be a billionaire and control massive amounts of wealth, you have to collaborate with existing power structures. Otherwise you won’t be allowed in, and if you are in you’ll be kicked right out.

    It’s always easier to move with power than against it. That’s why ambitious journalists promote the imperial narrative, it’s why new money plutocrats always wind up aligning with establishment interests, and it’s why so many other nations align with the US.

    In theory, markets and government checks and balances are supposed to keep the big players competing against each other to our benefit. In practice, the big players always wind up collaborating against us for their own benefit.

    __________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    In what’s surely the biggest “Imagine the outrage if Trump had done that” moment to date, the Biden administration has admitted that it is giving Facebook a list of accounts to censor for spreading “disinformation” about Covid-19.

    “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told the press on Thursday. “Within the Surgeon General’s Office, we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts with people, who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content. So, we’re helping get trusted content out there.”

    Psaki told the White House press corps that the administration has a list of accounts who produce most of the anti-vaccine information on Facebook, which civil libertarians are decrying as an obviously authoritarian government overreach.

    “The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as ‘problematic’ so that Facebook can remove them,” Glenn Greenwald said on Twitter in response to the news. “This is the union of corporate and state power — one of the classic hallmarks of fascism — that the people who spent five years babbling about fascism support.”

    “If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian,” Greenwald said. “No other information is needed about you to know that. There is no circumstance — none — in which it’s acceptable for the White House or any other agency of the government to be providing lists to Facebook of ‘problematic’ content it wants removed, yet that’s exactly what Psaki says they’re doing. The White House is admitting that they’re compiling lists of people who they claim are posting content they regard as ‘problematic’ and that constitute ‘misinformation’ and are demanding Facebook remove them. This is authoritarianism.”

    The most common argument you’ll hear from those who support monopolistic social media giants controlling speech on their platforms is that these are private corporations, not the government, so it doesn’t count as censorship. Whenever you object to Silicon Valley oligarchs exerting total control over the political speech of billions of people, mainstream liberals instantly transform into an army of Ayn Rands defending the private property rights of those companies. The fact that these platforms are inseparably interwoven with the highest branches of the US federal government kills such arguments stone dead.

    And if you were paying attention, that argument was already dead. All of these online platforms use censorship and algorithm manipulation to hide undesirable political speech from the mainstream public in direct collaboration with government and government-tied institutions.

    In 2017 Senator Dianne Feinstein threatened social media platforms that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election means they need to start utilizing more censorship or else face consequences, saying, “You created these platforms, and they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it—or we will.”

    That same year representatives from top internet platforms were brought before congress and told they needed to adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord,” because “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words.”

    In the lead-up to the 2020 election online platforms were openly coordinating with US government agencies to censor speech believed to compromise election integrity.

    Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world where a third of Americans regularly get their news, openly enlists the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

    Google, for its part, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.

    “Americans deserve to know to what extent the federal government works with social media companies,” former congressman Justin Amash said on Twitter in response to Psaki’s incendiary admission. “Is there any quid pro quo? The First Amendment exists to keep the government from controlling what Americans hear. Free societies counter misinformation with information, not bans.”

    “Democrats have summoned tech executives to the Congress at least four times in the last year,” Greenwald replied to Amash. “The last time, they repeatedly and explicitly threatened regulatory and other legal punishment if they don’t start censoring more: the content Dems regard as disinformation or ‘hate speech.’”

    In a corporatist system of government, where there is no separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. The actual government as it actually exists is censoring the speech not just of its own people, but people around the world. If US law had placed as much emphasis on the separation of corporation and state as it had on the separation of church and state, the country would be unrecognizably different from what we see today.

    Only infantile narcissists and power-worshipping bootlickers want the most powerful government on earth controlling what people are allowed to say to each other about a virus response which affects everybody, and only those with no sense of self-preservation entrust worldwide human speech to an alliance of government agencies and powerful tech plutocrats.

    We cannot keep heading in this direction.

    _______________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has published a gallery of grim portraits — those of 37 heads of state or government who crack down massively on press freedom, reports RSF.

    Some of these “predators of press freedom” have been operating for more than two decades while others have just joined the blacklist, which for the first time includes two women and a European predator.

    Nearly half (17) of the predators are making their first appearance on the 2021 list, which RSF is publishing five years after the last one, from 2016.

    All are heads of state or government who trample on press freedom by creating a censorship apparatus, jailing journalists arbitrarily or inciting violence against them, when they do not have blood on their hands because they have directly or indirectly pushed for journalists to be murdered.

    Nineteen of these predators rule countries that are coloured red on the RSF’s press freedom map, meaning their situation is classified as “bad” for journalism, and 16 rule countries coloured black, meaning the situation is “very bad.”

    The average age of the predators is 66. More than a third (13) of these tyrants come from the Asia-Pacific region.

    “There are now 37 leaders from around the world in RSF’s predators of press freedom gallery and no one could say this list is exhaustive,” said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

    “Each of these predators has their own style. Some impose a reign of terror by issuing irrational and paranoid orders.

    Others adopt a carefully constructed strategy based on draconian laws.

    A major challenge now is for these predators to pay the highest possible price for their oppressive behaviour. We must not let their methods become the new normal.”

    The full RSF media predators gallery 2021.
    The full RSF 2021 media predators gallery. Image: RSF

    New entrants
    The most notable of the list’s new entrants is undoubtedly Saudi Arabia’s 35-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is the centre of all power in his hands and heads a monarchy that tolerates no press freedom.

    His repressive methods include spying and threats that have  sometimes led to abduction, torture and other unthinkable acts. Jamal Khashoggi’s horrific murder exposed a predatory method that is simply barbaric.

    The new entrants also include predators of a very different nature such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose aggressive and crude rhetoric about the media has reached new heights since the start of the pandemic, and a European prime minister, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the self-proclaimed champion of “illiberal democracy” who has steadily and effectively undermined media pluralism and independence since being returned to power in 2010.

    Women predators
    The first two women predators are both from Asia. One is Carrie Lam, who heads a government that was still democratic when she took over.

    The chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region since 2017, Lam has proved to be the puppet of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and now openly supports his predatory policies towards the media.

    They led to the closure of Hong Kong’s leading independent newspaper, Apple Daily, on June 24 and the jailing of its founder, Jimmy Lai, a 2020 RSF Press Freedom laureate.

    The other woman predator is Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister since 2009 and the daughter of the country’s independence hero. Her predatory exploits include the adoption of a digital security law in 2018 that has led to more than 70 journalists and bloggers being prosecuted.

    Historic predators
    Some of the predators have been on this list since RSF began compiling it 20 years ago. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, were on the very first list, as were two leaders from the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, whose recent predatory inventiveness has won him even more notoriety.

    In all, seven of the 37 leaders on the latest list have retained their places since the first list  RSF published in 2001.

    Three of the historic predators are from Africa, the region where they reign longest. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, 79, has been Equatorial Guinea’s president since 1979, while Isaias Afwerki, whose country is ranked last in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index, has been Eritrea’s president since 1993.

    Paul Kagame, who was appointed Rwanda’s vice-president in 1994 before taking over as president in 2000, will be able to continue ruling until 2034.

    For each of the predators, RSF has compiled a file identifying their “predatory method,” how they censor and persecute journalists, and their “favourite targets” –- the kinds of journalists and media outlets they go after.

    The file also includes quotations from speeches or interviews in which they “justify” their predatory behaviour, and their country’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index.

    RSF published a list of Digital Press Freedom Predators in 2020 and plans to publish a list of non-state predators before the end of 2021.

    Asia Pacific Report and Pacific Media Watch collaborate with the Paris-based RSF.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The attempts to muzzle the press did not start with Trump, however. President Obama oversaw a war on whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, and ensured that Julian Assange has spent the best part of a decade in hiding or in prison. Assange’s most notable journalistic action was to release the Iraq War Logs and the Collateral Murder video, which showed US pilots massacring civilians—including two Reuters journalists—in cold blood.

    The post US Censorship Is Increasingly Official appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  •  

    Press TV: This Website Has Been Seized

    The US government boasting of its censorship of Press TV.

    The Biden administration made headlines last week as it moved to shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine. Officials justified the decision by claiming the organizations were agents of “disinformation.”

    The most notable of these is probably English-language Iranian state broadcaster Press TV. Visitors to PressTV.com are now met with the seal of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and a message notifying them that the domain “has been seized by the United States government.” (The site has since migrated to an Iranian-based domain, PressTV.ir.)

    This is far from the first time Press TV has been targeted. Eighteen months ago, Google deleted the Iranian channel’s YouTube account; earlier this year, Facebook did the same, banning its page, which had over 4 million followers. In 2019, the US also arrested American Press TV presenter Marzieh Hashemi, holding her without charge for over a week. Hashemi, a Muslim, said her headscarf was forcibly removed, and she was offered only pork to eat.

    Western outlets covering the new seizures did not frame them as an attack on the First Amendment (Washington Post, 6/23/21; CNN, 6/23/21; Fox News, 6/23/21), many preferring instead to discuss the shortcomings of the Iranian media landscape. Slate (6/24/21), for example, reminded readers that Iran “blocks foreign social media sites, censors critical foreign outlets and jails reporters.” While this may be perfectly true, Slate suggested it was possible for the Biden administration to make a “clear distinction” between when Iran does it and when the US carries out similar actions; “disinformation and election interference are serious problems,” it helpfully noted.

    Nosediving press freedom

    Decrying the state of press freedoms in official enemy states is a favorite pastime of corporate media (FAIR.org, 11/1/06, 5/20/19, 10/20/19). It is a point of pride in the US that freedom of speech is written into the Constitution. Increasingly, however, if we want to find direct government censorship of speech, we don’t have to travel far.

    NYT: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses

    Donald Trump’s claim that his anti-BDS order “targets antisemitism” was presented as fact in the New York Times headline (12/10/19); the perspective of “critics” that it was “an attack on free speech” was treated as an allegation in the subhead.

    Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, freedom of the press nosedived. Reporters working for foreign outlets like RT America were forced to register as “foreign agents,” under a 1938 law passed to counter Nazi propaganda. The channel was subsequently taken off the air in Washington, DC.

    Meanwhile, critics or opponents of US foreign policy have been constantly penalized and often pulled off major social media platforms (FAIR.org, 4/16/19). The Trump administration also attempted to force the sale of Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to an American company, and to halt Huawei’s spread as 5G network provider of choice to the globe.

    Internally, Trump demanded the NFL fire star quarterback Colin Kaepernick for peacefully protesting during the national anthem. He also directly interfered in the university curriculum; his Department of Education ordered the universities of Duke and North Carolina at Chapel Hill to rewrite their Middle Eastern Studies programs, as they were overly “positive” towards Islam and did not promote US national security goals.

