Category: Censorship

  • The American Library Association (ALA) recently reported there have been 695 attempts to censor library materials and services, as well as documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles over a seven-month period in 2023. According to the ALA report, “The majority of the targeted books were ‘written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.’ For example, in Iowa’s Urbandale…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Trudeau government in Canada is doing the bidding of the World Economic Forum in creating its very own online news registry aimed at “disinformation”. This is code for censorship and control. Canada is also rolling out the Online Safety Act which will protect you from nefarious truth-tellers that speak out against government propaganda.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • And, so, THAT Anniversary too is on my mind: 22 Years Ago, October 7, 2001, US-NATO Invaded Afghanistan: It Was Presented as “Act of Self Defense.” “America Was Attacked by an ‘Unnamed Foreign Power.’”

    World Water Monitoring Day | Ecovie Water Management

    From silly to serious, these national and international celebration days give pause for serious writers.

    World Suicide Prevention Day - LMFM


  • In the land of the free and the home of the brave, a wave in the politically charged battle for intellectual freedom has peaked once more. Censorship threatens to silence underrepresented communities nationwide, encompassing LGBTQ+ youth, marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and many other facets of social identity. In academic spaces from coast to coast, the increasingly politicized, rising tide of book bans and challenges is washing away voices that need to be heard.

    Imagine striving to understand your place in the world as a 16-year-old queer student in today’s America. The journey of self-discovery is challenging enough without the additional burden of denied access to literature that reflects your experiences. Yet, this is the reality that many young people face as a growing number of states and school districts ban books that explore themes related to LGBTQ+ identities, racial diversity, gender equality, and the list continues.

    For me and my peers, books are not just stories; they are lifelines. Literature provides us with solace, understanding, and a sense of belonging to a world where our voices matter. When narratives that represent the experiences of underprivileged and underrepresented communities are silenced, the message is clear: your experiences and identity are not valid, and your voice does not matter.

    The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom’s latest report shows that the most recent bans on books strike a deeply troubling chord. It is alarming how these banned books overwhelmingly represent the challenges and lives of underprivileged, underrepresented groups. In the eyes of those imposing these bans, any ideas or identity that doesn’t fit the mold of a perfect white heteronormative America should be denied to our youth.

    Recent years have seen Texas leading the nation on this front, with challenges and book bans increasing significantly. In 2023 alone, the rate nearly doubled, and the year has yet to conclude. These bans are not occurring in isolation but are fueled by organized groups, including one that was recently categorized as an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    This is only one of the more organized groups that constantly try to trump the rights of students and youth across the nation in the name of “parental rights.” However, their day of reckoning is soon approaching because students have rights, too, and deserve better. As more and more groups like Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) call out this students’ rights crisis and work with legislators to combat these issues, a powerful movement is emerging.

    One leader can ignite a movement in their community, but it is not enough for one voice to rise against this tide. We need a chorus of voices, united in our determination to protect intellectual freedom and diversity of thought. It is time to reject the stifling influence of politics on our education system. We must demand that our schools remain spaces where all voices are heard, and all stories are valued, not where fear and politics supersede our rights.

    Whether you are a student, adult ally, policy maker, teacher, librarian, or anything in between or beyond, you can make a difference:

    1. Stay Informed: Educate yourself about the issues at hand. Understand what books are commonly banned, where, and why. Stay updated on the actions of groups advocating for censorship.
    2. Advocate: Attend school board meetings, engage with local policymakers, and use your voice to advocate for the inclusion of diverse perspectives in education.
    3. Support Affected Communities: Offer your support to marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ youth, racial and ethnic minorities, and others who are disproportionately affected. Amplify their voices and stories.
    4. Join or Support Organizations: Engage with SEAT and other groups actively working to combat censorship and promote intellectual freedom.
    5. Engage Youth: If you are an adult ally, engage with young people. Listen to their concerns, empower them to speak out, and provide guidance and support in their advocacy efforts.
    6. Encourage Open Dialogue: Foster open dialogue in your communities about the importance of intellectual freedom and the value of diverse literature.
    7. Vote: Use your voting power to support candidates who prioritize education and intellectual freedom.

    In the face of this escalating battle for intellectual freedom, the call to action is clear. The rising tide of politically driven book bans and censorship threatens the very core of our imperfect educational system and the values we hold dear. Book bans are a threat to the voices of underprivileged and underrepresented communities of all backgrounds who deserve to see themselves reflected in the literature they read.

    Our response to this challenge must be resolute and unwavering. Let our rallying cry be clear: censorship has no place in our classrooms, and we stand united to protect the right to learn and the freedom to explore diverse ideas. The battle is ongoing, but with the growing coalition of advocates, educators, and students, we can turn the tide.

    Together, we can ensure that our future generations inherit a society that values humanity, acceptance, and understanding above all else. Let us march forward, hand in hand, knowing that our collective efforts will bring about the change we seek. In unity and mutual aid, we shall prevail against the forces of censorship, for the sake of a more inclusive, empathetic, and enlightened future.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • So, I’ve been excommunicated from Michael Shellenberger’s global anti-censorship movement. It’s my own fault. I was sowing dissension. I engaged in harmful speech in the group chat. I was making people feel uncomfortable. I was not playing ball. I was not with the program.

    The program, as you may recall, was launched in Westminster, London, in June, when Mike and Matt Taibbi and Russell Brand exposed the Censorship Industrial Complex …

    … for 35 pounds sterling a head.

    My readers may recall this piece I published about the secret gathering of journalists, authors, artists, academics, and activists that took place after that public event. I couldn’t say too much about it at the time, as we were operating under strict OPSEC protocols, and had taken oaths of silence, and so on, which, being excommunicated, I am no longer bound by. I’m still going to be a little cagey, however, as there are a lot of people involved in Mike’s movement who I like and respect, and I don’t want to harm them with my dissension-sowing any more than necessary.

    Also, before I make fun of Mike, and share my somewhat more serious thoughts about how not to launch “a free-speech movement,” I want to make it clear that I still support this campaign, and any other anti-censorship campaign, regardless of how flawed or supercilious it may be.

    All right, let’s get down to it, shall we?

    Mike’s movement is preparing to publish a declaration. It’s a good declaration. I contributed to it. I signed it, although my name will not appear on it now, as Mike has threatened to remove it if I published a piece like this. Mike is an extremely smart guy, but he doesn’t seem to get that I don’t respond well to threats … or, rather, that this is how I respond to threats. Or, who knows? Maybe he actually wanted me to publish this piece, and goaded me into it, which, I can see how that could be a shrewd PR move.

    In any event, it’s a good declaration (or it was the last time I had access to it). There is nothing wrong with the declaration. What has taken up most of the last three months of the coalition’s time and energy, and has led to my excommunication, is the hunt for Very Important Persons to be included as signatories when the declaration is released.

    Apparently, the way it works with such declarations and “open letters,” and so on, is that you write up your declaration or letter and then you try to get selected big shots to sign it in order to make it look more impressive to … well, whoever you’re trying to impress. The character of your big-shot signatories is critical, because the media, and “the court of public opinion,” and your potential major philanthropic backers, are going to judge you by the company you keep.

    Mike’s anti-censorship coalition has been carrying out this process by “consensus,” under the watchful eye and firm hand of Mike. Mike is not the “leader” of this coalition, which is totally leaderless and democratic, of course. He is just the “facilitator,” who explains the objectives, makes the final decisions, polices people’s speech, and excommunicates suppressive persons whose dissension-sowing threatens to disrupt the “atmosphere of mutual respect” that Mike feels he needs to “maintain” in the group chat.

    Yes, Mike has a little control-freak problem. Many non-leader leaders of “movements” do. If you’ve ever been involved in political activism, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, count your blessings.

    Anyway, the Hunt for VIP Signatories has been awkward, due to (a) the need to maintain the appearance of “decision-by-consensus” in the coalition’s totally non-hierarchical group chat, (b) concern among various coalition members about including “divisive” VIPs, and (c) Mike’s behind-the-scenes machinations.

    For example, at one point, I offered to contact one of the only VIPs I know to ask him for help with further VIP outreach. Mike jumped into the chat and quashed that idea, as I had made it clear that I was not willing to try to dictate to this Very Important Person who he should and shouldn’t reach out to for us. Days or weeks later — I can’t remember exactly — one of Mike’s employees wrote to me sub rosa and gave me the secret go-ahead from Mike. So, I reached out to this VIP, who then reached out to some other VIPs, many of whom were happy to sign, and some of whom offered to help with further outreach.

    Panic broke out at Coalition HQ. Some of the Very Important Persons that my Very Important Person had invited were potentially Divisive Persons, who hadn’t been vetted by consensus on the coalition’s VIP-vetting spreadsheet. (I kid you not, there’s an actual spreadsheet.) So, I was asked to reach out to my VIP and instruct him to cease and desist with further outreach before he reached out to further Divisive Persons, who might reach out to further Divisive Persons, at which point, everything might spin out of control! Needless to say, I declined to do that.

    If you’re wondering about exactly who qualifies as a “Divisive Person” in the coalition … well, certainly not Very Important Persons like Richard Dawkins, who in 2021 compared folks who “refused” the Covid “vaccines” to “faith-heads releasing rattlesnakes in supermarkets”…

    But later admitted that “mistakes may have been made”

    Or fanatical New Normalist Slavoj Žižek …

    You can watch Slavoj getting extremely worked up in support of Covid “vaccine” mandates, and mocking people who care about “silly” things like their personal bodily autonomy, with Briahna Joy Gray in 2021, if you think you have the stomach for it …


    VIPs like Dawkins and Žižek are not “divisive.” They are very important A-list persons who are committed to universal human rights, and freedom of speech, and all that kind of stuff, unless, of course, the authorities announce that they need to go full-blown totalitarian and lock down and segregate and censor everyone because of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate, in which case, you know, “Sieg fucking Heil!”

    Russell Brand, however, is definitely “divisive.” You remember Russell Brand from that poster above advertising the big event in London, don’t you? Here’s our friend Russell Brand today …

    The Russell-Brand-cancellation op was what sealed my fate with Mike’s free speech movement. I had been holding my nose for quite a while — for example, I never opposed having people like Dawkins and Žižek on the signatories list, as I understood the PR logic — and I was praying that none of the coalition members would bring up “the revelations” (as one of them put it), but the odds of that not happening were poor. Sure enough, someone brought Brand up, and someone checked, and he had been asked to sign on, but as of Saturday he hadn’t responded, at least not according to the VIP-vetting spreadsheet. So that was obviously a huge relief. However, what if he responded now (i.e., post-“revelations”) and wanted to sign? Should he still be allowed to? A “risk assessment” was suggested.

