radiofree.asia 
radiofree.asia 
radiofree.asia 

Category: Censorship

  • The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom

    What you smell is the stench of a dying republic.

    Our dying republic.

    We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic.

    In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

    In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

    We’re in trouble, folks.

    This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

    Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

    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 militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom.

    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.

    My friends, we’re being played for fools.

    On paper, we may be technically free.

    In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

    We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

    Truth be told, 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.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

    In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

    Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction.

    The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

    This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

    That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

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

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

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

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    So, what’s the answer?

    For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

    Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

    Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

    You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

    You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

    So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

    The post The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Did Elon Musk’s X Platform Censor Our Content On Tibetan Independence?

    Why Did Elon Musk's X Platform Censor Our Content On Tibetan Independence?

    Image: @tibettruth

    We know how well the team @tibettruth are doing over on ‘X’. That the account is being targeted by Chinese political bots and trolls is a welcome indication that our message on Tibet is strong and un-welcomed by the China’s regime. Keep up the great job folks!

    What’s disappointing though is the censorship and restrictions placed @elonmusk and his @X colleagues. Limiting our follower count, preventing the massive interest and support in our online work on Tibet’s cause translating into increased followers.

    Today we noticed again that our posts (see image above) are being interfered with by @X a cynical and sly measure to obscure and reduce the reach of our content by labeling it as ‘sensitive’. So discouraging viewing counts, since people regard such a warning as indicating unsuitable, disturbing, or abusive content. This is the second occasion we’ve suffered such censorship, which is curious given Mr Musk postures as a champion of free speech!

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • CPJ urges transparency as India broadcast bill raises censorship fears 

    New Delhi, August 15, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Indian government to ensure proper consultation with media publishers before enacting a broadcast regulation bill that journalists fear will give authorities sweeping powers to control online content. 

    “India’s planned broadcast bill could have a chilling effect on press freedom,” CPJ’s Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi said on Thursday. “We are extremely concerned by the opacity surrounding the proposed law and its enactment process, and urge the Indian authorities to be transparent to ensure the bill is not tantamount to online censorship.”

    A draft of the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, released to a few select groups in July but not officially made public, would classify online content creators as “digital news broadcasters” and compel them to register with the government. 

    They would also have to set up internal vetting committees at their own expense to approve content before it is posted online. Failure to comply could result in imprisonment and fines. 

    The provisions in the bill came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost support in a national election earlier this year – a development that supporters blamed partly on social media influencers for boosting the opposition’s chances.

    Following criticism, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said on X, formerly Twitter, that a fresh draft bill will be published and it would extend the deadline for stakeholder comments until October 15, 2024. 

    The ministry did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Controversial Kids Online Safety Act Is Getting Derailed by Queer Youth Online

    As millennials become parents and Gen Z grows up glued to smartphones, Congress has come under massive pressure to do something, anything, to protect children and teens from online harm and hold Silicon Valley accountable. Since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous testimony before the Senate in 2018, determined parents have met with lawmakers in both parties and showed up for contentious…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Utah Bans Titles by Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood in School Libraries Statewide

    Last week, Utah became the first state in the U.S. to ban an entire set of books across all public schools within its borders. Thirteen titles, including books by famed authors Judy Blume and Margaret Atwood — the latter whose book “The Handmaid’s Tale” features a dystopian future where women are legally disallowed from reading — were ordered to be removed from bookshelves in school libraries…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Students and Educators Are Joining Forces to Fight Book Bans Across the US

    Casting shadows over both public and school libraries, book bans have hit record numbers and continue to trend upward. But education experts say that despite these “bleak” realities, the power to preserve literary freedom still remains in the hands of concerned parents, kids and educators. On July 10, children marched across the campus of South Carolina State University in a protest against…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Should We Obey Bad Laws?


    A guest on Judging Freedom, Dr Gilbert Doctorow, took a contrarian stance to Scott Ritter’s journalism work on Russia, which seemingly aligns Doctorow’s stance with the official government stance.

    Doctorow accused Ritter (starting about 21:30) of stomping across redlines that any person familiar with Russia should have been aware of. Doctorow didn’t specifically state what any of these redlines might be.

    He also accused Ritter of violating FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), albeit he conceded that was not for him to judge.

    Says Doctorow,

    My concern is [that] two generations of Americans have not understood the Cold War and how you behave in circumstances when you are backing the cause or at least sympathetic to the cause or even understanding the cause of an [US] adversary. How do you avoid becoming Tokyo Rose [as English-speaking female radio propagandists for Japan were called]?

    In other words, Doctorow is accusing Ritter of being a (perhaps unwitting) propagandist for Russia as well as not knowing how to behave in certain circumstances. In other words, Doctorow (who has his academic credentials highlighted as “Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.”) comes across as questioning the intellectual rigor of Ritter.

    An additional redline, according to Doctorow,

    And, you do not accept payments of any kind, or of favors, like travel. That is air travel, hotels, and the rest of it. You do not touch that. If it is being offered to you by a country, by a foreign country, particularly a foreign country that is in such hostile relations with the United States. (23:50)

    … Ritter has “exposed himself to [violating FARA] charges by admitting he received money from RT and so forth.” (29:45)

    Such an argument is problematic for many reasons. According to Doctorow, any journalistic work with a hostile country must be unpaid. Journalism, for many, is a paying job. It is a means to be reimbursed for one’s time, effort, training, and skill. Yet Doctorow proffers that in certain circumstances a journalist should forgo payment.

    If US authorities do not explicitly decree that journalism relaying the situation or views of a certain foreign country is prohibited, then how is one to know?

    Besides, do Americans not have an inalienable right to know? Or is knowledge/information/data to be solely the prerogative of the US government to determine what citizens can be exposed to? Is gaining insight to what the other side is saying to be prohibited? Americans will just have to trust that their government knows best; for instance, that Viet Nam had fired missiles at US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction, that Syrian government forces had carried out chemical weapon attacks, that there is no genocide in Palestine.

    Does the First Amendment in the US not protect freedom of speech and the press? Because if one has to pay to fly to Russia, pay for hotels, transportation, and meals in Russia, then only those with the means to self-finance such an endeavor are likely to provide information — with potential for bias from the well-to-do perspective. If reporting on Russia has to be done out of the pocket of a journalist, this sounds like a good way to censor journalism. It is censorship that limits the rights of those who want to work as a journalist and also denies the rights of readers/viewers of such journalism.

    If it wasn’t largely for Ritter then how many people would have known about Iraq having been “fundamentally disarmed”? More recently, if not for Ritter, how many people would have heard that the Bucha massacre of scores of civilians blamed on Russia and reported as such by the stenographers in western monopoly media was a fabrication for killings carried out by Ukrainians?

    People and the interests behind them seek to control information. They want to prevent certain information from reaching an audience and they’d like a certain narrative, even disinformation, to reach that audience.

    If knowledge is power (not a corrupting power, it is hoped), then it should not be controlled by the already powerful, it should be a liberatory force to empower the masses.

    Don’t Be a Yes Man

    There are different types of contrarians depending on whether those who we are talking to are in agreement or disagreement.

    We are encouraged to be critical thinkers. We are taught to value leadership. However, there is a type of person called a Yes Man (or Yes Woman). This is a weak person who always supports whoever is in a position of power, rightly or wrongly. Yes Men are dangerous.

    There are plenty of bad laws on the books. One aphorism holds that laws are meant to be broken. This is too simplistic. But some bad laws should be broken and taken off the books.

