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.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) has written a letter to social media companies asking that they stop removing and suspending posts and users from their platforms for spreading information about Israeli violence against Palestinians.
The letter to Facebook, Twitter and ByteDance, which owns TikTok, asks the companies to answer a series of questions on their methodologies for removing certain posts and highlights a double standard in censorship of Palestinians online.
“I write with urgent concern regarding reports of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok censoring content and disabling user accounts on your respective platforms that are raising awareness about recent Israeli state-backed violence on the Palestinian people,” writes Tlaib. “It is critical to ensure that your companies, whether intentional or unintentional, do not have algorithms and staff that silence people based on their ethnicity or religious affiliation.”
Tlaib points out that because corporate media often can’t be trusted to give reliable information on the Israeli apartheid, social media is a vital resource for Palestinians to share information with the world and each other. Posts containing pictures and videos of what’s happening on the ground can be crucial documentation.
“Social media accounts have been some of the only places for Americans to access first-hand accounts of the occupation and violence from Palestinians on the ground,” writes Tlaib, who says her email inbox is flooded with reports from people whose pro-Palestine posts have been removed from social media. “That is why these reports are particularly troubling — Palestinians often have nowhere else to turn to make their voices heard other than social media.”
Indeed, many social media users are reporting that they have been censored for posting about Israeli violence being inflicted on Palestinians and for advocating for Palestinian rights. A report from last week from 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, an advocacy group that helps Palestinians access and utilize social media, documented over 500 reports about removed and censored posts, users and hashtags over just two weeks in May.
Some social media companies have admitted to removing content related to Palestine, explaining that their algorithms sometimes mistakenly remove or block posts. Congresswoman Tlaib pushed back against this claim, saying, “The employees at your companies are the ones that ultimately make the final determination of what content is acceptable and what is not.”
Tlaib also points out that Zionist organizations and the Israeli government have pressured social media companies to adopt a definition of antisemitism that ties Zionism, a political ideology, with Judaism. Many Jewish people have pushed back on the notion that being anti-Zionist is equivalent to antisemitism, pointing out that they can fight for the rights of Palestinian people while still being opposed to antisemitism.
“The liberation movement for Palestine is centered on equality and justice for all people, regardless of religion, and is proud to stand with all people of Jewish faith in the face of the disgusting surge in hateful, anti-Semitic attacks against them,” wrote Tlaib.
The Michigan representative also points to a recent New York Times article that highlighted what she calls a double standard in social media companies’ censorship practices. The article reported on Israeli groups openly using WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, to coordinate mob violence on Palestinians.
“I cannot understand how Facebook can justify censoring peaceful Palestinian voices while providing an organizing platform for extremist hate,” she wrote.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Facebook and other social media companies face intense criticism from both the right and left these days, but the biggest threat to giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google may be increasingly diverse coalitions led by progressives that are renewing a push to break up big tech monopolies.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Mondaire Jones, a Democrat on the House Judiciary’s anti-trust subcommittee, are expected to announced a new push to break up Facebook and Google this week alongside Freedom From Facebook and Google, a growing coalition of advocacy groups that argues the companies are two of the world’s “most dangerous monopolies.”
Warren campaigned for president on breaking up big tech, and advocates see the senator as key to pushing the Biden administration to enforce anti-trust regulations and Congress to write new rules. Democratic members of the anti-trust subcommittee released a groundbreaking report last year with a number of ideas for breaking up big tech companies and updating anti-trust regulations for digital commerce after years of allowing tech corporations to grow into alleged monopolies.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented level of momentum within the federal government — and at the state level, as well — to address the power that these platforms have and the harms that they are causing to democracy and to civil rights,” said Morgan Harper, director of advocacy and policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, in an interview. “You have to address the business model to also address the harms these platforms are causing.”
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a bill on Monday supposedly targeting “censorship” of political candidates by social media platforms, but the new law was quickly panned by critics and legal experts as a show of loyalty to former President Trump that has little chance of holding up in court. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and his Facebook account was suspended for lying about the election he lost and stoking violence after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
While conservatives accuse Facebook of “censoring” them as the company attempts to clamp down on misinformation, progressives say the company is not doing enough to prevent overtly racist messages and violent conspiracy theories from proliferating on its platform. However, for progressives, this issue is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the mammoth social media company, which also owns the Instagram and WhatsApp platforms.
On Tuesday, a separate coalition of progressive watchdog and media justice groups released a litany of 70 public complaints against Facebook. The complaints range from mass surveillance and alleged privacy violations that feed the company’s targeted advertising schemes to the silencing of Palestinian activists critical of the Israeli occupation. Like Google and Amazon, critics say Facebook has raced to secure monopoly power over its respective markets by developing “predatory” business practices that harvest user data for profit and leave minorities open to discrimination online.
The list represents a broad range of grievances from various ideological interests, but they agree broadly that Facebook’s own efforts to appease critics have not gone far enough, because profit remains the company’s top priority. For example, the groups say Facebook has intentionally amplified racist, sexist, antisemitic and ageist messages and disinformation because they boost engagement — a far cry from the right’s complaints about censorship. The business model of “surveillance capitalism,” they argue, is simply incompatible with human rights and democracy.
“Now, instead of being a tool for social movements fighting for justice and liberation, Facebook has become a machine used to advance tyranny, corruption, and greed,” said Evan Greer, an organizer with the digital justice group Fight for the Future, in a statement. “By using algorithms that are optimized to generate ad revenue, they amplify some of the worst content on the internet, while at the same time actively silencing and suppressing the voices of marginalized people, activists, artists and creators.”
The coalition, which also includes groups, such as Accountable Tech and Data for Black Lives, is calling on Congress to breakup Facebook into smaller companies and write regulation that “forces Big Tech companies to find a new business model that does not rely on intrusive surveillance of users,” according to Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
“Facebook’s ongoing operations, let alone expansionist designs, are incompatible with the functioning of a democratic society,” Weissman said in a statement on Tuesday as activists delivered the complaints to Facebook. “The company has too much political power, too much surveillance capacity, too little regard for its users, too little respect for communities of color and oppressed groups around the world, and far, far too little self-restraint.”
Facebook gets a lot of attention for its outsize role in the social media universe and a seemingly endless stream of political controversy, but activists and anti-trust lawyers are also moving to break up Google and Amazon, which are also alleged monopolies that control vast swaths of the internet. If Congress writes anti-trust legislation with Facebook in mind, the rules would likely also apply to other tech giants that squeeze out competition and use data surveillance to generate massive profits.
The fight has already made its way into the courts. On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C. attorney general’s office filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Amazon alleging the e-commerce giant unlawfully maintains monopoly power by preventing independent sellers from offering their products at lower prices on other platforms, according to The Verge. Google faces multiple anti-trust lawsuits over its alleged dominance of the search engine business, including a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in October.
The big tech industry is clearly aware of the growing movement to hold it accountable. In March, Public Citizen reported that Facebook and Amazon are now the biggest individual corporate lobbying spenders in the United States, surpassing traditional lobbying powerhouses such as tobacco firms and fossil fuel producers. (The analysis looks at individual companies and excludes trade groups that aggregate lobbying spending for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, for example.)
During the 2020 election cycle, big tech companies spent a collective $124 million on lobbying and campaign contributions, more than ever before. Amazon’s spending increased by 30 percent while Facebook’s spending spiked by 56 percent, according to the report.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Several right-wing organizations, including the Federalist and Washington Free Beacon outlets, attacked the news service over Wilder’s previous affiliation with Students for Justice in Palestine, when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. AP, which recently had its office in Gaza destroyed by Israeli missile fire, bowed to the pressure.
The post AP Firing Shows Right-Wing Hypocrisy, Illusion of ‘Objectivity’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Nassar’s research, like many others before it, clearly demonstrates that more than three decades after the publication of Said’s landmark essay, the exclusion of Palestinian voices from mainstream media narratives in the West – and the attempts to erase the humanity of the Palestinians or whitewash Israel’s crimes against them – continue unabated.
The post Digital Apartheid: Palestinians Being Silenced On Social Media appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Emily Wilder, fired by AP after 16 days on the job. (photo: Angel Mendoza)
Emily Wilder had thought she’d hit it big. After interning at the Arizona Republic, she earned a newsroom assistant job at the Phoenix bureau of the Associated Press, starting May 3. It wouldn’t last long.
Several right-wing organizations, including the Federalist (5/19/21) and Washington Free Beacon (5/18/21) outlets, attacked the news service over Wilder’s previous affiliation with Students for Justice in Palestine, when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. AP, which recently had its office in Gaza destroyed by Israeli missile fire, bowed to the pressure (Washington Post, 5/20/21).
The News Media Guild, the union representing AP staff, said it was investigating Wilder’s firing (Twitter, 5/20/21):
The company told the Guild that Wilder had violated the Social Media Policy that was negotiated with the union and by which all employees are required to comply. AP noted that the policy was specifically brought to her attention after her hiring, but did not specify which comments caused her termination. The Guild asked if the comments that caused her termination were posted before or after her hiring, and awaits a response.
This is a thin excuse from AP. Wilder told SFGate (5/20/21) that some of her past social media posts had been highlighted in a thread from the Stanford College Republicans, such as one calling Sheldon Adelson a “far-right, pro-Trump, naked mole rat–looking billionaire.” SFGate reported that “Wilder…said she would not have used such language today,” and that “not long after the thread started to gain steam on Twitter,” an AP editor told Wilder that “she would not get in trouble for her past activism and social media activity.” Wilder described her “firing as selective enforcement against those who have expressed criticisms of Israel.”
Wilder told FAIR in a phone interview that “to anyone with eyes and ears and brain,” the fact that her firing came after right-wing trolling “is no coincidence,” and that “it feels like it was a convenient opportunity to make me a scapegoat.” Wilder said that AP brass haven’t told her which of her posts were the reason for her firing, or what line she crossed. She noted that her views on Israel/Palestine were irrelevant to her work, which was entirely local. “I might have been one of the youngest employees at the AP,” she said, adding that her opinions as a “citizen, as a young Jewish woman, have nothing to do with the work that I’ve done.”
The Federalist website (5/19/21) features hundreds of posts decrying “cancel culture.”
The first reaction of many supporters of Palestinian rights was that the firing was an example of just how eager and able right-wing organizations are to ruin the career of anyone who dares speak out about social justice in Israel/Palestine. Would someone who interned at AIPAC and/or shared memes from the IDF’s Twitter account be treated the same way? And it’s of course another example of hypocrisy: While the right talks a lot about fighting “cancel culture,” it is one of the biggest agitators for silencing speech it disagrees with (FAIR.org, 10/23/20), especially when it comes to Palestine.
This comes at the same time as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied a tenured position at the University of North Carolina school of journalism (Inside Higher Ed, 5/20/21), with the university’s board of trustees overruling the school’s hiring process. Given that much of the negative attention against Hannah-Jones comes from conservatives who focus on her role in the New York Times’ “1619 Project” (8/14/19), a feature that looked at US history through the lens of slavery, the event seems akin to what happened to Wilder—with the right essentially exercising veto power over hiring at prestigious institutions. These incidents aren’t outliers: Right-wing activists successfully forced the Times to fire an editor for “tweeting she had ‘chills’ at seeing Joe Biden’s plane land” (Guardian, 1/25/21), and the Guardian fired columnist Nathan Robinson for making a joke about US support for Israel (FAIR.org, 2/22/21).
