Category: Disinformation

  • “Hamas terrorists”, “hostages”, “anti-Semitism”, Israeli “right of self-defense”, standing with Israel, upholding the “laws of war”, peace thru “negotiations”, “2-state solution”, end game?  What are the relevant facts?  How should recent events be evaluated?

    Double standard

    Western imperial states (US, Britain, France, Germany, et cetera) and their mainstream media report the conflict with a pro-Israel anti-Arab bias.

    + Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence never is.  Statistics: Israeli violence (2008-2023 June) killed 6,407 Palestinians, while Palestinian violence killed 307 Israelis.[1]

    + Israelis taken captive by Palestinian fighters are categorized as “kidnapped” and “hostages”, while the 4,500 Palestinians (including 147 minors as young as 12) in Israeli detention are not so categorized despite the facts that: more than 1,100 are held under administrative detention without charge or access to any court, and many of the remainder were detained on purported “security grounds” (sometimes for nothing other than: denunciation of harsh Israeli policies, relationship with actual militants, expressions of sympathy with the resistance, and/or mere suspicion of support for militant resistance) by military courts (used only against Palestinians) with outcome almost always predetermined with a 99% conviction rate).[2]

    + Ethnic cleansing is recognized in international law as a crime against humanity, but the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing to create a Lebensraum for their so-called “Jewish state” is simply accepted.

    + Apartheid in South Africa (though the US and its Western allies did not always oppose it) is now considered an injustice, but Israeli apartheid-like persecutions of Palestinians go mostly unmentioned and without condemnation.[3]

    + The territory between the river and the sea is often called “Israel”, never “Palestine”.

    + When Israeli forces kill Palestinians one or a few at a time; it is barely, if at all, mentioned. It is only when Israeli bombings kill Palestinian civilians by the hundreds and thousands that the West sees fit to report on it. Killings of Israelis by Palestinians are reported empathetically as tragic, while Palestinians killed in far greater numbers by Israeli forces are merely unfortunate. With Israel now beginning to mass-murder Palestinians of all ages with indiscriminate bombing and thru starvation (preventing access to food, safe drinking water, and necessary medical supplies with which to treat mass casualties from Israeli bombing); Western state leaders excuse Israeli genocidal war crimes in Gaza, with banal assertions that Israel is only exercising its “right of self-defense” against “terrorists”, assertions which go unchallenged in the mainstream media.

    + Palestinian grievances (home demolitions, road blockages and checkpoints applied only to Palestinians, land and water resources taken from Palestinians and given to neighboring illegal Israeli settlements, grossly inequitable social services, travel restrictions applicable only to Palestinians, the economic siege of Gaza which impoverishes its population, the closing of Gaza’s borders so as to turn it into an “open-air prison”, and so forth) almost invariably go unmentioned.[4]

    + Ever increasing attacks (including murders) upon West Bank Palestinians by neighboring Israeli settlers, sometimes accompanied by participating Israeli soldiers, are perpetrated with impunity and rarely reported in the Western mainstream media.[5]

    The most overtly fascist coalition now governing the Zionist state has intensified its oppression of the Palestinians, especially in the occupied West Bank. That has naturally provoked an increase in militant resistance. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, notwithstanding their faults, currently constitute the most organized force in said resistance. The current armed conflict (begun October 07) between Gaza and the Zionist state is the natural outcome of Israeli/Zionist persecution and violence against the Palestinians.

    Hamas

    There are valid criticisms of Hamas as a governing entity. For example, it has permitted its most Islamist faction to impose a religiously intolerant, theocratic, and patriarchal regime in Gaza (acts which oppress fellow Palestinians); but that is not why Israel and the US condemn it.

    Hamas evolved from a Palestinian affiliate of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  Israel originally promoted Hamas as an alternative to the PLO which then represented the Palestinian resistance to Zionist oppression.  Indiscriminate Israeli violence against Palestinians during the first intifada (1987—93) affected all Palestinians including Hamas supporters. At that point, Hamas embraced the resistance against the Zionist state. Following the Oslo Accords (1993), Fatah and Israel established the Palestinian Authority which then devolved into a corrupt and subservient client regime for the Zionist state.  Hamas has filled much of the vacuum for the militant resistance.

    Israel, the US, and their apologists accuse Hamas of being ISIS.  That is not a valid comparison; in fact, Hamas denounced ISIS and its crimes.  Hamas fighters may have committed some “atrocities” (killing unarmed Israelis of all ages) in the current conflict; but the sensational allegations (beheading babies, immolating captives, raping women) voiced by Netanyahu and Biden are evidently false. Moreover, the charge that Hamas targeted “innocent” civilians ignores context (which is never considered by apologists for Israel, even though it mitigates Palestinian violence). For example, the Kibbutz residents attacked by Hamas are largely armed settlers in possession of land stolen from Palestinians.  Furthermore, most non-Arab Israeli adults (women as well as men) serve, or have served, in the Israeli army, which has perpetrated decades of often-murderous persecutions of the Palestinians (including ethnic cleansings); and those Israelis are military reservists until they reach the age of exemption (which varies from 40 to 49 depending upon rank and specialty).  Reasoned analysis of Hamas’ actions indicates that they intended to take as many captives (bargaining chips) as possible rather than simply kill Israelis. It appears that it was primarily those Israelis who resisted capture, including by fleeing, who were the ones killed.