    Don’t follow bad leaders or bad laws. Ritter is a contrarian to the fetid state. He has the courage to oppose censorship, bad thinking, and following bad laws.

  • Image from fractal enlightenment.

    • The post Should We Obey Bad Laws? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bangladeshi journalists hopeful for return to press freedom as Hasina era ends

    Reporters cautiously optimistic as interim government takes over after years of intimation and censorship under outgoing prime minister

    Bangladeshi journalists are hoping the resignation of the prime minister Sheikh Hasina will bring an era of censorship and fear to an end, as they prepare to hold a new interim government to account.

    Arrests, abuse and forced disappearances at the hands of Bangladesh’s security forces have loomed over journalists for most of Hasina’s 15-year rule, preventing them from routine reporting for fear of writing anything that could be perceived as embarrassing for the government.

    Continue reading…

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

  • On Being a Patriot

    Journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin put out a video “Scott Ritter’s home raided by the FBI.” Maupin affirmed his solidarity with Ritter, a staunch opponent of US militaristic support for Ukraine and Israel.

    Ritter’s anti-imperialist stand is nothing new. He first came to wider attention with his opposition to US plans to attack Iraq for having weapons-of-mass-destruction. Ritter, the then United Nations weapons inspector, said that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed.” History has proven Ritter correct. The US government was wrong.

    Nonetheless, many patriots often trot out the canard “my country, right or wrong.”

    Scott Ritter, a former US marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector, is a fierce critic of US militarism. Yet, he does not equivocate when it comes to his patriotism: “I’m an American Patriot who puts my country and its security first.”

    This fidelity called patriotism is universal. For example, it is one of the 12 goals of socialism in China. Generally, it is understood to mean “love of country.” Thus, the Chinese characters for love and country.

    Patriotism: “devotion to and vigorous support for one’s country.”

    To vigorously support one’s country? Right or wrong? And what exactly is a country? Is it specific to a geographically defined dimension?

    Country: “a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.”

    This definition of country does not clarify precisely the orbit of patriotism. Is it government? It couldn’t be that because people, who consider themselves to be patriots, in countries with elections are often voting governments out. And one can often hear citizens venting displeasure with their government. Does this mean they are not patriots? Ritter, undeniably, does not hide his displeasure with government.

    Nation: “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.”

    Well, the United States often describes itself as a melting pot: “a term that was used to describe Americanization in which immigrants adopt American culture and abandon culture from their home country.”

    So, US culture is the result of abandoned cultures?

    Previously, I asked why people like Scott Ritter and colonel Douglas Macgregor keep professing their love of the US while pointing out its dishonesty, bullying, war crimes, warmaking, corruption, etc. Why love such a country?

    Ritter points out the multitudinous crimes of US empire, the racism, the crimes against whistleblowers and publishers (e.g., Julian Assange), the crimes of US allies (e.g., Israel; it took him a while to realize the evil of Zionism, but credit to him that he rejected a previously held position that he later found to be intellectually and morally untenable), the unfair “trade” practices (e.g., sanctions, theft of another country’s assets), the deterioration of US infrastructure (e.g., water in Flint, MI), the destruction of the environment, the inequality, homelessness, poverty, etc. Yet, he always says he is an American patriot and that he loves his country.

    The logical disconnect seems huge, but it is also understandable. Why? If Ritter didn’t praise his American citizenship to the heavens, then he would likely be dismissed as anti-American, and people who swallow the patriotism Kool-aid would tune him out. A sad state of affairs.

    If Ritter, Macgregor, and other American voices that speak in opposition to the imperialist agenda did not profess their love of the US of America, an entity that came into existence because of a massive genocide, then they all know that they would be silenced.

    The world needs contrarian voices to be free to speak, and not just contrarian voices, all voices. People must have the opportunity to consider what the voices say. Are their facts verifiable, is their logic sound, and is their message morally based?

    Ritter educates many of us about US militarism, what the fighting in Ukraine is about, who the actors are and why they are involved.

    Back to Maupin

    I do not always agree with Ritter, and I have expressed some of my reservations and my reasons for them. Likeliest, Ritter would like to revisit and amend some of his formulations, as most of us would. But Ritter is a cut above; he is experienced; he does his homework; he talks straight and extemporaneously.

    A friend who started checking out Ritter’s geopolitical views on my recommendation, came across disturbing news about Ritter and asked me about it. The news of the FBI raid on Ritter’s domicile, has provided the monopoly media the opportunity to dredge up his past indiscretions and criminal activities. However, these should not just be brushed aside or dismissed. And neither should Ritter’s views be brushed aside. Whatever the facts are of the unsavory matter, Ritter had been punished. Now the state is piling on. Because past actions are past, we cannot undo them; the best we can do is atone.

    Some might question whether a person with certain criminal deficiencies could be trusted about their reporting on geopolitics and militarism? The answer seems obvious. The focus ought to be on whatever information, from whoever. By all means, take into account the source; regarding the information, take what is good and factual and relegate what is bad and dubious to a lesser file.

    Ritter is an important voice. The assumption is that the FBI raid was only about Ritter’s expressing his first amendment rights. Regardless, I have no problem to standing in solidarity with Ritter against imperialism, warring, and Zionism.

    The common refrain “I love my country…” is almost mandatory in the US if uttering any criticism of the state. As ex-military and a declared patriot, Ritter had created a space to function as a critic of the international crimes of America. That space appears to have severely narrowed. To express non-allegiance with America – despite it being a moral abomination – would invite the wrath of the state. For one, these critics would be slandered and have their communication platforms targeted, as Maupin knows well since his book Kamala Harris & the Future of America was banned by Amazon. This is another example of the government and its allies undermining free speech.

    As Maupin said in the video, an injustice to one is an injustice to all. It is a call for the free speech rights of Ritter, and it emphasizes the same rights for all of us.

    The post On Being a Patriot first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two)

    So, my second trial for alleged thoughtcrime-tweeting is going ahead as planned on August 15 in Berlin Superior Court (Das Kammergericht). Full-blown anti-terrorism security protocols will be in effect in the courtroom. Yes, that’s right, the Berlin Superior Court denied my attorney’s motion to rescind their special Security Order, so the German authorities will be putting on an elaborate official show of force, which everyone is welcome to attend!

    Or, actually, according to the Security Order, only 35 people are welcome to attend. That’s one of the anti-terrorism security protocols. Also, if you do attend, you’ll have to surrender all your personal possessions (i.e., notebooks, phones, wallets, pens, pencils, other writing instruments, wristwatches, hats, and other head coverings, etc.) and any outwear (i.e., jackets, scarves, etc.) and totally empty your pockets of all items, presumably into a plastic bin like the ones they use at airport security, which the Court’s security personnel will carry away and store somewhere while you attend the trial, and which the Superior Court expressly denies any liability for (i.e., for your items). Once you have surrendered all your possessions, and have been body-scanned and metal-detected, and possibly physically patted down, you will be admitted into Room 145a, where you will have to sit in the rear five rows of the gallery, behind a presumably bullet-proof security barrier, so that the security staff can monitor you during the proceedings.

    OK, I know what you’re probably thinking, but the Superior Court’s Security Order is not at all intended to prevent members of the press from attending and reporting on the trial. Members of the press are absolutely welcome! It’s just that they will have to surrender their cameras and phones and their pens and other writing instruments to the security staff before they enter the courtroom. But they are welcome to attend and report on the trial! The security personnel will even provide them with pencils — presumably those little child-sized pencils, which are harder to use as Jason-Bourne-style stabbing weapons — and sheets of paper that they can position on their knees and attempt to make notes on during the trial.