    Trump also issued an order all but outlawing the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Since the Civil Rights era, boycotts have been understood to be protected speech under the First Amendment. Nevertheless, since 2015, 35 US states have approved laws penalizing BDS. Effectively, anyone wanting to take public money in any form must sign a pledge to never boycott the state of Israel.

    Last year, journalist Abby Martin (herself a target of social media censorship) was blocked from giving a lecture at Georgia Southern University because she refused to sign those First Amendment rights away. Public school staff have been fired for the same thing.

    Perhaps most worryingly, Trump’s base is on board with tearing up the First Amendment. A 2018 poll found that 43% of Republicans agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.”

    State censorship by states

    News 5 Cleveland: Proposed law making cell phone video of cops a crime moves forward by Ohio legislators

    A proposed Ohio law could outlaw videos like the one that led to Derek Chauvin’s conviction for murdering George Floyd (News 5 Cleveland, 6/24/21).

    Even after Trump’s defeat, the GOP is still pushing through regulations limiting speech across America. A new Ohio law making filming police illegal is currently rapidly advancing (News 5 Cleveland, 6/24/21). Critics note that the bill would outlaw recording crimes like the murder of George Floyd.

    Meanwhile, laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory—a paradigm that examines structural racism in US institutions—have been passed or are being considered in at least 21 states (US News, 6/23/21). This has been egged on by the conservative press, who have turned the school of thought into an ideological fixation, mentioning it nearly 1,300 times in the past three and a half months (Media Matters, 6/15/21).

    These bans on Critical Race Theory are mirrored by new “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which forbid the teaching of LGBT history in K-12 schools, or give parents the opportunity to pull children from classes mentioning key historical events like the Stonewall Riots. A swath of red states have either passed or are currently considering such legislation (New Republic, 6/28/21).

    In another worrying move for free speech advocates, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has just signed a bill requiring both university students and their professors to register their ideological views with the state (Salon, 6/23/21), supposedly in a bid to promote “intellectual diversity” on campus. Staff fear the results will be used to purge or deny employment to those deemed insufficiently conservative.

    DeSantis is also currently overseeing a huge rewrite of the state’s school curriculum, in an effort to ensure that children are definitively instructed that “communism is evil,” in his own words (WBNS, 6/22/21). Children will be provided with “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.” DeSantis presents the move as providing children with facts rather than “trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.”

    Long before Trump

    NATO's bombing of RTS

    The offices of Radio TV Serbia after being deliberately targeted by US bombers.

    The attempts to muzzle the press did not start with Trump, however. President Obama oversaw a war on whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, and ensured that Julian Assange has spent the best part of a decade in hiding or in prison. Assange’s most notable journalistic action was to release the Iraq War Logs and the Collateral Murder video, which showed US pilots massacring civilians—including two Reuters journalists—in cold blood.

    Outright attacking media outlets is a common tactic for the US military. During the Kosovo War, the US deliberately targeted the buildings of Serbian state broadcaster RTS, killing 16 people (FAIR.org, 8/2/00). Four years later, it conducted airstrikes on the offices of Abu Dhabi TV and Al Jazeera in Baghdad at the same time as American tanks shelled the Hotel Palestine. On the incident, Reporters Without Borders, stated: “We can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists” (FAIR.org, 4/10/03). This was far from the only military attack on Al Jazeera during the invasion. The Bush administration even had the network’s journalist Sami al-Hajj kidnapped, holding him inside the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison camp for six years without charge.

    Although many still like to hold up the United States as a bastion of free speech uninhibited by government censorship, in this new era, the idea is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. While corporate media like to highlight the many press freedom shortcomings of hostile foreign nations, the censorship worries start much closer to home.


     

    The post US Censorship Is Increasingly Official appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Ron DeSantis speaks at a podium that reads "STOP"

    Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the rising star of all conservative rising stars, signed a Republican-backed bill that will require public colleges and universities in Florida to survey the ideological leanings of their students and faculty. The bill, HB 233, which purportedly aims to assess each state school’s level of “intellectual freedom,” comes largely in response to the current right-wing hysteria over “critical race theory,” and also to the broader perception that American academia has become a breeding ground for “leftist indoctrination.”

    “It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said in a press conference last week. “Unfortunately now, the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida.”

    Though the motivations behind the measure seem clear enough, the bill’s language evades any explanation of what the survey’s findings might be used for. Florida Republicans have largely stayed mum on this point — except for DeSantis himself, that is, who last week suggested the data might be used to dictate state funding.

    “We do not want [universities] as basically hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said. “That’s not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”

    Given the Republican obsession with “cancel culture,” DeSantis’ threat to go after “thoughtcrime” (in George Orwell’s phrase) could have a chilling effect on the Sunshine State’s educational landscape.

    State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat who opposed the bill in Education Committee meetings, told Salon that she thinks DeSantis made “a serious threat” that could dampen the free speech rights of professors and students.

    “It’s quite possible this could result in certain professors being dismissed on the university level,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past our governor to pull funding from universities if they don’t dismiss these professors or change some things they’re not happy with.”

    Though the bill has already been enacted, it remains unclear precisely how the surveys will be conducted or what questions will be asked.

    Berman noted that the bill does not require participation from students; it merely mandates that the surveys be distributed to students. This could lead to significant participation bias, where students who feel ideologically at odds with their surroundings are overrepresented among respondents.

    Democratic state Sen. Tina Polsky, who also serves on the Committee on Education, echoed Berman’s concerns, telling Salon that HB 233 has “so many problems.”

    “We have no idea what the implications are, whether it’s getting professors fired, or having to hire professors of different ilks to fill some kind of ‘thought diversity’ quota,” she said. “And of course, funding is a concern.”

    “No one really knows what the point of the surveys is,” Polsky added. “Nobody knows who’s going to fill it out, how many students, or whether it’s going to be accurate.”

    Salon reached out to more than two dozen professors and school administrations throughout Florida’s public educational institutions to gauge their feelings toward HB 233.

    The University of Florida, the state’s flagship research university, responded with a statement: “In keeping with the best traditions of higher education, the University of Florida is a marketplace of ideas where a wide variety of opinions are expressed and independent inquiry and vigorous academic deliberation are valued. We believe the survey will reflect that, and we look forward to widespread participation across campus.”

    No administrators at other colleges or universities responded to Salon’s inquiries.

    Berman said that Florida’s state schools are “in a position where they’re not going to want to speak out against anything the governor and Republican leadership is supporting,” adding, “If it comes to it, I hope they support their faculty.”

    Dr. David Canton, director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Florida, told Salon in an interview that the bill is “a political stunt – a diversion or way to carry over to November 2022 [i.e., DeSantis’ re-election campaign] due to a lack of any policies.”

    “If you look at the data and numbers,” he added, “the reality is that it’s hard to get a diversity course as a requirement; you get so much resistance from some students.” Florida colleges and universities, he said, are “not liberal bastions of indoctrination.”

    Canton also noted that the bill does not serve the state’s long-term economic interests because it could drive top-tier scholars away from graduate programs or faculty positions in Florida schools.

    Other provisions in HB 233, beyond the mandatory surveys, have also become controversial. One such provision allows students to “record video or audio of class lectures for their own personal educational use.”

    While the state of Florida has a two-party consent law — meaning that all individuals in any form of communication must consent to being recorded — the bill appears to carve out a specific exemption for college and university classrooms, which have previously been understood as private spaces.

    Karen Morian, the president of United Faculty of Florida, one of the state’s leading faculty unions, told Salon in an interview that the provision “was created to allow the creation of ‘gotcha’ videos or reputation-destroying videos,” in which conservative students record and leak evidence of their professors promoting “radical leftist” views.

    During the bill’s consideration, Morian said a host of concerns arose around illegal sharing of such videos, the potential for deceptive editing, and the non-consensual recording of minors. “All these questions were raised in committee and debate, but none of them were clarified nor was the language revised,” she said.

    In recent years, professors at many academic institutions across the country have been the subjects of whistleblowing” by conservative students who feel their voices have been stifled. In April, the Intercept reported on an organized “whistleblowing” effort by Campus Reform — a billionaire-backed conservative nonprofit that trains student activists to expose “liberal bias” in higher education. It found that the conservative group targeted hundreds of professors with “online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire [them].” According to a survey this year by the American Association of University Professors, 40% of professors targeted by Campus Reform reported receiving threat by email, phone, or social media.

    In 2016, Turning Point USA, another conservative youth advocacy group funded by right-wing billionaires, similarly launched the Professor Watchlist, an online registry of academics who it suggested “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site also led to a number of threats made against professors, including threats of rape and lethal violence.

    Apart from video and audio recordings, HB 233 also addresses attempts by school administrations to “shield” their students from discomfort. The measure defines “shielding” as “limit[ing] students’, faculty members’, or staff members’ access to … ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive” and prohibits the practice altogether, which conceivably restricts or removes administrators’ ability to decide who should be given a platform on campus.

    Morian told Salon that administrators “have the safety of students to consider when making those decisions.”

    In 2017, the University of Florida allowed neo-Nazi Richard Spencer onto campus to give a speech, a move that was angrily rejected by much of the student body. After the event, police arrested three of Spencer’s supporters who made “Nazi salutes, repeated Hitler chants and then shot at a group of protesters.”

    Administrators should have the flexibility to deny such speakers access to university platforms, either for educational or campus safety reasons, Morian said. “The legislature has seemingly taken those decisions away from our institutions. So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

    Though HB 233 has received considerable media attention recently, it is best understood as part of Florida’s broader effort to crack down on the perceived or apparent influence of the left in both K-12 and higher education.

    During this year’s legislative session, the state Senate attempted to pass a bill to reduce the amount of scholarship money given to students who major in lower-paying fields in the humanities. That bill failed to reach the governor’s desk.

    More recently, DeSantis signed a bill last week that will require Florida K-12 schools to teach their students that communist governments are undesirable. The governor said Florida’s public school curriculum will now paint “portraits in patriotism,” and provide “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.”

    Polsky, the Democratic state senator, called the latest attempt by conservatives to wrest control over Florida’s educational system especially ironic. “It’s a big government situation,” he said. That’s what “they say they’re against.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The DOJ statement claims – absurdly and without proof – that these outlets are “disguised as news” and run by Iran’s Quds Force, an elite military unit under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It was formerly headed by General Qassem Soleimani, assassinated on Trump’s order in January 2020.

    The post US Shuts Down Iranian Websites For Confronting Imperialism & Colonialism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The ultimate goal of every totalitarian system is to establish complete control over society and every individual within it in order to achieve ideological uniformity and eliminate any and all deviation from it. This goal can never be achieved, of course, but it is the raison d’être of all totalitarian systems, regardless of what forms they take and ideologies they espouse. You can dress totalitarianism up in Hugo Boss-designed Nazi uniforms, Mao suits, or medical-looking face masks, its core desire remains the same: to remake the world in its paranoid image … to replace reality with its own “reality.”

    We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.