    Should actual Hamas atrocities be disapproved? Yes. Should every violent Palestinian response to Israeli violence be denounced? No. Should Hamas excesses be equated to, and condemned equally with, those of the Zionist state? To do so (as have, all too eagerly, many left liberal peace advocates posturing as sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians) is to equate the violence of the resistance to that of the oppressor. In effect, it legitimizes the existence of a racist state built upon mass murder, often brutal persecutions, and the violent ethnic cleansing of a country stolen from its indigenous population. Is it appropriate to express uncritical praise for Hamas (October 07) action (as have some radical pro-Palestinian activists)? No. Such response dehumanizes and fails to recognize that the dead and wounded (sometimes avoidably, sometimes unavoidably) included, not only actual enemies, but also innocent children and likely some Israeli Jews of the minority which are actual opponents of the Zionist oppressions of Palestinians. Israeli assertions to the contrary, Hamas does not hate Jews in general; but it is not wrong in recognizing that Israeli “civilians” are not all “innocents”.

    Israelis

    Many Jews in Israel (and elsewhere: Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now) have sought an end to the Zionist state’s apartheid-like oppressions of the Palestinians[6]; but, in Israel, they are a minority.  A much smaller minority of Israeli Jews (along with many Jews in other countries) actually renounce the Zionist project and demand a single state between the river and the sea with equal rights for all, and the right of return and compensation for exiled Palestinians. Certainly, justice-seeking Israelis (some affiliated with organizations such as B’Tselem) do not deserve to suffer and die because of the crimes perpetrated by their government, crimes which provoke the inevitable counter-violent resistance by its victims.

    Fantasy: a permanent peace based upon the 2-state solution!

    Many liberals (including many of those denouncing Hamas while posturing as sympathetic to the suffering Palestinians) insist that the “Palestinian problem” be resolved thru negotiations toward the vaunted “2-state solution”. They evade the facts. The Zionist state (regardless of ruling party) has never been willing to share Palestine with any actual Palestinian Arab state.

    1. After 30 years of British Mandatory rule with democratic governance denied to the Palestinian populace (in violation of Mandate precepts); the UN (then with white-ruled countries constituting nearly ¾ of its 56 member states), indifferent to the rights of the indigenous Palestinians, divided Palestine so as to give 55% of the territory to the Zionist settlers who then constituted 32% of the total population.
    2. The Zionists, after having “agreed” to the UN plan, then invaded, conquered, and annexed half of the 42% of territory designated by the UN for the Palestinian state (which was never established). The Zionists also permanently expelled a majority of the Palestinians from the 77% of Palestine which then came under their rule.
    3. The Zionist state, in secret alliance with Britain and France, launched a war of conquest to seize the remainder of Palestine plus the Egyptian Sinai. The US, then led by President Eisenhower, issued a firm “no”, and compelled the aggressor: to abort before it had seized the West Bank, and to withdraw from seized territory in Gaza and Egypt.
    4. Israel launched another war of conquest, this time enabled by the US and its allies, and seized all remaining Palestinian territory plus parts of Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It then began its ongoing practice of planting illegal Zionist settlements in the newly conquered territories.

    1993-95. Israel signed onto the Oslo Accords, which did not include any actual provision for the creation of a real “state” in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians are wrongfully blamed for the failure to achieve a 2-state peace agreement. In fact, no Israeli government, then or at any other time, has ever been willing to remove the illegal settlements or to accept a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state. Moreover, repeated Palestinian attempts to achieve justice by peaceful methods have always been thwarted by the Zionist state and its imperial allies.

    For a more detailed history, see Charles Pierce: “The essential facts concerning Zionism and Palestine,” (Dissident Voice, 2023 Oct 10).

    End game?

    Israel, asserting “right of self-defense” as pretext, states its intention to wipe out Hamas and its operatives. Toward that end, Israel, in addition to bombing the territory into rubble, plans a ground invasion of Gaza. If that occurs, it appears reasonable to expect: much more mass killings of Gaza Palestinians (whom the Israeli Defense Minister describes as “human animals”, followed by a very brutal Israeli military rule, and eventual establishment of a quisling regime to rule the populace, plus Israeli detentions of any Palestinians who openly decline to be subservient to that regime, and inevitably a renewed violent Palestinian resistance to the ongoing persecution. Either that or Israel will complete its ethnic cleansing (as advocated by some parties in the ruling coalition) by expelling most remaining Palestinians from all Israeli-ruled territory.

    Biden, most members of Congress, and the US foreign policy establishment

    Israeli and US leaders responded to outrage over the aerial bombing of the Baptist hospital in Gaza (on Oct 17), with death toll in the hundreds, by blaming it on a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. Except by their apologists, that assertion is reasonably disbelieved. Militants in Gaza simply do not have rockets with bombs large enough to kill hundreds; whereas Israeli bombs have actually and deliberately destroyed multi-story buildings in Gaza, killing hundreds of their residents. Lies and cover-ups such as this are nothing new for the US; remember previous lies: babies taken from incubators in Kuwait, WMD in Iraq, unprovoked Vietnamese attack in Gulf of Tonkin, no US commanders’ orders to massacre civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere during the War in Korea, et cetera.