    Same goes for all you members of the public. This Security Order is not in any way intended to discourage you from attending the trial, or to intimidate or humiliate you by subjecting you to pointless “security protocols” and treating you like suspected terrorists. No, you are absolutely welcome to attend! You just might want to think about what you bring with you. Sharp objects are probably not a good idea. Likewise anything the Court might construe to be a camera or an audio-recording device. The Security Order is clear about that … there is to be no photographic or audio record of the proceedings.

    Oh, and, definitely do not bring any state-of-the-art terrorist “wiretapping technology” with you. The Court is particularly worried about that stuff. Hence the need to subject everyone to TSA-style body-scanning, and pat-downs, and to confiscate their personal possessions, i.e., to ensure that no one smuggles in some sort of remotely-activated wiretapping technology that will infect the judges’ smartphones with some kind of untraceable surveillance software that will secretly record everything they say and transmit it to Tehran, or Moscow, or wherever.

    You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. Here’s how one of the Superior Court judges justified the Court’s Security Order in his denial of our motion to have the Order rescinded …

    I cannot see the unreasonable restriction of the press and your defense that you are concerned about, nor any violation of the guarantee of a fair trial. I admit that the restrictions imposed by the Security Order are quite significant; however, they are by no means unreasonable. They are objectively required both by the overall tense security situation (e.g. publicly announced threats of attacks against judges of the Superior Court) and the increased special security requirements in at least one criminal trial conducted in the same courtroom. Since only the courtroom in question is assigned to the Criminal Division (and the other divisions) as a permanent courtroom, and a regular search of the courtroom following every session using suitable technology for recently introduced wiretapping technology represents an objectively unjustifiable burden, its introduction must be prevented from the outset if possible.

    Yes, you read the judge’s explanation right. Apparently, the Court is worried that my readers, or maybe members of the German independent press, might be planning to launch an “attack” on the judges, presumably with their phones and writing instruments, and possibly their head coverings and outerwear (for example, their scarves, which I suppose, in the hands of trained terrorist assassins, could be used to strangle them). In any event, they clearly believe that an “overall tense security situation” exists, one which necessitates these anti-terrorism security protocols at the trial of a 62-year-old playwright, author, and political satirist.

    OK, I probably should have mentioned that earlier for the benefit of anyone not familiar with my case. I’m not a terrorist, or in any way terrorist adjacent. I’m just an author and a political satirist. The German authorities are prosecuting me because I criticized them and their Covid mask mandates.

    As I explained in my most recent column …

    The German authorities have been investigating and prosecuting me since August 2022. My case has been covered in The Atlantic, Racket News, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, and many other outlets … Basically, I am being prosecuted for ‘spreading pro-Nazi propaganda’ because I criticized the Covid mask mandates and tweeted the cover artwork of one of my books, The Rise of The New Normal Reich. Here’s the cover artwork of that book. The other two images are recent covers of Der Spiegel and Stern, two well-known mainstream German magazines, which are not being prosecuted for spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.

    My punishment for doing that (i.e., criticizing the Covid mask mandates, not spreading Nazi propaganda) has been … well, here I am, on trial, again, in The People’s Court of New Normal Germany. The German authorities had my Tweets censored by Twitter. They reported me to The Federal Criminal Police Office, which is kind of the German FBI. They reported me to The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic Intelligence agency. My book is banned in Germany. They have damaged my income and reputation as an author. They have forced me to spend thousands of Euros in attorney’s fees to defend myself against these blatantly trumped-up charges. And now they are going to subject me, and my attorney, and anyone who attends my trial, to this humiliating, ham-fisted, official show of force.

    If you’re an American (or a Brit, or Australian, or whatever), and you’re thinking this is just a story about Germany, or the EU … well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t. My case is just one of countless examples of the criminalization of dissent that is happening throughout the West. A lot of Americans don’t realize it, but freedom of speech is protected in the German constitution.

    My story is not about the differences between the German and American freedom-of-speech protections. It is about the authorities prosecuting government critics like me on fabricated charges, banning our books, and censoring our political speech.

    Once a government starts doing that, the protections in its constitution no longer matter. You are no longer dealing with questions of law. You are dealing with the exercise of authoritarian power. That is what my story is about. Any Americans (and any other non-Germans) who have been paying attention to recent events will recognize what I’m talking about.

    As I’ve been saying, repeatedly, for the last four years or so, the global-capitalist power system (or the “corporatocracy,” or “The Powers That Be,” or whatever other name you need to call it) is going totalitarian on us. It dominates the entire planet, so it doesn’t have anything else to do. It is conducting a global “Clear and Hold” op. It is neutralizing internal resistance … any and all forms of internal resistance. The criminalization of dissent is an essential part of that. I’ve been documenting this process in my columns and in my books, and specifically in The Rise of the New Normal Reich — which you can read, unless you live in Germany — so forgive me if I don’t rehash it all here.

    The point is, we’re not in Kansas anymore. All that democracy and rule of law stuff is over. It is being gradually, and not so gradually, phased out.

    I get that most people don’t believe that. Most people won’t, until it’s too late. That’s how these transitions generally work. Most people can’t see what is coming until it gets here. I see it, but not because I’m a prophet. I’m just a loudmouth, and the loudmouths get crushed first.

    Anyway, if you are in Berlin on August 15, and would like to observe The People’s Court of New Normal Germany in action, or just get groped by a German law enforcement officer, the trial is scheduled to start at 10:30AM. Seating is on a first-come-first-served basis. So you may want to show up a little early, given all the scanning and screening and groping, and the “overall tense security situation.”

    The address is Elßholzstraße 30-33.

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Big Tech’s Trump Censorship Exposed

    You might be shocked to learn that Big Tech is already censoring information about America’s presidential race… I know it’s SHOCKING!

    The post Big Tech’s Trump Censorship Exposed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Briefing Paper: Digital Rights in Bahrain

    Introduction 

    When we refer to digital rights—in this example, Bahraini rights—we refer to a wide set of human rights that are exercised and defended in the digital sphere. These include liberties like privacy, information access, and freedom of speech. As digital platforms are becoming increasingly important in social, political, and economic life, these rights have become crucial. Although the relevance of this has increased over time, Bahrain’s digital rights situation remains highly restrictive. This is mainly because of three things; government censorship, surveillance and legal repression. In a globalised world where digital infrastructures are critical to social and economic progress, Bahrain must strike a balance between protecting human rights and advancing technology. This briefing paper examines the present status of digital rights in Bahrain.

    In the Middle East, Bahrain, a small island of 1.5 million people, has been a scenario of both government persecution and digital activism. This briefing paper examines the intricate dynamics surrounding digital rights in Bahrain, emphasizing the country’s past, and current policies, and wider ramifications for both the advancement of digital activism and human rights. Several measures, such as sophisticated surveillance, internet censorship, and legal repression, have been put in place by the Bahraini government to restrict and control digital expression. The report explores how the state monitors activists and dissidents, intercepts conversations, and gathers personal data. Censorship is another element to highlight a common practice that affects websites and online platforms with a critical stance towards the government, which are frequently blocked. We highlight the role of laws such as the Press Law of 2002 and the Cybercrime Law of 2014, which have become tools used to criminalize online dissent.