    And, OK, I got a little snarky and proposed that we skip the “risk assessment” and all the other PR-strategizing bullshit and just uphold the principles we are claiming to defend.

    Whereupon Mike Shellenberger needed to reach me, urgently, presumably to shout at me and threaten me again. I’d had an earlier such phone call from Mike, when I criticized his sucking up to Elon Musk and suggested that it made us look not quite neutral. Mike called me at home, apoplectic, that time, and threatened to kick me out of the club if I didn’t toe the line, which I found sort of funny, and a bit disturbing, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I have known a lot of control freaks in my day. And Mike has done, and is still doing, a lot of great work. And we all have our character flaws, don’t we?

    Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for another screaming, threatening conversation with Mike, as I was still at my friend’s converted monastery in Italy, and I finally had a peaceful day to myself. (The Italian workmen who are jackhammering big holes in the monastery walls don’t work on the weekends.) I decided I would call him back later.

    Next thing I knew, I was excommunicated.

    I’m not a professional movement builder, but I’m pretty sure this is not how you do it. I don’t mean my excommunication. I mean the suffocating top-down micromanagement, and the PR-strategizing, and the VIP-idolatry, and the paranoia about alienating mainstream people who are going to be alienated anyway, regardless of how many Hollywood celebrities and Harvard professors you dangle in their faces. The simple fact is, playing by the rules of the system and the “reality” you claim to be opposing a recipe for failure. Or, worse than failure, a diversion, the simulation of success. Which is where I’m afraid Mike’s “movement” is headed.

    Movements are not PR campaigns. Yes, of course, some PR is involved, but the masses are not your employees. And they aren’t CGI extras in your narcissistic movie. They are actual living, breathing people, people who do not need us to lead them. Basically, the masses don’t give a shit what Richard Dawkins and Slavoj Žižek endorse. The editors of “respected” publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times give a shit, but the masses don’t give a shit about them. If you are going to “build a movement” to oppose the Censorship Industrial Complex (which Mike claims he wants to do), at some point, you’re going to have to alienate some of your friends and colleagues in NormalWorld and get your hands dirty and connect with the masses, or the “people that no one has ever heard of,” as Mike calls them.

    The people that no one has ever heard of are not stupid. They know the difference between a serious anti-censorship campaign and a vanity project. There’s still time for Mike to turn this thing around, let go of the reins, stop sucking up to the mainstream establishment, and reach out to the masses. Honestly, I hope he will. I wish him and the London gang success. There are millions of people out there who would get on board with a grassroots campaign opposing the Censorship Industrial Complex, but, to get them on board, you have to let go of the wheel and let them steer the ship.

    The irony is, when you’re “building a movement,” when you know you are succeeding is when you lose control of it, when the movement doesn’t need you to “lead” it, when it starts moving in directions you never imagined and starts doing things you never intended. But you can’t get there if you suffocate it in its infancy, if you are so obsessed with maintaining control that you snuff out every idea and impulse that doesn’t conform to your vision of it.

    Mike means well. He’s got a good heart. And he’s a fighter. All of which I respect. I hope he can learn that lesson, quickly. Perhaps the thing he has set in motion will teach it to him as things progress. We could certainly do with an actual global grassroots anti-censorship movement. I hope Mike and the gang can unclench their anal sphincters a bit and help get us there.

    Oh, and regarding Russell Brand. I don’t know Russell Brand. I have absolutely no idea what he has or hasn’t done. Neither do you, probably. Which is not the point. The point is the current global-capitalist crackdown on dissent, which is in full-swing. Russell Brand is just the latest head on a spike, alongside the heads of Assange, Snowden, Trump, Corbyn, Carlson, et al. They are greasing up a spike for Bobby Kennedy’s head, and the head of anyone else who challenges them, even people that no one has ever heard of, like me.

    I think Max Blumenthal made the point succinctly …

    … but, you know, Max is a Russian-sponsored, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Trump-loving, transphobic, anti-Semitic Jew, who raped his neighbor’s hamster … or whatever. But then, who among us isn’t, these days?

  • In recent years, conservative parents (and dark money-funded “parents’” groups) have attacked school boards as a political target and increasingly pursued book bans. PEN America reported “1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles” during the first half of the 2022-23 school year. These bans restrict students’ and local residents’ access to important knowledge about…

    Source

  • Over the past two and a half years, Republicans across the United States have introduced nearly 380 bills aimed at establishing a climate of fear among educators, librarians, and other school officials, according to a report released Wednesday by the free expression group PEN America. Distinct from the outright censorship measures that GOP lawmakers have unveiled in a number of U.S.

    Source

  • In suburban Atlanta on August 17, the Cobb County School District voted 4-3 to dismiss Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher, for reading the Scholastic-approved book “My Shadow Is Purple.” This decision contrasts with a prior ruling by a district tribunal, which cleared Rinderle and recommended against her termination. Georgia and several other states have enacted laws this year restricting youth…

    Source

  • Next week, I will begin teaching at a public university in Florida. When I announced my move to friends and colleagues, they were horrified. Wasn’t I terrified? Didn’t I know what Gov. Ron DeSantis was doing to public education in that state? In May, Governor DeSantis told Fox News that he would “destroy leftism in this country.” A week before that, Florida Sen. Rick Scott issued what he called a…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Exclusive: Media company recently signed lucrative deal with Saudi government-controlled MBC Group

    Vice has repeatedly blocked news stories that could offend the Saudi government, leaving its reporters unsure if they are still able to report freely on the kingdom’s human rights abuses, sources have said.

    The media company recently signed a lucrative partnership deal with the MBC Group, a media company controlled by the Saudi government, to establish a joint venture in the Middle Eastern country. Of the 29 jobs currently advertised on Vice’s careers page, 20 are based in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh.

    Continue reading…

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

  • In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum.  “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”

    The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light.  Information freedom is only to be lauded when it favours your side.

    Who regulates, let alone should regulate, information disseminated across the Internet remains a critical question.  Gone is the frontier utopianism of an open, untampered information environment, where bright and optimistic netizens could gather, digitally speaking, in the digital hall, the agora, the square, to debate, to ponder, to dispute every topic there was.  Perhaps it never existed, but for a time, it was pleasant to even imagine it did.

    The shift towards information control was bound to happen and was always going to be encouraged by the greatest censors of all: governments.  Governments untrusting of the posting policies and tendencies of social media users and their facilitators have been, for some years, trying to rein in published content in a number of countries.  Cyber-pessimism has replaced the cyber-utopians.  “Social media,” remarked science writer Annalee Newitz in 2019, “has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.”  The emergence of the terribly named “fake news” phenomenon adds to such efforts, all the more ironic given the fact that government sources are often its progenitors.

    To make things even murkier, the social media behemoths have also taken liberties on what content they will permit on their forums, using their selective algorithms to disseminate information at speed even as they prevent other forms of it from reaching wider audiences.  Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, heeding the call of the very screams and bellows of their own creation, thought it appropriate to exclude or limit various users in favour of selected causes and more sanitised usage.  In some jurisdictions, they have become the surrogates of government policy under threat: remove any offending material, or else.

    Currently under review in Australia is another distinctly nasty example of such a tendency.  The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is a proposed instrument that risks enshrining censorship by stealth.  Its exposure draft is receiving scrutiny from public submissions till August.  Submissions are sought “on the proposed laws to hold digital platform services to account and create transparency around their efforts in responding to misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”

    The Bill is a clumsily drafted, laboriously constructed document.  It is outrageously open-ended on definitions and a condescending swipe to the intelligence of the broader citizenry.  It defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.”  Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”

    The bill, should it become law, will empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to monitor and regulate material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”.  The Big Tech fraternity will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA, with the regulator even going so far as proposing to “create and enforce an industry standard”.  Those in breach will be liable for up to A$7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations.

    What, then, is harm?  Examples are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill.  These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability.  It can also include disruption to public order or society, the old grievance the State has when protestors dare differ in their opinions and do the foolish thing by expressing them.  (The example provided here is the mind of the typical paranoid government official: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”)

    John Steenhoff of the Human Rights Law Alliance has identified, correctly, the essential, dangerous consequence of the proposed instrument.  It will grant the ACMA “a mechanism what counts as acceptable communication and what counts as misinformation and disinformation.  This potentially gives the state the ability to control the availability of information for everyday Australians, granting it power beyond anything that a government should have in a free and democratic society.”

    Interventions in such information ecosystems are risky matters, certainly for states purporting to be liberal democratic and supposedly happy with debate.  A focus on firm, robust debate, one that drives out poor, absurd ideas in favour of richer and more profound ones, should be the order of the day.  But we are being told that the quality of debate, and the strength of ideas, can no longer be sustained as an independent ecosystem.  Your information source is to be curated for your own benefit, because the government class says it’s so.  What you receive and how you receive, is to be controlled paternalistically.

    The ACMA is wading into treacherous waters.  The conservatives in opposition are worried, with Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman describing the draft as “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers.  It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.”  Not that the conservative coalition has any credibility in this field.  Under the previous governments, a relentless campaign was waged against the publication of national security information.  An enlightened populace is the last thing these characters, and their colleagues, want.

  • Earlier this year, members of the News Enlightenment Initiative (NEI-Germany) and Project Censored partnered to recruit an international jury of news professionals and media scholars to identify and highlight “News…

    The post Media Freedom Matters: Exposing International News Neglect, Censorship, and Agenda Cutting Across the Globe appeared first on Project Censored.

    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

  • In a world of visible hate, it’s critical that we stand together in solidarity and unite against hatred and division.

    Recent events in Sweden for example have been very unsettling – not just in Sweden itself, but on a global scale.

    In June, an Iraqi man (of Christian heritage) named Salman Momika burned the Qur’an (a Holy text for Muslims) outside a mosque in Stockholm.

    On a second occasion, he stamped on the text outside of the Iraqi embassy (not setting it alight).

    Many Muslims across the globe were outraged and diplomatic relations between Sweden and Iraq were strained.

    Protesters in Iraq stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad (starting fires within the compound), with the Swedish embassy later evacuating staff from Iraq to Stockholm for security purposes.