But beyond the censorious power of the right, there’s something else in corporate journalism’s culture to blame here, and that is its obsession with “objectivity“—not just in coverage, but in the expectation that full-time journalists be completely neutral in the issues of the day.
Ideally, a news organization would not want its Jerusalem correspondent to have conflicts of interest while covering the Middle East conflict, although FAIR has found plenty of pro-Israel conflicts of interest at the New York Times (Extra!, 4/10, 5/12) and Washington Post (FAIR.org, 9/26/13). It isn’t uncommon for newsrooms to have rules about political correspondents not giving money to candidates (though these rules don’t necessarily apply to their corporate bosses—FAIR.org, 11/5/10).
The Washington Post recently told its staff about what behavior was acceptable off the clock. According to Washingtonian (5/3/21), the memo said, “Context matters: It would be fine to participate in a celebration at BLM Plaza but not a protest there, or attend a Pride gathering but not a demonstration at the Supreme Court.” The memo also said of DC statehood: “A shirt with the flag of the District of Columbia is fine. One supporting statehood would not be—that would be an expression of public advocacy on a matter we cover.”
In this case, AP hired a young woman who graduated from Stanford, perhaps the most prestigious American private university west of the Mississippi River. What kind of education should someone with worldly intentions receive in order to travel and report on the world? Someone who never debated in political science class? Someone who never had to have their views challenged? Someone who has never been motivated by passion to learn more and conduct research?
Pulitzer Prize–winner Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied a tenured position by the University of North Carolina board of trustees after right-wing attacks on her ideas.
Professional journalists have all sorts of backgrounds. New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers previously served in the Marine Corps, an experience that shaped how he has covered war and insurrection (New York Times, 6/23/20). It’s common for reporters to take a break by working in public relations, and then return to journalism. The point here is not that objectivity is wrong, but rather that it doesn’t truly exist. No one walks into a newsroom for a job without a worldview, or unsullied by affiliations with groups that might end up being newsworthy. Reporters should strive to get the facts right, talk to all sides, take a step back from a story and paint it fairly. But no one can be expected to be a robot even before their first day on the job.
Obviously, any news organization might have misgivings about having someone on staff with a past of promoting violent extremism—like a member of a white nationalist organization—or someone with a history of fringe conspiracism. There are disqualifying factors, but reasonable people should be able to recognize those exceptions. These days, college campuses pride themselves on their activist organizations, acknowledging that activism beyond the classroom is often part of education. As the Supreme Court noted in Regents v. Bakke, “The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth” through dialogue and debate. Employers like AP should want well-rounded recruits who have gone through that kind of dialogue.
But Wilder told FAIR that the vagueness of when such standards of objectivity apply meant these standards could be “asymmetrically imposed on certain journalists in a way that has censored and policed journalists before me.”
Wilder said she worried that her firing will dissuade “aspiring journalists who have opinions and have righteous outrage and want to channel that into storytelling,” and that AP damaged its mission and commitment to standards, because it “sacrificed someone with the least power to this kind of trolling and bullying from random bad-faith actors.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to AP through this web form (or via Twitter: @AP). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message to AP in the comments thread of this post.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Contrary to Newsweek‘s headline (5/5/21), the “Jewish Harper’s Letter” is part of a conservative tradition of stifling debate.
The late Village Voice journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff loved telling the story about how three rabbis, gathered in a Massachusetts motel in 1982, officially excommunicated him from the Jewish people for the crime of signing a New York Times advertisement protesting Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. That their clerical authority to extinguish Hentoff’s Judaism was recognized by no one but themselves is a source of both comedy and anger. In matters political, even the smallest of factions can pretend that their extremism matters, but at the heart of that absurdity is the dark human desire to censor and to silence anyone deviating from the party line.
And so joining the three rabbis in this tragic comedy are the 900+ signers of what’s now called the “Jewish Harper’s Letter,” published by the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, alleging that an undefined “social justice ideology” holds that there is “only one way to look at the problems we face, and those who disagree must be silenced.” They assert that this “suppression of dissent violates the core Jewish value of open discourse” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/5/21). It’s called the “Jewish Harper’s Letter” because it echoes and extends a letter signed by journalists and academics about censoriousness, published in Harper’s (7/7/20; FAIR.org, 8/1/20).
So far the letter has received some mainstream attention (Newsweek, 5/5/21), given the prominence of some of the rabbis, academics and journalists who signed it, like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and his former colleague Bari Weiss. The letter never says how their views have been silenced, or names a group, individual or specific school of thought that is implementing such a chilling effect. Nor do the signers, many of whom are prominent journalists associated with the Jewish right, disclose their own unease with free discourse, their own desire to suppress speech and their own extremism.
You can be a leader of the free speech movement and still try to get people fired when they joke about you. Ask Bret Stephens how (Washington Post, 8/27/19)!
For example, Weiss (who now maintains her own newsletter at Substack) famously tried to silence critics of Israel at Columbia University (Intercept, 3/8/18). Stephens alerted an academic’s boss because he called the columnist a “bedbug” on Twitter (NBC, 8/27/19). Liel Leibowitz, a signer and Tablet writer, said Jews shouldn’t go to college because of the ideas they might be exposed to (Tablet, 10/28/18)—or, as he put it, because college is a place where “tenured professors train like-minded fanatics, and students are punished or rewarded for their willingness to pledge allegiance to their loony dogma.”
The lack of specificity in the letter isn’t an accident. Defining an ideological enemy so vaguely will allow these individuals, many of whom are on the right of the political spectrum, to employ the accusation of overly censorious “social justice” talk when they deem it necessary.
Given that so much of the letter aims at racial discord—the letter says that on “racial justice,” Jewish organizations do not “encourage discussions that include differing perspectives,” because “in some cases, Jewish leaders have even denounced Jews for expressing unpopular opinions”—one can assume this is responding to Jewish Americans who have in the last several years aligned with Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE and Antifa, which have responded to both the rise of far-right extremist groups and the state violence of border enforcement and overly militarized policing. The letter evokes the Republican hype about “cancel culture,” the idea that the price of offending “social justice” activists means losing your job or media platform.
“This is not a new phenomenon,” said Joshua Shanes, an associate professor of Jewish studies at the College of Charleston. “The idea that [the left] is betraying liberalism is an old trope to stop progress, going back to the ’30s, and then to ‘neocons’ in the ’70s and ’80s.”
The fact is that while the Jewish right claims they are being silenced or vilified in the media by the left, the Jewish right and its allies have levied harsh criticism toward liberal Jews and have in some cases attempted to deplatform them. The right-wing Zionist Organization of America blasted the Jewish immigration group HIAS for opposing the Trump administration (Jerusalem Post, 8/24/20), and the ZOA has also attempted to punish campus Jewish groups for voicing criticism of Israel (American Prospect, 1/4/07). DePaul University rejected tenure to anti-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein, a result of his famous feud with pro-Israel legal scholar and Trump advocate Alan Dershowitz (Inside Higher Ed, 6/11/07). When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an executive order against the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, he didn’t do so in a vacuum, but in “a speech at the Harvard Club in Manhattan to an audience including local Jewish leaders and lawmakers” (New York Times, 6/5/16).
The former US ambassador to Israel likened liberal Jews—that is, the bulk of US Jews—to Nazi collaborators (New York, 12/16/16). Chicago-based Palestine Legal published a report on the heavily coordinated activity to silence critics of Israel across the country—a report that, unlike the JILV letter, cited specific examples, like how Florida politicians attacked the president of the Florida State student senate because of “social media posts he had made against the Israeli occupation.”
The Forward (5/6/21) linked the foundation that circulated the letter to oil exec Adam Beren, a generous contributor to the Trump Victory campaign.
The JILV “is a project of an opaque foundation connected to Republican megadonor Adam Beren,” the Forward (5/6/21) reported. Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Temple University, told FAIR, “It is concerning when an initiative claiming to ‘stand up for democratic liberal values’ is far from transparent about its funding source.” She added: “It seems that a basic requirement of supporting free and open debate would be to eschew cloaked or unaccountable modes of influence.”
Leo Ferguson, director of strategic projects at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told FAIR:
The letter demonstrates a cynical, willful misunderstanding of the liberal political tradition, the meaning of free speech and dissent, and the mechanisms at work in a free marketplace of ideas. Let’s be clear—the almost exclusively white signatories to this letter aren’t motivated by an ironclad commitment to free political expression. On the contrary, many of these folks have led the charge to pass anti-BDS bills like the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which is about as illiberal and censorious as you can get in a country with a First Amendment. At the end of the day, the not-so-sub-text of this letter is that conservative white Jews really don’t like being called racist. But just because they don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It’s easy to laugh off academic and journalistic elites who believe that they’re being censored, but the true tragedy of the letter is that the signers hold up robust Jewish debate as their guiding tradition, when what they really want is for their ideas to go unchallenged in the marketplace of ideas. These signers have every right, both in the name of free discourse and the US constitution, to say whatever they want, no matter how controversial. But that also means Jewish leftists and “social justice” activists have a right to respond in kind. The anti-woke, anti–social justice right, to quote Hentoff again, wants “free speech for me, but not for thee.”
Weiss said in her resignation letter that her conservatism was under attack while at the Times because colleagues ridiculed her, and that she faced viciousness on Twitter (New York Times, 7/14/20). But the gritty world of New York City journalism is home to lots of biting editors, and sources who love to complain to reporters about their coverage.
As for online harassment, that is unfortunately the world that any journalist has to deal with in the social media age. Julie Ioffe received considerable antisemitic harassment after she wrote a critical profile of Melania Trump (GQ, 4/27/16), attacks that Trump, whose husband would later become president, blamed on Ioffe (Washington Post, 5/17/16). I was put on an alt-right hit list (Forward, 10/19/16), and was harassed by Nazis on Twitter when I defended Antifa (Ha’aretz, 6/7/20). Welcome to the club, Bari. If you don’t like it here, perhaps the writing profession isn’t for you.
This failed attempt to paint “social justice” as some sort of anti-free speech mob is funny only until you put it into the context of a conservative movement that is taking legal moves to ban or threaten certain ideas (such as proposed laws against boycotts against Israel), and to protect violence against protestors. I have previously written for FAIR.org (10/23/20, 2/16/21) that right-wing anger about “cancel culture” and “wokeness” are often merely projections of the right’s desire to censor the left. The “Jewish Harper’s Letter” is simply another chapter in this disinformation tactic by the right.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
AP (5/15/21) reporting on the Israeli military’s destruction of its Gaza offices.
The Israeli government’s targeted destruction of a Gaza building housing offices of the AP and Al Jazeera has seemingly brought a new dimension to the latest military action against Palestinians.
Free press advocates slammed the action, and the Israeli government’s defense that the building was a Hamas military installation was met with eye-rolling skepticism—Hamas denies this (Intercept, 5/17/21), the US State Department claims it hasn’t seen evidence of this (Axios, 5/17/21) and AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt (AP, 5/16/21) said, “We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building.” Such an attack on two prominent news agencies is a sign that Israel seeks to stifle information coming out of Gaza, but also, as Israel’s political center of gravity moves sharply to the right, a sign that the nation is at war not just with its occupied population, but with the notion of a free society itself.