    This report provides a comprehensive overview of the current digital rights situation in Bahrain, assessing governmental actions, the effects of censorship and monitoring, and the reactions of civil society. By bringing these concerns to light, it hopes to foster a deeper understanding of Bahrain’s digital rights possibilities and difficulties as well as offer recommendations for improving the situation. This will facilitate the development of

    informed and effective strategies to protect and promote human rights in the country’s digital environment.

     Future Directions and Recommendations 

    Despite the challenges enumerated, there is room for improvement regarding digital rights in Bahrain as the digital sphere never changes. This indicates that it is possible to create new ways of protecting and promoting these rights when it is backed up by strong advocates who are also supported by the international community. This implies that digital security should be reinforced while at the same time developing secure communication platforms as well as advocating for legal reforms which will guard against infringement on online freedoms.

    Recommendations 

    1. Strengthening Digital Security: Activists need all-inclusive training to learn how they can protect their communications and data from being monitored by the governments.
    2. International Advocacy: International bodies and foreign nations must continue standing firm for Bahrain’s digital rights while reminding people about these rights to enable them to push for reformation through diplomatic means.
    3. Secure Platform Development: It is necessary to invest in creating safe communication networks that put the privacy of users first thus preventing any form of government infiltration.
    4. Legal Reforms: Recommend legal reforms based on EU law.

    Conclusion 

    Digital rights in Bahrain remain a contentious and challenging issue. The government’s extensive surveillance and censorship measures have significantly restricted these rights, however, activists are still finding ways by which they can resist these restrictions and advocate for greater freedoms. International support and continued efforts to develop secure technologies and legal protections are critical to ensuring that digital spaces can serve as platforms for positive political change in Bahrain.

    By shining a light on the digital rights situation in Bahrain and supporting efforts to protect these rights, the international community can contribute to the broader struggle for human rights and democratic governance in the region.

     

    Press below to download the Briefing Paper:

    Digital Rights in Bahrain

     

    The post Briefing Paper: Digital Rights in Bahrain appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • The People’s Court of New Normal Germany

    Just when I thought things could not possibly get more shockingly totalitarian in New Normal Germany, where I’m being prosecuted in criminal court (for the second time) for tweeting, the German authorities have gone and surprised me again. No, they haven’t established an actual Nazi-style People’s Court (pictured above) yet, and, of course, there is absolutely no similarity between the current German justice system, which is totally fair and democratic and a paragon of impartial justice and the rule of law, and The People’s Court of Berlin during the Nazi era, nor is there any similarity between Nazi Germany and New Normal Germany (i.e., modern-day Germany), and I would never, ever, suggest that there was, as that would be intellectually lazy, and tasteless, and completely inaccurate, and illegal, and … well, let me fill you in on the latest.

    The Berlin Superior Court has set a date for my next thoughtcrime trial. As regular readers will probably recall, my first thoughtcrime trial in January ended with my acquittal. So, the German authorities are putting me on trial again. Yes, they can do that in Germany. But, wait, that’s not the best part.

    The best part is, at my new thoughtcrime trial — this time in Berlin Superior Court — full-scale Anti-Terrorism Security protocols will be effect in the courtroom. Everyone will be subjected to TSA-style scanning and screening, and will have to surrender all their personal possessions and hats and coats and head coverings to the Security Staff, and completely empty their pockets of all items, before entering the courtroom. No computers, phones, smart-watches, or any other potential recording devices will be allowed in the courtroom. Pencils and sheets of paper will purportedly be provided to members of the press by Security Staff. Members of the press and public will be limited to 35, and, after they have successfully passed their “security screening,” they will be cordoned off in the last five rows of the gallery in the very back of the courtroom, “for security reasons,” and monitored by the armed Security Staff.

    For the benefit of any new readers unfamiliar with me and my case, I am not a terrorist. I’m an award-winning American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. I have lived here in Berlin for 20 years. The German authorities have been investigating and prosecuting me since August 2022. My case has been covered in The Atlantic, Racket News, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, and many other outlets, so I won’t reiterate every little detail again here. Basically, I am being prosecuted for “spreading pro-Nazi propaganda” because I criticized the Covid mask mandates and tweeted the cover artwork of one of my books, The Rise of The New Normal Reich.

    Here’s the cover artwork of that book. The other two images are the recent covers of Der Spiegel and Stern, two well-known mainstream German magazines, which are not being prosecuted for “spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.”As anyone (even the German authorities) can see, the Spiegel cover artwork uses exactly the same concept as the cover artwork of my book. The only difference is, the Spiegel swastika is covered by the German flag, whereas the swastika on my book is covered by a medical mask.

    Both artworks are obviously intended as warnings of the rise of a new form of totalitarianism. Der Spiegel was warning about the Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD) — as was Stern with its swastika floating in a champagne glass. I was warning about what I dubbed “The New Normal Reich,” the new nascent form of totalitarianism that emerged during 2020-2023, which is still very much on the rise, and which is thoroughly documented and analyzed in my book (which book was banned by Amazon in Germany at the same time the German authorities launched a criminal investigation of me and instructed Twitter to censor my Tweets, which Twitter did).

    The pretext the Court is citing for ordering these Anti-Terrorism Security protocols at my trial is ridiculous, and infuriating. The Court claims that the courtroom in which my trial is to take place is occasionally used for a certain “high-security” trial. Therefore, according to the Court, my trial must also be subjected to Anti-Terrorism Security protocols. Seriously, the Court sent my attorney a fax setting forth this “explanation,” which is, of course, a load of horseshit. The Berlin Superior Court is a huge building containing multiple courtrooms, one or two which are probably not subject to such Anti-Terrorism Security protocols when “high-security” trials are not taking place within them.

    No, the imposition of these Anti-Terrorism Security protocols is clearly a cynical ploy intended (a) to suppress coverage of the trial, (b) to discourage the press and public from attending, and (c) to intimidate and harass me and my legal counsel, and any members of the press and public who nevertheless attend the trial in spite of the “security procedures” they will be subjected to.

    This cynical tactic — which is not an official press blackout, because journalists can still attend and attempt to scribble notes on their knees with the pencils and sheets of paper provided by the Security Staff — comes as no real surprise. As I mentioned above, my case and my first trial got a fair amount of attention from the international press, enough to put the Court on notice that my prosecution was being watched. So, it’s no mystery why the German authorities would want to discourage any reporting on my “do-over” trial in Superior Court.

    Also, the gallery was filled to capacity at my original trial in January, where I delivered a rather unusual closing Statement to the Court, which was then published and disseminated widely in Germany. So, again, it is no real mystery why the Superior Court wants to discourage members of the public from attending this new trial by threatening to subject them to these humiliating “security” protocols, and why it has limited the gallery size to only 35 seats.

    I assume the German authorities — and by “authorities” I mean the Berlin District Prosecutor’s office, the Berlin Superior Court (Der Kammergericht), and whatever other authorities are intent on punishing me, and making an example of me, for daring to criticize the government’s edicts during 2020-2022, i.e., suspension of the constitutional rights, mask mandates, segregation, the banning of protests, etc. — I assume these authorities are particularly motivated to prevent the press from covering this second trial in Superior Court, because, from what I understand of the German legal system, they are going to “do” me (i.e., convict me) this time.

    The way the German legal system works, if they want to do you, is (1) you are acquitted in the lower Criminal Court, (2) the District Prosecutor appeals the verdict to the Superior Court, (3) the Superior Court overturns your acquittal, and (4) the prosecution goes back to the original Criminal Court, which stages a new trial, at which you will be found guilty, because, once the Superior Court has overruled your acquittal, the Criminal Court will convict you based on the Superior Court’s ruling. At which point you will appeal. And on and on and on it will go, until you are broke, or until you give up fighting because you are just so fucking exhausted.