    The Iraqi government later expelled the Swedish ambassador in Baghdad and suspended business with Swedish companies.

    Following the recent book burning in Sweden, further threats in “counter-protest” proposed burning the Torah and Christian Bible – but did not go ahead.

    And these are not the only incidents – and disappointing responses – of its kind in recent years in Sweden. Other countries such as Denmark have also been affected.

    However, book burning is just the tip of the iceberg.

    In recent years, we’ve witnessed increasing levels of hate and division globally.

    Rising levels of hate continue across the board, for example in the form of antisemitism, anti-Muslim hate, homophobia, anti-refugee rhetoric and abuse towards the Chinese community following the Covid-19 pandemic.

    At the same time, increasing frustrations and fear around censorship, (self-made) blasphemy laws and (losing the right to) freedom of expression have surfaced.

    Take France for example. In this fiercely secular nation of Christian heritage, with a large Muslim population, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons row has repeatedly ignited rows over freedom of expression and the targeting minority communities.

    Discussions have often censored around Muslims beliefs and representations of Islamic traditions.

    Likewise, across the Middle East and North African region and diaspora, ex-Muslims and activists fleeing religious theocracies (such as Iran), are feeling increasingly censored and targeted.

    The #LetUsTalk campaign, for example, critically highlighted how Muslims and feminists in the diaspora (with very different lived experiences) are repeatedly attempting to silence Iranian women.

    Targeting a range of women (ex-Muslims, liberal Muslims and secular activists), they’ve falsely been labelling their political activism as “Islamophobic”.

    We’ve therefore seen growing tensions and discussions around religious and cultural coexistence and the right to assembly and free speech.

    At the same time however, we’ve also seen examples of inter-communal solidarity.

    For example, we’ve witnessed welcome gestures of solidarity amongst different communities – including Jewish-Muslim partnerships. I myself was delighted to recently attend another wonderful event led by Voice of Salam partner, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).

    Their Jewish-Muslim Solidarity Rally was held online to a global audience. And with speakers from the USA, UK, wider Europe, India and more – it was a great moment of solidarity, friendship and conversation.

    Moving forward, what these incidents, debates and gatherings of solidarity now bring are an opportunity for reflection and united action, whatever our faith or cultural background.

    Questions around censorship, freedom of expression and belief (both religious and secular) and social cohesion have all been brought to the forefront. And need to be addressed.

    And it’s exactly in the name of freedom of expression and social cohesion, why I believe that the most sustainable necessary changes and solutions must be developed through inter-communal dialogue.

    We need to be respectful but also inclusive of difference. We need to welcome diverse and opposing views, not censor or shut down them down.

    We must not ban or censor acts of “(perceived) offense”, such as the burning of sacred texts. For the law exists to protect us from hate, not offence – and here lies a critical difference.

    As a Muslim woman, I know how publicly burning the Qur’an (in particular in a multifaith society where Muslims represent religious minority) is hurtful, heartbreaking and disrespectful to many.

    I also know of – and fervently believe in – the fundamental importance of the right to freedom of expression is. One that has long been fought for – and still is in many societies.  

    On a personal level, I’m not outraged by the act of the Qur’an being burned in itself. I don’t welcome it, but I’m more worried about the reasons behind the act and the responses than the pages itself (of if people dislike my religion).

    My faith is personal and doesn’t rely on the approval of others or mere paper.

    I won’t respond negatively to hate, fear or ignorance. This serves no purpose and proposes to understand the actions of the perpetrator – which can be complex.

    Instead, I’m keen to know the reasons behind the act – which can include trauma, social isolation and negative stereotyping. These actions worry me – and their effects before and after such personal protests. 

    What’s worrying about public burning of sacred texts is how they are potentially damaging to the social cohesion of our societies, inspiring hatred and exclusion.

    This is what we should be outraged about – as well as the counter-protests by Muslims. Such behaviour feeds into negative stereotypes of Muslims and homogenises the beliefs and actions of a varied religious community.

    Responding so violently and loudly also feeds fears of censorship and the loss of personal freedom of expression.

    Of course, book burning should be discouraged and denounced for the harm it does to social cohesion. It’s an act of anger, distrust and/or trauma. It’s not positive.

    Yet, as upsetting as it is for many, this unwelcome act – at least in the Muslim context –must not be outlawed.

    We must instead stop future book burnings by tackling the root causes – for the sake of the book burner, the community behind the text and wider society. Because we’re all in this together.

    Firstly, we must attempt to understand the motives and history behind this behaviour.

    Voices of those with lived experience – including those of ex-Muslims and religious minorities both within and outside of Muslim countries, must not be silenced and censored. Even if they are “disliked”.

    We need to nurture societies where respect across the board erases the intentions behind these book burnings (whether anger, fear, distrust or hate) – where harmony, freedom and diversity all thrive

    As a society, we need to also understand the views and experiences behind hate and the effects of trauma and conflict.

    Secondly, we must discourage negative reactions.

    Freedom of expression (whether religious or secular in context) and freedom of assembly are crucial human rights.  Just like the freedom to practice ones’ religion, to believe in a faith or not, and to leave a religion too.

    Freedom to “not be offended” is not a right.

    It’s dishonest and disingenuous to confuse the right to be protected from hate (e.g. anti-Muslim hate) and the right to practice ones religion from the (non-existent) “right” to “not be offended”. 

    Conflating a group of people (Muslims) with a religious ideology (Islam – including Islamism) is also dangerous.

    It shuts down free speech in the name of Orthodox standards of “blasphemy” and places religious beliefs above human rights and secular freedoms. And as liberal Muslims, we know all about this.

    For myself and likeminded colleagues cling to the fight for freedom of expression and to stave off self-made blasphemy laws – including here in the UK.

    Left to right: abuse towards myself and a Muslim colleague from other members of the Muslim community – including antisemitic/misogynistic trolling campaigns (image 1), physical attacks (image 2) and being sent abusive messages with pornographic videos (image 3).

    We have often faced attempted censorship and exclusion – exactly because we stand up against hate: including homophobia, misogyny and antisemitism.

    In the UK for example, after nationwide protests by members of the British Muslim community, screenings of the Shia film “Lady of Heaven” were cancelled last summer in various cinemas across the country (I saw the film but that’s another story!).

    Then there was the Batley Grammar School affair in which a teacher was suspended, and forced into hiding by British Muslims, for wanting to show a cartoon of Prophet Muhammad to discuss the topic of blasphemy.

    As Muslims, we continue to struggle again and again against censorship.

    From within our community, we’re up against Islamists who repeatedly seek to censor “unpopular”/liberal views (e.g. regarding LGBT+ and women’s rights) in the name of “blasphemy” and “Islamophobia”.

    Likewise, outside our community false/naïve “allyship” (including from the Far Left) helps booster Islamist views and attempts to shut down more liberal/secular voices of Muslim origin (yes, a non-Muslim himself called me an “Islamophobe”!).

    Of course, we also face the problem of anti-Muslim hate from the Far Right – but for altogether different reasons and with different outcomes.

    As Muslims, a crucial struggle that isn’t getting talked about enough is exactly this: how we’re critically striving for liberal Muslim and ex-Muslim views to be heard.

    And that’s why its imperative that we remember that human rights must only be limited in cases of public safety and security – e.g. where hate speech or violence rears its ugly head.

    Disliking a religion is not “hate speech”. Targeting its adherents is.

    Whilst the law must denounce and criminalised hate speech and violence, as a society we need to study the social, political and cultural context behind such divisive acts.

    This must form part of our shared mission to maintain a society based on understanding, dialogue and inclusion.

    There must be no place for hatred. And there must be room for listening, dialogue and healing across the board.

    Society must enable people to be free from fear and hate in every context. Not offence.

    When we lose the right to freedom of expression – when we march towards censorship – we lose our freedoms in both secular and religious contexts.

    We therefore need to respond with contextual understanding and solutions.

    And that includes learning from other communities and responding through unity, solidarity and education across social, cultural and communal divides.

    Book burning in Berlin, 10th May 1933. Image: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    As a society, we mustn’t tolerate the intolerant – from either political or religious extremes.  

    We must instead promote education, solidarity and understanding – of course recognising the role of the law to keep us safe. 

    We therefore need to build solidarity and much-needed dialogue and understanding across the board – including with other communities. This is especially important to understand different experiences, histories and contexts.

    For example, when it comes to book burning in particular, the Jewish community will of course all recoil in horror at the burning of any holy text.

    Book burning across the ages has been used by both secular and religious groups/governments to supress ideas deemed “heretical” or “of threat” to the ruling order.

    In the Jewish world, book burning has a very dark history across the ages, with one particularly grotesque period in the last century.

    Amid the horrors of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the burning of Jewish texts marked one of history’s darkest periods.

    As the United States Holocaust Museum aptly describes: “Book burning has a long and dark history. The burning of books under the Nazi regime on May 10, 1933, is perhaps the most famous book burning in history.”

    This was an act of hatred, intolerance and censorship towards an ethno-religious minority in one of the darkest periods of history. Not an act of “political protest”.

    We must never forget such events and never allow a re-occurrence of such events. 

    Hatred, intolerance and censorship must not be allowed to fester in any context, in any society – against any group or people or individuals. And that’s why we need to learn from different communities to understand their different histories.

    As multifaith and multicultural societies, we to come up with a shared solution. To come together to build, strengthen and promote nuanced responses to incidents of hatred/offence.

    Kneejerk reactions to increasing levels of hate and division, such as the recent response of a counter-protest threatening to burn the Torah and Christian Bible, do nothing to promote positive change.

    We gain nothing from harming or threatening to harm others. Such “tit for tat” approaches are counterproductive, short-sighted, disrespectful and harmful.

    A sustainable positive solution must instead aim to build a more inclusive society for us all – Jewish, Muslim, ex-Muslim, atheist – for people of all faiths and none.

    This must be based on mutual understanding and shared values. And that’s where the role of intercultural and interfaith dialogue comes in.  

    Learning about different faith traditions. At a mosque in Nepal during the KAICIID fellowship programme training in intercultural and inter-religious dialogue (May 2022). Image credit: KAICIID.

    So, how do we move forward and what changes need to be made?

    Well, of course, we need to ensure that governments maintain strong contextualised anti-hate speech laws. We need to ensure that people are held accountable when they’re promoting hatred.