    Biden, who rushed to assert that the US “stands with Israel”, pretends to be pressing Israel to abide by the “laws of war” which prohibit making war on civilians; but he certainly knows that Israel will not comply as long as he refuses to use US leverage to compel compliance; and he clearly will not do so. Likewise pro-Israel politicians in the US Congress will not stop, or even put conditions upon, the $3.8 billion/year of US taxpayer funding (to which Biden intends to add an extra $14 billion) for the Israeli war machine; because (beyond their commitment to Western imperial world domination) they only care that the election-campaign funding, provided by the rich and powerful Zionist lobby and US Zionist billionaires, shall go to themselves rather than to their challengers.

    The anti-racist “left” needs to recognize that Biden along with most members of the US Congress and their counterparts in the Western allies, all now rushing to assist Israel, are ultimately no less racist than are Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other right-wing populists.

    ENDNOTES

    [1] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “Data on casualties,” 2023.

    [2] Addameer: “The Israeli military court system,” 2017 July.  B’Tselem: “Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli custody,” 2023 Sep 07.

    [3] B’Tselem: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” 2021 Jan 12.

    [4] Amnesty International: “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, a look into decades of oppression and domination,” 2022 Feb.

    [5] Leila Fadel: “Palestinians appear to have been killed in reprisal attacks in the West Bank,” NPR, 2023 Oct 18.  Amira Hass: “Israeli Settlers Aren’t Pausing the Expulsion and Dispossession in the West Bank,” Ha’aretz, 2023 Oct 12.

    [6] Ellen Brotsky & Ariel Koren: “We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza,” Guardian, 2023 Oct 18.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Judge imposes gag order on Donald Trump” is a perfect headline for Trump’s campaign fundraising machine, which is bleeding mounds of cash to pay for the former president’s mounting legal bills. It’s a snappy statement, free of any context, and has the power to immediately rile up both fans and foes on social media. The Trump campaign kicked into high gear after a federal judge hit the former…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Headlines have been dominated since Saturday by the surprise Hamas attack against Israel and the Netanyahu government’s response. By Monday, Israel had formally declared war against the Islamist group and moved tens of thousands of troops toward Gaza in what looks like preparation for a full-blown ground invasion. Most controversially, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that Israel is cutting off water, food and fuel to the Gaza strip — an area that contains about two million people, about half of whom are children — which constitutes collective punishment, a war crime prohibited under international law.

    Government heads and opposition leaders alike across Western Europe and North America have been denouncing Hamas in withering terms and pledging unconditional support for Israel. The Biden administration issued a statement shortly following the attacks stating that the US “unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza.” The statement added that the US is “ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel.”

    British prime minister Rishi Sunak declared: “There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. … [Hamas’] barbaric acts are acts of evil.” The Guardian had reported earlier that he has pledged “to provide diplomatic, intelligence or security support to Israel.” British Home Secretary Suella Braverman went so far as to suggest that the police should arrest people for engaging in “provocative demonstrations” that could “cause distress to UK Jewish communities.” This reportedly could include something as simple as chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Never to be outdone, opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer pledged his support for Netanyahu’s move to prevent food, water or fuel to enter Gaza during an interview on London’s LBC radio.

    The corporate-owned media have been acting in lockstep — demanding unwavering support of Israel, denouncing Hamas in the harshest terms and, above all, viciously dismissing any attempt to engage in what some outlets term “equivalence.” Even the most modest of attempts to add balance are fiercely denounced as “terrorist apologetics.”

    But not all is as it seems. Independent journalists and activists have begun investigating and fact-checking some of the claims that are being repeated in corporate-owned media. And all turns out that many of the claims made about Saturday’s surprise Hamas incursion are misleading or, in some cases, even outright false. Recent changes made to the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), meanwhile, have led to a tsunami-like spread of unverified footage and made it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction.

    Undoubtedly the most damning accusation to be leveled against Hamas is the charge that some of its units that took part in the Saturday attack murdered 40 babies, some of whom were decapitated. This claim was quickly seized on by corporate media outlets as part of their outrage against Hamas. But increasing doubt began to surround the allegation as people looked for verification. Ultimately, it turned out that not even the Israeli military itself was willing to confirm the reports. Another claim that has been circling corporate media outlets and right-wing X accounts is the accusation that Hamas engaged in rape. But again, there has been no independent verification. By Wednesday at least one mainstream outlet had retracted the claim.

    Some of the videos circulating on X is based on footage that is misrepresented or, in some cases, even of completely different conflicts in different countries. One video, for example, that was labeled “Hamas fires a salvo at Israel,” turned out to actually be footage of the conflict in Syria filmed three years earlier. One X user, far-right commentator and friend of Elon Musk, Ian Miles Cheong, posted a video with the caption: “Imagine if this was happening in our neighbourhood, to your family” that purported to depict Hamas militants killing Israeli citizens. It turned out that those in the video did not belong to Hamas but rather Israel’s own law enforcement. Other footage turned out to not even be depicting real life but rather the content of a video game. Labeled on X as “NEW VIDEO: Hamas fighters shooting down Israel war helicopter in Gaza,” it turned out to be taken from the 2013 open world tactical shooter simulation game Arma 3.