    There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.

    During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.

    This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new “reality.” It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new “reality.” It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go. The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.

    And this is what has been so incredibly frustrating for those of us opposing the roll-out of the “New Normal,” whether debunking the official Covid-19 narrative, or “Russiagate,” or the “Storming of the US Capitol,” or any other element of the new official ideology. (And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivaled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.)

    Anyway, what has been so incredibly frustrating is that many of us have been operating under the illusion that we are engaged in a rational argument over facts (e.g., the facts of Russiagate, Literal-Hitlergate, 9/11, Saddam’s WMDs, Douma, the January 6 “insurrection,” the official Covid narrative, etc.) This is not at all what is happening. Facts mean absolutely nothing to the adherents of totalitarian systems.

    You can show the New Normals the facts all you like. You can show them the fake photos of people dead in the streets in China in March of 2020. You can show them the fake projected death rates. You can explain how the fake PCR tests work, how healthy people were deemed medical “cases.” You can show them all the studies on the ineffectiveness of masks. You can explain the fake “hospitalization” and “death” figures, send them articles about the unused “emergency hospitals,” the unremarkable age-and-population-adjusted death rates, cite the survival rates for people under 70, the dangers and pointlessness of “vaccinating” children. None of this will make the slightest difference.

    Or, if you’ve bought the Covid-19 narrative, but haven’t completely abandoned your critical faculties, you can do what Glenn Greenwald has been doing recently. You can demonstrate how the corporate media have intentionally lied, again and again, to whip up mass hysteria over “domestic terrorism.” You can show people videos of the “violent domestic terrorists” calmly walking into the Capitol Building in single file, like a high-school tour group, having been let in by members of Capitol Security. You can debunk the infamous “fire-extinguisher murder” of Brian Sicknik that never really happened. You can point out that the belief that a few hundred unarmed people running around in the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” or an “attempted coup,” or “domestic terrorism,” is delusional to the point of being literally insane. This will also not make the slightest difference.

    I could go on, and I’m sure I will as the “New Normal” ideology becomes our new “reality” over the course of the next several years. My point, at the moment, is … this isn’t an argument. The global-capitalist ruling classes, government leaders, the corporate media, and the New Normal masses they have instrumentalized are not debating with us. They know the facts. They know the facts contradict their narratives. They do not care. They do not have to. Because this isn’t about facts. It’s about power.

    I’m not saying that facts don’t matter. Of course, they matter. They matter to us. I’m saying, let’s recognize what this is. It isn’t a debate or a search for the truth. The New Normals are disassembling one “reality” and replacing it with a new “reality.” (Yes, I know that reality exists in some fundamental ontological sense, but that isn’t the “reality” I’m talking about here, so please do not send me angry emails railing against Foucault and postmodernism.)

    The pressure to conform to the new “reality” is already intense and it’s going to get worse as vaccination passes, public mask-wearing, periodic lockdowns, etc., become normalized. Those who don’t conform will be systematically demonized, socially and/or professionally ostracized, segregated, and otherwise punished. Our opinions will be censored. We will be “canceled,” deplatformed, demonitized, and otherwise silenced. Our views will be labeled “potentially harmful.” We will be accused of spreading “misinformation,” of being “far-right extremists,” “racists,” “anti-Semites,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-global-capitalist violent domestic terrorists,” or just garden variety “sexual harassers,” or whatever they believe will damage us the most.

    This will happen in both the public and personal spheres. Not just governments, the media, and corporations, but your colleagues, friends, and family will do this. Strangers in shops and restaurants will do this. Most of them will not do it consciously. They will do it because your non-conformity represents an existential threat to them … a negation of their new “reality” and a reminder of the reality they surrendered in order to remain a “normal” person and avoid the punishments described above.

    This is nothing new, of course. It is how “reality” is manufactured, not only in totalitarian systems, but in every organized social system. Those in power instrumentalize the masses to enforce conformity with their official ideology. Totalitarianism is just its most extreme and most dangerously paranoid and fanatical form.

    So, sure, keep posting and sharing the facts, assuming you can get them past the censors, but let’s not kid ourselves about what we’re up against. We’re not going to wake the New Normals up with facts. If we could, we would have done so already. This is not a civilized debate about facts. This is a fight. Act accordingly.

    The post Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Image from Imgur @i.imgur.com

    Orientation

    As I was looking at images to place at the beginning of this article, I was struck by how many images and quotes there were of Le Bon. It is pretty amazing for someone whose first work was published in 1895 and whose last works are still around 100 years old. It is especially strange given how unscientific his methods were and how recent empirical studies of crowds like David Miller’s Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action contradicts virtually everything Le Bon claimed. Why is Le Bon’s work still circulating despite lack of scientific rigor? Why have the last fifty years of research on crowds that have a solid scientific basis been ignored?

    Purpose of this article

    The purpose of this article is to:

    • Expose the propagandist roots and branches of our biases against crowds while showing some of the scientific evidence that supports the actual behavior of crowds.
    • To outline what historical events occurred that supported the prejudice against crowds.
    • Propose that it is ruling-class fears of crowds that fuels the perpetuation of unscientific theories about crowds.
    • Propose that ruling class fears that working-class people mobilized into crowds will seize their resources, destroy their property and enslave them.

    Crowds vs Masses

    Crowds are large collections of people who meet at the same place at the same time and are large enough that it is difficult to have a central conversation. A loudspeaker, microphone or some external device is necessary to have a single central discussion.  There are different kinds of crowds. There are casual crowds like those that meet by chance at the scene of an accident or a fire. They may congregate to watch a building go up or be torn down. A second kind of crowd are long lines that form to buy tickets to ball games or musical concerts.

    An audience is a more formal crowd with a more deliberate focus. Examples are attending a musical concert or a sporting event. Lasty, there are unconventional crowds which can lead to riots, lynchings, protests and demonstrations. Mass behavior involves large numbers of people who are spatially dispersed but participate in common activities like fads or fashions.  Mass behavior involves the use of radio (Orson Wells, War of the Worlds) television, movies which often lead to rumors or urban legends.

    Questionnaire on Crowds

    In order to understand the purposes of this article, I ask that you spend about 25 to 30 minutes answering the following true-false questions. For the answer to be true, it simply means most of the time, not all the time.  For the answer to be false, it just means it rarely happens, not never happens. Follow your answer with a one sentence justification. Feel free to draw from your experience as well as what you’ve read. It is important to answer quickly and spontaneously and not dwell on the answers. One purpose of the questionnaire is to see if you think there are any significant differences between how people in crowds behave (collective behavior) as opposed to how small groups or individuals behave.

    Here are the True – False questions:

    • Most crowds consist of strangers, rather than family, friends or acquaintances.
    • The percentage of violent behavior is higher in crowds than in small groups such as a musical band or a baseball team.
    • The behavior of crowds is more likely to be unanimous than the behavior of small groups.
    • Crowds of people are more likely to engage in unusual or extraordinary behaviors than either groups or individuals.
    • The behavior of individuals and small groups is more likely to be rational than the behavior of a crowd, which is more likely to be irrational.
    • There are certain kinds of personalities that are drawn to crowds that you could predict would join a crowd if you knew enough about their personalities.
    • There is a disproportionately higher number of working-class people in crowds compared to other social classes.
    • Compared to people without legal convictions, there is a higher percentage of criminals in crowds.
    • Individuals and small groups that are more likely to deliberate and plan their actions are less likely to be spontaneous.
    • You could predict that most individuals are more likely to lose their personal identity in a crowd rather than alone or in small groups.
    • Emotions are more likely to spread by contagions in a crowd rather than in a small group.
    • Groups are easier to disperse than crowds because people in crowds want to linger longer.
    • There has been more research done on crowds than on groups because the behavior in crowds has greater social impact.
    • People conform less to norms in crowds than they do in groups or as individuals.
    • Most violence in crowds is caused by the participants in the crowd rather than the police.
    • There is a higher degree of unpredictability of behavior in crowds than there is in small groups or within an individual.
    • The goals of a crowd are more extreme and unconventional than the goals of groups or individuals.
    • Riots are equally likely to happen regardless of the season of the year.
    • The most typical reaction to a natural disaster or emotional shock is panic – that is, uncontrolled individualistic flight as opposed to a rational, deliberate response.
    • There is a correlation between which people will engage in a protest and their political beliefs before the protests.
    • The most likely group to join a movement is the group who has absolute deprivation of resources as opposed to relative deprivation or no deprivation.

     The last three questions are about mass behavior, not crowd behavior:

    • Fads are less predictable than fashions.
    • Rumors begin mostly because people lose their ability to investigate before coming to a conclusion.
    • Fashions exist in all societies, tribal as well as industrial.

    Myths vs Facts About Crowds

    In their book, Social Psychology, Delamater Myers and Collett, citing the research of Carl Couch, Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein argued that there are seven basic myths about crowds. They are:

    • Irrationality
    • Emotionality
    • Suggestibility – mindless behavior
    • Destructiveness
    • Spontaneity
    • Anonymity
    • Unanimity of purpose

    Through these seven myths we are likely to see why all the answers in relation to crowds to the True-False questions are false. The only true answers are the first two questions about masses. Rather than explaining why every single question on crowds is false, I will speak generally and then answer a few questions specifically.

    Are crowds wholes that are less than the sum of their parts?

    One of the great underlying beliefs about crowds is that terrible things happen in a crowd that somehow would not happen in a small group and especially at an individual level.  Individuals are seen as rational, non-violent and prudent, but once the individual is surrounded by enough other individuals, things turn sour. The belief is that while individuals and groups may have differences with each other, those differences melt away in a crowd as individual members turn into a group hive. In fact, differences between individuals and small groups are maintained in crowds. To cite one example, in riots, crowds rarely act in unison. Some throw rocks and break windows. Others climb telephone poles and smash statues. Others disapprove and try to talk the others out of armed conflict. Still others are altruistic and help protesters who have been injured by cops.

    Who is orderly and disorderly in crowds?

    Speaking of cops, research on mass psychology has shown that most of the time, contrary to Le Bon, riots are started by the police, not the crowd. Furthermore, crowds assemble and disassemble at ballgames and concerts without any police necessary. Once gathered crowds do not stick together like honey. They easily disperse and really do not need the police to do so. I have been to many a Yankee and Knicks game in which the crowd, anywhere from 15 thousand to 30 thousand people leave the game, peacefully get on the train and talk about the ballgame. There is no need for police because nothing controversial happens. For conservatives like Le Bon, they cannot imagine that crowds regulate themselves. For them crowds are filled with animalistic, hedonistic barbarians who need the police to whip them into order.

    Are working-class people more likely to be disorderly?

    There is some truth to the fact that a higher percentage of working-class people will be in crowds. This has more to do with the reality that middle-class or upper-middle class people can afford to take a taxi to a ball game or a concert instead of taking the train. But this has little to do with the behavior of working-class crowds. Furthermore, plenty of protests are filled with upper-middle class anarchists who torch police cars and topple monuments. There is no clear relationship between social class and crowd violence.