This is not the first such attack on media offices Israel has carried out in Gaza. In the fall of 2012, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Israel conducted a series of strikes that injured at least nine journalists and damaged several offices,” including an attack on “Al-Shawa and Housari Tower, which is home to Al-Quds TV…. Khader al-Zahhar, a cameraman for Al-Quds TV, lost his right leg in the explosion” (11/19/12).
This latest incident is an escalation of Israel’s harsh treatment of journalists and human rights activists, both inside the Green Line and in the occupied territories, for the last several years. For example, Israeli forces shot and killed Ahmed Abu Hussein of Gaza’s Al-Shaab radio station, and Yaser Murtaja of Ain Media, while they covered protests in 2018 (Reuters, 4/25/18). Reporters Without Borders ranked Israel 86th in the 2021 press freedom index, after Gambia and before Haiti. A few incidents showing Israel’s growing hostility toward journalists and other observers:
The list goes on. In the current crisis, Israeli forces injured and arrested several journalists before the attack on the AP and Al Jazeera building (Committee to Protect Journalists, 5/14/21) and injured eight journalists covering protests in Jerusalem (CPJ, 5/11/21). Mark Stone of Sky News (Twitter, 5/18/21) reported that Israeli police manhandled a CNN crew, in a scene that he said was now typical.
Ahmed Abu Hussein (left) and Yaser Murtaja, Palestinian journalists shot to death by Israel while covering protests.
Central to hasbara—public diplomacy to promote Israel in a positive light—is the notion that mainstream corporate media are inherently skewed to the pro-Palestine narrative. There are several organizations—like Honest Reporting and CAMERA—devoted to painting the media as pro-Palestine. Israel advocates often disregard gruesome footage of military assaults on Palestinians as “Pallywood” (Palestine plus Hollywood), which they say involves “media manipulation, distortion and outright fraud by the Palestinians…designed to win the public relations war against Israel” (Jerusalem Post, 10/11/07). The idea goes that Palestinian activists know that an old Arab woman throwing a stone at a Merkava tank or a child rescued from the rubble are the kinds of “David and Goliath” images that journalists are hungry for, and that activists are eager to provide them.
Israel’s public relations advocates hold that the nation is not simply at war with terrorist organizations, but with an entire apparatus of human rights organizations, academic institutions, media outlets and the United Nations that is dedicated to treating Israel unfairly. And that sentiment has intensified as the country, which prides itself as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” faces a crisis of legitimacy. Two major human rights groups, Human Rights Watch (4/27/21) and B’Tselem (1/12/21), have accused Israel of administering an “apartheid” regime. The country has held five national elections since 2015, and the Knesset still can’t resolve who is in charge of the government. Rabbi Meir Kahane’s fanatical religious party was once banned in Israel—now it’s a viable force (AP, 5/14/21).
Journalists who cover the Middle East historically have considered Israel and the occupied territories as a safer place to work than, say, Syria or Yemen. But if a country’s parliamentary structure weakens and it becomes more authoritarian, its tolerance for the press will only shrink. In this context, the attack on the AP and Al Jazeera doesn’t just indicate a military willing to indiscriminately set targets in a densely populated area (as harrowing as that is), but that it has broadened its enemies list to include a larger set of democratic norms, like a free press and international cooperation.
Blaming the destruction of media outlets’ offices on dubious claims of Hamas controlling the building, Israel thinks it has a “get out of jail free” card for what would otherwise be a war crime. But the linkage also signals that the Israeli government sees journalists themselves as somehow embedded with the dreaded enemy. Reporters who continue to work in the territory will be branded as associates of a combatant group, which compromises their safety, discredits their work and discourages reporters from taking on the job.
The rest of the world will be worse off, and the Israeli government will get more of what it wants: darkness, and freedom from outside scrutiny.
Featured image: AP image of its Gaza offices, destroyed by the Israeli military (photo: Khalil Hamra).
This post was originally published on FAIR.
It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed. Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the powerful.
Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial interests.
You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who will.
A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US congressional hearings.
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Western journalists learn very quickly that they can only get published by mainstream outlets by promoting narratives that are favorable to US imperialism. Example:
I have a story of air-strikes in Afghanistan killing/injuring over 1,500 children – and largely US led airstrikes. So far I have not been able to get the NYT, WaPo, BBC, Guardian, Mirror, Times to bite. If anyone wants it as a story, please DM me and I can send details.
— Iain Overton (@iainoverton) May 5, 2021
This is how propaganda occurs in the west. It’s not that Jeff Bezos emails Washington Post reporters saying “Promote US wars!”, it’s that only reporters who support imperialism see their articles published and their careers rise. As Noam Chomsky famously said in an interview with Andrew Marr, “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
It’s always easier to flow with power than to flow against it. Entire societal infrastructures have been built to ensure that this is the case. Any effort which helps the powerful will be elevated and amplified, while any effort which inconveniences them falls into an empty void.
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The mass media’s garbage coverage of police violence toward protesters in Colombia and Jerusalem is nothing new; as FAIR‘s Alan MacLeod documented back in 2019, mainstream news consistently mitigates its reporting on such brutality when it is committed by member states of the US empire. And it is very revealing that the mass media’s policy of ignoring/justifying human rights abuses by US allies while amplifying those committed in unabsorbed nations just so happens to be identical to the US government’s own standing human rights policy.
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An IDF soldier could punch a Palestinian baby in the face on video and centrists would be sharing it on Twitter with “Very concerned about this violent clash, both sides should have de-escalated.”
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It’s just too hard to pick a side. On one hand the Palestinians want to stay in their homes that they live in, but on the other hand the Israelis don’t want to live near Palestinians and an invisible deity said some stuff in a religious text authored thousands of years ago.
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Criticism of both Israeli apartheid and Saudi war crimes are the most mainstream they’ve been in my lifetime. That’s either a sign that things are becoming more conscious or a sign that the imperial crosshairs really are pivoting from the Middle East to Asia. Or maybe the empire is just that confident that it’ll be able to retain enough control over the narrative.
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One major challenge to escaping an abusive relationship is recognizing that you’re in one; it can be hard to connect your experience with the abusive relationships you’ve seen depicted in TV and movies. This is also the case with realizing you’re living under a tyrannical regime.
People just have a hard time making that connection, that their own government is the Evil Empire they see depicted in movies, that it is the tyrannical regime they see condemned by mass media pundits every day. Just as in an abusive relationship, the evidence is all around them, but they don’t see it.
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“Socially liberal and fiscally conservative” means “Conservative but I want to feel good about it.”
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Q: What is a tankie?
A: A tankie is anyone who chooses to focuses most of their foreign policy criticisms on the most powerful and destructive government in the world.
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It says so much about the power of modern propaganda that such a massive percentage of internet users think “I oppose waging hot or cold war against that government” means the exact same thing as “I think that government is perfect and I wish it was my government.”
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Saying “Caitlin I like your anti-war stuff but your anti-capitalist stuff is bad” is just saying “Caitlin I agree with you sometimes but other times I disagree with you.” That’s normal. That’s supposed to happen. Congratulations on not living in an airtight echo chamber.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Philadelphia public broadcaster WHYY (4/24/21) was one of the few outlets to report on an April 24 rally seeking the release from prison of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The story included important information on Abu-Jamal, who is serving a life sentence for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
It noted that the case has “drawn scrutiny” over claims of police, prosecutorial and judicial bias and misconduct. It cited new evidence released as part of the appeal process, including a note from a key prosecution witness asking the prosecuting attorney for money—the sort of evidence that Johanna Fernandez, a history professor and part of Abu-Jamal’s legal team, notes has in other instances led to a defendant either being set free or getting an immediate new trial.
The post Why Have Media Gone To Such Lengths To Silence Mumia Abu-Jamal? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk
Fiji has dropped three places in the latest Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index and been condemned for its treatment of “overly critical” journalists who are often subjected to intimidation or even imprisonment.
The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog has criticised many governments in the Asia-Pacific region for censorship and disinformation that has worsened since the start of the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic last year.
“On the one hand, governments use innovative practices often derived from marketing to impose their own narrative within the mainstream media, whose publishers are from the same elite as the politicians,” says RSF.
“On the other, politicians and activists wage a merciless war on several fronts against reporters and media outlets that don’t toe the official line.”
Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Philippines are among the regional countries condemned for draconian measures against freedom of information. China was given a special panel for condemnation in a summary report.
“Thanks to its massive use of new technology and an army of censors and trolls, Beijing manages to monitor and control the flow of information, spy on and censor citizens online, and spread its propaganda on social media,” says RSF.
Independent journalism was also being fiercely suppressed in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and and Nepal.
‘Less violent repression’
“A somewhat less violent increase in repression has also been seen in Papua New Guinea (down 1 at 47th), Fiji (down 3 at 55th) and Tonga (up 4 at 46th).” The Tongan “improvement” was due to the fall in other countries.
In the country report for Fiji, reference is made to the “draconian 2010 Media Industry Development Decree, which was turned into a law in 2018, and under the regulator it created, the Media Industry Development Authority”, which is under direct government oversight.
“Those who violate this law’s vaguely-worded provisions face up to two years in prison. The sedition laws, with penalties of up to seven years in prison, are also used to foster a climate of fear and self-censorship.
“Sedition charges poisoned the lives of three journalists with The Fiji Times, the leading daily, until they were finally acquitted in 2018. It was the price the newspaper paid for its independence, many observers thought.”
RSF also referred to the banning of Fiji Times distribution in several parts of the archipelago at the start of the covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.
A year ago, RSF condemned an op-ed by a pro-government Fiji military commander in Fiji defending curbs on freedom of expression and freedom of the press in order to enforce the lockdown imposed by the government to combat covid-19.
“In times of such national emergency such as this […] war against covid-19, our leaders have good reasons to stifle criticism of their policies by curtailing freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Brigadier-General Jone Kalouniwai wrote in an op-ed in the pro-government Fiji Sun newspaper on 22 April 2020.
‘Enemy within’
General Kalouniwai, the Republic of Fiji Military Forces chief-of-staff and who is regarded as close to Prime Minister Bainimarama, went on to voice “deep concerns about this enemy within, which have been fuelled by irresponsible citizens selfishly […] questioning the rationale of our leader’s decision to impose such restrictions.”
“No authority, and certainly not a military officer, should be arguing in favour of placing any kind of curb on press freedom,” declared Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk at the time.
“These comments recall the worst time of the Fijian military dictatorship from 2006 to 2014. We urge the Fijian government to do what is necessary to guarantee the right of its citizens to inform and be informed, which is an essential ally in combating the spread of the virus.”
In late March, after the first coronavirus case was confirmed in the western city of Lautoka, police manning a roadblock outside the city prevented delivery of the Fiji Times, the country’s only independent daily.
Its pro-government rival, the Fiji Sun, was meanwhile distributed without any problem.
RSF noted “two other significant media actors that sustain press freedom” in the country – the Fiji Village news website and associated radio stations, and the Mai TV media group.
PNG journalists ‘disillusioned’
In Papua New Guinea, the ousting of Peter O’Neill by James Marape as prime minister in May 2019 was seen as an encouraging development for the prospects of greater media independence.