    I’m not making this up. This is how The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (i.e., the post-Covid German justice system, which, again, bears no resemblance whatsoever to The People’s Court of Berlin in Nazi Germany, or to the courts in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, or any other totalitarian “justice” system) … this is how it works in New Normal Germany if you are a critic of the authorities and refuse to meekly accept whatever punishment they want to summarily dish out for whatever they deem to be your thoughtcrimes.

    But, hey, at least they’re not going to take me out and put me up against a wall and shoot me, like they did with political criminals in Nazi Germany, and the USSR, so I suppose I should be grateful. I’ll have to work on that.

    If you think my case is an aberration, it isn’t. There are many, many other people — critics of the government’s “Covid measures” during 2020-2023 — who are being persecuted and made examples of. Most of these people do not have the financial resources to pay lawyers to fight these prosecutions, so they plead guilty to the charges and pay the fines, which are typically much less than what they would face in attorney’s fees. Being somewhat of a public figure, I thought it was my responsibility not to do that. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has donated to my legal defense fund, which is how I have been able to cover my legal expenses. There’s enough left in that fund to cover this next trial in Superior Court, so I’m OK for now, financially. I mention that because people are already asking how they can send me money.

    What people can do, if they want to do something helpful, is make as much noise as possible about what is happening, not just in Germany, but all throughout the West. Because what is happening is, well, what I tried to capture and analyze in my book. The Powers That Be are going totalitarian on us. They are gradually, and not so gradually, phasing out the so-called “liberal” or “democratic” rights and principles that it was necessary to placate the Western masses with during the Cold War era, which it is no longer necessary to do beyond a certain superficial point.

    I have published three books of essays documenting this transition to a new global-capitalist form of totalitarianism, so I’m not going to go on and on about it here. But that’s what all the censorship is about. That’s what all the manufactured hysteria, fomented hatred, fanaticism, the permanent state of “emergency” and “crisis,” the “culture wars,” the cults of personality, the bombardment of our minds with absolutely meaningless nonsense, the naked displays of force, the blatant instrumentalization of the justice system to punish political dissidents, not just here in Germany, but throughout the “democratic” West … that is what all this is about.

    I’ll keep my readers posted on the details of my upcoming trial in Berlin Superior Court. My attorney is objecting to these “security protocols,” of course. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, instead of sending me money this time, maybe try to step back from all the mass hysteria and hatred that we are being inundated with and see the big picture. It isn’t pretty.

    Help spread the word about the new totalitarianism, about the phasing-out of our democratic rights. I don’t care which “side” of whatever you are on — Trump, Biden, Palestine, Israel, the culture wars, the cancel campaigns, Covid, Elon Musk, Russia, whatever — and neither do The Powers That Be. Take a step back and try to see the bigger picture … the forest, instead of just the trees. And then make as much noise about it as you can.

    We are heading somewhere very ugly … somewhere most of us can’t imagine. Some of us will get there first, but all of us will be there, together, eventually. My story is just one example of what it will be like there, in that ugly place. It isn’t really a story about Germany. It is a story about the end of the myth of democracy, and the rule of law, and all that good stuff. As Frank Zappa once so eloquently explained …

    The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

    It’s something to behold, that brick wall is, especially up close and personal. You’ll see when you get here. I’ll save you a seat.

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tibet’s Flag Getting Censored In Elon’s ‘X’ Files

    For a number of years now our team; over on what was Twitter, now ‘X’, noticed our account was being targeted and restricted, with follower numbers cut, various bans and posts being blocked from view. Any thought that Elon Musk’s take-over would see a lifting of such covert censorial actions was soon dashed when our already serverely reduced follower count was blocked by a ceiling limit. So much for free-speech and respecting human rights, eh Elon?

    Today we discover that Tibet’s flag is now being regarded by ‘X’ as ‘sensitive content’ (another way to reduce the visibility and reach of a post) having been sent a tweet by Raimo Kangasniemi – a long-standing friend and supporter of or work for Tibet – we noticed it was hidden from open view.

    Tibet's Flag Getting Censored In Elon's 'X' Files

    Clearly Musk’s ‘X’algorithms lack the capacity to decide for themselves to suddenly apply such restrictions on viewing the Tibetan national flag, or deeming it ‘sensitive material’ which means that this latest incidence of censorship is yet another example of the sly censorship operating in regard to Tibet; and our account!

    For those brave enough to view the content this is what they would have seen, shocking and deeply offensive, right Elon?

    Tibet's Flag Getting Censored In Elon's 'X' Files

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • Israel Faces No Apparent Red Line, But Pro-Palestinian Media Workers Do

    British cartoonist Steve Bell estimates that he has drawn more than 13,000 comic strips, illustrations and cartoons since the early 1980s, most of them for The Guardian newspaper. But shortly after the Israeli military attacked Gaza in the aftermath of October 7, Bell’s drawing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu carving a Gaza-shaped incision into his belly led to his dismissal from the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Idaho Law Criminalizes Librarians Who Allow LGBTQ Books to Stay on Their Shelves

    It just became more dangerous for a librarian to check out a book to a child in Idaho. On July 1, House Bill 710 went into effect in the state, undermining the agency of library workers to build collections that meet the needs of their communities. The legislation targets “harmful materials” in public and school libraries, requiring library workers to move them within 60 days at the request of any…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized

    The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

    This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

    This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

    In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

    Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

    For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

    For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

    “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

    This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

    Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

    Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

    Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

    Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

    Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Digital currencies, combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism, will create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society.

    Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

    Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    Weaponizing politics. Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset.

    Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have-nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

    The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the facts speak for themselves.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

    The post Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden

    No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.

    Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.

    Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.

    1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”

    2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

    4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.

    6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

    7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

    8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

    9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

    12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

    14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

    15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.

    16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.

    17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.

    18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

    20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

    These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    We are the government.

    The post Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Censorship at a Jewish School Part of a Crisis for Free Expression

     

    Boiling Point: School censors story about LA Muslim teens and war

    Shalhevet school head David Block (Boiling Point, 6/2/24): “If our community can’t handle something, I do have to consider that.”

    The staff of the Boiling Point don’t consider themselves student journalists. They consider themselves journalists.

    The official paper of Shalhevet, a prestigious orthodox Jewish day school in Los Angeles, is not a mere extra-curricular activity for the college-bound, but a living record of the larger community. And so the fact that the school is censoring the paper’s coverage of pro-Palestine viewpoints is an illustration of the nation’s current crisis of free speech and the free press as Israel’s slaughter in Gaza rages on.

    The Boiling Point (6/2/24) reported that the school administration had censored an article about Muslim perspectives on Gaza because it quoted a teenager who “said Israel was committing genocide and that she did not believe Hamas had committed atrocities.” The paper said:

    Head of school Rabbi David Block told faculty advisor Mrs. Joelle Keene to take down the story from all Boiling Point postings later that day.

    It was the first time the administration had ordered the paper to remove an active story. The story is also not published in today’s print edition.

    “Shalhevet’s principal ordered that the entire paper be taken out of circulation in what advisor Joelle Keene said was a striking change of pace,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (6/11/24) reported. She told the wire service, “There have been difficult stories and difficult moments and conflicts and that sort of thing. We’ve always been able to work them out.”