    This helps prevent violence and hate speech and ensure that communities and individuals remain safe. This also critically includes those who face isolation and abuse from within/by their own or former communities, such as ex-Muslims.

    The law exists to protects citizens from harm. It however must not be used as a form of “moral policing”.

    So, we must not look to ban offensive acts, but instead look at changing attitudes to build socio-cultural cohesion. We therefore must develop effective solutions to nurture mutual sustainable coexistence.

    Promoting the importance of interfaith dialogue with Nisa-Nashim at the British Islam Conference (2020). Image credit: New Horizons in British Islam.

    This is only possible through inter-communal dialogue, where we share experiences, listen to each other and build mutual respect and understanding.

    We therefore critically need to engage in dialogue that prioritises:

    When we homogenise communities, we fail to understand the diversity and lived experiences of people within communities.

    We must ensure that liberal and dissenting voices from within have freedom of speech and assembly – not just more conservative strands. We must not shut down and isolate the voices of those leaving said communities who also deserve freedom and safety.

    People across the board need to feel heard, included, welcomed and understood.

    We need to foster societies where differences of opinion are respected, where negative stereotypes are dismantled, where lived experience is not silenced and the seeds of hatred and fear are quelled through unity and understanding

    We need to go beyond the mere idea of “tolerance”. We need to recognise the diversity both within and amongst different religious, cultural, ethnic and social groups – protecting the freedoms of everyone and remembering how diversity enriches our society.

    Tolerance does not appreciate difference it merely promotes “allowing it to exist”. This is a critical difference as it does not foster empathy, respect and shared values

    Through education and advocacy we need to highlight how human rights are universal.

    This includes freedom of expression (free from religious oppression by groups and states) and freedom to practice one’s faith (free from community and state-based oppression).

    Rights work both ways and are not limitless – but limits must only be in place to protect other human rights (e.g. for public safety and security)

    By coming together across communal divides, we learn from each other’s experiences to nurture a common sense of citizenship and belonging.

    We grieve together, we celebrate together and we promote peace and unity. This critically sends a loud message that we will not tolerate hate and will not be divided!

    Events over recent months and years really must stand as a turning point to foster respect for human rights and secular freedoms. And with that: mutual understanding to help build a fairer, safter society for everyone.

    Trauma (including religious and cultural trauma) is very real. People deserve healing and compassion. Just as secular, cultural and religious groups deserve freedom and security.

    Diversity must be our strength – not manipulated by hate-fuelled narratives as a point of division and conflict.

    As always, the best response to fear, distrust and hatred is solidarity, compassion, understanding and dialogue.

    We’re all in this together and as always: we mustn’t and we won’t let hate win.

    If you’ve been affected by any of the issues in this blog, please visit:

    If you’d like to show solidarity with other communities, why not:

    This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.

  • We live in a time of menacing freedoms and the rise of fascist politics. Freedom in the current historical moment has turned ugly. The presence of “ugly freedoms” is not new, and its history is repeating itself with a politics that is as cruel as it is dangerous and widespread. This is an age inextricably defined by the question of who qualifies as a citizen of the United States and what kind of…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked the implementation of an Arkansas law criminalizing librarians and booksellers who provide access to materials deemed “harmful to minors.” U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — issued a preliminary injunction against two sections of Act 372 (also known as S.B. 81), a censorship bill introduced by…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Senate Commerce Committee has advanced the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), despite warnings from civil liberties groups and LGBTQ advocates that the bill has been endorsed by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, and could be used to censor LGBTQ content. KOSA, introduced by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee)…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.

    This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.

    The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.

    Yet the song gets it wrong.

    You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.

    Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.

    It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.

    Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

    That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.

    Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.

    While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

    Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.

    For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

    We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

    We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

    We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

    And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

    By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

    This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

    The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.

    Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.

    So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Organized pro-censorship activism has produced double-digit increases in documented censorship attempts in public and school libraries, prompted state and federal legislation aimed at restricting the right to read, and animated the presidential campaign as Ron DeSantis runs on the issue while Joe Biden looks to coordinate a federal response against book bans by naming a “book ban” czar.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In war, truth is the first casualty.

    — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)

    How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.

    It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.

    Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.

    But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

    It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts.  The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.

    Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.

    This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No words for emotions — alexithymia

    New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

    Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

    The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

    Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

    It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

    While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

    Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

    Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

    Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

    My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

    Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

    In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

    All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

    Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

    Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

    I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

    It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

    Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

    The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

    Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

    “Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

    “I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

    Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

    So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

    This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

    Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

    And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

    Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

    Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

    But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

    The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

    The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

    So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

    China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

    The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

    Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

    At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

    There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

    He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

    Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

    “Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

    Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

    This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

    An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

    “Little children working,” the visitor replied.

    Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

    But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

    Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

    Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

    Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

    Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

    Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

    By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

    American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

    When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

    Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

    May be an image of artillery and text

    May be an image of artillery, military uniform and text

    [Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

    Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

    May be an image of 7 people

    Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

    A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

    The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

    May be an image of raft and ocean

    The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

    Poverty and Crisis: Sucking Humanity Dry

    The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

    “Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

    May be an image of 2 people, crowd and text that says 'No ES, SEQUIA SAQUEO! Es'

    It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

    While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

    Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

    The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

    May be an image of 1 person, suit, microphone, dinner jacket and text

    So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

    The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

    Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

    The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

    CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

    If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What does it mean to be antisemitic in modern Britain? The answer seems ever more confusing.

    We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.

    And in a further irony, those behind the accusations do not appear to have made a priority of anti-racism themselves – not, at least, until it proved an effective means of defeating their political enemies.

    And yet, the list of those supposedly exposed as antisemites – often only by association – keeps widening to include ever more unlikely targets.

    That is especially true in the Labour Party, where even the vaguest ties with any of the three iconic left-wing figures noted above – Jeremy Corbyn, Roger Waters and Ken Loach – can be grounds for disciplinary action.

    One of the Labour Party’s most successful politicians, Jamie Driscoll, North of Tyne mayor, was barred last month from standing for re-election after he shared a platform with Loach to talk about the North’s place in the director’s films.

    Not coincidentally, Driscoll has been described as “the UK’s most powerful Corbynista” – or supporter of Corbyn’s left-wing policies. The nadir in this process may have been reached at the Glastonbury Festival.

    Back in 2017, Corbyn, then-Labour leader, was given top billing as he set out a new, inspirational vision for Britain. Six years on and organisers cancelled the screening of a film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, highlighting the sustained campaign to smear Corbyn as an antisemite and snuff out his left-wing agenda.

    The decision was taken after pro-Israel pressure groups launched a campaign to smear the film as antisemitic. The festival decided showing it would cause “division”.

    So what is going on?

    To understand how we arrived at this dark moment, one in which seemingly anyone or anything can be cancelled as antisemitic, it is necessary to grapple with the term’s constantly mutating meaning – and the political uses this confusion is being put to.

    A huge irony

    A few decades ago, an answer to the question of what constituted antisemitism would have been straightforward. It was prejudice, hatred or violence towards a specific ethnic group. It was a form of racism directed against Jews because they were Jews.

    Antisemitism came in different guises: from brazen, intentional hostility, on the one hand, to informal, unthinking bias, on the other. Its expressions varied in seriousness too: from neo-Nazi marches down the high street to an assumption that Jews are more interested in money than other people.

    But that certainty gradually eroded. Some 20 years or so ago, antisemitism began to encompass not just hostility to an ethnic group, Jews, but opposition to a political movement, Zionism.

    There was a huge irony.

    Zionism is an ideology, one championed by Jews and non-Jews, that demands either exclusive or superior territorial and political rights for mostly Jewish immigrants to a region of the Middle East inhabited by a native population, the Palestinians.

    The key premise of Zionism, though rarely stated explicitly, is that non-Jews are inherently susceptible to antisemitism. According to Zionist ideology, Jews therefore need to live apart to ensure their own safety, even if that comes at the cost of oppressing non-Jewish groups.

    Zionism’s progeny is the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, created in 1948 with bountiful assistance from the imperial powers of the time, especially Britain.

    Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state required the ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The small number who managed to stay inside the new state were herded or caged into reservations, much as happened to Native Americans.

    Racial hierarchies

    None of this should be surprising. Zionism emerged more than a century ago in a colonialist Europe very much imbued with ideas of racial hierarchies.

    Simply put, Israel’s founders aspired to mirror those ideas and apply them in ways that benefitted Jews.

    Just as European nations viewed Jews as inferior and a threat to racial purity, Zionists regarded Palestinians and Arabs as inferior and endangering their own racial purity.

    It is only once one understands Zionism’s inbuilt and systematic racism that it becomes clear why Israel has shown itself not just unwilling but incapable of making peace with the Palestinians. Which, in turn, helps to explain the recent evolution in antisemitism’s meaning.

    After Israel collapsed the Oslo peace talks in 2000 to prevent a state for Palestinians being established on a sliver of their former homeland, the Palestinians launched an uprising, or intifada, that Israel brutally subdued.

    Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians’ fight for self-determination coincided with the arrival of new, digital kinds of media that made concealing the cruelty of Israel’s repression much harder than before.

    For the first time, western publics were exposed to the idea that Israel and the ideology that underpinned it, Zionism, might be more problematic than they had been encouraged to believe.

    The romantic illusions about Israel as a simple refuge for Jews started to unravel.

    That culminated in a series of reports by leading human rights groups in recent years characterising Israel as an apartheid state. Israel’s supporters, however, whether Jews or non-Jews, have struggled to acknowledge the ugly, anachronistic ideas of race, apartheid and colonialism at the heart of a project they were raised to support since childhood.

    Instead they preferred to expand the meaning of antisemitism to excuse Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians.

    So in parallel to Israel’s crushing of the Palestinian uprising, its apologists intensified the blurring of the distinction between hostility towards Jews and opposition to Israel and Zionism.

    They began a campaign to redefine antisemitism so that it treated Israel as a kind of “collective Jew”.

    In this new, perverse way of thinking, anyone who opposed Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians was as antisemitic as someone who marched down the high street shouting anti-Jewish slogans.

    Antagonism to Israel was denied the right to present itself as evidence of anti-racism, or support for Palestinian rights.

    Colonial meddling

    This evolution culminated in the adoption by a growing number of governments and official bodies of an entirely new, and extraordinary, definition of antisemitism that prioritised opposition to Israel over hatred towards Jews.