However, “journalists were disillusioned” in April 2020 when the police minister called for two reporters to be fired for their ‘misleading’ coverage of the covid-19 crisis.
“In addition to political pressure, journalists continue to be dependent on the concerns of those who own their media. This is particularly so at the two main dailies, the PNG Post -Courier, owned by US-Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which is above all focused on commercial and financial concerns, and The National, owned by the Malaysian logging multinational Rimbunan Hijau.”
In contrast to the Pacific drops in the index, Timor-Leste rose seven places to 78th.
“In 2020, journalists came under attack from the Catholic clergy, which is very powerful in Timor-Leste. A bishop [attacked] two media outlets that published an investigative article about a US priest accused of a sexual attack on a minor.
“The Press Council that was created in 2015 plays an active role in defusing any conflicts involving journalists, and works closely with university centres to provide aspiring journalists with sound ethical training.
“But the media law adopted in 2014, in defiance of the international community’s warnings, poses a permanent threat to journalists and encourages self-censorship.”
‘Press freedom models’
In other regional developments, RSF said that the “regional press freedom models – New Zealand (up 1 at 8th), Australia (up 1 at 25th), South Korea (42nd) and Taiwan (43rd) – have on the whole allowed journalists to do their job and to inform the public without any attempt by the authorities to impose their own narrative”.
In Australia, “it was Facebook that introduced the censorship virus.
“In response to proposed Australian legislation requiring tech companies to reimburse the media for content posted on their social media platforms, Facebook decided to ban Australian media from publishing or sharing journalistic content on their Facebook pages.”
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Asia-Pacific region’s authoritarian regimes have used the covid-19 pandemic to perfect their methods of totalitarian control of information, while the “dictatorial democracies” have used it as a pretext for imposing especially repressive legislation with provisions combining propaganda and suppression of dissent.
The behaviour of the region’s few real democracies have, meanwhile, shown that journalistic freedom is the best antidote to disinformation, reports the RSF World Press Freedom Index.
Just as covid-19 emerged in China (177th) before spreading throughout the world, the censorship virus – at which China is the world’s undisputed specialist (see panel) – spread through Asia and Oceania and gradually took hold in much of the region.
This began in the semi-autonomous “special administrative region” of Hong Kong (80th), where Beijing can now interfere directly under the national security law it imposed in June 2020, and which poses a grave threat to journalism.
Vietnam (175th) also reinforced its control of social media content, while conducting a wave of arrests of leading independent journalists in the run-up to the Communist Party’s five-yearly congress in January 2021. They included Pham Doan Trang, who was awarded RSF’s Press Freedom Prize for Impact in 2019.
North Korea (up 1 at 179th), which has no need to take lessons in censorship from its Chinese neighbour, continues to rank among the Index’s worst performers because of its totalitarian control over information and its population. A North Korean citizen can still end up in a concentration camp just for looking at the website of a media outlet based abroad.
China (177th)
In censorship’s grip
Since he became China’s leader in 2013, President Xi Jinping has taken online censorship, surveillance and propaganda to unprecedented levels. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), an agency personally supervised by Xi, has deployed a wide range of measures aimed at controlling the information accessible to China’s 989 million Internet users. Thanks to its massive use of new technology and an army of censors and trolls, Beijing manages to monitor and control the flow of information, spy on and censor citizens online, and spread its propaganda on social media. The regime is also expanding its influence abroad with the aim of imposing its narrative on international audiences and promoting its perverse equation of journalism with state propaganda. And Beijing has taken advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to enhance its control over online information even more.
Countries that block journalism
At least 10 other countries – all marked red or black on the World Press Freedom map, meaning their press freedom situation is classified as bad or very bad – used the pandemic to reinforce obstacles to the free flow of information.
Thailand (up 3 at 137th), Philippines (down 2 at 138th), Indonesia (up 6 at 113th) and Cambodia (144th) adopted extremely draconian laws or decrees in the spring of 2020 criminalising any criticism of the government’s actions and, in some cases, making the publication or broadcasting of “false” information punishable by several years in prison.
Malaysia (down 18 at 119th) embodies the desire for absolute control over information. Its astonishing 18-place fall, the biggest of any country in the Index, is directly linked to the formation of a new coalition government in March 2020.
It led to the adoption of a so-called “anti-fake news” decree enabling the authorities to impose their own version of the truth – a power that the neighbouring city-state of Singapore (down 2 at 160th) has already been using for the past two years thanks to a law allowing the government to “correct” any information it deems to be false and to prosecute those responsible.
In Myanmar (down 1 at 140th), Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government used the pretext of combatting “fake news” during the pandemic to suddenly block 221 websites, including many leading news sites, in April 2020. The military’s constant harassment of journalists trying to cover the various ethnic conflicts also contributed to the country’s fall in the Index.
The press freedom situation has worsened dramatically since the military coup in February 2021. By resuming the grim practices of the junta that ruled until February 2011 – including media closures, mass arrests of journalists and prior censorship – Myanmar has suddenly gone back 10 years.
Pakistan (145th) is the other country in the region where the military control journalists. The all-powerful military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), continues to make extensive use of judicial harassment, intimidation, abduction and torture to silence critics both domestically and abroad, where many journalists and bloggers living in self-imposed exile have been subjected to threats designed to rein them in.
Although the vast majority of media outlets reluctantly comply with the red lines imposed by the military, the Pakistani censorship apparatus is still struggling to control social media, the only space where a few critical voices can be heard.
Pretexts, methods for throttling information
Instead of drafting new repressive laws in order to impose censorship, several of the region’s countries have contented themselves with strictly applying existing legislation that was already very draconian – laws on “sedition,” “state secrets” and “national security”. There is no shortage of pretexts. The strategy for suppressing information is often two-fold.
On the one hand, governments use innovative practices often derived from marketing to impose their own narrative within the mainstream media, whose publishers are from the same elite as the politicians. On the other, politicians and activists wage a merciless war on several fronts against reporters and media outlets that don’t toe the official line.
The way India (142nd) applies these methods is particularly instructive. While the pro-government media pump out a form of propaganda, journalists who dare to criticise the government are branded as “anti-state,” “anti-national” or even “pro-terrorist” by supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
This exposes them to public condemnation in the form of extremely violent social media hate campaigns that include calls for them to be killed, especially if they are women. When out reporting in the field, they are physically attacked by BJP activists, often with the complicity of the police.
And finally, they are also subjected to criminal prosecutions.
Independent journalism is also being fiercely suppressed in Bangladesh (down 1 at 152nd), Sri Lanka (127th) and Nepal (up 6 at 106th) – the latter’s rise in the Index being due more to falls by other countries than to any real improvement in media freedom.
A somewhat less violent increase in repression has also been seen in Papua New Guinea (down 1 at 47th), Fiji (down 3 at 55th) and Tonga (up 4 at 46th).
Other threats
In Australia (up 1 at 25th), it was Facebook that introduced the censorship virus. In response to proposed Australian legislation requiring tech companies to reimburse the media for content posted on their social media platforms, Facebook decided to ban Australian media from publishing or sharing journalistic content on their Facebook pages.
In India, the arbitrary nature of Twitter’s algorithms also resulted in brutal censorship. After being bombarded with complaints generated by troll armies about The Kashmir Walla magazine, Twitter suddenly suspended its account without any possibility of appeal.
Afghanistan (122nd) is being attacked by another virus, the virus of intolerance and extreme violence against journalists, especially women journalists. With no fewer than six journalists and media workers killed in 2020 and at least four more killed since the start of 2021, Afghanistan continues to be one of the world’s deadliest countries for the media.
Antidote to disinformation
A new prime minister in Japan (down 1 at 67th) has not changed the climate of mistrust towards journalists that is encouraged by the nationalist right, nor has it ended the self-censorship that is still widespread in the media.
The Asia-Pacific region’s young democracies, such as Bhutan (up 2 at 65th), Mongolia (up 5 at 68th) and Timor-Leste (up 7 at 71st), have resisted the temptations of pandemic-linked absolute information control fairly well, thanks to media that have been able to assert their independence vis-à-vis the executive, legislature and judiciary.
Although imperfect, the regional press freedom models – New Zealand (up 1 at 8th), Australia, South Korea (42nd) and Taiwan (43rd) – have on the whole allowed journalists to do their job and to inform the public without any attempt by the authorities to impose their own narrative.
Their good behaviour has shown that censorship is not inevitable in times of crisis and that journalism can be the best antidote to disinformation.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy … each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.
— Max Weber, Economy and Society, 1922
This doesn’t infer private companies, organizations, trade groups, corporations, lobbies are any better than the bureaucracies of government. In fact, the bureaucratic hell we all have been put through — those of us who do not go quietly into the night or roll over to show some yellow belly — consumes millions of lifetime lives, working us over through a very disgusting labyrinth of penury, penalties, prosecutions, persecutions and penal phalanx designed to wear down the innocent.
If you do not have a stable of lawyers (imagine: $2000 an hour; imagine, at least 33.33 percent plus expenses for supposed civil cases of a class action variety), or a stable of lobbyists (imagine: entire companies set up to lie, steal, block, and hide for the rich, the corporations), or a brothel of politicians (imagine: how much does it cost to run for a Senate seat) — here, October 2020:
The North Carolina Senate race is already the most expensive congressional race of all time, with $265 million spent between candidates and outside groups. The Iowa Senate race has already claimed the No. 2 spot with $218 million. — Open Secrets
Those small potatoes people like you and I, those underclass, those lower classes, those less than medium wage/middle class, and all those developing world classes, and all those displaced classes, and all the farmer and laborer classes, we are set up for failure, and when we do fight, we have to empty the savings accounts just to get to the courthouse.
I won’t go into deep-deep detail, but my own family has a recent living example of this fleecing, here in good old Oregon. That person set up an LLC — limited liability corporation — when he got a job with a hospitality staffing agency back east. This agency is run by a multimillionaire, who Zooms his gig workers (all workers have to pay the money in respective states for setting up LLC’s) from his 5,000 square foot “dream home” in Vermont, the second or third one in his portfolio. Imagine, a schmuck like me assisting my family member in Oregon to set up his LLC. It cost him $100. Some of my family member’s teammates ended up getting lawyers and CPA’s to help at a tune of not less than $450.
The entire gig and DIY and precarious and atomized world of work, including recruiting and staffing, is full of money at the top, and worker bees at the bottom. These worker bees are usually women. Covid-19 stupidity hit, and, well, the hospitality and restaurant business caved. This company then went after the N95 mask makers, and other industries still operating during the planned-economic-demic.
So, you have I Can’t Breathe George Floyd unfolding, yet this multimillionaire white man did not talk about the national movement to stop the police murders of black people (Duh, restaurant workers are BIPOC). Nothing even on his company’s web site decrying pig-cop violence against blacks.
This commission-based job went south for my family member. Fast. He did not make money, and got one commission check, $3,000 for hundreds of hours of work. Do the math. Think of the money lost, time lost, percentage of the soul eaten out.
Now, he looked for work, paid work, and landed a job. The problem is the Oregon Department of Revenue sent a mountain-high set of letters, warnings, bills, and then penalties. You know, some people have to try and make a living. This family member also had in his past bad nightmares from the IRS coming to his family home and taking the house over, kicking the family into the streets. He was an 11-year-old. Try another incident with a repo of a car, and other such IRS crap, and this family member just could not handle all the chaos of the bureaucracies of hate, failure to file, not knowing the codes inside and out. He expected it all to be washed out at the end of the year when he filed his taxes.