    Justifications for censorship

    The administration’s justification for the censorship was twofold. The first reason for the censorship was that the pro-Palestine viewpoints were simply too hurtful for a community that was still in shock over the October 7 attacks against Israel by Hamas.

    This is, to be quite blunt, demeaning to the students and the community. I was not much older than these students during the 9/11 attacks, but I spent that day and days after that at my student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. While our reporters piled into a car to drive to New York City, I joined my fellow editorial board members—Jews, Arabs and many others—in navigating a future of war, attacks on civil liberties and anti-Islamic hate.

    And today, student journalists are no less important in this historical moment where students are standing up against the genocide in Gaza (USA Today, 5/2/24; AP, 5/2/24).

    The Boiling Point is hardly pro-Hamas. As one of its editors, Tali Liebenthal, said in response to this point, it was indeed painful for the community to hear anti-Israel opinions, but “I don’t think that the Boiling Point has any responsibility to shield our readers from that pain.” The Shalhevet students, in the tradition of Jewish inquiry, do certainly appear able to explore the tough and difficult subjects of their moment.

    But there’s a second, more banal reason for the censorship. Block told the Boiling Point, “My feeling is that this article would both give people the wrong impression about Shalhevet.” He added:

    It would have very serious implications for whether they’re going to consider sending the next generation of people who should be Shalhevet students to Shalhevet.

    Block is placing prospective parents’ sensitivities before truth and debate. He’s worried that families will see a quote in the paper they disagree with, decide the school is a Hamas hot house, and send their child for an education elsewhere. The suggestion is that the school’s enrollment numbers are more important, not just than freedom of the press, but than a central aspect of Jewishness: the pursuit of knowledge.

    Would Block block articles exploring why ultra-religious Jews like Satmars (Shtetl, 11/22/23) and Neturei Karta (Haaretz, 3/27/24) oppose Zionism for theological reasons? We should hope a school for Jewish scholarship would be wise to value discussions of deep ideas over fear of offending potential enrollees.

    Perverting ideals of openness

    Intercept: Columbia Law Review Refused to Take Down Article on Palestine, So Its Board of Directors Nuked the Whole Website

    Intercept (6/3/24): “After the editors [of the Columbia Law Review] declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.”

    The Boiling Point affair is indicative of a larger problem with a censorship that exploits the term “antisemitism” and a sensitivity to Jewish suffering to silence anything remotely critical of Israel’s far-right government. Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide, had his position as director at the Center of Genocide and Holocaust students at the University of Minnesota rescinded (MPR, 6/11/24) because he wrote that Israel’s intentions for its campaign in Gaza were genocidal (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23). The board of directors of the Columbia Law Review briefly took down the journal’s website in response to an article (5/24) published about the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians—after the piece had already been spiked by the Harvard Law Review (Intercept, 6/3/24).  The chair of the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College was violently arrested during an anti-genocide protest (Jerusalem Post, 5/3/24).

    The 92nd Street Y, a kind of secular Jewish temple of arts and culture in New York City, encountered massive staff resignations (NPR, 10/24/23) after it canceled a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (London Review of Books, 10/18/23). The author of the American Jewish Committee’s definition of antisemitism admits that his work is being used to crush free speech (Guardian, 12/13/19; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/27/24).

    These are prominent institutions that are meant to be pillars of openness and discourse in a free society, yet that are perverting themselves in order not to offend donors, government officials and sycophantic newspaper columnists. And the victims of this kind of censorship are Jews and non-Jews alike.

    From the highest universities down to high schools like Shalhevet, administrators are cloaking their worlds in darkness. The journalists at the Boiling Point are part of a resistance keeping free speech and expression alive in the United States.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison – podcast

    My poems were written in anger after Tiananmen Square. But what motivates most prison writing is a fear of forgetting. Today I am free, but the regime has never stopped its war on words. By Liao Yiwu

    Continue reading…

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

  • Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates

    It was given top billing, a near absurd show intended to rope in content on a global social media platform, thereby denying all outside Australia access to it.  Because an Australian official had deemed a video too disturbing and offensive for Australians of ordinary sensibility (the standard remains opaquely absurd), the world’s citizenry were also to be barred from viewing it.  It did not matter that those in the US, for instance, could readily digest the same, unabridged content, or that news networks in that country could readily broadcast the material in its entirety.

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, smacked X (formerly known as Twitter) and Meta with legal notices to remove links to a video within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The video featured a livestreamed church service at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church, which was abruptly interrupted by a stabbing assault.  The perpetrator was a 16-year-old youth.  Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.

    X Corp’s erratic, truculent CEO thought differently about this overly generous extension of Australia’s Online Safety Act.  Elon Musk found Inman Grant’s demand insensible, calling her a “censorship commissar” in her insistence on global content bans.  While he was happy to acquiesce to restricting access to the video in Australia, the world was quite something else.

    The issue wound its way to the Federal Court.  On May 15, the Commissioner’s case received something of a sinking blow.  Justice Geoffrey Kennett pondered the “potential consequences for orderly and amicable relations between nations, if a notice with the breath contended for were enforced”.  It would, for instance, “be ignored or disparaged in other countries”.  In the United States, no court would agree to enforce any relevant injunction requiring X Corp to take down the relevant URLs, numbering 65.

    The judge acknowledged that the Online Safety Act covered “acts, omissions, matters and things outside Australia” but did not stipulate what “all reasonable steps” were in the context of removing material.  “A clear expression of intention would be necessary to support a conclusion that Parliament intended to empower the Commissioner to issue removal notices with the effect for which she contends.”  It followed that she had failed to establish “that compliance with the removal notice entails blocking access to the 65 URLs by all users of X Corp.”

    The matter should have ended there, but the regulatory instinct of condescending officials is often obstinate.  As proceedings continued through the month, more opposition manifested.  On May 27, Justice Kennett granted orders permitting the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) leave to intervene.  The intervention, reasoned FIRE, sought “to focus the court’s attention on how a global takedown order would disregard the strong free speech protections of countries like the US and lend an air of legitimacy to repressive regimes’ efforts to assert control over online content everywhere.”

    On June 5, the Commissioner finally filed a notice of discontinuance in proceedings against X.  The EFF stated with much satisfaction “that the Commissioner saw the error of her efforts”, reasoning that such global take down notices “threaten freedom of expression around the world, creating conflicting legal obligations, and lead to the lowest common denominator of internet content being available around the world”.  Doing so permitted “the least tolerant legal system to determine what we all are able to read and distribute online.”

    Very true – except that the Commissioner showed few signs of enlightenment, and certainly nothing in mending her crypto-authoritarian ways.  A statement from Inman Grant showed that her program of infantilisation and regulation of the Internet is an ongoing one.  “Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community. I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made.”

    In Inman Grant’s mind, Australians generally accepted (very good of her to think so) that such “graphic material should not be broadcast on television, which begs an obvious question why it should be allowed to be distributed freely and accessible online 24/7 to anyone, including children.”  As the country’s online safety regulator, she expected “reasonable companies to be taking action in relation to this type of content.”

    Unfortunately for free speech advocates and information libertarians, the Commissioner’s paranoia does have an audience. Ever since its creation, the Australian Commonwealth has shown a parental obsession with censorship.  And now, we have such sentiments as those of Michael Miller, Executive Corp Australasia Executive Chairman, lecturing the public about the need for big tech companies to pay “a social license” should they “want access to Australian consumers”.