    How unpredictable are crowds?

    Another one of Le Bon’s mistaken generalizations about crowds is that people in crowds act without rhyme or reason. This demonstrates, as an upper middle-class doctor, Le Bon has no understanding of all the deliberation and planning that goes into protests on the part of the organizers. This planning goes on weeks before the event. It is true that unpredictable things happen in protects, but they are exceptions to the rule. Furthermore, individuals act in unpredictable ways, as in the case of mass shootings. Individuals get caught up in cults and act in unpredictable and astonishing ways. Cults are large groups, not crowds.

    Are emotions in crowds contagious?

    People are every bit as emotional in small groups as they are in crowds. There is nothing contagious about emotions in crowds. People maintain emotional judgement while in the crowd. In fact, the leaders of protests harangue people to sing and chant as a way to unify the group. Just being in a crowd does not automatically unify the individuals. It takes work to do so. When faced with members of a crowd who become hysterical, rather than mindlessly joining in, other members of the crowd will distance themselves and exercise the same prudence that individuals or people in small groups will.

    Is the crowd to social life what Freud’s id is to individual life?

    Le Bon, Freud, Bion and the rest of the crowd psychologists we will soon meet think that at the social level the crowd is like the id, lurking on the margins of society waiting for a chance to jump out and wreak havoc. This is exemplified in the movie Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. In natural disasters these crowd psychologists imagine that the socialized ego is swarmed by the individualistic dictum, “every person for himself”. They imagine the results are pillaging and raping. The trouble is that research on behavior in natural disasters shows that people are consistently heroic and cooperative.

    One hundred years of neglect of scientific research on crowds

    Lastly, unlike individual psychology and group psychology the scientific study of crowds and masses lags way behind. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the first research was done. Why is this? On the one hand, studying crowds is far more difficult because crowds are so large and their life-times short. But something else was going on. Why were Le Bon’s, Tarde’s and Sighele’s, speculations allowed to stand unchallenged and repeated mindlessly in social psychology textbooks for almost 100 years? In large part it was because their theories served the interests of the ruling class.

    Historical Reasons for the Biases Against Crowds

    Growth of cities

    One of major changes in European history and geography was the gradual reversal of numbers of people living in cities compared to those of people living on farms.  People move to cities in part because there is more work, but also, as the saying goes, “city air makes you free”.  Some people felt trapped by the nosiness and stifling customs of rural life. Non-conformists to religious traditions, artists and hustlers with big dreams were drawn to cities for a chance to start fresh. Living on a farm, the general expectations was that you would engage in the same occupation as your parents. Moving to the city broke that tradition and it raised expectations. Especially those living in coastal cities who were exposed not only to people coming from different cities within Yankeedom, but people from other countries were also looking for work. Different languages, different religions, and different political traditions converged.

    There are rarely, if ever, crowds in rural areas. While farmers may get together on holidays, everyone knows everyone else and rarely are strangers invited.  Even when farmers would go to town to get supplies, the overwhelming number of people knew each other and greeted each other. There were no stadiums or concert halls in which large numbers of people could congregate to watch professional sports or music. Long before the Industrial Revolution, crowds in cities would gather to hear political speeches. So, what we have in pre-industrial cities are relatively rootless people with raised expectations, surrounded by strangers from different cultures for whom being in a crowd is becoming normal.

    The Great French revolutions

    As most of you know, the French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the king and the aristocrats as the merchants rose to power on the backs of artisans and peasants. The revolution was also anti-clerical. Churches and chateaux were burned to the ground. The aristocrats never forgot this. As if your memory needed any jogging, there were more revolutions in Paris in 1830 and 1848. In all these revolutions, crowds are violent and know where the upper classes live. Doesn’t it start to make sense that the study of crowds would never be objective so long as the upper classes were threatened by them and therefore controlled the research on crowds? In this case they made sure no research was done.

    Industrialization

    At the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, cities became industrialized.  People were forced off the middle of streets to make way for wheeled vehicles accompanied by horses and later, trolley cars. Grid systems of streets were built which sped up transportation and the circulation of goods. Industrial capitalists built factories in cities as opposed to artisan shops in the countryside (the putting out system). The emergence of factories had enormous revolutionary potential because it brought large numbers of people working under horrible conditions together. For 12-15 hours a day, at least six days a week, people have a common experience while all in the same place and the same time.

    Formation of unions

    It is no accident that unions first formed in factories. When common experience is concentrated at the same place and same time, people are likely to compare experiences and accumulate grievances. Some workers begin to recognize that they have collective power if they can organize themselves. They can strike for better working conditions and better wages. Unions made crowds more dangerous because crowds can, in an extremely chilling way, stop and start the work process itself. This is like cutting off the blood supply for vampiric capitalists.

    Emergence of socialism

    The first socialists were theoretical. William Godwin was the first theoretical anarchist, writing Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. In the early 19th century, there were utopian communities set up by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and others but none of these communities were connected to unions or workers movements. It wasn’t until the writings of Marx and Engels that socialism was really connected to worker’s struggles. The socialism of Marx and Engels or the anarchism of Bakunin both said to workers, “it is not enough to have tiny little pieces of pie. You create all the wealth; you deserve the whole pie.”

    In order to gain the whole pie, workers in crowds had to move in a mass, take over factories and run them for themselves, while confiscating the private property of the upper classes. For the upper classes, socialism and the prospects of crowds burning down their houses, and peasants taking over their land was their worst nightmare. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first revolutionary situation that was inspired by socialism as a movement.

    Stock Market instabilities

    Crowd instabilities also came from the capitalist side, between 1873 to 1896 when the stock market was very unstable creating panics and depressions. This meant stock market traders were wheeling and dealing on the floor of the stock market at the same time that people who had money in banks were worried about their savings and, in some cases, making runs on the bank.

    Crowd Psychologists

    Origins of Crowd Theory

    Crowd theorists were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of only themselves. Beginning about 1870, crowd psychologists claimed that Darwinian evolution demonstrated that progress was a slow process, and any sudden changes based on violence were throwbacks to premodern times. Crowds were looked upon as akin to Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter.

    According to H. Stuart Hughes, (Consciousness and Society), beginning in the 1890s intellectuals became obsessed with the prospect that unconscious, primitive, and emotional forces were driving things. Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theorists such as Durkheim and Marx because they ignored emotions and unconscious motivation. What was really driving crowds, they thought, was below the level of consciousness. For crowd psychologists, individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. The four major crowd theorists were Hippolyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave Le Bon.

    Crowd Theorists

    Taine

    Taine’s Origins of Contemporary France (written between 1876 and 1894) was a conservative attack on the Enlightenment. Taine blamed the Enlightenment ideas, including Rousseau’s, for what he considered the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Taine believed that the line between normal cognition and hallucinations, dreams and delusions, was closer than we might suspect. He cited evidence from research on organic lesions of the brain, hypnotism, and split personalities. He determined that the dramatic transformation of humans into savages is caused by what he called “the laws of mental contagion.” With the exception of the hypnosis model, Taine’s book embodies all the rudiments of French crowd psychology. For Taine, all leaders were the crazed dregs of society.

    According to Taine, the Enlightenment failed to factor in the amount of time it took for humans to develop from barbarity to civility. Enlighteners weren’t interested in how people really were, but only as they could be measured by an abstract, ideal humanity. Taine thought the French Revolution was a relapse into primitive barbarism. Like Hume, Taine thought that reason was the passive servant of the passions. Bodily needs, animal instinct, prejudices which Taine thought were hereditary, were really driving people.

    Criminalization of crowds (Sighele) 

    Theories of hypnosis were split in two directions. Followers of Charcot claimed that being suggestible was a sign of psychopathology and only certain types of people could be hypnotized. The Nancy school of Bergheim argued that anyone could be hypnotized. The criminal school of Sighele sided with Charcot, arguing that crowds were composed of criminal individuals who were naturally suggestible. He followed the work of Lombroso who was a medical scholar of deviants in the military. Lombroso measured the skulls and anatomical characteristics of 3,000 soldiers.

    According to Serge Moscovici (The Age of the Crowd), mass psychology was treated simply as part of criminal anthropology. Crowds were seen as mobs, scum, and made up of men who were out of control and would destroy anything in their path. Sighele claimed that hypnotism can explain the process by which individual minds become susceptible to outside forces, leading to actions that are carried out automatically, unconsciously, and then spread to others by contagion. The conservative hand Sighele played was transparent in his labeling of social revolutionaries such as socialists, anarchists, or even striking workers as part of the criminal crowd. The hysteria of stock market traders was never seen as criminal.

    Tarde

    More than Taine or Sighele, Gabriel Tarde placed the crowd on a broader social spectrum. All social life, according to Tarde, is based on imitation, and the process of crowd formation and reproduction simply comes from the laws of imitation sped up. He described the crowd as the first stage of association—rudimentary, fleeting, and undifferentiated. From this foundation, more stable and ongoing groups form, including corporations, political parties, and religious bodies such as churches or monasteries. Unlike other crowd psychologists, Tarde thought that literacy, newspapers, and mass communication would replace the crowd with what he called “the public.”

    Tarde also thought that the extremes of behavior demonstrated in crowds are unique to cities. Unlike his right-wing crowd theorists, Tarde thought the madness of crowds is a product of civilization. He argued that crowd madness was uncommon in rural areas and among pre-state societies. Both Tarde and Le Bon supported the Nancy school, which suggested that there were social-psychological processes that any individual could fall prey to, if exposed to them. They believed that the solitary individual was superior to the group in all ways.

    Le Bon

    Le Bon concocted a mix of anthropological, social Darwinist, and psychological theories, which were in the same family as Taine and the racist Joseph Gobineau. He thought that cranial size could be used as an accurate measure of intelligence and he believed that people in primitive societies had small skulls. Le Bon thought the European race was superior, and only Caucasian males could transcend the constraints of biology.

    Like Sighele and Tarde, Le Bon thought that what happens to an individual when in a crowd was analogous to what happens in hypnosis. All crowd theorists up to Le Bon agreed that the crowd was no more than what was already inside the psychology of individuals. They also believed that whatever destructive behavior transpired in a crowd was due to the lower-class origins of its members. Le Bon was the first to say that all personalities, regardless of class and intelligence, are susceptible to the pull of the crowd.

    According to Serge Moscovici, Le Bon directly challenged Locke’s theory of the mind. As was par for the course in the Enlightenment, Locke believed that as the mind of humanity was gradually ridding itself of religious terrors, there would be fewer and fewer secrets. Le Bon, in contrast, said that revolutions shake the mind from its perch, sending it tumbling and howling into the abyss of the primitive world, which is driven by heredity, instinct, custom, and race. For Locke, visions and dreams were overridden by simple and complex reasoning. For Le Bon, crowds could not follow reason but instead learned by association, just as individuals do in dreams.