    Seven of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 11 examples of antisemitism focus on Israel. The most problematic is the claim that it is antisemitic to argue Israel is “a racist endeavour”.

    That view has been a staple of anti-racist, socialist thought for decades, as well as serving for 16 years as the basis of a United Nations resolution.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Israel took a pivotal role behind the scenes in formulating the IHRA definition.

    The new definition might have gained little traction, but for two key factors.

    One was that it was not just Zionists who had an interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny or serious criticism. For the West, Israel was the lynch pin for projecting its military power into the oil-rich Middle East.

    The benefits the West received from that power projection – continuing colonial meddling in the region – could be disguised, too, by directing attention at Israel and away from the West’s guiding hand.

    Better still, the backlash against Israel’s role inflaming the Middle East could be stifled by labelling any critic as antisemitic. It was the West’s perfect cover story and the ideal silencing tool all wrapped up in one smear.

    The second factor was Corbyn’s explosion onto the political scene in 2015, and his near-miss two years later in a general election, when he won the biggest increase in votes for Labour since 1945. He was 2,000 votes shy of winning.

    Corbyn’s unexpected success – against all odds – sharply underscored the urgent, shared interests of the British establishment and the Zionist movement.

    A Corbyn government would curb the privileges of a ruling elite; it would threaten the West’s colonial war machine, Nato; and it would seek to end the UK’s military and diplomatic support for Israel, the West’s key ally in the Middle East.

    After the 2017 election, no effort was spared by the political establishment – by the government, by the media, by Labour’s right wing, and by pro-Israel groups – to constantly suggest that Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of new left-wing Labour party members he attracted were antisemitic.

    Under mounting media pressure, the IHRA definition was foisted on the party in autumn 2018, creating a trap into which the left was bound to fall every time it took a principled stance on Israel and human rights.

    Even the chief author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, warned it was being “weaponised” to silence critics of Israel.

    The antisemitism campaign sapped Corbyn’s campaign of energy and momentum for the 2019 general election. The once-inspiring left-wing leader was forced into a permanent  posture of defensiveness and evasiveness.

    Purge of members

    Corbyn was ousted from the Labour benches in 2020 by his successor, Keir Starmer, who had been elected leader on the promise of bringing unity.

    He did the opposite.

    He waged a war on the party’s left wing. Corbyn’s few allies in the shadow cabinet were driven out.  Then, Starmer’s team began a relentless, high-profile purge of the party’s Corbyn-supporting members, including anti-Zionist Jews, under the claim they were antisemitic.

    Debate about the purges was banned in local constituencies, on the grounds that it might make “Jewish members” – really meaning Israel’s apologists – feel unsafe.

    This process reached a new level of surrealism with the barring last month of the popular figure of Jamie Driscoll, the first mayor of North of Tyne, from standing for re-election on a socialist platform.

    Driscoll had embarrassed Starmer’s officials by proving that running society for the benefit of all could be a vote-winner. He needed to be neutered. The question was how that could be achieved without making it clear that Starmer was really waging a war not on antisemitism but on the left.

    So a set of tendentious associations with antisemitism were manufactured to justify the decision.

    Driscoll was punished not for saying or doing anything antisemitic – even under the new, expanded IHRA definition – but for sharing a platform to discuss director Ken Loach’s films. Loach, it should be noted, had not been expelled from the party for antisemitism.

    Loach’s expulsion in 2021 had been justified on the grounds he had accused Starmer’s officials of carrying out a witch hunt against the party’s left. Loach’s treatment thereby proved the very allegation he was expelled for making.

    But to bolster the feeble pretext for targeting Driscoll, which even in the official version was entirely unconnected to antisemitism, media organisations ignored the stated grounds of Loach’s expulsion. They emphasised instead fanciful claims that the director had been caught denying the Holocaust.

    Not only was Driscoll barred from running again as mayor, but, according to reports, any mention of his name can lead to disciplinary action. He has become, in a terrifying phrase from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, an “Unperson”.

    In parallel, Starmer has overseen the rush by the party back into the arms of the establishment. He has ostentatiously embraced patriotism and the flag. He demands lockstep support for Nato. Labour policy is once again in thrall to big business, and against strikes by workers. And, since the death of the Queen, Starmer has sought to bow as low as possible before the new king without toppling over.

    His whole approach seems designed to foster an atmosphere of despair on the left. At the weekend, in a sign of how quickly the purges are expanding, it emerged that the Starmer police had been knocking at the door of a figure close to the party establishment, Gordon Brown’s former speechwriter Neal Lawson.

    Cultural dissent

    None of this is surprising. Labour, under Corbyn, was the one holdout against the complete takeover of British politics by neoliberal, predatory capitalist orthodoxy. His socialism-lite was an all-too-obvious aberration.

    Now, under Starmer, that political threat has been swept away.

    There is a bipartisan – meaning establishment – consensus. The UK government voted last night to ban all public bodies, including local governments, from approving a boycott of one country over its record of human rights abuses: Israel.

    The legislation will effectively protect Israel from boycotts even of products from Jewish settlements, built illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to drive Palestinians off their historic homeland.

    Michael Gove, the communities secretary, argued in the Commons debate that such practical expressions of solidarity with Palestinians would “harm community cohesion and fuel antisemitism” in Britain.

    The government appears to believe that only the sensitivities of the more extreme Zionist elements within the UK’s Jewish community need protecting, not those of British Palestinians, British Arabs or Britons who care about international law.

    Starmer’s party, which shares the government’s hostility to boycotts of Israel, whipped Labour MPs to abstain on the bill, allowing it to pass. It was left to a handful of Tory MPs to highlight the fact that the bill undermines the two-state solution that the government and Labour party pay lip service to.

    Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the bill “essentially gives exceptional impunity to Israel”.

    Speaking for Labour,  Lisa Nandy referred to boycotts of Israel as a “problem” that needed to be “tackled”, and instead urged amendments to the legislation to soften the bill’s draconian powers to fine public bodies.

    Starmer’s Labour eased the bill’s passage even as Israel launched yesterday the largest assault on the West Bank in 20 years. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in the initial attack on Jenin and more than 100 injured, while thousands fled their city.

    On Tuesday, the United Nations said it was “alarmed” by the scale of Israel’s assault on Jenin.

    The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, reported that the Israeli army was preventing first responders from reaching and treating the wounded.

    With all political dissent on Israel crushed, what is left now are small islands of cultural dissent, represented most visibly by a handful of ageing giants of the arts scene.

    Figures like Loach and Roger Waters are leftovers from a different era, one in which being a socialist was not equated with being antisemitic.

    Loach was a thorn in Starmer’s side because he made waves from within Labour.

    But the scope of Starmer’s ambition to eviscerate the UK’s cultural left too was highlighted last month when he wrote to the Jewish body, the Board of Deputies, to accuse Waters – in entirely gratuitous fashion – of “spreading deeply troubling antisemitism”.

    The last fires

    In a further sign of his authoritarian instincts, Starmer called for the musician’s concerts to be banned.

    Evidence for Waters’ supposed antisemitism is as non-existent as the earlier claim that Jew hatred had become a “cancer” under Corbyn. And it is the same establishment groups defaming Waters who smeared Corbyn: the government, the corporate media, Starmer’s wing of Labour, and the Israel lobby.

    Waters has been widely denounced for briefly dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform during his shows, as he has been doing for 40 years, in a clear satire on the attraction and dangers of fascist leaders.

    No one took an interest in his shows’ political messaging until it became necessary to weaponise antisemitism against the cultural left, having already eliminated the political left.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is an outspoken and high-profile supporter of Palestinian rights. Like Corbyn, Waters is noisily and unfashionably anti-war, including critical of Nato’s efforts to use Ukraine as a battlefield on which to “weaken” Russia rather than engage in talks.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is a critic of capitalist excess and a proponent of a fairer, kinder society of the kind expunged from most people’s memories.

    And like Corbyn, and very much unlike our current breed of charisma-free, technocratic politicians, Waters can draw huge crowds and inspire them with a political message.

    In Britain’s current, twisted political climate, anyone with a conscience, anyone with compassion, anyone with a sense of injustice – and anyone capable of grasping the hypocrisy of our current leaders – risks being smeared as an antisemite.

    That campaign is far from complete yet. It will continue until the very last fires of political dissent have been extinguished.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    I saw a video clip of Julian Assange speaking in London in 2010 where he made an important observation while explaining the philosophy behind his work with WikiLeaks. He said that all our political theories are to some extent “bankrupt” in our current situation, because our institutions are so shrouded in secrecy that we can’t even know what’s really going on in the world.

    “We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt,” Assange said. “And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don’t even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories — to greater and lesser extents of course — are bankrupt.”

    It’s an extremely important point if you think about it: how can we form theories about how our governments should be operating when we have no idea how they are currently operating? How can a doctor prescribe the correct treatment when he hasn’t yet made a diagnosis?

    Political theories are in this sense “bankrupt”, because they are formed in the dark, without our being able to see precisely what’s happening and what’s going wrong.

    The nature of our institutions is hidden from us, and that includes not only our government institutions but the political, media, corporate and financial institutions which control so much of our society. Their nature is hidden not only by a complete lack of transparency but by things like propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the fact that all the most loudly amplified voices in our society are those who more or less support status quo politics.

    The fact that all the most important aspects of our civilization’s operation are hidden, manipulated and obfuscated by the powerful makes a joke of the very idea of democracy, because how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?

    Democracy is impossible when the public is flying blind, and so is any other means by which the public might impose their will on existing power structures. You will never see a collective uprising of the masses against their rulers when the dominant message being inserted into everyone’s mind is that everything is basically fine and if you don’t like the way things are you can change it by voting. If the veil of secrecy was ever ripped away from the US empire’s inner workings and everyone could see the full scale of its criminality in the plain light of day you’d probably have immediate open revolution in Washington. Which is precisely why that veil exists.

    We can’t form solid political theories while everything’s hidden from us, and even if we could we’re unable to organize any means to put those theories into action for the same reason. The fact that the nature of our world is being so aggressively obfuscated from our view keeps us from knowing exactly what needs to change, and keeps us from effecting change.

    For this reason I often argue that our most urgent priority as a civilization is rolling back all the secrecy and obfuscation, because until that happens we’ll never get change, and we’ll never know what should be changed. I have my ideological preferences of course, but I’m just one person taking their best guess at what needs to happen in a world where so many of the lights are switched off. Not until our society can actually see the world as it really is will we have the ability to begin, as Assange says, “setting course for a different direction.”