Wrong, sucker.
I helped him out, sending in thoughtful and rhetorically-magnificent letters to stop this idiocy. No go. Still, more and more late penalties.
I went to the Tax Court (logged on), and the only way to get a hearing in Oregon is to pay the charged (but incorrect) taxes and the added-on penalties. At more than $10,000 to pay the government, my family member had to dump two IRA Roth’s. So much for the savings.
Now, just to get an administrative judge to hear this, another $280 check had to be written to the state of Oregon. Think of all the work we had to do to try and figure out what the hell was going on. Over $10,000 shelled out, and here it is, waiting for forms to be filled out.
Then, on top of this, ending the LLC cost my family member, $110. That’s $100 to create a sole proprietor LLC, and another $110 to dissolve it.
My family member did not have the bandwidth to handle this. Of course, over the years the toll of medical bills, mortgage company thieves, PayDay loan thugs, school loan sharks, real estate appraisers, auto creeps, and on and on, I have had to come to the assistance of many many people. In reality, this capitalist society — call it parasitic, diseased, disruptive, poisonous — is a wasteland of fraud, scams, and downright theft. In a real society, there would be navigators for people of all ages and ilk — free legal advice, free clinics, free social workers and services workers helping cut through the avalanche of red-tape and bureaucrats who should be — along with at least the first million lawyers on earth, and first 10 million lords of war, and the first 100 million financial real estate insurance scammers — at the bottom of the sea.
This is it for a broken society. Broken big time. And how do all those notices and penalty scare letters and authentication letters from courts and the revenue service and unemployment service and department of labor come to us in a small rural town?
Yep, through the post office … the dying USPS. That that bumbling mean as a white old man Biden can hardly muster a trickle of phlegm in his words. No groundswell of legislators (sic) and policy makers (sic) and law makers (sic) putting a stop to this evisceration after evisceration.
My family member gets the hearing, appointing me as a secondary or primary family member allowed to present “evidence.” In the first three minutes of my family member presenting evidence, it is clear the Revenue guy is a buttoned down bureaucrat on Prozac. We are talking legalese, and mentioning form x and form y to be filed, with Zeros in all the boxes, to trigger the next step of a refund for the taxes my family member didn’t owe, and then, with the waiving of penalties. My family member literally left, vomiting, and yelling.
Did the judge hear this? Yep. Did the Revenuer hear it? Yep. This wasn’t a Zoom Doom call, but I could hear some dry voices, and then, I took over and navigated the Revenuer’s promise to the judge that all fines and penalties and interests and the initial taxes would be refunded.
Luckily, the Revenuer had some humanity, and emailed me immediately, and we talked, too, on his personal phone, and he attempted to navigate me on some forms, sent them to me, and, alas, the forms did not work. He saw that, and he tried to get some workarounds, and this is where we are at:
Trauma. PTSD. Past bad-bad interaction with IRS, state code men, tax folk, cops, pigs, the entire buffet of bumbling and overpaid and inhumane people. Think of the ticket guy on the street, and the pig-cop. Try and have conversations with these “public” officials about how they live with themselves. I have, in bars. They will throw down, pull a gun, call more pigs-cops. I’ve had many a yelling match. This is the cancel culture.
Courts, Cops, DA’s, HR, Customer Service, Code Enforcers, Penalty Purveyors.
We await the refund checks, and I will have to let the court know it was resolved once a check comes in, but not without more headaches after the administrative hearing. I will petition the court to charge back the $281 court fee to the state of Oregon, demanding a refund.
More letters.
And that’s where we are at — letters encoded in Digital Blockchains, on those electronic strips on the DMV license, passport, medical card, on the license plate. And that leads us to the vaccination passport, and soon, the vaccination electronic tattoo.
All app driven, all approved by the Google-Palantir-Facebook-AI masters of the universe. With those sleazy millionaire governors and sleazier senators and congressmen.
Those of us knew this was beyond 1984 and a Brave New World and Minority Report and The Jungle, more than a modern Grapes of Wrath, we knew all of this three decades ago, way before Plans for the Pandemic, shortened to Plan-demic.
The horror is looking at Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk, Fauci, and a million other toadies and Eichmann’s in their lizard eyes. The Agenda 2030 and Great Reset proverbial bulldozer of humanity? Already in second gear!
Here we are, now Rutgers, looking for every person on campus to have been hit with the drug-thing in the hypodermic. Prove your worth, prove your jab (s). And anyone really looking at this bio-nano technology knows that the mRNA poison, and the entire suite of bad-bad brews, well, we can expect constant jabs.
Rutgers Campus about to go 100 percent forced vaccinations!
The federal government’s assurance of vaccine supply for all Americans prompted Rutgers to make the decision, the university said in a statement.
Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and executive vice president for health affairs, said the vaccine is the key “to the return of campus instruction and activities closer to what we were accustomed to before the pandemic.”
“The COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be safe and effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Storm said in the statement.
— Source: Market Watch
“The Vaccine Passport Propaganda Template” by Adam Dick
And my shitty job with shitty pay and shitty respect, oh, the managers I work with are actually breaking confidentiality rules by announcing which people have gotten the jab vis-à-vis the nonprofit, and those (me) who have not. Can you believe that shit? I have to tell them if, or if not, where and how and which one?
Asking same said boss what the hell is his BMI? How’s that red face blood pressure going? What the hell is going on with the heavy asthmatic breathing? Those fat-laden lunches? You sure about those? Imagine, a world where they ask, or demand, or press — “You’ve gotten the vaccine, right?”
Sure, this is the new normal, and it is their immoral code, their anti-ethics, their Scarlet Alphabet — A through Z, and many symbols stitched into the digital passport signifying the Wrong Kind of American.
My friend does recruiting for California businesses, and that fine fucked up state is requiring vaccine passports, to get to and from work. Pigs-Cops tackling you and folding you into a squad car. That’s step one. Many more steps here to this Plan-Demic takeover.
And this physics and chemistry high school teacher is so right, so vulnerable in this shit show called United Snakes of America:
Today, I would describe myself as a Marxist who thinks the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the most recent example of a working class revolution but would describe its counter-revolutionary collapse as ending in state-run capitalism. I still believe the experience of the Bolshevik party in Russia is vital to look at as an example of what needs to be built today, and there are writings of Lenin and Luxemburg that I use as a political touchstone today. However, I no longer adhere to the idea that “socialism in one country” came only with Stalin, but that you can see its beginnings under Lenin in the policies of the NEP and other changes in policies of the Soviet state under Lenin. The revolution’s fate was sealed when it did not spread to Germany shortly after the socialist revolution in Russia.
Still, I believe the only way out of the mess we are in today is another working class revolution for the establishment of socialism. But that will not take place through the ballot box. It will require mass strikes and an armed insurrection to establish it. Also, it cannot be called socialism unless working class democracy is at its center and is preserved and expanded through the course of the revolution and beyond. Overall, while I firmly believe capitalism must be dismantled, I have more questions than answers about the state of our political tradition and the process by which this mass socialist uprising will take place. Part of the reason I started “What’s Left?”, a podcast/channel I host with two friends, was to give myself an open space to investigate political questions that I am still working through.
The last year has made the prospects for revolutionary change (which were exceedingly dim before the mania around COVID started) seem even more unlikely. I have witnessed the revolutionary Left collapse behind the capitalist state and institutions through the course of the pandemic. I am exceedingly grateful for the existence of Left Lockdown Sceptics and their attempt to fashion a Left response and oppositions to the authoritarian maneuvers of the capitalist classes across the globe. This blog has been a glimmer of hope for me in what has felt like an ocean of despair.
Just how long does Andy have left in the rotting K12 school system? DV readers know the real way to beating down the masters, and beating back their toadies and Eichmann’s. You’ve read my stuff until you’ve hacked up the offal of capitalism and the rotting meat percolating from the core systems of oppression and subjugation. You know my stance on K12 and higher education.
Solutions to homelessness, obesity, paranoia, fear, sickness, illiteracy, poverty, hunger? Shit, the entire community-based land-formed people-centered, ecosystem-dominating holism and complete person, from cradle to cradle. Every system checked against a true precautionary principle. Every move for 10 generations out. Every decision made for the good of the community.
Art over science. Environment over economics. Ecology over commerce. All tied into a localized economy, regionalized planning, fair use, retrenchment, and ending capitalism, here, there, everywhere.
Naïve? Shit thinking? Is believing in this warring, poisoning, thieving and murdering system of money and top owning the world better? Is that where we are — giving Musk the green light to dump satellites and space junk into orbit after orbit? Who has the right to the Moon and Mars? Just what price is that sickness, that megalomania?
Embarrassing — sick:
Read Andy’s piece. Follow his links to Alison McDowell and Cory Morningstar and Jake Klyceck!
That is the horror story after horror story — Daily, more and more sad sack humans are opting for Zoom Teaching-Medicine-Social Work-Counseling-Engagement with the lighting on the best side of the face, while every Tom, Dick, Harriet and Jane are Zooming in their Underpants.
Andy, again:
I think we need to get back to our source of power – our workplace and centers where we congregate to do work – immediately and begin figuring out how we can stop what is coming. The remote learning experience we are going through right now is not a momentary mirage of a world trying to escape COVID. What we are witnessing and participating in (as either educator or student) is the future of education that is preparing future workers for what work will be like in the coming years: remote, on a screen, mediated through data flow and transmission, overseen, monitored and directed by AI. Students are experiencing education (separated, individualized, isolated, controlled and obscure) as they will experience their future work.
Participating in remote learning today isn’t ‘safer’, it’s actually far more dangerous to all our futures. It means our lives will be more separated, more surveilled, more scrutinized and more controlled than ever before. Physical schools will be replaced with laptops and drop-in centers. Teachers will be replaced with screens and AI. Education itself will be a lifelong chase, not of learning, but of job skills so each worker can compete in a global labor market where ever-centralized capitalist centers get their pick of the litter to screen for and exploit workers not as a class but as an isolated worker connected via a screen.
And it seems apropos to end with John Steppling, now in Norway, and an intellect on the wane, as is anyone who looks critically at the demise, whether it is art or culture.
There is a deep anti-human agenda in Capitalism. There always has been, but today, as capitalism reaches its most dire crises (one expected, perhaps even planned) the class struggle has taken on its most profound form. And fear is the currency in play. And the most coercive aspect of this struggle is the war on children. And it is found in many forms- from the known and ignored toxicity of plastics and the poisoning of the earth and oceans, to the revanchist sex negativity of social distancing and masks, and to the addictions of screens. And the habituation to screens is, of course, also intentional.
He cites much of Robert Bly’s work and his thinking around fantasy, art, the poet’s duty:
As I mentioned, Bly is in his 90s now. I met him once. And he was like a shining light in the room. My old mentor Terry Ork knew him well. I learned more from Bly than probably anyone. So I feel I want to return to him a bit more right now. I found his opening remarks at the 1968 National Book Awards Ceremony…
“I know I am speaking for many, many American poets when I ask this question: since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, have we the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence ? Isn’t that out of place ?