    Far from representing some inventive first on the part of Israel, engaging in this kind of disinformation campaign is, in fact, a tried and trusted component of its military arsenal. And some of them come straight from the Israeli government itself. During the flair up of violence in May 2021 sparked by the Israeli raid of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, for example, an Israeli government spokesperson posted a video on X (then Twitter) purporting to depict explosions taking place in Gaza. It turned out that the footage was actually of rockets fired from Syria or Libya three years earlier. The Israeli government sometimes even enlists student groups as part of this propaganda effort. In July 2014, Electronic Intifada reported: “Israel student union sets up “war room” to sell Gaza massacre on Facebook”

    Israel apologists will naturally claim that the Palestinian side engages in media manipulation as well. Though there have been some isolated examples of this (hardly surprising given the sheer number of social media users), it should be pointed out that Palestinians don’t have anywhere near the same kinds of resources that Israel does. After all, Israel is a regional superpower and the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since the end of World War II. And it has used these resources to engage in media manipulation operations even in third countries. In February of this year, for example, France24 reported: “An Israeli firm sought to influence more than 30 elections around the world for clients by hacking, sabotage and spreading disinformation, according to an undercover media investigation published Wednesday.”

    In addition to outright distortion and lies, another tactic that Israel and its media allies have been employing is what some have termed “selective outrage.” For instance, in the case of rape, even if we imagine for a moment that accusations against Hamas on this charge are true, the corporate media proceeds as if this is something entirely unique to the Palestinian side of the conflict. Sexual violence against Palestinian women on the part of Israeli security forces and prison guards, however, is in fact well documented. Just last month reports emerged that Israeli soldiers in the occupied city of Al Khalil had forcibly stripped five women and paraded them naked before stealing their jewelry — all in front of their own children. A 2020 academic study exploring the experience of 20 female Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail found that all but one had “experienced some sort of unwanted verbal and nonverbal sexual comments or gestures, forced nudity, or forced touching by prison personnel.”

    The most outrageous example of selective outrage, however, must be the killing of children. Again, even if we imagine for a moment that the accusations against Hamas are true, the Islamist group would be mere amateurs compared to the Israeli security forces when it comes to killing children. Israel’s record is far too extensive to list exhaustively here, but examples include Operation Protective Edge in 2014 during which Israeli forces murdered 495 children and Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9 during which they murdered 344 children. Israeli snipers, meanwhile, have shot dead in 2023 alone: two-year-old Mohammed al-Tamimi in June; three-year-old Muhammad Haitham al-Tamimi in June; 15-year-old Sadeel Naghniyeh in June; 14-year-old Qusai Radwan Yousef Waked in February; and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Hasan Ahmad Hardan in July. In January of this year, Israeli security forces and allied settler extremists managed to kill just under 40 Palestinian children in just one day.

    To be absolutely clear, accusations against Hamas should not be automatically dismissed as Israeli disinformation. And certainly, no rape or murder on the part of Israeli forces would excuse a rape or murder by a member of Hamas. But at the same time, we must consistently stress that Israel and its minions in the corporate-owned press are adept at spreading false information against the Palestinian side and notorious for engaging in flagrant selective outrage to make Israel out as the sole victim of the conflict. As they continue to manufacture consent for what is shaping up to be an all-out war against Gaza, a heavy burden falls on independent media to call out these duplicitous actions and shameless double standards.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pacific Media Watch

    Stuff, New Zealand’s biggest independently owned news business, today announced it will stop sharing content to X (formerly Twitter), effective immediately.

    A media statement said that decision followed Stuff’s increasing concerns about the volume of mis- and disinformation being shared, and the “damaging behaviour being exhibited on and enabled by the platform”.

    All Stuff brands including stuff.co.nz, and publishing mastheads brands The Post, The Press and Waikato Times will no longer post on X, with the exception of stories that are of urgent public interest — such as health and safety emergencies, said the statement.

    Stuff will also publish these stories on Neighbourly, to reach communities fast and with hyper-local information.

    The following message was sent to all staff from CEO Laura Maxwell:

    Trusted storytelling
    “When Stuff returned to New Zealand ownership in 2020, we set growth in public trust as a key measure of success. Three years on, our mission is to grow our business through trusted storytelling and experiences that make Aotearoa New Zealand a better place,” she said.

    “As a business we have made the decision that X, formerly known as Twitter, does not contribute to our mission.

    “We are increasingly concerned about the volume of mis- and dis-information being shared on the platform, and the damaging behaviours we have observed, and experienced.

    Stuff's CEO Laura Maxwell
    Stuff’s CEO Laura Maxwell . . . “We will also continue to assess our use of other social platforms.” Image: Linked-in/PMW

    “So, as of today, we will stop sharing our content on X. An exception to this will be stories that are of urgent public interest, such as health and safety emergencies. We will also publish these stories on Neighbourly.