    Such an encumbering license would permit the Australian government “to make the platforms liable for all content that is amplified, curated, and controlled by their algorithms or recommender engines”.  It would also grant the government powers to “ultimately block access to our country and our people if they refuse to play by our rules.”

    When an entity such as News Corp gives advice on what should or should not be accessible to the broader citizenry of any country, the bells should be going off.  The Big Tech behemoths have much to answer for – the destruction of privacy, the ruthless monetisation of user data, behavioural modification and hypnotic seduction.  But governments of all hues always cling to the same logic: the public is a dangerous beast best fed morsels of information rather than the whole buffet.  Ignorance breeds manageable docility.

    The post Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chinese artist hits back at party censorship with trashy performance

    A Chinese artist is hitting back at the Communist Party’s ongoing attempts to censor cultural expression even far beyond China’s borders with an exhibit in Sydney depicting the kind of “garbage” that gets produced when artists agree to stay within the government’s “red lines.”

    As part of her performance art exhibit at Sydney’s Passage Gallery — titled “Junk,” which runs through July 19 – Xiao Lu creates artwork live, but within a pattern of red neon strips, before crumpling it up and tossing it away like trash.

    “The whole of the Passage Gallery exhibition hall is set up as a black space,”  Xiao told RFA Mandarin at the launch of her exhibit. “There are red lights that represent China’s censorship of art exhibitions and free speech.”

    “In Chinese, we use the phrase ‘red lines’ to denote lines that can’t be crossed,” Xiao said. “If you cross them, something bad will happen.”

    She said it’s not just in China that Beijing stifles creativity, however.

    “Self-censorship by art institutions invades everyone’s soul,” Xiao said, adding that even exhibition venues in Australia can be wary of annoying the Chinese government.

    “Even here, it’s rare to see an exhibit that truly reflects the reality of China,” she said.

    It’s not that Australia lacks work by Chinese artists. In Sydney alone, small and large venues alike run frequent shows year round that are lavishly sponsored by Chinese companies.

    “Most of those exhibits focus on work with ‘Chinese characteristics’ that is overwhelmingly unrelated to political and social reality in China today,” she said.

    ENG_CHN_ART CENSORSHIP_06172024.2.jpg
    Chinese artist Xiao Lu’s performance art exhibit at Sydney’s Passage Gallery, June 14, 2024. (Lionel TC/RFA)

    “This is increasingly similar to what’s happening in China, where most of the works I see are devoid of content,” Xiao said. “Contemporary art shouldn’t be about eulogizing something, or focusing on superficial form.”

    “It should face up to the problems of the age it is living in, and raise questions about them,” she said. “I don’t see this kind of work in China, but I only see it rarely in Australia, which is a problem.”

    ‘Soft-power infiltration’

    Xiao cites an example of Sydney’s Vermilion Art gallery, which invited her to write an article about the situation in China during the stringent restrictions of the zero-COVID era.

    “I was still in China when I received a call from a gallery asking me to write an article about the situation in China,” Xiao said. “It was during the pandemic [restrictions], and I wrote an article about lockdown. But the gallery didn’t dare to publish it.”

    Radio Free Asia approached Vermilion Art and invited them to respond to Xiao’s allegations, but no reply had been received by the time of publication.

    Taiwan-based artist Kacey Wong, who went to art school in Australia, agreed with Xiao’s assessment that Beijing is packaging approved forms of art to be shown in overseas galleries.

    “They take ancient Chinese culture and add various Communist Party-influenced elements to it, then export it as a form of soft-power infiltration and soft-power confrontation,” Wong said.

    “The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield,” he said.

    In January, Xiao boycotted an exhibition of Chinese art linked to former Australian Ambassador Geoff Raby, saying he had been lauded by the Communist Party newspaper the People’s Daily in December 2019 for his uncritical attitude to Beijing.

    In February, she held an exhibit in Melbourne which hit back at Beijing’s suppression of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and its clearance operations targeting the low-income population in the Chinese capital.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lionel TC for RFA Mandarin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be

    Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.

    Here’s what happened:

    1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.

    3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

    5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”

    7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).

    If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.

    University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.

    The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.

    Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.

    Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.

    In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.

    There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.

    We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Communication Crackdown in Federal Prisons Has Been Operating Quietly Until Now

    The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has quietly but steadily been implementing a nationwide policy that silences the voices of people incarcerated in federal prisons by preventing them from sharing the same email and phone contacts for people on the outside, also known as a “double contact ban.” The policy, which gives prison authorities wide leeway to censor communications, appears to have gone…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestinian Lawyer Censored for “Nakba as a Legal Concept” Article Speaks Out

    The website of the Columbia Law Review was taken down by its board of directors on Monday after student editors refused a request from the board to halt the publication of an academic article written by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” The article argues for the Nakba to be developed as a unique legal framework, related to but distinct from…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Columbia Law Review website shut down over ‘censored’ article critical of Israel

    Pacific Media Watch

    The editorial board of the Columbia Law Review journal — made up of faculty and alumni from the university’s law school — shut down the review’s website on Monday after editors refused to halt publication of an academic article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that was critical of Israel.

    Al Jazeera reports that the student editors of the journal said they were pressured by the board to not publish the article which accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza and implementing an apartheid regime against Palestinians.

    The review’s website was taken down after the article was published on Monday morning and remained offline last night, reports AP news agency.

    Columbia Law Review
    Columbia Law Review . . . “under maintenance”. Image: APR screenshot

    A static homepage informed visitors the domain was “under maintenance”.

    Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical.

    In a letter sent to student editors yesterday, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles”.

    However, the editor involved in soliciting and editing the aricle said they had followed a “rigorous review process”.

    ‘A microcosm of repression’
    The author of the article, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, said the suspension of the journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across US campuses”.

    The Intercept reports that this was the second time in barely eight months that Eghbariah had been censored by US academic publications.

    Columbia Law Review
    Columbia Law Review . . . second journal to censor Palestinian law scholar over Nakba truth. Image: APR screenshot

    Last November, the Harvard Law Review made the unprecedented decision to “kill” (not publish) the author’s edited essay prior to publication. The author was due to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the quality journal.

    As The Intercept reported at the time, “Eghbariah’s essay — an argument for establishing ‘Nakba’, the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope — faced extraordinary editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship.”

    “When the Harvard publication spiked his article, editors from another Ivy League law school reached out to Eghbariah.

    “Students from the Columbia Law Review solicited a new article from the scholar and, upon receiving it, decided to edit it and prepare it for publication.

    “Now, eight months into Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, Eghbariah’s work has once again been stifled.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Broadcast bill passed by Uruguay Senate threatens press freedom

    Mexico City, May 30, 2024—Uruguayan authorities should not approve a proposed broadcast law passed by the Senate and should ensure that all media legislation is discussed broadly, including with civil society organizations and journalist representatives, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

    On May 14, the Uruguayan Senate approved the proposed “Law of Audiovisual Content Broadcasting Services” without consulting civil society organizations or other groups, according to news reports.

    Article 72 of the proposed law states that broadcasting services “have the duty to provide citizens with information, analysis, opinions, comments, and evaluations in a complete, impartial, serious, rigorous, plural, and balanced manner among and regarding political actors.” Local civil rights groups, including press freedom organization CAinfo, have warned this could potentially serve as a state control mechanism over the media.

    The House of Representatives must vote in June to either approve or reject the bill without amendments, according to the news reports.

    “Uruguayan lawmakers should not approve the proposed broadcasting law and should ensure that any new legislation is discussed broadly,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in Sao Paulo. “Control over what constitutes ‘complete, impartial, serious, rigorous, plural, and balanced’ information should never be in the hands of the state.”