I met Bly a couple of times, drank with him a few times — Spokane, El Paso and Tucson.
Here, a short piece on him coming to Spokane, oh, 14 years ago. I’ve written and published a few essays on my remembrances of him, my work as a journeyman with him, and with others like William Stafford.
Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:
I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car.
So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…
what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.
— from Haeder’s article, “Bly’s Call to Duty“
There is that, really, seeing less than that life, blind spots, this teetering age of digital fascism, and worse. That light, barely there, now.
The post Caught in a Propaganda Mad House first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By Dian Erika Nugraheny in Jakarta
The Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet) recorded 147 digital attacks in Indonesia during 2020, the majority of which targeted groups that are often critical of the government such as academics, journalists and activists.
“Throughout 2020 we found 147 incidents of digital attacks. As many as 85 percent of attacks were directed at critical groups. One of which was our academic colleagues,” said SAFEnet executive director Damar Juniarto during a discussion titled Freedom of Expression, the Law and the Dynamics of Development last week.
Juniarto said that journalists often experience doxing – the disclosure and dissemination of private data. Activists meanwhile experienced far worse incidents.
READ MORE: West Papua media freedom articles
Juniarto gave as an example cases in Papua where activists have had their social media accounts taken over by unknown parties. Others have received food deliveries from online delivery apps which were never ordered.
“This kind of situation never occurred during the period of the previous (administration)”, said Juniarto.
Also speaking at the discussion, Airlangga University Faculty of Law lecturer Herlambang P Wiratraman said that the silencing of critics by the authorities had become increasingly complex.
Attempts to gag critics tended to take the form of digital attacks such as doxing, or disclosing and disseminating private data. On the other hand, efforts by censors, persecution and the jailing of critics were still taking place.
Producing hoaxes
“Things today are complex. In concert with technological development the method [used] to silence critics of the organisers of power isn’t by blocking access but through attacks by irrelevant information,” said Dr Wiratraman.
In other words, explained Dr Wiratraman, silencing critics in the digital era was also done by producing hoaxes. And the more complex the silencing of the media becomes the more it influenced the retreat of democracy in Indonesia.
Dr Wiratraman gave an example of when epidemiology expert Dr Pandu Riono from the University of Indonesia criticised the development of covid-19 drugs after which his social media account was hacked.
Then there was the case of Gajah Mada University student and resource persons in a study of the constitution in relation to impeaching the president.
“What became a question mark was that the committee, the discussion organisers could be stopped and [the discussion] closed down through digital attacks,” he said.
“They were even terrorised by means of sending food which hadn’t been ordered using an online motorcycle taxi, visited by unknown individuals, getting door-knocked,” he continued.
Nevertheless, Dr Wiratraman said that these two incidents were not surprising given that similar incidents had happened in the years before.
Journalists arrest
He also touched on the arrest of journalists and documentary film director Dandhy Laksono on the night of September 26, 2019.
Laksono was questioned by investigators from the Metro Jaya regional police special crimes detective directorate over alleged hate speech.
He was bombarded by 14 questions about a tweet on his Twitter account related to Papua and Wamena on September 23, 2019.
“Such as when Mas [Brother] Dandhy Laksono was brought in by police”, said Dr Wiratraman.
“Indeed digital attacks as well as attacks on campus have been unrelenting and even recorded since 2015”, he added.
Translated by James Balowski of IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “Mayoritas Serangan Digital Menyasar Akademisi, Jurnalis dan Aktivis”.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
By Dian Erika Nugraheny in Jakarta
The Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet) recorded 147 digital attacks in Indonesia during 2020, the majority of which targeted groups that are often critical of the government such as academics, journalists and activists.
“Throughout 2020 we found 147 incidents of digital attacks. As many as 85 percent of attacks were directed at critical groups. One of which was our academic colleagues,” said SAFEnet executive director Damar Juniarto during a discussion titled Freedom of Expression, the Law and the Dynamics of Development last week.
Juniarto said that journalists often experience doxing – the disclosure and dissemination of private data. Activists meanwhile experienced far worse incidents.
READ MORE: West Papua media freedom articles
Juniarto gave as an example cases in Papua where activists have had their social media accounts taken over by unknown parties. Others have received food deliveries from online delivery apps which were never ordered.
“This kind of situation never occurred during the period of the previous (administration)”, said Juniarto.
Also speaking at the discussion, Airlangga University Faculty of Law lecturer Herlambang P Wiratraman said that the silencing of critics by the authorities had become increasingly complex.
Attempts to gag critics tended to take the form of digital attacks such as doxing, or disclosing and disseminating private data. On the other hand, efforts by censors, persecution and the jailing of critics were still taking place.
Producing hoaxes
“Things today are complex. In concert with technological development the method [used] to silence critics of the organisers of power isn’t by blocking access but through attacks by irrelevant information,” said Dr Wiratraman.
In other words, explained Dr Wiratraman, silencing critics in the digital era was also done by producing hoaxes. And the more complex the silencing of the media becomes the more it influenced the retreat of democracy in Indonesia.
Dr Wiratraman gave an example of when epidemiology expert Dr Pandu Riono from the University of Indonesia criticised the development of covid-19 drugs after which his social media account was hacked.
Then there was the case of Gajah Mada University student and resource persons in a study of the constitution in relation to impeaching the president.
“What became a question mark was that the committee, the discussion organisers could be stopped and [the discussion] closed down through digital attacks,” he said.
“They were even terrorised by means of sending food which hadn’t been ordered using an online motorcycle taxi, visited by unknown individuals, getting door-knocked,” he continued.
Nevertheless, Dr Wiratraman said that these two incidents were not surprising given that similar incidents had happened in the years before.
Journalists arrest
He also touched on the arrest of journalists and documentary film director Dandhy Laksono on the night of September 26, 2019.
Laksono was questioned by investigators from the Metro Jaya regional police special crimes detective directorate over alleged hate speech.
He was bombarded by 14 questions about a tweet on his Twitter account related to Papua and Wamena on September 23, 2019.
“Such as when Mas [Brother] Dandhy Laksono was brought in by police”, said Dr Wiratraman.
“Indeed digital attacks as well as attacks on campus have been unrelenting and even recorded since 2015”, he added.
Translated by James Balowski of IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “Mayoritas Serangan Digital Menyasar Akademisi, Jurnalis dan Aktivis”.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.
All the folks moving to Portland from California or New York and talking about how great the real estate prices are here may not know it (note: I was once one of them), but this city is the most rent-burdened city in the United States, and it exists within a country that, like this city, is undergoing multiple long-term crises, one of which is a housing crisis. The housing crisis, like so many other crises, got much worse one year ago this week, when the country, and much of the rest of the world, shut down.
Although this is a city that lost half of its Black population to the rise in the cost of housing between the years of 2000 and 2010 alone, according to census data, one year ago this week, if we talked about the housing crisis as one neck-deep in institutional racism, we would often be met by blank stares.
The post The Housing Crisis: One Year After Lockdown appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
On Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol Hill “insurrection”, the Parler social media app was the number #1 most downloaded app in the Apple App Store. On “January 10, 2021, Parler CEO John Matze announced the company had been ‘dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements … Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.’” By Jan. 11, Apple, Google, and Amazon had successfully colluded to destroy the capacity of one of the most popular apps on the web to operate.
It was a blatant violation of antitrust laws during a period in which Big Tech has been repeatedly investigated and accused of similar infractions. In October 2020 top Democratic congressional lawmakers reported that “… Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google engage in a range of anti-competitive behavior, and antitrust laws need an overhaul to allow for more competition in the US internet economy.” The report recommended new legislation that could lead to the breakup of tech giants such as Facebook and Google.
Yet the overnight shutdown of Parler was accompanied by deafening cheers from the media and politicians across the country. While the elimination of a rising competitor no doubt played a significant role in the takedown, ensuring coordinated messaging across the major social media platforms was likely the deciding factor in Parler’s demise. The same journalists and politicians applauded the heroic tech titans just as loudly when Twitter suppressed evidence of Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings three weeks before the election and when Trump was permanently banned from Facebook.
Parler’s targeted takedown by a conspiracy of tech giants signaled a new phase in the war for strategic reality control. The narrative managers find it quite inconvenient that the pandemic propaganda campaign has not gone completely according to plan. Resistance to the mainstream covid story has turned out to be more widespread than expected. There was a whiff of desperation about this open crushing of a rival platform.
Parler’s real offense was to offer a media delivery system designed to foster free speech. Their service was a reaction against the rapidly multiplying and often inscrutable rules about what speech is allowed and what forbidden on the major platforms. Unlike Facebook and Google, Parler’s users choose what they want to see and are allowed to express their beliefs without the risk of being booted off the service for inadequate doublethink.
Parler was not shut down because it allowed violent postings. Calls for violence were far more prevalent on Facebook and Twitter during the Capital Hill “coup attempt.” Its real crime was to provide a platform where users could express ideas that undercut the dominant narrative without fear of censorship. Its brutal shutdown sent a stark warning to potential competitors who might be similarly tempted to open their platforms to free speech.
Domestic Netwar
Since the beginning of the 2020 U.S. election cycle, the tech giants have unleashed multiple large-scale crackdowns on the content that challenges elite narratives. To understand the scale of the current censorship drive, consider a few of the major actions by Facebook and Twitter:
In each case, the de facto union formed between media outlets and the tech giants initiated a massive censorship campaign without provoking the journalistic outrage that would have erupted a few years ago. Open censorship is now not only accepted by mainstream media but celebrated in the post-pandemic world as a much needed “weaponization of truth.”
Accompanying this unprecedented wave of repression is a new subgenre of journalism which Glenn Greenwald describes as “… an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power.” These journalists rationalize their sanitized tyranny as “working in the disinformation space” where their job is to identify offensive memes and shame those responsible for them.
One reason the tech giants have recently abandoned their earlier restraint in eliminating dissident perspectives is that they are now being ridiculed by the world’s most influential media organizations whenever they fail to suppress so-called “fake news” with sufficient zeal. But the more significant reason is that mainstream media outlets are an organic extension of the intelligence apparatus that helped build Google, Facebook, and several other tech giants. These companies supply the tools to detect, demote, and remove content when it threatens their control over internet information.
The attitude of many mainstream journalists is encapsulated in the recent recommendation by a New York Times reporter who called on the Biden administration to, “… put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’” This cross-agency task force leader “… would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws … it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.” This task force would coordinate the forces required for strikes against those found guilty of offering alternative accounts to officially defined reality.
A Wilderness of Mirrors
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” – Unknown.
According to his press, Tristan Harris is the trusted voice of the technological conscience. He co-founded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) to drive a shift toward technology that operationalizes our informational well-being. The top priority in the site’s “Ledger of Harms” is social media users’ rampant addiction to disinformation.
The CHT cites a finding from a recent scientific study that false news “… spreads six times faster than true news. According to researchers, this is because … fake news items usually have a higher emotional content and contain unexpected information which inevitably means that they will be shared and reposted more often.” This finding was based on the work of six fact-checking organizations.
Unfortunately for Tristan, there is a fundamental deception lurking behind the “fake news” meme. Whenever we hear the term it evokes a conditioned reflex that tends to short-circuit any reflection on its actual meaning. “Fake news” is intended to signify falsehoods that qualified information professionals are able to refute based on careful research. This is the rarely questioned myth behind “fact-checking.” However, it is more accurately understood as an ideological trap intended to inculcate a reductive concept of truth that can be easily manipulated to advance elite agendas.