    “We also encourage you all to consider how much you personally engage with X, if at all. The platform is diametrically opposed to our own values, as outlined in our Editorial Code of Practice and Ethics. It deliberately and actively seeks to undermine the value of our journalism.

    “We are aware many of you might use X for news gathering and as a way to share information with others. However, as a company that values truth and trust, this platform is no longer a tool for us.

    “As many of you know, this is not the first time Stuff has taken such a stance.

    “In July 2020, Stuff paused posting activity on Facebook. The move built on the decision to stop paid advertising on Facebook in 2019, following the live streaming and widespread dissemination of footage of the Christchurch mosque shootings on the platform. We will also continue to assess our use of other social platforms.

    “As New Zealand’s biggest news organisation, we benefit from a loyal audience, who engage with us every single day on our platforms, our papers, magazines and at our events.

    “As restless creators, our innovation mindset is enduring and so we’ll continue to innovate and invest in our platforms to deliver high-quality, trustworthy journalism that is relevant and reflective of Aotearoa.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • 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

  • Online platforms are railing against the Albanese government’s plan to combat misinformation and disinformation, warning draft legislation is poorly defined, hands the regulator too much power and could chill free speech and criticism of government. Through industry group DIGI, the platforms have warned that the planned regime would make it difficult for them to host…

    The post Digital platforms join misinformation plan pile on appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • The 2024 elections are more than a year away, but former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is already deploying disinformation about voter fraud and claiming that Democrats are trying “steal” the election, setting the stage for players in the right-wing cottage industry known as the “election denial industrial complex” to once again profit from riling up voters and casting doubt on any…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission NACC ignores huge Australian War Crimes & Carbon Debt

    I have made 5 huge successive Submissions to the newly formed  Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC). However my 2 most serious Submissions – on horrendous Australian war crimes (Submission #2: 6 million Afghan avoidable deaths from deprivation under Australian and US Alliance occupation in gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention) and on horrendous, planet-threatening  Carbon Debt (Submission #3: an enormous  $5 trillion fraud perpetrated on Australian children, grandchildren and future generations) – were rejected by the NACC on the basis that the NACC had “not been able to identify a clear allegation of corrupt conduct as defined by the National Anti-Corruption Commission Act (2022). As a result, the Commission is unable to take any further action in this matter”. My 5 Submissions are summarized below with the rejected Submissions asterisked.

    (1). “Submission To National Anti-Corruption Commission: Australian Labor Government’s Lying For Apartheid Israel”. On a bipartisan Coalition Opposition and Labor Government basis, Zionist-subverted and US-beholden Australia is second only to the US as a fervent a supporter of Apartheid Israel and hence of the evil crime of Apartheid that is condemned by the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Departure from fervent support for the Zionist-subverted US and for Apartheid Israel means potential political oblivion for Coalition and Labor MPs noting that Australian Federal MPs receive huge remuneration. MPs and governments should not lie and benefit from lying (fraud and corruption) and should not lie in the interest of inimical foreign governments (treason). Apartheid Israel and its Zionist agents have damaged Australians, Australian institutions and Australia in numerous serious ways. However the  Australian Labor Government lies for Apartheid Israel in 15 matters.

    *(2). “Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission Over Huge But Ignored Australian War Crimes”. Variously as UK or US lackeys Australians have invaded about 85 countries with 30 of these invasions being genocidal. In the last 80 years (i.e. within living memory) Australia has violated all circa 80 Indo-Pacific countries variously through occupation and invasion (most countries), complicity in US regime-changing coups (8 countries), and through disproportionate climate criminality (impacting all countries). The Brereton Report found that 39 Afghans had allegedly been unlawfully killed by Australian soldiers. However successive Australian Governments and their public servants have grossly violated  Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention by criminally rejecting their unequivocal demand for Occupier provision to the Conquered Afghan Subjects of life-sustaining food and medical services  “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”. Now 6,000,000 (Afghans passively murdered over 20 years by the US Alliance including Australia) / 39 (Afghans allegedly unlawfully killed by Australian soldiers) = 154,000 i.e. the passive mass murder of 6,000,000 Afghans (mostly women and children) by Australian and US Alliance politicians is 154,000 times worse than the alleged unlawful killing of 39 Afghans by Australian soldiers. Of course all war crimes should be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators tried and punished, but in my opinion no Australian soldier should be tried for any of these 39 alleged unlawful killings of Afghans before the politicians complicit in the 154,000 times greater war crime (the passive mass murder of 6,000,000 Afghans) are exposed and tried. The same argument applies to horrendous avoidable deaths from deprivation in the Australia-complicit WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indian avoidable deaths, 1942-1945) and Iraqi Holocaust (3 million avoidable deaths, 1990-2011).