    Furthermore, crowd theorists claimed that people in crowds do not deliberate, but are mesmerized by leaders through the power of hypnotic suggestion. When Locke argued that the truth can be seen with open eyes, he neglected to note that crowds are driven by unconscious primitive animalism, which takes over and spreads by what Le Bon called “contagion.” This contagion does not lead to prudent, rational judgment but instead can lead to cruelty or heroism. These extreme reactions are amplified by the feeling of anonymity that grips individuals, allowing a sense of individual responsibility to evaporate.

    Le Bon belonged to a liberal middle-class tradition that argued against both revolution and the weakness of liberal parliamentary systems. Despite his argument’s mediocre quality, rhetorically flattering the reader and lacking depth, Le Bon must have struck a nerve. According to Moscovici, no French thinker other than Georges Sorel and Alexander de Tocqueville has had an influence as great as Le Bon. Le Bon published The Crowd in 1890 and it was a best seller. Why was this? He mixed the disciplines of politics and psychology in an age of growing disciplinary specialization. Le Bon probably tapped into the fears that the middle and upper class and upper classes had about what would happen eventually if the new “democracy” was to expand.

    Distorting the work of Alfred Espinas

    It is worth noting that crowd psychologists distorted the work of Alfred Espinas on wasps and hornets to create an analogy between human crowds and insect societies. Espinas argued that societies were more than an aggregate of individuals and pointed out that alarm and danger were transmitted by visual contagion. Far from viewing this intensely social life of insects as a liability, he saw it as a strength in building bonds through cooperation.

    Crowd psychologists seized on his discussion of the invisible communication of wasps and hornets when confronted with an enemy to draw an analogy to crowds. Just as insects communicate collectively when faced with danger, so crowd behavior becomes contagious among spectators in a theater or when aroused by a great orator. Unlike Espinas, they saw very little, if anything, constructive in this. Crowd psychologists thought the communicability of emotions beyond the individual was proof of the primitive mentality of the crowd.

    Crowd Psychologist Distortions

    Here are Susanna Barrows’ (Distorting Mirrors) damning conclusions about crowd-psychologist theories:

    • Taine, Sighele and Le Bon did not do any empirical research (Tarde was a possible exception).
    • Taine’s work contains grave errors in the scientific method. The idea of empirical investigation was wholly alien to him.
    • What evidence they collected was extremely selective to support their case (again, with the possible exception of Tarde).
    • Statistics indicate that women committed many fewer crimes than men, yet women were blamed for a disproportionate amount of the violence that occurred.
    • Le Bon indiscriminately lumped together socialists and anarchists with common criminals.
    • Crowd psychologists distorted the work of Espinas on wasps and hornets to make an analogy between human crowds and insect societies.

    The Legacy of the 20th Century

    The events of the 20th century hardly provided a break for poor conservatives hoping for a return to religion, God, kings and aristocrats. The Russian revolution, the stock market crash in 1929, Fascism in Germany and Italy and Spain, the Spanish revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution vanquished those hopes. This does not even count the Zoot Suit race riots in 1943, Watts in 1967 or the Rodney King riots in 1992.

    Mass Media Propaganda Towards Crowds and Riots Carries Forward Obsolete Crowd Psychology

    Check any newspaper or TV news program in Yankeedom and watch how the crowd and the rioters are treated when they describe a protest or a natural disaster. If it is a riot, does the paper ever show the variety of responses that go on during the riot? No, they focus only on the rioters and assume everyone in the crowd was complicit. When they describe the origin of the riot, do they consider the research which says the police are usually the perpetuators of the riot? Not on your life! The police are depicted as restoring order rather than as being the perpetuators of disorder. Lastly, in a natural disaster do the newscasters show the overwhelming instances of cooperation, compared to natural disaster participants helping themselves in supermarkets and sporting goods stores? No, they don’t. Rather the echo chamber of capitalist media blares out “looting, looting, looting” just like they declared “weapons of mass destruction” in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq twenty years ago.

    Conclusion

    I began this article with a questionnaire designed to expose your prejudices against crowds. I contrasted these biases against what research on mass psychology actually shows about crowd behavior. The heart of my article is to show why these biases continue in spite of scientific research to the contrary. I identified the growth of cities, the revolutions in France in the 19th century, the process of industrialization, the formation of unions, the rise of socialism and stock market instabilities in the 19th century. What do these events have to do with biases against crowds?

    The answer can be found in the theories of mostly right-wing crowd theorists who wrote in the 2nd half of the 19th century. These theorists and their ruling class masters were terrified that crowds of working-class people would take their land, confiscate their resources and burn their chateaux to the ground. There was a great deal at stake for them. To call the people in crowds enraged, childish, criminal, beastly, stampeding, savage, irrational, impulsive, uncivilized, primitive, bloodthirsty, cruel and fickle is to dismiss, embarrass and mock anyone who participates. It is also a warning to future workers to stay away from crowds.

    We socialists have been the victims of a 150-year propaganda campaign that was started by crowd psychologists in the 1860s and has been perpetuated by all sources of media throughout the 20th century. Amazingly, social psychologists who pride themselves on filling their textbooks with empirical evidence, have given this discredited crowd theory a pass. There is so much money for research on what sells products and little or no money is available to study what moves crowds and masses. It is vitally important for the ruling classes to forestall the great day of reckoning by scaring people away from joining crowds that will be one of many vehicles for overthrowing them.

    • First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Ruling Class Fears of The Day of Reckoning: Historical Causes for the Biases Against Crowds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned yesterday’s police raid on Hong Kong media outlet Apple Daily’s headquarters — the second time in less than one year — and has urged the release of the five arrested senior staff.

    On 17 June, 2021 independent Hong Kong media outlet Apple Daily’s chief editor Ryan Law, chief executive Cheung Kim-hung, chief operating officer Royston Chow, associate publisher Chan Pui-man and director of Apple Daily Digital Cheung Chi-wai were arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces”, a crime that bears a life sentence under the National Security Law imposed last year by the Chinese regime.

    Approximately 500 police officers also raided the media outlet’s headquarters, forcing journalists to leave the newsroom, seizing their computers, phones and other devices.

    Authorities have also frozen Apple Daily’s HK$18 million assets (about €2 million).

    “Today’s arrests and raid on Apple Daily’s headquarters show that the government will do anything in their power to silence one of the last independent media outlets and symbols of press freedom in Hong Kong”, said Cédric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) East Asia bureau head.

    He called for “all charges to be dropped and all defendants immediately released”.

    This is not the first time that Hong Kong police have raided the media outlet’s headquarters: in August 2020, 200 police officers searched Apple Daily’s premises, blocked its journalists from entering the newsroom and obstructed several major news outlets from covering the incident.

    Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai, 2020 RSF Press Freedom Awards laureate, has been detained since December 2020 and was recently sentenced to a total of 20 months in prison for taking part in three “unauthorised” pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

    He also faces six other procedures, including two charges under the National Security Law for which he risks life imprisonment.

    Hong Kong, once a bastion of press freedom, has fallen from 18th place in 2002 to 80th place in the 2021 RSF World Press Freedom Index.

    The People’s Republic of China, for its part, has stagnated at 177th out of 180.

    Pacific Media Watch is an associate of Reporters Without Borders.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

    “I have reflected and wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding, “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”

    But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of ‘hyperbole’?

    To avoid pointless social media spats, one only needs to reference the ‘United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’. According to Article 2 of the 1948 Convention, the legal definition of genocide is:

    “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part …”

    In its depiction of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, the Geneva-based human rights group, Euro-Med Monitor, reported:

    The Israeli forces directly targeted 31 extended families. In 21 cases, the homes of these families were bombed while their residents were inside. These raids resulted in the killing of 98 civilians, including 44 children and 28 women. Among the victims were a man and his wife and children, mothers and their children, or child siblings. There were seven mothers who were killed along with four or three of their children. The bombing of these homes and buildings came without any warning despite the Israeli forces’ knowledge that civilians were inside.

    As of May 28, 254 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and 1,948 were wounded in the latest 11-day Israeli onslaught, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Though tragic, this number is relatively small compared with the casualties of previous wars. For example, in the 51-day Israeli war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, over 2,200 Palestinians were killed and over 17,000 were wounded. Similarly, entire families, like the 21-member Abu Jame family in Khan Younis, also perished. Is this not genocide? The same logic can be applied to the killing of over 300 unarmed protesters at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel between March 2018 and December 2019. Moreover, the besiegement and utter isolation of over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza since 2006-07, which has resulted in numerous tragedies, is an act of collective punishment that also deserves the designation of genocide.

    One does not need to be a legal expert to identify the many elements of genocide in Israel’s violent behavior, let alone language, against Palestinians. There is a clear, undeniable relationship between Israel’s violent political discourse and equally violent action on the ground. Potentially Israel’s next prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who has served the role of Defense Minister, had, in July 2013, stated: “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”

    With this context in mind, and regardless of why Ruffalo found it necessary to back-track on his moral position, Israel is an unrepentent human rights violator that continues to carry out an active policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the native, indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

    Language matters, and in this particular ‘conflict’, it matters most, because Israel has, for long, managed to escape any accountability for its actions, due to its success in misrepresenting facts, and the overall truth about itself. Thanks to its many allies and supporters in mainstream media and academia, Tel Aviv has rebranded itself from being a military occupier and an apartheid regime to an ‘oasis of democracy’, in fact, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’.

    This article will not attempt to challenge the entirety of the misconstrued mainstream media’s depiction of Israel. Volumes are required for that, and Israeli Professor Ilan Pappé’s ‘Ten Myths about Israel’ is an important starting point. However, this article will attempt to present some basic definitions that must enter the Palestine-Israel lexicon, as a prerequisite to developing a fairer understanding of what is happening on the ground.

    A Military Occupation – Not a ‘Conflict’

    Quite often, mainstream Western media refers to the situation in Palestine and Israel as a  ‘conflict’, and to the various specific elements of this so-called conflict as a ‘dispute’. For example, the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ and the ‘disputed city of East Jerusalem’.

    What should be an obvious truth is that besieged, occupied people do not engage in a ‘conflict’ with their occupiers. Moreover, a ‘dispute’ happens when two parties have equally compelling claims to any issue. When Palestinan families of East Jerusalem are being forced out of their homes which are, in turn, handed over to Jewish extremists, there is no ‘dispute’ involved. The extremists are thieves and the Palestinians are victims. This is not a matter of opinion. The international community itself says so.

    ‘Conflict’ is a generic term. Aside from absolving the aggressor – in this case, Israel – it leaves all matters open for interpretation. Since American audiences are indoctrinated to love Israel and hate Arabs and Muslims, siding with Israel in its ‘conflict’ with the latter becomes the only rational option.