How reliable is the “fact-checking”, the mechanism used by the major platforms to find and remove false news? A few months ago, OffGuardian published an article titled “WHO (Accidentally) Confirms Covid is No More Dangerous Than Flu.” According to a follow-up article, “… the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed ‘about 10%’ of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.” 0.14% is 24 times lower than WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% which was used to justify the lockdowns that devastated the world economy. That would put the IFR rate for covid right in line with the seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.
However, the fact-checking organization known as Health Feedback claimed the following statement to be false, “The coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.” Health Feedback is a member of the WHO-led project Vaccine Safety Net (VSN) which claims that each reviewer “… contributing to our analyses holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals.” Their parent organization Science Feedback works with Facebook as part of its fact-checking program.
Close analysis of the article indicates that the fact-checkers lied about Dr. Ryan’s actual claims. The lie was this: “Ryan said that, according to the WHO’s best estimates, the virus that causes COVID-19 could have infected up to 10% of the global population.” In fact, Ryan stated that “about 10%” was infected, not “up to 10%.” By reducing the size of the infected population, the IFR rate for covid can be bloated to the pandemic proportions needed to drive the elite agenda. To camouflage their mendacity, the fact-checker found a way to avoid directly quoting Dr. Ryan’s actual words by linking to Zero Hedge’s reblog of the article which provides a summary of his statements without quoting them directly.
This egregious example is only one of many that demonstrate how fact-checkers squeeze the facts into the straitjacket of official truth. Since fact-checking is the central pillar of disinformation detection, its failure to stand up to analysis means that the entire superstructure behind the disinformation purge falls apart. As one fact-checking critic put it, “… this is what is known as a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ – a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.” Propaganda can be much amplified by technology, but it is the believability of its stories that drives the strategic reality operation. Its goal is to bury the text of truth under a scaffolding of interpretive lies.
A Bodyguard of Lies
“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” – Winston Churchill
In the eyes of the elite, it is not the COVID-19 disease that is the existential threat to humanity, but alternative viewpoints about it. The “Doomsday Clock” released by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Jan. 27, 2021 highlighted three existential threats to humanity “… a resurgent nuclear arms race, climate change, and online misinformation about the Covid-19 epidemic.” The key question is whose existence is being threatened by covid misinformation – the planetary population or the great resetters who unleashed it? This could be a sign that the covid propaganda campaign has not lived up to elite expectations.
It’s clear that in the last several months the elite have felt compelled to pursue a much more aggressive disinformation campaign. Facebook recently decided to prohibit all COVID-19 or vaccine-related posts that contain erroneous claims as defined in the “COVID-19 and Vaccine Policy Updates & Protections” posting. The new rule is that any claim that calls into question information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) or other reliable health sources will be removed.
While Mark Zuckerberg constantly invokes AI as the ultimate solution to fake news, research shows that it can support, but not solve the problem of finding and suppressing news stories that undermine dominant narratives. Evaluating the threat, a story might pose depends on awareness of its social and political context. Yet even the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are currently incapable of identifying such contexts. Therefore AI-based content analysis does not yet provide reliable methods for the initial identification of misinformation except in straightforward scenarios such as detecting duplicates of previously debunked stories. Automation can speed up the work of professional fact-checkers, but at this time it can’t replace them.
However, some advanced AI-based approaches have shown promise in the initial detection of dangerous postings. One method is to use AI to detect a story’s pattern of propagation. Since, according to the scientific study by the CHT previously cited, “fake news spreads six times faster than true news”, by scanning for stories with rapid spread patterns, researchers believe that AI might automatically detect information that could endanger official narratives. Using this method, fact-checkers can rapidly sift through a much greater volume of material to uncover offensive memes. The tech giants never seem to consider the possibility that the rapid spread pattern might in some cases be driven by a massive unsatisfied hunger for truth.
Once a story has been tagged as disinformation, both defensive and offensive options need to be evaluated. If it is posted on a controlled social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter, the platform can reduce its distribution, label it, or directly remove it. If it is on a platform that permits free speech such as Parler, the platform itself can be targeted by removing its hosting service in the way Amazon did in the wake of the “violent insurrection” on Capitol Hill.
In the case of websites not hosted on an elite-controlled platform, these can be deplatformed by removing its domain name from the centralized DNS (Domain Name System) that controls access to web sites through its registered name. Since DNS is a centralised system, legal pressure from law enforcement agencies can force the domain name to be deleted so that the website becomes inaccessible. From 2018 to 2019, several police agencies seized 30,500 domain names in 20 different countries.
Further steps may be needed in some cases. In November 2020, “… the national-security states of the U.S. and UK have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to COVID-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.” Journalists who raise unwelcome concerns about covid vaccines can be de-platformed and where feasible, their stories algorithmically erased from the internet.
The UK signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been assigned the task of targeting websites that raise concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine. GHCQ’s cyberwar will not only take down anti-vaccine propaganda but will also seek to “… disrupt the operations of the cyber-actors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.’” These targeted strikes against information terrorists will be coordinated through the “Five Eyes” alliance of intelligence agencies (U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada).
Resisting the Reality Engineers
An alliance of intelligence agencies, fact-checkers, and think tanks have decided that the world population must be electronically immunized against information which undermines approved biosecurity narratives. Their tactical strikes against “disinformation” cloaks an attack on our capacity for independent thought. The algorithms used by the social media giants to generate obsessive user engagement transform us into easily manipulated slaves of semiconscious emotional stimuli. They are not protecting us from “fake news”, but from our own collective powers of discernment.
Yet the current hysteria about “disinformation” is also a tacit admission that mainstream media has lost so much credibility that it has to resort to increasingly harsh censorship to force their former audience to listen to them. An effective resistance strategy must include developing the tools of critical thinking such as the ability to detect logical fallacies. Only by keeping our powers of discernment switched on at all times can we retain both our freedom of thought and the sane vision of the world that it empowers.
Despite the social unrest that false news stories could and did cause, the founding fathers of the United States thought, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that those “… who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties … They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth …”1 In their minds, part of being an adult was the often-difficult art of distinguishing true from false information. The founders believed that truth is only accessible to free minds and that any attempt to curtail freedom weakens our access to truth.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
— George Washington, Address to the Officers of the Army, Saturday, March 15, 1783
It’s a given that the government is corrupt, unaccountable, and has exceeded its authority.
So what can we do about it?
The first remedy involves speech (protest, assembly, speech, prayer, and publicity), and lots of it, in order to speak truth to power.
The First Amendment, which is the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights, affirms the right of “we the people” to pray freely about our grievances regarding the government. We can gather together peacefully to protest those grievances. We can publicize those grievances. And we can express our displeasure (peacefully) in word and deed.
Unfortunately, tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.
The American Police State has shown itself to be particularly intolerant of free speech activities that challenge its authority, stand up to its power grabs, and force it to operate according to the rules of the Constitution.
Cue the rise of protest laws, the police state’s go-to methods for muzzling discontent.
These protest laws, some of which appear to encourage violence against peaceful protesters by providing immunity to individuals who drive their car into protesters impeding traffic and use preemptive deadly force against protesters who might be involved in a riot, take intolerance for speech with which one might disagree to a whole new level.
Ever since the Capitol protests on January 6, 2021, state legislatures have introduced a broad array of these laws aimed at criminalizing protest activities. Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are being marketed as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.
It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.
However, as Human Rights Watch points out, these assaults on free speech are nothing new. “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”
Make no mistake: while many of these laws claim to be in the interest of “public safety and limiting economic damage,” these legislative attempts to redefine and criminalize speech are a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Constitution and render the First Amendment’s robust safeguards null and void.
For instance, there are at least 205 proposed laws being considered in 45 states that would curtail the right to peacefully assemble and protest by expanding the definition of rioting, heightening penalties for existing offenses, or creating new crimes associated with assembly.
No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.
In Alabama, lawmakers are pushing to allow individuals to use deadly force near a riot. Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire are also considering similar stand your ground laws to justify the use of lethal force in relation to riots.
In Arizona, legislators want to classify protests involving seven or more people as felonies punishable by up to two years in jail. Under such a law, traditional, nonviolent forms of civil disobedience—sit-ins, boycotts and marches—would be illegal.
In Arkansas, peaceful protesters who engage in civil disobedience by occupying any government property after being told to leave could face six months in jail and a $1000 fine.
In Minnesota, where activists continue to protest the death of George Floyd, who was killed after police knelt on his neck for eight minutes, individuals who are found guilty of any kind of offense in connection with a peaceful protest could be denied a range of benefits, including food assistance, education loans and grants, and unemployment assistance.
Oregon lawmakers wanted to “require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.” In Illinois, students who twice infringe the rights of others to engage in expressive activities could be suspended for at least a year.
Proposed laws in at least 25 states, including Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Florida, would give drivers the green light to “accidentally” run over protesters who are preventing them from fleeing a riot. Washington wants to levy steeper penalties against protesters who “swarm” a vehicle, punishing them for a repeat offense with up to 40 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.
Responding to protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota enabled its governor and sheriffs to prohibit gatherings of 20 or more people on public land if the gathering might damage the land. At least 15 other states have also adopted or are considering legislation that would levy harsher penalties for environmental protests near oil and gas pipelines.
In Iowa, all it takes is for one person in a group of three of more people to use force or cause property damage, and the whole group can be punished with up to 5 years in prison and a $7,500 fine.
Obstruct access to critical infrastructure in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a seven-year prison sentence.
A North Carolina law would have made it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.
In Connecticut, you could be sentenced to five years behind bars and a $5,000 fine for disrupting the state legislature by making noise or using disturbing language.
Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use “any means necessary” to break up mass gatherings that block traffic. Lawmakers have since focused their efforts on expanding the definition of a “riot” and punishing anyone who wears a mask to a peaceful protest, even a medical mask, with 2.5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Georgia wants to ban all spontaneous, First Amendment-protected assemblies and deny anyone convicted of violating the ban from receiving state or local employment benefits.
Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an “unlawful assembly” after “having been lawfully warned to disperse” with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.
Missouri made it illegal for public employees to take part in strikes and picketing, only to have the law ruled unconstitutional in its entirety.
Oklahoma created a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure (including a telephone pole). The penalties range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you’re part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.
Talk about intimidation tactics.
Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways, trespassing on private property or vandalizing property—because such laws are already on the books—then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?
What’s really going on here?
No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn’t care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.
Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and comply with the government’s dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government’s transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.
In this way, the government conspires to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good but really for its own benefit.
Remember, the USA Patriot Act didn’t make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry—private and governmental—whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.
In much the same way that the Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program criminalizes otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities such as peaceful protesting.
Clearly, freedom no longer means what it once did.
This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.
Yet the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.
In other words, if we no longer have the right to voice concerns about COVID-19 mandates, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws or government policies by voicing our opinions in public or on social media or before a legislative body—no matter how politically incorrect or socially unacceptable those views might be—then we do not have free speech.
What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s what those who founded America called tyranny.
On paper, we may be technically free.
In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.