    And those who benefit from our current course are lucidly aware of this. That’s why we’re not allowed to see what they’re up to behind the veils of secrecy, that’s why our entire civilization is saturated in nonstop propaganda, that’s why the internet is being increasingly censored and manipulated, and that’s why Julian Assange is in prison.

    We can only begin fighting this from where we’re at. None of us individually have the power to rip the veil of secrecy away from the empire, but we do each individually have the ability to call out its lies where they can be seen and help wake people up to the fact that we’re being deceived and manipulated. Every pair of eyelids you help open is one more pair of eyes looking around helping to get an accurate picture of what’s going on, and one more pair of eyes helping to open the eyes of others.

    Once we have enough open eyes, we will have the potential for a real course of action.

    ___________________

    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on PatreonPaypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • We’re all being targeted now.

    We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.

    And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

    Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.

    Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

    These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance.

    While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “pre-crime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.

    Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

    As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

    Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censor and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lock down sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.

    For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.”

    It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report.

    Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

    What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

    The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

    In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.

    With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

    It’s also a setup ripe for abuse.

    For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

    One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peace-building summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.

    This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

    Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

    In fact, all you need to do is live in the United States.

    It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

    Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

    Combine predictive policing with surveillance, over-criminalization and pre-crime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.

    If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scheerpost logo

    This article originally appeared in Scheerpost on July 9, 2023. It is shared here with permission.

    LONDON: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous

    The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.  

    The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks. 

    Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication.

    On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here

    “I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said. “This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.” 

    When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job. But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.

    “They hated him,” Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. “They went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.”

    Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.” These attacks included “collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”

    Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero. 

    “Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded

    The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, all of which published WikiLeaks documents provided by Julian, published a joint open letter on Nov. 28, 2022 calling on the U.S. government “to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.” 

    But the demonization of Julian, which these publications helped to foster, had already been accomplished.

    Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published.

    “It was pretty much an immediate shift,” Stella recalled. “While the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they were partners. As soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, they turned around and attacked him. You have to put yourself in the moment where the press was in 2010 when these stories broke. They were struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn’t really adapted to the age of the internet. You had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism.” 

    There followed a WikiLeaks-isation of U.S. media outlets such as The New York Times, which adopted the innovations pioneered by WikiLeaks, including providing secure channels for whistleblowers to leak documents.

    “Julian was a superstar,” Stella said. “He came from outside the ‘old boys’ network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the Collateral Murder video reveals that this is a war crime.” 

    Julian was outraged when he saw the heavy redactions of the information he exposed in newspapers such as The Guardian. He criticized these publications for self-censoring to placate their advertisers and the powerful.

    He exposed these news organizations, as Stella said, “for their own hypocrisy, for their own poor journalism.”

    “I find it very ironic that you have all this talk of misinformation, that’s just cover for censorship,” Stella said. “There are all these new organizations that are subsidized to find misinformation. It’s just a means to control the narrative. If this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously, then all of these disinformation organizations would hold WikiLeaks up as the example, right? Julian’s model of journalism was what he called scientific journalism. It should be verifiable. You can write up an analysis of a news item, but you have to show what you’re basing it on. The cables are the perfect example of this. You write up an analysis of something that happened and you reference the cables and whatever else you’re basing your news story on.”

    “This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated. They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.”

    While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan. 

    Julian’s “message was journalism can lead to reform, it can lead to justice, it can help victims, it can be used in court and it has been used in court in the European Court of Human Rights, even at the U.K. Supreme Court in the Chagos case here,” she said. “It has been used as evidence. This is a completely new approach to journalism. WikiLeaks is bigger than journalism because it’s authentic, official documents. It’s putting internal history into the public record at the disposal of the public and victims of state-sponsored crime. For the first time we were able to use these documents to seek justice, for example, in the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was abducted and tortured by the CIA. He was able to use WikiLeaks cables at the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition. It was a completely new approach. It brought journalism to its maximum potential.” 

    “The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works.”

    Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK

    The claims of objectivity and neutrality propagated by the mainstream media are a mechanism to prevent journalism from being used to challenge injustices or reform corrupt institutions.

    “It’s completely alien, the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to better the world and inform people of what’s happening,” Matt said. “For them it’s a career. It’s a status symbol. I never had a crisis of conscience because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn’t do that.”

    “For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.”

    “It’s a very insidious system,” Matt went on. “Journalists can say to themselves ‘I can write what I like,’ but obviously they can’t. I think it’s quite interesting starting Declassified with Mark Curtis in the sense that journalists don’t know how to react to us. We have a complete blackout in the mainstream media.” 

    “There has been something really sinister that has happened in the last twenty years, particularly at The Guardian,” he said. “The Guardian is just state-affiliated media. The early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian. I remember 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times. I’d read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I’d always thought ‘Wow, we’re lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-U.S. pro-government position.’ That’s now flipped. I’d much prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff. And I’m not saying it’s perfect. Neither of them were perfect, but there was a difference. I think what’s happened is clever state repression.” 

    The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories

    The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement  during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.

    “The state realized after the war in Iraq that they needed to clamp down on the freedom in the British media,” Matt said. “The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’”

    This triggered the government campaign to neuter the press. 

    “I wouldn’t say we have a functioning media in terms of the newspapers,” he said. 

    “This is not just about Assange,” Matt continued. “This is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works. They don’t pick off one person and say we’re going to hold off now. They’ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.” 

    “If you’re working in an environment in London where there’s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn’t do that,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t question power. You shouldn’t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don’t know what’s going to happen…The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can’t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they’ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that’s fascism.” 

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

    Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in Papers of Jefferson, ed.

    The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

    Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

    Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

    Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

    Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

    As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

    The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

    For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

    By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

    This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

    For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

    A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

    Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

    Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

    The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

    The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

    This is how it begins.

    As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

    Already, discontent is growing.

    According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

    Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

    What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

    This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

    Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

    When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Brace yourselves.

    There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

    Any time you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

    Any time you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

    And any time you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

    The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

    We are at our most vulnerable right now.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    In just a few years Democrats flipped from freaking out about Nazis, shrieking that Trump was going to start a nuclear war, and denying US election results to cheering for Nazis, demanding more nuclear brinkmanship, and accusing anyone who denies election results of treason.

    Putin’s just lucky he didn’t suffer a real coup attempt, like several wingnuts wandering around a government building for a few hours.

    The powerful haven’t been promoting the idea that control of speech is needed because they want to stop viruses, protect marginalized groups, fight foreign influence and curb domestic extremism. They’ve been pushing for control of speech because they want to control speech.

    It’s a well-established fact at this point that western government bodies have been doing everything they can to infiltrate and influence Silicon Valley platforms where people gather to share ideas and information, because they understand that narrative control is real power.

    Speech hasn’t gotten any more dangerous lately, yet control of speech by government and government-adjacent bodies has gotten more and more normalized in recent years. Every excuse to expand this control has been seized upon by those in power, from Russian bots to January 6 to Covid. The window of what constitutes “shouting fire in a crowded theater” keeps getting deliberately broadened in mainstream liberal consciousness, which liberals accept because it’s framed by empire propagandists as a weapon that can be used against the political enemies of liberals.

    Western liberals are in effect being offered a political bribe by the empire: support the restrictions on political speech we are constantly pushing for, and it will undermine the interests of your political rivals. This bribery has made “liberals” far more tyrannical. Liberals play along because they’ve been convinced at every opportunity that restricting speech is the best way to fight hate, right wing extremism, health misinformation and malign foreign influence, but in so doing they’re supporting the most tyrannical regime on earth.

    So now we’re in this bizarre situation where being “liberal” effectively means supporting censorship to silence your political enemies for the benefit of the most murderous and tyrannical people on this planet.

    I often see people who are skeptical of power calling this or that news story a “distraction” and implying that the powerful orchestrate entire events to draw public attention away from more inconvenient stories. From what I can tell that’s not quite how it works though; in practice we see distraction used more as a general mundane distortion that’s always happening, rather than grand conspiratorial plots involving the orchestration of specific individual news stories to manipulate public attention. Certainly government officials may sometimes release stories at specific times for their political convenience, but that’s generally about the extent of it.

    We see the political/media class using distraction primarily in the form of agenda-setting, where emphasis is placed on some issues instead of others in ways that benefit the powerful. This can take the form of keeping people focused on domestic politics so they don’t pay attention to their government’s foreign interventions, or keeping people focused on culture war issues so they don’t focus on class war issues. As we’ve discussed previously, the employees of the mass media are all too happy to facilitate these distortions because they facilitate their own career and class interests as well as the interests of their employers.

    I respect leftist commentators who despise both the US empire and Putin and yet still do honest commentary on brinkmanship with Russia infinitely more than I respect those who act like it’s fine to mostly ignore this extremely dangerous conflict just because “both sides are bad”. It’s like, okay, fine, let’s say both sides are bad; let’s even say both sides are equally bad for the sake of argument. That’s still not a legitimate reason for a leftist to ignore their own government’s role in starting and perpetuating this increasingly dangerous standoff.

    Only baby-brained morons break down conflicts into “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” frameworks. The fact that you don’t subscribe to that infantile framing doesn’t give you an excuse to just check out. Just because there’s no Good Guy doesn’t mean it doesn’t urgently need our attention.

    It’s okay if you haven’t found a political faction or leader who you can throw your support behind. At this point in time humanity is very lost and confused, so its political movements — even the better ones — will frequently get lost and confused too. In a world that is ruled by evil tyrants who manipulate politics and media to make everyone crazy and keep us all focused on issues which don’t threaten the powerful, confusion is to be expected in every facet of political engagement.

    Speaking for myself I feel perfectly fine about mostly standing on my own and just throwing my weight behind any specific effort or movement I support on its own merit without joining up with any particular faction or party. I’ve found that having loyalty to political factions can cause one to fail to see the errors in their own faction, and in humanity’s current state of confusion there will necessarily be a lot of errors.

    So I’m comfortable standing on my own for the time being to make sure my vision stays clear, with the understanding that that hopefully won’t be necessary one day.

    _______________

    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on PatreonPaypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    There’s a frenzied rush by the Australian political/media class to both propagandise Australians as quickly as possible into supporting preparations for war with China, and to ram through legislation that facilitates the censorship of online speech.

    Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is set to release draft legislation imposing hefty fines on social media companies who fail to adequately block “misinformation” and “disinformation” from circulation in Australia, a frightening prospect which will likely have far-reaching consequences for political speech in the nation.

    Sydney Morning Herald reports:

    class=”mk ml mm”>

    Under the proposed laws, the authority would be able to impose a new “code” on specific companies that repeatedly fail to combat misinformation and disinformation or an industry-wide “standard” to force digital platforms to remove harmful content.

    The maximum penalty for systemic breaches of a registered code would be $2.75 million or 2 per cent of global turnover — whichever is higher.

    The maximum penalty for breaching an industry standard would be $6.88 million, or 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover. In the case of Facebook’s owner, Meta, for example, the maximum penalty could amount to a fine of more than $8 billion.

    Those are the kinds of numbers that change a company’s censorship protocols. We’re already seeing social media censorship of content in Australia that the Australian government has ruled unacceptable; here’s what the transphobic tweets embedded in a right-wing article about Twitter censorship looks like when you try to view them on Twitter from Australia, for example:

    These tweets were reportedly hidden from Australians on the platform at the behest of the Australian government. Australians could wind up seeing much more of this sort of Australia-specific censorship from social media platforms if this “misinformation” legislation goes through. Or they could just start censoring it for everyone.

    The problem with laws against inaccurate information is of course that somebody needs to be making the determination what information is true and what is false, and those determinations will necessarily be informed by the biases and agendas of the person making them. I can substantiate my claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO powers using an abundance of facts and evidence, for example, but there’s still a sizeable portion of the population which would consider such claims malignant disinformation with or without the supporting data.

    When the government involves itself in the regulation of speech, it is necessarily incentivized to regulate speech in a way that benefits itself and its allies. Nobody who supports government regulation of online mis- and disinformation can articulate how such measures can be safeguarded in a surefire way against the abuses and agendas of the powerful.

    Under a Totalitarian Regime, your government censors your speech if you say unauthorized things. Under a Free Democracy, your government orders corporations to censor your speech if you say unauthorized things.

    At the same time, Australian media have been hammering one remarkably uniform message into public consciousness with increasing aggression lately: there is a war with China coming, Australia will be involved, and Australia must do much more to prepare for this war as quickly as possible.

    Australians are remarkably vulnerable to propaganda due to the fact that ownership of our nation’s media is the most concentrated in the western world, with a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and Murdoch’s News Corp controlling most of the Australian press.

    Both of these media conglomerates have been involved in the latest excuse to talk about how more military spending and militarisation is needed, this time taking the form of a war machine-funded think tanker publishing a book about how we all need to prepare for war with China.

    Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have an article out titled “Military expert warns of ‘very serious risk’ of China war within five years” by the odious Matthew Knott, who is best known for being told to drum himself out of Australian journalism by former prime minister Paul Keating for his appalling war-with-China propaganda series published earlier this year by the same papers. Readers who follow Australian media would do well to remember Knott’s name, because he has become one of the most prolific war propagandists in the western press.

    The “military expert” who warns of the need to prepare for an imminent war with China is a man named Ross Babbage, who as Knott notes is “a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.” What Knott fails to disclose to his readers is that the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is funded by every war profiteer and war machine entity under the sun, the majority coming straight from the US Department of Defense itself.

    As we’ve discussed many times previously, it is never, ever okay for the press to cite war machine-funded think tankers for expertise or analysis on matters of war and foreign policy, and it is doubly egregious for them to do so without at least disclosing their massive conflict of interest to their readers. This act of extreme journalistic malpractice has become the norm throughout the mainstream press, because it helps mass media reporters do their actual job: administering propaganda to an unsuspecting public.

    The Murdoch press has also been using Babbage’s book release as an excuse to bang the drums of war, with multiple Sky News segments and articles with titles like “Military analyst Ross Babbage warns Australia of potential war with China in coming years,” “National security expert Ross Babbage warns ‘strong possibility’ of war with China in latest book,” and “‘Running out of time’: Xi may move on Taiwan in next few years.” Again, not one mention of Babbage’s conflict of interests.

    All for a news story that (and I cannot stress this enough) is not a news story. A war machine-funded think tanker saying he wants more war is not a news story — it’s just a thing that happens when the war machine is allowed to pay people to be warmongers.

    “War Machine-Funded Warmonger Wants More War.” That’s your headline. That’s the one and only headline this non-story could ever deserve, if any.

    Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.

    _____________

    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on PatreonPaypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • The Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko famously said that: ‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

    In this country, as in other western ‘democracies’, important truths are effectively being silenced. As we have written on many occasions, antisemitism was used as a weapon to destroy the chances of Jeremy Corbyn becoming the British Prime Minister. Labour HQ staffers, and even Labour MPs, actively conspired against him. Al Jazeera’s powerful series, The Labour Files, which was blatantly blanked by the establishment media, has documented all this in considerable detail.

    And now the Glastonbury Film Festival has succumbed to similar pressure and cancelled a screening of a new film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie.

    The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BDBJ), a right-wing establishment organisation that claims to represent the British Jewish ‘community’, had written to Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, saying it would be ‘profoundly sinister’ if the festival platformed the film. Marie van der Zyl, president of BDBJ, said in a letter to the festival organisers:

    ‘It seems profoundly sinister for it to be providing a platform to a film which clearly seeks to indoctrinate people into believing a conspiracy theory effectively aimed at Jewish organisations.

    ‘We would request that you not allow your festival to be hijacked by those seeking to promote hatred with no basis in fact, in the same way as we would hope that your festival would not screen films seeking to promote other conspiracy theories, such as anti-vaccination, 9/11 truthers or chemtrails.’

    The makers of the film, first shown in London in February, describe the film thus:

    ‘Produced by award-winning radical film-maker Platform Films, with contributions from Jackie Walker, Ken Loach, Andrew Murray, Graham Bash and Moshe Machover, and narrated by Alexei Sayle, this feature-length documentary film explores a dark and murky story of political deceit and outrageous antisemitic smears. It also uncovers the critical role played by current Labour leader, Keir Starmer and asks if the movement which backed Corbyn could rise again.’

    Reviewer Diane Datson wrote:

    ‘The real message conveyed in this film is that the Labour Party is no alternative to the Conservatives – it serves the ruling class and is led by someone every bit as devious as Boris Johnson, if not more so.’

    She added:

    ‘However, I for one felt uplifted, as the film ended optimistically. Many of the interviewees think that all is not lost – those millions of people who were inspired and given hope by the Corbyn project haven’t gone away – they are to be found supporting the picket lines, protesting and fighting for many causes such as public ownership of the NHS and the right to strike and the establishment is STILL petrified.’

    But Paul Mason, formerly of BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News, and now a would-be Labour MP under Starmer, attacked the film as presenting:

    ‘a full-blown conspiracy theory about Corbyn’s opponents, conflating Zionists, Jews and Israel as part of a force that “orchestrated” his overthrow.’

    Mason gave a specific example:

    ‘Seventeen minutes in, after presenting evidence of an “orchestrated campaign” against Corbyn, the narrator, Alexei Sayle asks: “But if it was an orchestrated campaign, who was in the orchestra?” There follows a silent montage showing the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, and the Israel Advocacy Movement.

    ‘As a professional film-maker I recognise this wordless presentation of a controversial idea not as an accident but as a technique: using captions and pictures to state what, if spoken aloud, could be accused of anti-Semitism.’

    Mason’s description is a gross distortion. This section of the film does indeed address the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, with the montage indicating key players. But prior to this section, The Big Lie already emphasises the crucial point that it was the establishment as a whole that worked tirelessly to bring Corbyn down, even to the extent of an unnamed acting British army general threatening that the army would ‘mutiny’ and that ‘people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul’ to get rid of Corbyn (Sunday Times, 20 September 2015).

    Sayle, as narrator, stated unequivocally that: ‘For the establishment, the sudden rise of Corbyn was terrifying.’

    He continued: ‘Corbyn was anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons. A socialist, even.’

    Mike Cowley, a Labour Party member, said:

    ‘I guess that’s what gave the establishment such a fright, to a degree, because they saw the numbers he was mobilising. And, as we began to see, it’s not actually Corbyn they’re afraid of. It’s us – he’s only one man. It’s us, they’re afraid of.’

    Sayle then pointed out that:

    ‘From the start, Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest threat was from his own Labour MPs.’

    After the 1917 election, the campaign against Corbyn ‘went into overdrive’:

    ‘The Tory press threw its all at Jeremy Corbyn. They tried smear after smear [front-page press montage]. But in the end, only one stuck [alleged antisemitism].’

    In other words, the film overwhelmingly makes clear that the pro-Israel lobby was only one player in a much larger orchestra that was fundamentally establishment, not Jewish, in nature. Mason chose to ignore this in his review. And yet, he had himself accepted the wider conspiracy in 2020:

    ‘A senior group of Labour staffers actively conspired for the party to lose the 2017 election… this is a Watergate moment, not just for Labour but for British politics’

    On Twitter, leftist singer Billy Bragg joined the attack on the film:

    ‘The problem with the film is that it implies there is a Jewish conspiracy behind Corbyn’s defeat. The fact that the film’s supporters have been blaming the Israeli lobby for the ban rather than the content of the film kinda underlines their lack of understanding of that problem’

    As evidence, Bragg then cited Mason’s misleading quote (presumably, and ill-advisedly, because Bragg had not himself seen the film) as an attempted ‘Gotcha!’

    Jackie Walker, a Jewish activist who is interviewed in The Big Lie, made an additional, relevant point when she responded to Bragg:

    ‘Labour Friends of Israel are overwhelmingly not Jewish, the Board of deputies do not hide their commitment to Israel, and the IAM [Israel Advocacy Movement] are exactly what they say on the tin – they ADVOCATE for Israel’

    The Big Lie is, of course, right to address the important part played by the pro-Israel lobby. It includes clips from the Al Jazeera film, The Lobby, which exposed Israel’s determined attempts to interfere in Britain’s politics. In particular, Israeli embassy official Shai Masot was caught on film boasting that he could help ‘bring down’ pro-Palestinian MPs. A clip of Peter Oborne, former political editor of the Telegraph, from the same Al Jazeera film, is also shown in which he says:

    ‘It [the actions of the Israel lobby] is outrageous interference in British politics. It shouldn’t be permitted.’