    *(3). “Submission To Australian National  Anti-Corruption Commission: Corporations & Governments Ignore  Huge Carbon Debt”. Australia is among world-leading climate criminal countries in 16 areas. Corporations, governments and Mainstream media conspire to fraudulently and corruptly ignore Australia’s huge and inescapable Carbon Debt that totals (in USD) about $5 trillion, is increasing at up to about $0.7 trillion each year, and at $69,000  per head per year for under-30 year old Australians. The Carbon Debt of the World is $250 trillion and increasing at $13 trillion each year. This is appalling intergenerational injustice because this ever-increasing and inescapable Carbon Debt will have to be paid by our children, grandchildren and  future generations. The damage-related Carbon Price is about $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent but the global applied average is merely $2 per tonne CO2-equivalent. A general principle of national law and the Natural Law  is that people are recompensed in full for damage done to them by others but this is rejected in relation to deadly Carbon Pollution by a greedy, fraudulent, corrupt, and traitorous Australian Mainstream (except notably for the science-informed and humane Australian Greens). Carbon Pollution from carbon fuel burning kills about 7 million people each year but the previous Coalition Government’s response to the IMF demand to adopt a modest $75 per tonne CO2-equivalent  Carbon Price to save 4 million lives by 2030 was a simple “No”. The present climate criminal Labor Government ignores Australia’s huge exported greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution and supports over 100 new coal and gas extraction projects. Australia has 0.33% of the world’s population but its annual Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution is 5.4% of the World’s total annual GHG pollution. In the absence of requisite action (atmospheric pollution by GHGs is increasing at record high rates) the direst expert prediction is that 10 billion people will die this century in a worsening Climate Genocide en route to a sustainable population in 2100 of  only 1 billion people.

    (4). “Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission: Huge & Fraudulent University Fees Exposed”. Education is a basic human right and all education should be free for all. However the commodification and corporatizing of higher education has meant that free university education presently only obtains in about 25 countries. Australian universities charge impoverished local and overseas students hugely excessive tuition fees whereas Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) can deliver top quality, reading-based courses and accrediting examinations essentially for free. All societies and nations need to have a large complement of expert scholars and scientists for a variety of economic, health, national security  and national prestige reasons – however  why should impoverished, circa 20 year old undergraduate students have to pay for this? Tertiary education provision in Australia can be vastly cheaper off-campus than on-campus. Thus off-campus university education can be essentially cost-free by simply involving students reading prescribed texts and addressing other  teaching materials, with qualifications established by expert accrediting examinations. This indeed was the de facto off-campus scheme during the Covid-19 Pandemic except that huge full fees were dishonestly applied to local and overseas students. The student debt from fees presently totals A$74 billion, a massive fraud perpetrated on Australian students, and indeed one of the biggest frauds in Australian history.

    (5). Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission, NACC: Mainstream Media Lying”. Australian Mainstream media (MSM), including the publicly-funded ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and the dominant US Murdoch empire media have an appalling and ongoing record of lying by omission and lying by commission. Lying by omission is far, far worse than repugnant lying by commission because the latter at least permits public refutation and public debate (subject, of course, to the will of MSM gate-keepers). Democracy ideally requires an informed electorate but driven by ever-increasing wealth inequity Western democracies (including Australia) have become kleptocracies, plutocracies,  Murdochracies. lobbyocracies, corporatocracies and dollarocracies  in which Big Money corruptly purchases public perception of reality, votes, more political power and hence more private profit. Although individual journalists can have certain opinions and biases, lying by omission and lying by commission by media is fraud and corruption when perpetrated for personal gain, and treason when perpetrated in the interests of inimical foreign governments such as those of Apartheid Israel and pro-Apartheid America. Experience of Australian MSM mendacity over many decades instructs that the serious examples of fraud, corruption and treason in my 5 Submissions will be resolutely ignored by cowardly and mendacious Australian MSM presstitutes. Australia can be saved from fraudulent MSM in part by (a) publicly exposing and listing all MSM falsehoods on the Web, and (b) banning foreign MSM ownership.

    For details and documentation see Gideon Polya, “Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission Rejects Submissions Re Huge Australian War Crimes and Carbon Debt,” Countercurrents, 2 October 2023.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Drown on Dry Land, 2019.

    Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’. Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself into Libya, and broke the dams. CCTV camera footage in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have been damaged in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and another 10,000 are missing.

    Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and told the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims, which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE). Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.

    Howls of anguish across Libya morphed into anger at the devastation, which are now developing into demands for an investigation. But who will conduct this investigation: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and officially recognised by the United Nations (UN), or the Government of National Stability, headed by Prime Minister Osama Hamada in Sirte? These two rival governments – which have been at war with each other for many years – have paralysed the politics of the country, whose state institutions were fatally damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombardment in 2011.

    Soad Abdel Rassoul (Egypt), My Last Meal, 2019.

    The divided state and its damaged institutions have been unable to properly provide for Libya’s population of nearly seven million in the oil-rich but now totally devastated country. Before the recent tragedy, the UN was already providing humanitarian aid for at least 300,000 Libyans, but, as a consequence of the floods, they estimate that at least 884,000 more people will require assistance. This number is certain to rise to at least 1.8 million. The WHO’s Dr Harris reports that some hospitals have been ‘wiped out’ and that vital medical supplies, including trauma kits and body bags, are needed. ‘The humanitarian needs are huge and much more beyond the abilities of the Libyan Red Crescent, and even beyond the abilities of the Government’, said Tamar Ramadan, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya.