As the great George Carlin rightly observed: “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”
In other words, we only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.
Remember: if the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
The post The Government’s War on Free Speech: Protest Laws Undermine the First Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Revealed for the first time: Reminiscent of what is happening in Hong Kong today, this is a story about underground film-making, radical art, and censorship. In 1979, Chi Xiaoning created his “Film of Star Group Activities of 1979.” It is the only known video documenting the radical activities of the Stars Group, avant-garde artists from China who championed individuality and freedom of expression. The only copy of the footage is in the M+ Collections in Hong Kong. American film-maker Andy Cohen, a regular Global Insights Magazine contributor, portrays this story in his 2020 film ‘Beijing Spring’, which is being premiered internationally at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival (FIFDH) in March, 2021. [see https://fifdh.org/en/2021/film/120-beijing-spring]
In Global Geneva of 11 February 2021 Andy Cohen writes about the challenges behind Chi Xiaoning’s daring film-making during a period that was subject to severe censorship in favour of official propaganda art.
Before the 1980s, documentary films in China were mostly propaganda made to serve the ideological purposes of the Communist Party. Views critical of the party were prohibited. Only one official voice could be heard: that of the government. Film-makers obeyed Mao Zedong’s dictum that artists’ works should reflect the lives of the masses — the workers, peasants, and soldiers—for whom they were made. These films, scripted and staged using ‘model people’ instead of ordinary subjects, were crafted in a dogmatic, formulaic style that put a positive spin on government policies.
By 1979, however, the political tide in the People’s Republic had turned and the scent of reform began to fill the air, heralding what would become known as the Beijing Spring. Mao Zedong had died a few years earlier, and the nation had begun to reawaken after thirty years of oppression that had claimed more than fifty million lives. Deng Xiaoping, the new ‘paramount leader’, experimented with not only economic reforms but also loosening restrictions on freedom of speech. He even tolerated the open postings of government criticisms in one easily monitored locale in central Beijing — a long brick wall running along Xidan Street just west of Tiananmen Square that came to be known as Democracy Wall.
Originally intended for workers and peasants to post the grievances they’d suffered during the Cultural Revolution, the wall was quickly overtaken by artists and activists, who seized the opportunity to post their radical works in such a prominent place. These artworks and writings not only exposed the suffering the country had been through but also focused on the present plights of ordinary people, emphasising that every individual is unique, equal, and imbued with the right to openly express thoughts and emotions without being crushed or silenced.
A young Beijing film-maker named Chi Xiaoning used this moment to shoot an unofficial documentary about the Democracy Wall movement in a style different from its predecessors. Chi chose to focus his film on the daring activities of one specific group that had arisen from the underground magazine Today: a band of artists who called themselves the Stars Group (Xingxing). Explaining the imagery behind the choice of the name, the group’s co-founder Ma Desheng said: ‘When I was growing up there was only one star in the sky: the red sun, Mao Zedong. Many stars mean many people. Every individual is a star.’
In order to realise his vision, Chi needed to overcome one major obstacle: finding a camera and film stock, both of which were unavailable to the average person. Luckily for Chi, his faithful friend Ren Shulin was among the precious few who not only knew how to operate a camera but actually had access to one.
In May 1979, Ren was assigned to work at the Institute of Coal and Carbon Science. His job was to film official documentaries about safety in coal mines. ‘To smuggle one or two boxes of film out of my service was easy. To get more? That took some time. And to get the movie camera out — that racked my brains,” Ren later stated. In the end, Ren succeeded and the two began filming on 27 September, 1979, the first day that the Stars Group hung an unofficial exhibition on the perimeter fence outside of Beijing’s China Art Gallery (now known as the National Art Museum of China). Simultaneously, an official propaganda art show was being held inside the space.
Adding to this paradox was the name of the film Ren had smuggled out: Every Generation Is Red (Dai Dai Hong). Ren’s knowledge and courage enabled him to play the crucial role of camera assistant, steadily unloading and reloading the reels under the cover of trees at the eastern wall of the gallery. By keeping the film stock safe from the crowds, avoiding the scrutiny of undercover police, and feeding him reels, Ren enabled Chi to continuously film the Stars exhibition on the fence.
The camera Ren smuggled out was a hand-wound Gansu’s Light model (Gan Guang). This made Chi’s already difficult task all the more so, as he aimed to capture real events unfolding in real time. A fully wound camera could shoot for only thirty seconds, and an entire box of film produced only three minutes of footage. This time constraint, coupled with having to avoid the police, tested Chi’s improvisational style.
Chi climbed the back of the fence to capture the impressions of onlookers as they stared at the artworks with shock and awe. Chi’s method, like the Stars artists’, focused on ordinary people such as factory workers, teachers with students, and the elderly. He recorded their genuine emotions and free expressions typically hidden beneath the outer masks that had become the default after years of toeing the party line.
The fact the Stars artists also employed original, modernist styles and content, utilising free forms and abstraction, added a meta-artistic layer to the undertaking. Chi shot an avant-garde film about avant-garde artists during a time when the act of filming was also considered an act of protest. This was art for art’s sake, produced about and with the aim of freedom of expression. Chi’s lens revealed faces viewing never-before-seen artworks that challenged the aesthetic conventions of the party, and that depicted the naked female body in twisted modern forms. The first day was a success for both the Stars artists and the greater artistic principle.
Early the next morning, Chi and Ren were back at the fence, locked, loaded, and ready to film, when the police suddenly arrived to take down the Stars Group exhibit. As the police closed in, Chi wound his way through the crowds, in and out of the chaos ‘like a wartime journalist in a battlefield’, as Ren later described it. After tearing the art off the fence, the police surrounded Chi and Ren. They had no chance to escape. The police confiscated the camera from Chi. From Ren, they took the camera bag containing the used and unused film stock.
“I was very nervous,” Ren recounted. “If the camera was confiscated, I’d be fired from my job at the institute. But Xiaoning was calm, arguing with the other side.” After being kept in a windowless room inside the museum for hours, the film and the camera were abruptly and inexplicably returned to Chi and Ren. For some reason, the authorities’ mood was sympathetic to the artists that day.
The Stars Group artists, on the other hand, were angry that their show had been terminated and their artworks confiscated. Together with other political activists, they planned a protest rally and march. Everyone knew this could mean jail time for the ringleaders.
The Stars rally was an enormous provocation to the Communist leaders — it was reported on and documented by foreign media at the time — and it was planned for 1 October: National Day and the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The big parade had been cancelled in light of Mao’s death in 1976; now, in its stead, the Stars and their supporters took it upon themselves to march from Democracy Wall to the Municipal Building. Chi planned to film it but told Ren not to assist him. If caught, there was no sense in both of them going to jail, as he would need Ren to develop the reels and edit the film.
Chi stood atop Democracy Wall, filming as the rally began. When the group headed for the Municipal Building, Chi and his camera weaved in and out. He went inside factories and shot from windows to capture workers’ perspectives; he zoomed in on passengers’ reactions as they peered from the windows of passing buses; he filmed the crowds of protestors marching along rainy streets, zooming in on their puddle-pounding feet.
While the crowds marched on, Ren waited anxiously all day for news of his friend. This was an era before cell phones and pagers. It was inevitable that, with a 16mm camera in hand, filming in highly visible locations, Chi once again attracted the omnipresent authorities’ attention. When asked how Chi had saved his film, Stars Group artist and friend Wang Keping recounted that Chi had told him he’d exposed the part that had not yet been filmed, tricking the police into thinking it was useless. Beyond showcasing his enormous talent, what makes Chi’s footage even more spectacular and immediate is the constant risk of arrest he faced while filming.
In stark contrast to his main action footage of the protest march, Chi also shot B-roll focusing on scenes by the lake in the park of the Old Summer Palace. In its deceptively quiet manner, however, the B-roll is just as avant-garde. From the weather conditions it is evident that he filmed on two different occasions. On the first day, the water was calm, as were the demeanours of the subjects—rowing on the lake, playing guitars or mah-jong, strolling along tree-lined trails, and picnicking. This idleness was diametrically opposed to the ‘heroic’ actions of the ‘model people’ in official documentaries. The calmness of the lake mirrors the first quiet day of the exhibit.
On the second day of B-roll, the wind was flapping the red flags on the bridge and bending the branches of trees, reflecting the chaos of the protest march. Chi’s use of contrasting weather filmed at the park echoes the inner emotions of his subjects as well as the political events surrounding them. The B-roll shows close-ups of everyday objects with an anthropomorphic introspection: the empty rowboats lined up like cadres, crates of empty soda bottles (Coca-Cola had just entered China in December 1978), goldfish swimming in a vendor’s water-filled plastic bag—all shots considered unsuitable for documentaries at the time.
When asked why the style of this footage can now be considered groundbreaking, Ren replied, “Documentary films in China were almost all propaganda, not the expression of the author himself. We were conscious of this, so our film, from idea to structure to visual language, was different from documentaries of that time.”
Despite its significance, almost no one knew about this unfinished film until recently. In total, it comprises forty-seven minutes of raw footage, out of sequence, that was hidden from the authorities for the past thirty-five years. Fearing for the safety of his friends and his family, Chi hid the salvaged footage in a confidant’s home, swearing him to secrecy.
After Chi’s untimely death in 2007, no one knew the whereabouts of the footage, not even Ren, as it had been kept underground, passed from friend to friend. The footage was eventually recovered and the only copy now resides in the M+ Collections.
Film of Star Group Activities of 1979 by Chi Xiaoning and Ren Shulin reflects on and documents the social, cultural, and political changes that took place during the Beijing Spring. This treasure trove will be mined for years to come by film-makers, historians, and art historians alike. This pivotal moment in China’s history, which gave birth to its democracy movement, could not have been possible without the powerful combination of art and activism that coalesced at Democracy Wall. And because of the courageous feats of one documentarian and his assistant cameraman, history will forever have the visual accounts of those exciting times.
Andy Cohen is an American documentary film-maker, journalist and author based in Geneva. Much of his work is investigative and human rights-based. Cohen’s films have been shown at the FIFDH Geneva, Venice Film Festival, Telluride, Tribeca, Traverse City, Toronto International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival, among others, and broadcast on PBS, BBC, UK Ch4, ARTE, Netflix, and Amazon.For more information about AC Films, please go to his website.
A version of this article was first published by M+ HK.
‘Beijing Spring’ is scheduled for its International Premier at the Human Rights Film Festival in Geneva (FIFDH), which takes placed 5-14 March, 2021. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/03/06/2021-edition-of-geneva-film-festival-kicks-off-in-virtual-format/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
I write about humanity’s problems as a species in all sorts of ways in this space, but really if you want to get straightforward about things all we’re ever actually talking about here is a lack of awareness of what’s true and the need to eliminate that lack.
A lack of awareness is the source of all our major problems, whether we’re talking about war, poverty, ecocide, corruption, exploitation, authoritarianism, prejudice, or even much smaller-scale problems like abusive family dynamics or the psychological suffering of the individual.
If there were sufficiently widespread and penetrating awareness of the contributing factors in any of these problems, these problems would cease to exist. All you’d have left would be the odd natural disaster and the inevitability of sickness and death, which would also become far less problematic with the introduction of more awareness.
The post All Of Humanity’s Problems Are Caused By A Lack Of Awareness appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