    Israel has sustained a military occupation of 22% of the total size of historic Palestine since June 1967. The remainder of the Palestinian homeland was already usurped, using extreme violence, state-sanctioned apartheid, and, as Pappé puts it, ‘incremental genocide’ decades earlier.

    From the perspective of international law,  the term ‘military occupation’, ‘occupied East Jerusalem’, ‘illegal Jewish settlements’ and so forth, have never been ‘disputed’. They are simply facts, even if Washington has decided to ignore international law, and even if mainstream US media has chosen to manipulate the terminology as to present Israel as a victim, not the aggressor.

    ‘Process’ without ‘Peace’

    The term ‘peace process’ was coined by American diplomats decades ago. It was put to use throughout the mid and late 1970s when, then-US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, labored to broker a deal between Egypt and Israel in the hope of fragmenting the Arab political front and, eventually, sidelining Cairo entirely from the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’.

    Kissinger’s logic proved vital for Israel as the ‘process’ did not aim at achieving justice according to fixed criteria that has been delineated by the United Nations for years. There was no frame of reference any more. If any existed, it was Washington’s political priorities which, historically, almost entirely overlapped with Israel’s priorities. Despite the obvious American bias, the US bestowed upon itself the undeserving title of ‘the honest peace broker’.

    This approach was used successfully in the write-up to the Camp David Accords in 1978. One of the Accords’ greatest achievements is that the so-called ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ was replaced with the so-called ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’.

    Now, tried and true, the ‘peace process’ was used again in 1993, resulting in the Oslo Accords. For nearly three decades, the US continued to tout its self-proclaimed credentials as a peacemaker, despite the fact that it pumped – and continues to do so – $3-4 billion of annual, mostly military, aid to Israel.

    On the other hand, the Palestinians have little to show for. No peace was achieved; no justice was obtained; not an inch of Palestinian land was returned and not a single Palestinian refugee was allowed to return home. However, American and European officials and a massive media apparatus continued to talk of a ‘peace process’ with little regard to the fact that the ‘peace process’ has brought nothing but war and destruction for Palestine, and allowed Israel to continue its illegal appropriation and colonization of Palestinian land.

    Resistance, National Liberation – Not ‘Terrorism’ and ‘State-Building’

    The ‘peace process’ introduced more than death, mayhem and normalization of land theft in Palestine. It also wrought its own language, which remains in effect to this day. According to the new lexicon, Palestinians are divided into ‘moderate’ and ‘extremists’. The ‘moderates’ believe in the American-led ‘peace process’, ‘peace negotiations’ and are ready to make ‘painful compromises’ in order to obtain the coveted ‘peace’. On the other hand, the ‘extremists’ are ‘Iran-backed’, politically ‘radical’ bunch that use ‘terrorism’ to satisfy their ‘dark’ political agendas.

    But is this the case? Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, many sectors of Palestinian society, including Muslims and Christians, Islamists and secularists and, notably, socialists, resisted the unwarranted political ‘compromises’ undertaken by their leadership, which they perceived to be a betrayal of Palestinians’ basic rights. Meanwhile, the ‘moderates’ have largely ruled over Palestinians with no democratic mandate. This small but powerful group introduced a culture of political and financial corruption, unprecedented in Palestine. They applied torture against Palestinian political dissidents whenever it suited them. Not only did Washington say little to criticize the ‘moderate’ Palestinian Authority’s dismal human rights record, but it also applauded it for its crackdown on those who ‘incite violence’ and their ‘terrorist infrastructure’.

    A term such as ‘resistance’ – muqawama – was slowly but carefully extricated from the Palestinian national discourse. The term ‘liberation’ too was perceived to be confrontational and hostile. Instead, such concepts as ‘state-building’ – championed by former Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and others – began taking hold. The fact that Palestine was still an occupied country and that ‘state-building’ can only be achieved once ‘liberation’ was first secured, did not seem to matter to the ‘donor countries’. The priorities of these countries – mainly US allies who adhered to the American political agenda in the Middle East – was to maintain the illusion of the ‘peace process’ and to ensure  ‘security coordination’ between PA police and the Israeli army carried on, unabated.

    The so-called ‘security coordination’, of course, refers to the US-funded joint Israeli-PA efforts at cracking down on Palestinian resistance, apprehending Palestinian political dissidents and ensuring the safety of the illegal Jewish settlements, or colonies, in the occupied West Bank.

    War and, Yes, Genocide in Gaza – Not ‘Israel-Hamas Conflict’

    The word ‘democracy’ was constantly featured in the new Oslo language. Of course, it was not intended to serve its actual meaning. Instead, it was the icing on the cake of making the illusion of the ‘peace process’ perfect. This was obvious, at least to most Palestinians. It also became obvious to the whole world in January 2006, when the Palestinian faction Fatah, which has monopolized the PA since its inception in 1994, lost the popular vote to the Islamic faction, Hamas.

    Hamas, and other Palestinian factions have rejected – and continue to reject – the Oslo Accords. Their participation in the legislative elections in 2006 took many by surprise, as the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) was itself a product of Oslo. Their victory in the elections, which was classified as democratic and transparent by international monitoring groups, threw a wrench in the US-Israeli-PA political calculations.

    Lo and behold, the group that has long been perceived by Israel and its allies as ‘extremist’ and ‘terrorist’, became the potential leaders of Palestine! The Oslo spin doctors had to go into overdrive in order for them to thwart Palestinian democracy and ensure a successful return to the status quo, even if this meant that Palestine is represented by unelected, undemocratic leaders. Sadly, this has been the case for nearly 15 years.

    Meanwhile, Hamas’ stronghold, the Gaza Strip, had to be taught a lesson, thus the siege imposed on the impoverished region for nearly 15 years. The siege on Gaza has little to do with Hamas’ rockets or Israel’s ‘security’ needs, the right to ‘defend itself’, and its supposedly ‘justifiable’ desire to destroy Gaza’s ‘terrorist infrastructure’. While, indeed, Hamas’ popularity in Gaza is unmatched anywhere else in Palestine, Fatah, too, has a powerful constituency there. Moreover, the Palestinian resistance in the Strip is not championed by Hamas alone, but also by other ideological and political groups, for example, the Islamic Jihad, the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other socialist and secular groups.

    Misrepresenting the ‘conflict’ as a ‘war’ between Israel and Hamas is crucial to Israeli propaganda, which has succeeded in equating Hamas with militant groups throughout the Middle East and even Afghanistan. But Hamas is not ISIS, Al-Qaeda or Taliban. In fact, none of these groups are similar, anyway. Hamas is a Palestinian Islamic nationalist movement that operates within a largely Palestinian political context. An excellent book on Hamas is the recently published volume by Daud Abdullah, Engaging the World. Abdullah’s book rightly presents Hamas as a rational political actor, rooted in its ideological convictions, yet flexible and pragmatic in its ability to adapt to national, regional and international geopolitical changes.

    But what does Israel have to gain from mischaracterizing the Palestinian resistance in Gaza? Aside from satisfying its propaganda campaign of erroneously linking Hamas to other anti-American groups, it also dehumanizes the Palestinian people entirely and presents Israel as a partner in the American global so-called ‘war on terror’. Israeli neofascist and ultranationalist politicians then become the saviors of humanity, their violent racist language is forgiven and their active ‘genocide’ is seen as an act of ‘self-defense’ or, at best, a mere state of ‘conflict’.

    The Oppressor as the Victim

    According to the strange logic of mainstream media, Palestinians are rarely ‘killed’ by Israeli soldiers, but rather ‘die’ in ‘clashes’ resulting from various ‘disputes. Israel does not ‘colonize’ Palestinian land; it merely ‘annexes’, ‘appropriates’, and ‘captures’, and so on. What has been taking place in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, for example, is not outright property theft, leading to ethnic cleansing, but rather a ‘property dispute’.

    The list goes on and on.

    In truth, language has always been a part of Zionist colonialism, long before the state of Israel was itself constructed from the ruins of Palestinian homes and villages in 1948. Palestine, according to the Zionists, was ‘a land with no people’ for ‘a people with no land’. These colonists were never ‘illegal settlers’ but ‘Jewish returnees’ to their ‘ancestral homeland’, who, through hard work and perseverance, managed to ‘make the desert bloom’, and, in order to defend themselves against the ‘hordes of Arabs’, they needed to build an ‘invincible army’.

    It will not be easy to deconstruct the seemingly endless edifice of lies, half-truths and intentional misrepresentations of Zionist Israeli colonialism in Palestine. Yet, there can be no alternative to this feat because, without proper, accurate and courageous understanding and depiction of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance to it, Israel will continue to oppress Palestinians while presenting itself as the victim.

    The post On “Conflict”, “Peace” and “Genocide”: Time for New Language on Palestine and Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • By Benny Mawel in Jayapura

    The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) believes that the Indonesian government has nine motives behind the branding of National Liberation Army of West Papua as terrorists.

    Executive director Markus Haluk of ULMWP said this during a seminar and book discussion “Demanding Dignity, Papuans Are Punished” in Jayapura on Friday.

    He said it was believed that one of the reasons the Indonesian government labels armed groups as terrorists was to stem and limit ULMWP diplomacy in various Melanesian countries, the Pacific, and in other countries worldwide.

    “We’ve been reading that since a few months ago,” said Haluk.

    He said the Indonesian the government continued to strive to increase its influence in a number of international forums attended by the ULMWP delegation.

    In these various forums, the Indonesian delegation strived to minimise the role of the Papuan delegation.

    “They started with the issue [that] Papua could not afford to pay the dues (For the Melanesian Spearhead Group). Papua has already handled [the various efforts].

    ‘Terrorism’ issue raised again
    “[Then] Indonesia raised the issue of terrorism again,” said Haluk, who delivered a presentation entitled “Revealing the government’s motivation with the terrorist label to Papua”.

    According to him, the terrorist brand was also an attempt to silence and isolate the movement of indigenous Papuans.

    As a result, whatever the activities of the indigenous Papuans are they would come to the attention of the Indonesian government because they were associated with the terrorist label.

    “The terrorist label is a way of isolating the Papuan issue and silencing Papuans’ freedom of expression,” Haluk said.

    Haluk said that the effort to silence the expressions of indigenous Papuans was part of the Indonesian government’s efforts to pass a revision of Law No. 21/2001 on Papua’s Special Autonomy.

    This happened because the Papuan people continued to reject the Indonesian government’s efforts to extend the Special Autonomy Law, including by holding demonstrations and collecting the signatures of the Papuan People’s Petition (PRP).

    “Clearly, there was the arrest of Victor Yeimo, spokesman for the [international West Papua National Committee] and the PRP. There have been expulsions of students from Cenderawasih University student dormitories and flats, internet access has been cut off,” Haluk said.

    Easier for Indonesian weapons
    “Haluk suspects that the terrorist label for armed groups (West Papua National Liberation Army) is an effort to smooth the way for procurement of weapons and combat equipment for the TNI/POLRI (Indonesia National Army/Indonesia National Police).