    The emphasis on the state’s limitations is not to be minimised. Similarly, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas pointed out that although there was an unprecedented level of rainfall (414.1 mm in 24 hours, as recorded by one station), the collapse of state institutions contributed to the catastrophe. Taalas observed that Libya’s National Meteorological Centre has ‘major gaps in its observing systems. Its IT systems are not functioning well and there are chronic staff shortages. The National Meteorological Centre is trying to function, but its ability to do so is limited. The entire chain of disaster management and governance is disrupted’. Furthermore, he said, ‘[t]he fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk’.

    Faiza Ramadan (Libya), The Meeting, 2011.

    Abdel Moneim al-Arfi, a member of the Libyan Parliament (in the eastern section), joined his fellow lawmakers to call for an investigation into the causes of the disaster. In his statement, al-Arfi pointed to underlying problems with the post-2011 Libyan political class. In 2010, the year before the NATO war, the Libyan government had allocated money towards restoring the Wadi Derna dams (both built between 1973 and 1977). This project was supposed to be completed by a Turkish company, but the company left the country during the war. The project was never completed, and the money allocated for it vanished. According to al-Arfi, in 2020 engineers recommended that the dams be restored since they were no longer able to manage normal rainfall, but these recommendations were shelved. Money continued to disappear, and the work was simply not carried out.

    Impunity has defined Libya since the overthrow of the regime led by Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011). In February–March 2011, newspapers from Gulf Arab states began to claim that the Libyan government’s forces were committing genocide against the people of Libya. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions: resolution 1970 (February 2011) to condemn the violence and establish an arms embargo on the country and resolution 1973 (March 2011) to allow member states to act ‘under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter’, which would enable armed forces to establish a ceasefire and find a solution to the crisis. Led by France and the United States, NATO prevented an African Union delegation from following up on these resolutions and holding peace talks with all the parties in Libya. Western countries also ignored the meeting with five African heads of state in Addis Ababa in March 2011 where al-Gaddafi agreed to the ceasefire, a proposal he repeated during an African Union delegation to Tripoli in April. This was an unnecessary war that Western and Gulf Arab states used to wreak vengeance upon al-Gaddafi. The ghastly conflict turned Libya, which was ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index (the highest ranking on the African continent), into a country marked by poor indicators of human development that is now significantly lower on any such list.

    Tewa Barnosa (Libya), War Love, 2016.

    Instead of allowing an African Union-led peace plan to take place, NATO began a bombardment of 9,600 strikes on Libyan targets, with special emphasis on state institutions. Later, when the UN asked NATO to account for the damage it had done, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote that there was no need for an investigation, since ‘NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya’. There was no interest in the wilful destruction of crucial Libyan state infrastructure, which has never been rebuilt and whose absence is key to understanding the carnage in Derna.

    NATO’s destruction of Libya set in motion a chain of events: the collapse of the Libyan state; the civil war, which continues to this day; the dispersal of Islamic radicals across northern Africa and into the Sahel region, whose decade-long destabilisation has resulted in a series of coups from Burkina Faso to Niger. This has subsequently created new migration routes toward Europe and led to the deaths of migrants in both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea as well as an unprecedented scale of human trafficking operations in the region. Add to this list of dangers not only the deaths in Derna, and certainly the deaths from Storm Daniel, but also casualties of a war from which the Libyan people have never recovered.

    Najla Shawkat Fitouri (Libya), Sea Wounded, 2021.

    Just before the flood in Libya, an earthquake struck neighbouring Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, wiping out villages such as Tenzirt and killing about 3,000 people. ‘I won’t help the earthquake’, wrote the Moroccan poet Ahmad Barakat (1960–1994); ‘I will always carry in my mouth the dust that destroyed the world’. It is as if tragedy decided to take titanic steps along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea last week.

    A tragic mood settled deep within the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi. On 10 September, before being swept away by the flood waves, he wrote, ‘[w]e have only one another in this difficult situation. Let’s stand together until we drown’. But that mood was intercut with other feelings: frustration with the ‘twin Libyan fabric’, in his words, with one government in Tripoli and the other in Sirte; the divided populace; and the political detritus of an ongoing war over the broken body of the Libyan state. ‘Who said that Libya is not one?’, Al-Trabelsi lamented. Writing as the waters rose, Al-Trabelsi left behind a poem that is being read by refugees from his city and Libyans across the country, reminding them that the tragedy is not everything, that the goodness of people who come to each other’s aid is the ‘promise of help’, the hope of the future.

    The rain
    Exposes the drenched streets,
    the cheating contractor,
    and the failed state.
    It washes everything,
    bird wings
    and cats’ fur.
    Reminds the poor
    of their fragile roofs
    and ragged clothes.
    It awakens the valleys,
    shakes off their yawning dust
    and dry crusts.
    The rain
    a sign of goodness,
    a promise of help,
    an alarm bell.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Many have noted that the indictments of Trump ring of lawfare by the Biden administration. Donald Trump has now been indicted four times, and in blatant overkill, now faces 91 criminal charges. In New York alone  he was hit with 34 felonies for the payments to Stormy Daniels. Trump also faces felony charges for claiming the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and then seeking to invalidate the outcome of that election through allegedly unlawful means.