    On Twitter, Ben Sellers observed that:

    ‘I have worked in Parliament & been an anti-racist activist all my adult life. I’m not naive about these things. I watched the film very carefully for anything that could be deemed antisemitic. The idea that it implies a “Jewish conspiracy” defeated Corbyn is a distortion.’

    He continued:

    ‘What it does is explain that organisations (with their own centrist & right-wing politics) inside & outside the party, worked to create a crisis for Corbyn’s leadership & in order to defeat the left in the party. This is well documented & evidenced (e.g in the Al Jazeera docs).’

    Sellers concluded:

    ‘It’s not a conspiracy theory – it’s an argument. And what people [like Mason and Bragg] don’t like is that argument. They don’t want to hear it. So they’ve manage[d] to silence the voice of left-wing Jews (on the basis that the Jewish community is some sort of monolith). That’s dangerous & undemocratic.’

    ‘Anti-Racists Accused of Racism by Racists’

    ‘The Big Lie’ also highlights the incessant establishment media attacks on Corbyn, particularly after the 2017 General Election which he came so close to winning. The ‘smear that stuck’ was the myth that antisemitism was supposedly rife in Labour under Corbyn. A ‘cancer’, as one despicable newspaper headline put it.

    In his distorted review of the documentary, Mason raised the spectre of legal action on the grounds that the film supposedly breaches the politically biased and much-disputed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Simply put, the film dares to criticise the apartheid state of Israel, its lobbyists and the media acolytes who campaigned to smear Corbyn and his supporters, including long-time grassroots Labour activists.

    As journalist Jonathan Cook observed in 2021, a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups was able to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been wrongly described as the ‘gold standard’ definition of antisemitism. The definition has now become ‘a cudgel’ with which to beat critics of Israel and to suppress the rights of Palestinians.

    Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford University, observed in the foreword of a 2021 report on how the definition of antisemitism has been misrepresented:

    ‘[A] definition intended to protect Jews against antisemitism was twisted to protect the State of Israel against valid criticisms that have nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism.’

    In September 2018, Alexei Sayle had told a packed fringe meeting at the Labour party conference that:

    ‘There can be no greater injustice than anti-racists being accused of racism by racists.’

    That is a precise and succinct summary of what has been happening in recent years.

    Having watched the complete documentary, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, it is clear that it is thoroughly researched, relies on credible and articulate interviewees, and its arguments are expertly marshalled and presented. The notion that it is in any way ‘antisemitic’ is just a sign of how far down the road of totalitarian censorship we have travelled in this country.

    Glastonbury Capitulates

    Rather than spring to the film’s defence, Michael Walker of Novara Media criticised the film’s title:

    ‘Normally I’m v against clamping down on any open discussion about what happened in and to labour between 2015 and 2019. But calling your film “the big lie” is, at best, really really dumb.’

    Why? Because Hitler had used the same phrase, ‘the big lie’. But, as several people pointed out in response to Walker’s ‘really really dumb’ comment, so have many others. In fact, ‘the big lie’ comes from one of the Jewish contributors to the film, Moshé Machover, in describing the smears against Corbyn. Moreover, Walker admitted he had not even seen the film.

    This continued the shameful record of Novara – remember, supposedly an ‘alternative’ to the corporate media – in failing to critically appraise the weaponising of antisemitism; indeed, accepting the myth that antisemitism was endemic under Corbyn-led Labour.

    Once they had caved in to pro-Israel pressure to cancel the film, the Glastonbury festival organisers then issued a statement in which they said:

    ‘Although we believe that the Pilton Palais [cinema] booked this film in good faith, in the hope of provoking political debate, it’s become clear that it is not appropriate for us to screen it at the festival.

    ‘Glastonbury is about unity and not division, and we stand against all forms of discrimination.’

    What a contrast from 2017 when Corbyn had addressed a massive, appreciative crowd at Glastonbury, proclaiming a message of ‘unity, and not division’ and ‘standing against all forms of discrimination’.

    The BDBJ crowed that the film had now been cancelled:

    ‘We are pleased that in the wake of a letter we sent earlier today, @glastonbury have announced the cancellation of the screening of this film. Hateful conspiracy theories should have no place in our society.’

    Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a founding member of Jewish Voice for Labour who was expelled from Starmer’s Labour Party for being the ‘wrong type of Jew’, said on Twitter:

    ‘Unbelievable that @glastonbury has bowed to demands from fans of Starmer’s @uklabour, banning a film exposing demonisation of @jeremycorbyn. The censors say the film conflates Zionists, Jews & Israel. No, actually, that’s what they do. See it & judge for yourself.’

    US journalist Glenn Greenwald noted:

    ‘The @glastonbury Film Festival capitulated to pressure and cancelled the Corbyn documentary.

    ‘This illustrates the great crisis in the democratic world: an intense fixation on suppressing and silencing, rather than engaging, dissenting views.

    ‘Every solution now is censorship.’

    It is indeed the ‘solution’ seen by established power, and it is utterly wrong.

    There was minimal reporting by the British state-corporate media and, crucially, no uproar about censorship and yet another step being taken towards suppression of free speech. There was a handful of short news reports, including in the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Guardian (passed over in just three lines), the Times, Daily Mail and Telegraph.

    These mainly led with the charges of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘conspiracy theory’. The Evening Standard also carried a smear piece, ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn: Glasto myth and a poisonous conspiracy theory’, by Tanya Gold.

    The single significant piece refuting the specious, cynical charges was an article in the Independent reporting the reaction of Norman Thomas, the film’s producer. He said that the film’s cancellation had been caused by ‘vicious outside pressure’. He added:

    ‘An outside pressure group [BDBJ] has declared war on our film. They wrote to the festival’s sponsors… and whipped up huge storm of complaints about the film claiming, without any foundation whatsoever, that the film is antisemitic.’

    He continued:

    ‘The claim that the film is antisemitic is a total smear.

    The festival organisers even had a lawyer examine the film who pronounced it totally devoid of antisemitism. [Our emphasis]’

    As we have also seen with the cruel persecution of Julian Assange and the treatment of Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, the establishment is becoming ever fiercer in its attacks on those who challenge power.

    It is ironic indeed that Glenn Greenwald, a US journalist, is far more vocal in defending UK freedom of speech than British journalists. A great silence has fallen over the media in this country.

  • Texas Book Ban Bills Set a Dangerous Precedent

    Amid an unprecedented wave of censorship, many of our state legislators have left no mercy for LGBTQ+ Texans. Censorious legislation like House Bill 900 and Senate Bill 13 attempt to relate queer identity with sexual obscenity. The bills target educators’ expertise and diminish students’ right to read in a vitriolic attack on queer identity, and more broadly, the agency young people wield in our own education.

    Students are the primary stakeholders in our education, but this legislation is among the slew of bills nationwide favoring so-called parental rights above those who learn, teach, and work in schools full-time. Students deserve a seat at the table in decisions directly affecting us, but these legislative efforts subvert our authority in life experiences we face daily.

    In a recent survey by the New York Times, “the overwhelming majority of students were opposed to book bans.” Censorship bills seek to exclude and erase marginalized identities from the mainstream. Book banning ultimately harms students, especially when Gen Z is the queerest, most diverse, and progressive generation in America. Unfortunately, policymakers have an agenda to further marginalize the already-unheard and traditionally-silenced youth of our nation. Students deserve better.

    Every student should feel the same comfort and passion I felt as a young child walking into a community library or bookstore with shelves lined with dynamic character arcs and magical, faraway lands yet to be discovered. Public school libraries should serve our diversity, not shutter stories and silence voices. We cannot spare losing narratives with the power to open our eyes to a world never before seen – a world that could exemplify the beauty of queerness and the compassion all could share when united as a community in acceptance and love.

    Books save lives, and students need increased access to literature, not less. Aside from student retention or career success, readily accessible books in school libraries can be a lifeline for students seeking support for how to say “no” in uncomfortable situations or how to explain our first menstrual cycle. They can provide insight for how to handle an interaction with police or navigate ambivalent emotions. Americans routinely face these real scenarios, and our nation is failing its younger generations when our worth is not valued and our needs are not met.

    Any effort to limit students’ access to knowledge is an attempt to erase our narrative as a generation, one that represents our nation’s future. Signed by Governor Greg Abbott June 12 in Texas, HB 900 will impose a state takeover of local school district policies, requiring vendors to rate books by their “offensiveness” to “current community standards of decency” or risk losing business from school districts.

    Policymakers must not weaponize the status quo by mischaracterizing literature with subjective politics. Not one of the roughly 30 million Texans may have an identical view of what defines a “pervasively vulgar” book, but in exclusively selective committees like those described in SB 13 to review library collections, just a few parents could dictate decisions of an entire district.

    Cameron Samuels testified against censorship legislation to the Senate Education Committee on April 12, 2023

    Cameron Samuels testified against censorship legislation to the Senate Education Committee on April 12, 2023

    While proponents of book banning may claim their intention is to protect children, book bans do not challenge explicit content. They primarily target books exploring race, sexuality, and gender. Censorship targets authentic, diverse stories that help youth navigate trauma and discover ourselves.

    By mandating libraries to recognize “parents are the primary decision makers regarding a student’s access to library material,” these policies impact vulnerable students while denying us the agency to hold power in the policymaking.

    We must never forget that reading fosters personal growth and inspires leaders who drive society forward. Young people, organizing with Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and other youth-led movements, contributed to the demise of SB 13. Student organizers developed debate talking points and legislative amendments that senators proposed against HB 900 during the proceedings.

    In limiting the books students can access, policymakers further narrow students’ views on diversity and inclusion and dim what flourishes beyond the horizon. Students thrive when robust representation and affirmation can be found in the books of our school libraries because we come to discover a meaningful connection to education and our community.

    It’s time students reclaim ownership of our education and our right to read and learn. We all must pave a clear path for progress in defending our libraries and educators before it’s too late. Young people depend on leaders who speak truth to power.

    Our nation ought not to be silent when young people feel obligated to defend our own rights because we feel no others will.

  • Originally published at Project Censored.
  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Over the past several weeks, Tennessee legislators and Gov. Bill Lee have been engaged in an increasingly acrimonious battle with the state’s LGBTQ+ community and civil liberties defenders over the permissibility of drag shows in public spaces. It isn’t the first time the state has found itself at the epicenter of a burgeoning culture war over what can and cannot be said or done or taught in…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.