    The designation of armed groups in Papua as terrorists would also increase the opportunity for members of the TNI/POLRI to participate in various cooperation exercises in dealing with terrorists with other countries and increase the opportunity to obtain funds for handling terrorists from the European Union, United States, Australia and New Zealand.

    Haluk said that the terrorist label would also be a means of intimidation against executive and legislative officials in Papua.

    In addition, the terrorist label would facilitate the state’s efforts to secure investment and the interests of national and international investors.

    “Indonesian political elites play a big role in investment interests, for example in forest concession rights, selling alcoholic beverages, and mining,” he said.

    The labeling of terrorists could even be used as a stage for politicians to contest the general election in Indonesia.

    “[It could be] a political stage for the sake of the legislative and presidential elections in 2024, as well as for the interests of the local Papuan political stage, for example, seizing the leadership of the Democratic Party in Papua, or the 2023 Papuan gubernatorial election,” Haluk said.

    ‘Branding’ not new
    The president of the Fellowship of West Papua Baptist Churches, Reverend Dr Socratez Sofyan Yoman, who is also a member of the Papuan Church Council, said that the label of terrorists was not new.

    “The label appeared in the 1960s. [There is a label] Free Papua Organisation, separatist, KKB, KKBS, GPK, [then now] we are facing the terrorist label. It’s a repetition of all those [labels],” he said.

    According to Yoman, the various labels were created to smooth over or legalise the actions of the state apparatus to commit violence against Papuans.

    “Papuans continue to be tortured and killed in their own country,” said Reverend Yoman.

    This article from Tabloid Jubi has been translated by a Pacific Media Centre correspondent and is republished with permission.

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sought to shut down all use of the popular video-sharing app TikTok in Israel last month.

    The attempt to censor TikTok, details of which emerged last weekend, is one of a number of reported attempts by Israel to control social media content during last month’s military assault on the Gaza Strip.

    Netanyahu tried to impose the blackout as Israel faced an international social media outcry over its 11-day attack on Gaza, which killed more than 250 Palestinians, and the violent repression by Israeli police of Palestinian protests in occupied East Jerusalem and inside Israel.

    Government law officers are understood to have resisted the move.

    Benny Gantz, the defense minister, also lobbied senior officials at Facebook and TikTok to crack down on posts critical of Israel, labelling them incitement and support for terror.

    The tech giants responded by agreeing to act “quickly and effectively,” according to a statement from Gantz’s office.

    The revelations follow widespread reports last month that social media corporations regularly removed posts that referred to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where Israel recently stepped up moves to force out Palestinian families and replace them with Jewish settlers.

    Social media users and digital rights organizations also reported censorship of posts about the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

    Threats of expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah and an invasion by Israeli soldiers of al-Aqsa were the main triggers causing Hamas to fire rockets into Israel last month. Israel responded by destroying swaths of Gaza.

    Shadowy cyber unit

    Israel’s success in manipulating social media last month follows warnings from Israeli human rights groups about the longer-term threat of Israeli censorship faced by Palestinians.

    Adalah, a legal rights group in Israel, said a shadowy Israeli government “cyber unit” – which works hand in hand with tech giants like Facebook and Twitter – had been given “a blank check” to police social media and muzzle online dissent.

    Israel’s supreme court ruled in April that the cyber unit could continue its often secretive operations from inside the justice ministry, arguing that its work contributed to national security.

    Since 2016, the cyber unit has removed many tens – and more likely hundreds – of thousands of Palestinian social media posts in collaboration with global tech corporations.

    The posts are erased without any legal oversight and usually without notifying users, Adalah pointed out. In many cases, users’ accounts are suspended or removed entirely, or access to whole websites blocked.

    The vast bulk of those being silenced are Palestinians – either those under a belligerent Israeli occupation or those who live inside Israel with degraded citizenship.

    The cyber unit was established in late 2015, part of a raft of measures by Israel purportedly intended both to identify “terrorists” before they strike and to curb what Israel describes as “incitement”.

    Given the opaque nature of the process, it is impossible to know what content is being taken down, Rabea Eghbariah, one of the Adalah lawyers who filed a petition against the unit to Israel’s high court, told The Electronic Intifada.

    Examples in the Israeli media, however, suggest that Israel regularly targets posts critical of Israel’s belligerent occupation or express solidarity with Palestinians.

    The court petition to end the cyber unit’s work was filed in November 2019 by Adalah, which represents 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of Israel’s population.

    According to Adalah, the unit’s methods violate “the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and due process”.

    In approving those methods, Adalah observed, the courts had conferred on the Israeli state the “unchecked” power “to govern online speech” and had allowed private tech companies to usurp control of the judicial process.

    Eghbariah said Palestinians could rarely challenge their silencing on social media. The tech companies do not reveal when Israel is behind the censorship or what “terms of service” have been violated.

    In court, Israeli officials defended their sweeping suppression of online content by arguing that ultimately social media companies like Google and Facebook were free to decide whether to accede to its requests.

    News sites shuttered

    However, Israeli officials have previously boasted that the tech giants almost always agree to remove whatever content Israel demands. In 2016, the justice ministry reported that Facebook and Google were “complying with up to 95 percent of Israeli requests to delete content” – almost all of it Palestinian.

    Eghbariah told The Electronic Intifada that some 80 percent of Israel’s referrals for removing content relate to Facebook and its other major platform, Instagram, both of which are heavily used by Palestinians.

    The next most targeted site was YouTube, where Palestinians often post videos showing attacks by Jewish settlers illegally taking over Palestinian land or Israeli soldiers invading Palestinian communities.

    The accounts of Palestinian news agencies and journalists have also been repeatedly shut down.

    Eghbariah noted that submissions by Israel’s cyber unit to social media platforms had skyrocketed since it was set up. In 2019, the last year for which there are figures, some 19,600 requests to remove content were submitted – an eightfold increase on three years earlier.

    He added that each referral to a tech company could relate to tens or hundreds of posts, and that the removal of a whole website typically counted as a single request.

    “What’s noticeable is the increasing cooperation rate of the social media platforms,” he said. “In 2016, three quarters of Israeli requests were complied with. By 2019 that had risen to 90 per cent.”

    Distinctions blurred

    Human Rights Watch is among those who have criticized Israel for blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism made by Palestinians and incitement.

    By contrast, the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh has noted, Israel rarely takes action against Israeli Jews, even though they are responsible for posting racist or inciteful material roughly every minute.

    And the politicized nature of Israel’s crackdown on social media is often hard to disguise.

    In December 2017, Nariman Tamimi was detained for incitement.

    She had streamed a video on Facebook of her then 16-year-old daughter, Ahed, confronting and slapping an Israeli soldier who was invading their home in the occupied West Bank moments after his unit shot her cousin.

    Dareen Tatour, a poet from the town of Reine, next to Nazareth, spent years either in jail or under strict house arrest for supposedly glorifying violence in a poem.

    Experts said the lines had been misunderstood by Israel’s security services.

    Indeed, errors in translations from Arabic have been regularly evident. In a case in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer was arrested for supposedly threatening a terrorist attack on Facebook before it was discovered that the Arabic expression he used meant “good morning.”

    In 2019, 7amleh reported that fears over this online crackdown had left two-thirds of Palestinians worried about expressing their political views on social media.

    Normalizing censorship

    Other governments may look to the Israeli court’s decision in April as further encouragement to adopt a more aggressive role in censoring online content.

    Eghbariah said that the UK, France and the European Union already had their own cyber referral units, although unlike Israel’s those units were explicitly authorized by legislation.

    In a sign that Israel’s politicized approach to crushing online dissent could become normalized worldwide, an architect of Israel’s cyber unit was appointed to Facebook’s new oversight board last year. Emi Palmor was the justice ministry’s director-general at the time the unit was established.

    The board is supposed to oversee what content should be allowed on Facebook and Instagram.

    The Israeli cyber unit’s increasing efforts to remove content from Palestinians, labelling it “terrorism,” “disinformation” or “incitement,” are the latest stage in more than a decade of moves by Israel to control and manipulate its image online as social media has become more central in most people’s lives.

    Israel stepped up its digital activities after its large-scale attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, which killed large numbers of civilians, including children, and shocked much of the world.

    During the attack, the Israeli army established its own Youtube channel, the first army to do so, offering a model that the US army quickly sought to emulate.

    At the same time tech-savvy youngsters were recruited to pose as ordinary web-surfers as they secretly promoted foreign ministry talking-points.

    Several “cyber warrior” teams established in the following years, including one that recruited former officers from Israel’s military spying unit 8200.

    Erased from maps

    Since then, Israel has expanded its digital operations, not only promoting hasbara (propaganda) online but intensifying its silencing of Palestinians.

    At a conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2018, local representatives for Google and Facebook conceded that the companies’ priority was to avoid upsetting powerful governments like Israel’s that could tighten regulation or constrain their commercial activities.

    The tech giants are also unlikely to be neutral between the claims of the Israeli state and ordinary Palestinians when they are so reliant on Israel’s hi-tech sector. Technologies developed using the West Bank and Gaza as a testing-bed have been eagerly bought up by these global corporations.

    Incensed by Facebook’s censorship, a Palestinian campaign of online protests was launched in 2018 under the hashtag #FBcensorsPalestine.

    In Gaza, demonstrators have accused the company of being “another face of occupation.”

    Google and Apple have also faced a wave of criticism for colluding in Israel’s policy seeking to erase Palestinians’ visible presence in their homeland. The tech companies have failed to identify many Palestinian villages in the West Bank on their online maps and GPS services while highlighting illegal Jewish settlements.

    They have also refused to name the Palestinian territories as “Palestine,” in accordance with Palestine’s recognition by the United Nations, subordinating these areas under the title “Israel.”

    Jerusalem is presented as Israel’s unified and undisputed capital, just as Israel claims – making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible.

    • First published in Electronic Intifada

    The post Tech giants help Israel muzzle Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Life is full of slips.

    Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us.  Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us.  Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us.  And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.

    Slips are double-edged.

    It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control.  Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.”  Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.

    Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.

    In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide.  They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations.  This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior.  Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories.  It is not just words that have etymologies.

    When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today.  Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown.  It slips in when people are asleep.

    John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:

    Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

    And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control.  For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life.  This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines.  A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign.  In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:

    … the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual.  The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything.  Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.

    Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively.  Ellul again:

    It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary).  Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.

    The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds.  This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.

    In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses.  This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness.  To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.

    Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.”  First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem.  A slippery slope indeed.

    But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare.  It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.

    In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum.  I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously.  The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality.  Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it.  And it will.  But don’t say this out loud.

    So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:

    So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.

    A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility.  Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion.  Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.

    The other day I was going grocery shopping.  My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.”  Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred.  “I prefer whipping,” she said.