    Fabián Werner, president of CAinfo, told CPJ that the bill would put Uruguay in a dangerous position, especially ahead of the country’s general elections scheduled for October 27.

    “This new law was rushed through the Senate to avoid democratic discussion and goes against international standards of freedom of expression,” he said. “It is very bad for democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.”

    Werner said that Uruguay’s current media law, approved by the government of former President José Mujica in 2013, was widely discussed with civil society sectors and international organizations such as UNESCO before and after passage.

    International organizations, including the Inter American Press Association, UNESCO, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have also expressed concerns about the proposed law.

    CPJ emailed the president of the Uruguayan House of Representatives, Ana Olivera, but did not immediately receive a reply.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Geoffrey King/CPJ Technology Program Coordinator and Tom Lowenthal/CPJ Staff Technologist.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them

    If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

    — Thomas Jefferson

    If America’s schools are to impart principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, they must start by respecting the constitutional rights of their students

    Take the case of Lucas Hudson.

    With all the negative press being written about today’s young people, it’s refreshing to meet a young person who not only knows his rights but is prepared to stand up for them.

    Lucas is a smart kid, a valedictorian of his graduating class at the Collegiate Academy at Armwood High School in Hillsborough County, Fla.

    So, when school officials gave Lucas an ultimatum: either remove most of his speech’s religious references from his graduation speech—in which he thanked the people who helped shape his character, reflected on how quickly time goes by, and urged people to use whatever time they have to love others and serve the God who loves us—or he would not be speaking at all, Lucas refused to forfeit his rights.

    That’s when Lucas’s father turned to The Rutherford Institute for help.

    In coming to Lucas’ defense, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warned school officials that their attempts to browbeat Lucas into watering down his graduation speech could expose the school to a First Amendment lawsuit.

    Thankfully for Lucas, the school backed down, and he was able to deliver his speech as written.

    It doesn’t always work out so well, unfortunately.

    Over the course of The Rutherford Institute’s 42-year history, we have defended countless young people who found themselves censored, silenced and denied their basic First Amendment rights, especially when they chose to exercise their rights to free speech and religious freedom.

    In case after case, we encounter an appalling level of ignorance on the part of public school officials who mistakenly believe that the law requires anything religious be banned from public schools.

    Here’s where government officials get it wrong: while the government may not establish or compel a particular religion, it also may not silence and suppress religious speech merely because others might take offense.

    People are free to ignore, disagree with, or counter the religious speech of others, but the government cannot censor private religious speech.

    Unfortunately, you can only defend your rights when you know them, and the American people—and those who represent them—are utterly ignorant about their freedoms, history, and how the government is supposed to operate.

    As Morris Berman points out in his book Dark Ages America, “70 percent of American adults cannot name their senators or congressmen; more than half don’t know the actual number of senators, and nearly a quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment. Sixty-three percent cannot name the three branches of government. Other studies reveal that uninformed or undecided voters often vote for the candidate whose name and packaging (e.g., logo) are the most powerful; color is apparently a major factor in their decision.”

    More than government corruption and ineptitude, police brutality, terrorism, gun violence, drugs, illegal immigration or any other so-called “danger” that threatens our nation, civic illiteracy may be what finally pushes us over the edge.

    As Thomas Jefferson warned, no nation can be both ignorant and free.

    Unfortunately, the American people have existed in a technology-laden, entertainment-fueled, perpetual state of cluelessness for so long that civic illiteracy has become the new normal for the citizenry.

    In fact, most immigrants who aspire to become citizens know more about national civics than native-born Americans. Surveys indicate that half of native-born Americans couldn’t correctly answer 70% of the civics questions on the U.S. Citizenship test.

    Not even the government bureaucrats who are supposed to represent us know much about civics, American history and geography, or the Constitution although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

    For instance, a couple attempting to get a marriage license was recently forced to prove to a government official that New Mexico is, in fact, one of the 50 states and not a foreign country.

    You can’t make this stuff up.

    Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. The government’s purpose is to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

    It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”

    Those who founded this country knew quite well that every citizen must remain vigilant or freedom would be lost. As Thomas Paine recognized, “It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

    You have no rights unless you exercise them.

    Still, you can’t exercise your rights unless you know what those rights are.

    “If Americans do not understand the Constitution and the institutions and processes through which we are governed, we cannot rationally evaluate important legislation and the efforts of our elected officials, nor can we preserve the national unity necessary to meaningfully confront the multiple problems we face today,” warns the Brennan Center in its Civic Literacy Report Card. “Rather, every act of government will be measured only by its individual value or cost, without concern for its larger impact. More and more we will ‘want what we want, and [will be] convinced that the system that is stopping us is wrong, flawed, broken or outmoded.’”

    Education precedes action.

    As the Brennan Center concludes “America, unlike most of the world’s nations, is not a country defined by blood or belief. America is an idea, or a set of ideas, about freedom and opportunity. It is these ideas that bind us together as Americans and have kept us free, strong, and prosperous. But these ideas do not perpetuate themselves. They must be taught and learned anew with each generation.”

    There is a movement underway to require that all public-school students pass the civics portion of the U.S. naturalization test—100 basic facts about U.S. history and civics—before receiving their high-school diploma, and that’s a start.

    Lucas Hudson would have passed such a test with flying colors.

    On graduation day, Lucas stepped up to the podium and delivered his uncensored valedictorian speech as written, without any interference by school censors.

    As Lucas’s father relayed to The Rutherford Institute:

    In the end, Lucas got to give his entire speech the way he wanted to give it, and everybody was paying attention.  Nobody got hurt.  Nothing bad happened.  It was just a young man using the First Amendment rights to speak his mind regarding his personal beliefs. [Lucas] never thought a few sentences in a speech would create such a controversy in his world, but this speech turned into a defining moment for him.  He will never be the same after this experience, but this permanent change is a good thing.  When it mattered, Lucas stood up for himself, and when those he stood up against tried to push him down, [The Rutherford Institute] came to his aide and backed him up to make it a fair fight. I am comforted to know you are defending the rights of the people.  These fights matter.  Every time you defend the rights of one person, you defend the rights of every person.  You helped my son fight for his rights against the school, and, in doing so, Hillsborough County Public Schools will think twice before infringing on the rights of future students. Your defense of Lucas became an inspiration for the students in his school and sparked a healthy and meaningful debate among the teachers, students, and parents about the value of the First Amendment and the need for limits on government control over our personal beliefs.  You are fighting for good and doing important work.  Don’t ever stop. Thank you, Rutherford Institute, for being there for my son when he needed you most.

    America needs more freedom fighters like Lucas Hudson and The Rutherford Institute.

    It’s up to us.

    We have the power to make and break the government.

    We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

    We must act—and act responsibly.

    A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s our job to keep freedom alive using every nonviolent means available to us.

    As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized in a speech delivered on December 5, 1955, just four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus: “Democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.”

    Know your rights. Exercise your rights. Defend your rights. If not, you will lose them.

    The post Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • K-12 Schools in New Jersey Are Becoming a Battlefield Over Palestine Advocacy

    On the heels of the eruption of the university movement for Palestine and the subsequent wave of repression that has been at the center of national politics, Congress has begun questioning K-12 school districts about how they will clamp down on the movement for Palestine. Under the guise of addressing “antisemitism,” public K-12 schools may become more of a flashpoint across the country over…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.