    I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”

    We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she.  She slipped, and I found humor in that.  Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.

    But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

    It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things.  Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them.  Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.

    Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down.  In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies.  We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.

    It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many.  A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”

    But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate.  To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society.  Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.

    So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?

    This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.

    I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.

    We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells.  Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television.  Close the computer.  Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others.  Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away.  Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe.  Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly.  Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite.  Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow.  It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing.  In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:

    It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.

    I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us.  But without it we are lost.  Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought.  Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.”  Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset.  If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation.  Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.

    There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks.  It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness.  Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”

    It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.

    The post The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    Indonesia has cut off the internet in West Papua to conceal its crackdown on the peaceful liberation movement, says a leading Papuan campaigner.

    Benny Wenda, interim president of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP), has condemned the internet gag while Indonesia’s leading English-language daily newspaper, The Jakarta Post, has also criticised Jakarta’s actions.

    In an editorial last Friday, the Post said that many people “suspect that the disruption to the [Papua] internet service in April was actually a deliberate move to silence anti-government critics and activists”.

    “The government has been cutting off Papua from the outside world for decades by measures that included restricting foreign visitors, especially foreign journalists,” the newspaper said.

    Jakarta remained “stubbornly insistent on maintaining its isolation policy for Papua”.

    Erik Walela, secretary of the ULMWP’s “Department of Political Affairs”, is now in hiding, and two of his relatives — Abi, 32, and Anno, 31 — were arrested by the Indonesian colonial police on June 1.

    Victor Yeimo, spokesperson of the KNPB, had already been arrested.

    Stigmatised as ‘terrorists’
    “I am concerned that all the ULMWP leaders and departments inside West Papua are now at risk after Indonesia has tried to stigmatise us as ‘terrorists’,” said Wenda.

    “The head of Indonesia’s National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) has stated that it considers the entire liberation movement, including anyone associated with me, to be terrorists.

    “Anyone who stands up to injustice in West Papua is now in danger. Indonesia is cutting off the internet to conceal its crackdown and military operations, continuing its long tradition of concealing information from the world by banning international journalists and spreading propaganda.

    “The only way anyone can currently access the internet inside is by standing near a military, police, or government building.”

    Wenda said Indonesian authorities had tried to label Papuan pro-independence groups “separatists”, “armed criminal groups”, and in 2019, “monkeys’”.

    “Now they are labelling us ‘terrorists’. This is nothing but more discrimination against the entire people of West Papua and our struggle to uphold our basic right to self-determination,” he said.

    “I want to remind the United Nations and the Pacific and Melanesian leaders that Indonesia is misusing the issue of terrorism to crush our fundamental struggle for the liberation of our land from illegal occupation and colonisation.”

    21,000 troops deployed
    More than 21,000 troops had been deployed in less than three years, including last month ‘Satan’s forces’ implicated in genocide in East Timor, said Wenda.

    Densus 88, trained by the West, were also using their skills “against my people”.

    These operations were being carried out on the direct order of the President and the head of the Parliament.

    “My people are traumatised, scared to go to their gardens, to hunt or fish. Everywhere they turn there are military posts and bases,” said Wenda.

    “How long will the world ignore my call? How long can the world watch what is happening to my people and stand by?”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • On this one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, I’m thinking about settler colonial nations who routinely spend great amounts of capital to militarily and politically repress indigenous and popular uprisings led by the most historically oppressed peoples of the world.

    The United States and Israel—two settler-colonial nation states whose drive to exterminate and replace indigenous peoples with settler colonists has led to unending repression and brutality for decades (in the case of Israel) and centuries (in the case of the United States). These two inherently genocidal projects also happen to be financially, materially, logistically and geopolitically intertwined. They depend on each other.

    As President Biden so aptly put it in his Congressional speech in 1986, “We look at the Middle East. I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”

    Israel is described as “the most militarized nation in the world” by the Global Militarization Index. The US provides Israel $3.8 billion a year in cash and weapons, to make sure it is so. The marriage of these two settler empires makes it such that any US Congressional attempts to thwart Israel’s ongoing brutality against Palestinians are probably about as likely to be effective as Hamas’ rockets launched at Israel’s Iron Dome.

    The US also provides Israel massive state-sponsored propaganda, backed by incredibly powerful Israeli lobbying groups like AIPAC, to make sure this funding stays in place and is not ever ideologically challenged inside the United States or Israel. These lobbying groups picked up steam and recruited more right-wing backers during Trump’s tenure, enhanced by his extreme support of Zionism, Netanyahu, the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and further funding for Israel’s settler colonial projects. But to be clear, US support for Israel is a bipartisan project, and it has been for decades. Even so-called progressive Democrats like Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, have just signed onto an AIPAC letter, whose aim is to prevent any cuts in funding to Israel, in response to Minnesota Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum’s new bill, HR2590, designed to “block Israel from using U.S. military aid to demolish Palestinian homes, arrest Palestinian children, and annex Palestinian land.”

    AIPAC and its bipartisan allies have also, for decades, functioned to make sure that anyone who dares question “Israel’s right to self-defense” loses all political credibility, career opportunity, and is unilaterally smeared by Democrats and Republicans alike. From AP Press writers who get fired because they used to support Palestine in college, to US Congress members who joke about “the Benjamins,” criticizing Israel in any form has become a form of political suicide inside the United States. Recent attempts to criminalize anyone who supports the BDS movement have become clear violations of the First Amendment according to the ACLU, and yet, US states are moving ahead with these measures, despite legal challenges in the courts. Now that is one powerful international propaganda apparatus.

    So it is against this David-and-Goliath-style backdrop that we see the beginnings of the US-Israeli-military-public-relations façade beginning to crumble inside the realm of US public opinion, as decades of organizing work on behalf of Palestinian human rights begin to slowly trickle up into the halls of Congress. According to a new Gallup poll, there’s a “53 percent majority of Democrats favor pressuring Israel—a 10-point jump since 2018—and progressive figures are clearly betting that the broader electorate is more willing to hear critics out than ever before.

    This is a significant shift, especially inside a country where both major parties’ unilateral support for Israel has gone unquestioned for decades. And in the last few weeks, we’ve also seen some of the most progressive US Congressional members take courageous stances on Palestinian human rights: Rashida Tlaib’s impassioned speech on the House floor, AOC’s reference to Israel as an “apartheid state,” Bernie’s “resolution of disapproval” and other attempts to block an increased $735 million in additional weapons package.

    These rhetorical shifts are tremendous acts of resistance inside the proverbial belly of the beast. And they certainly represent a broader shift in US public opinion, which we also see shifting internationally, given the massive Palestine solidarity protests throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, over the last few weeks. But make no mistake—these rhetorical shifts inside the US halls of power are not the same thing as fundamentally shifting US policy, which is deeply invested in maintaining and supporting its own economic, geo-political and military interests inside what UC Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson calls the “global police state.” The following is an excerpt from Robinson’s book, Global Police State:

    The Occupied Palestinian Territory has been transformed into probably the most monitored, controlled, and militarized place on earth. It epitomizes the dream of every general, security expert and police officer to be able to exercise total bio-political control. In a situation where the local population enjoys no effective legal protections or privacy, they and their lands become a laboratory where the latest technologies of surveillance, control, and suppression are perfected and showcased, giving Israel an edge in the highly competitive global market. Labels such as ‘Combat Proven,’ ‘Tested in Gaza,’ and ‘Approved by the IDF’ (Israeli Defense Forces) on Israeli or foreign products greatly improves their marketability.

    These methods of control and repression fine tuned against the Palestinians have been exported by Israel to racist police in US inner cities, Brazilian security forces that patrol the impoverished residents of the Rio favelas, Colombian and Guatemalan military and paramilitary forces in their battles against social movements, Central Asian intelligence officers monitoring human rights activists and journalists, Chinese Army agents developing domestic systems of social control, and corporate clients and repressive states and police agencies the world over.

    Indeed, many Palestinian activists who have found solidarity with indigenous rights activists in the United States have noted, as recently as Standing Rock in 2016:

    Many of the law enforcement officers at Standing Rock have been trained in Israel. The weapons and tactics are identical. The use of high pressure water cannons, rubber bullets, rubber coated steel bullets, the use of attack dogs, and sound grenades are the same in both places.

    And over the last few years, Amnesty International and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have published reports detailing how Israeli training of US police officers has resulted in systematic brutality. Amnesty International’s report cites “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement and a culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department. JVP’s report went on to say, “Police brutality of the kind that led to the death of George Floyd is both deeply embedded in American policing and also reinforced by the exchange of the ‘best practices’ and expertise in counter-terrorism techniques taught to US law enforcement officials during their training in Israel. Thousands of these officials from across the US have been sent to Israel for training, and thousands more have participated in conferences and workshops with Israeli personnel.”

    The Middle East Monitor writes:

    George Floyd’s killing is the latest, but probably not the last, example of classic American policing to mirror Israel’s ‘best law enforcement practice.’ It is being put to deadly use on the streets of America. If black lives really do matter in 21st century America, then the ‘deadly exchange programmes’ with Israel should be brought to an end without delay.

    So this is the fundamental barrier for our movements trying to stop US aid to Israel. For decades, we’ve watched US Presidents offer Israel and Palestine peace deal after peace deal. We’ve seen an inordinate number of trips from Washington to Israel to host diplomatic talks about “two-state solutions.” Throughout all of these duplicitous negotiations, the US government has pretended to be an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is not. It never has been. It never will be. And while there may be much-welcomed symbolic efforts coming down the pike to pass resolutions condemning Israeli violence as a sort of symbolic offering to human rights groups, the United States will not cut off aid to Israel any time soon. Nor will it ever be able to broker an honest peace deal, as long as its geopolitical, economic and military interests are fundamentally tied to those of Israel.

    Both Israel and the United States are settler-colonial projects whose very existence is based on oppressing and replacing its indigenous peoples, as well as repressing popular resistance movements that emerge within their national borders. Both states now exist within a new global context described by Bill Robinson — a transnational capitalist project of building a global police state against ever-increasing popular uprisings. This is the current political moment in which we find ourselves. These well-intentioned measures from even the most progressive US Congress members are definitely worth celebrating for their rhetorical and symbolic progress. They are not, however, likely to become law, nor result in any fundamental reduction in military aid or support to Israel. We are going to need a lot more to break up the geopolitical marriage of these two capitalist, settler empires. Only relentless, intersectional and international solidarity movements against white supremacy, transnational capitalism, and settler colonialism have the power to do that.

    The post From BLM to Palestine: Only a Marriage of Movements can Counter a Marriage of Empires first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Erin McCarley.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A federal court ruled in favor of journalist Abby Martin, who was barred from speaking at Georgia Southern University after she refused to pledge she would not boycott Israel.

    The post Journalist Abby Martin Had Free Speech Rights Violated By Georgia’s Anti-BDS Law, Court Rules appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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