    These criminal cases rest on the assumption that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, making his actions to overturn the election an illegal conspiracy. However, what anti-Trumpers declare disinformation is what Trumpers and others consider their First Amendment free speech right to speak the truth. So far, the US has no official 1984-style Ministry of Truth or “science” that declares what is misinformation – though Biden sought to create one with the Nina Jankowicz Disinformation Governance Board.

    Trump challenged the election results in some states and asked officials there to find evidence of fraud. Later he asked Vice President Pence to reject the Electors from those states. A candidate in any election has the right to challenge the vote count. The Constitution presents some procedures for doing this, which Trump followed.

    Yet, in 2000, 2004, and particularly in 2016, when Democrats lost the election, they also challenged the final vote. The US clearly has undemocratic presidential elections, where winning the popular vote does not mean you win the election, a consequence of the Constitution giving us no right to vote for president.

    In 2000, the Supreme Court did intervene to stop the recount of votes for president in Florida that would have made Al Gore the president. In 2004, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and others objected to certifying the Ohio elector votes for Bush, which would make him the victor. In 2016, after the Hillary Clinton-CIA-FBI Russia collusion hoax – the biggest national security state hoax since their WMDs in Iraq – had failed to stop Trump, Democratic activists tried to convince electors to switch their votes from Trump. Two did. Some even received death threats if they voted for Trump. No one was charged with obstructing an official proceeding in either case.

    Trump stands accused of violating the Espionage Act, treason, by possessing classified documents in his private mansion – something we know Biden did as Vice President and Clinton did as Secretary of State. Trump – unlike Biden or Clinton at the time – was President of the United States, the highest official of the Executive Branch of the government. Even the American Bar Association states the President has “broad authority to formally declassify most documents.”

    Glenn Greenwald asked:

    What is it that Donald Trump did exactly that was illegal? He definitely sued in court multiple times and lost, which is absolutely his right to do. He told Mike Pence what he heard from his lawyers was Mike Pence’s ability to do, even if it wasn’t, which was act as that vice presidential role and reject as certified results, ones that he regarded had evidence of fraud and send them back to the states. He arranged for an alternative state of electors to be ready to be anointed in the event he could prove that there was a fraud. But what about this is criminal? Which of these steps is illegal?

    In Georgia state court Trump was charged with 13 felony conspiracy counts under their RICO anti-racketeering law used against mobsters. The law makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy a full member of the criminal ring and equally responsible for crimes committed by others, as long as they were committed as part of the conspiracy. The prosecutor outlandishly claimed this conspiracy began one day after the 2020 election, when Trump gave a speech saying he won. This is criminalizing our First Amendment free speech rights.

    National Security State Lawfare to Fix 2024 Election for Biden

    The Biden administration is using the Department of Justice to eliminate his only serious challenger in the presidential race. This lawfare election fixing is unprecedented in US history, though presidents have been “elected” in underhanded ways, as in 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000. Even more ominously, this lawfare is being engineered by the national security state. They have opposed Trump since he first condemned US wars in the Middle East during the 2016 Republican primary debates, and called out the national security state hoax of weapons of mass destruction to instigate the war on Iraq.

    It now looks like the 2024 presidential election will not be decided by our vote, but by the national security state intervening beforehand to remove Biden’s most formidable challenger.

    Trump could have brought the same charges against Biden in 2020, when Biden, years after no longer holding a government position, had secret documents in his house. However, there would have been national outrage and popular mobilizations against “fascism” if Trump’s Department of Justice had indicted Biden for treason in the run-up to the election. But today, progressive people either approve of lawfare against Trump, or are silent.

    In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter mass protests, people called for defunding the police and prison network, and regarded prosecutors as covering for police brutality. Now, the left and liberals champion the prosecutors of Trump, not questioning their credibility. Greenwald noted, “They really have come to be a political movement that reveres institutions of power because they regard them as being their political allies.”

    Voters for Democrats now Trust the FBI and CIA

    A Gallup poll a year ago, before the indictments of Trump corroborates this: 79% of Democrat voters say the FBI is doing an excellent or good job; only 29% of Republican voters do. And 69% of Democratic voters say the CIA is doing a good job; only 38% of Republican voters do. We live in a different era from what we grew up in, even 20 years ago at the start of Bush’s war on Iraq. Now most Democrats like the CIA and FBI and most Republicans don’t. Now all the Democrats in Congress vote to continually fund the war in Ukraine, while only Republicans vote against.

    It’s a bygone era when Republicans were the war hawks and a wing of the Democrats were pro-peace. Unfortunately most leftists and progressives still live in that era.

    Today many who want to defend free speech, stop endless war, stop censorship, oppose the “deep state,” find a hearing with Trump Republicans, while the Democrats have become advocates of war and state censorship.

    Lawfare Indictments against Trump will be directed against us

    These lawfare charges to remove Trump from the presidential race, presented by the national security police agencies along with the Democratic Party and neo-con Republicans, will be used against viable future third parties. They will be a threat to our constitutional rights and our ability to organize against the 1%. Already, in part thanks to the absence of progressive outcry, the RICO law prosecution of Trump in Georgia is used against Stop Cop City protestors in Atlanta.

    We should protest the indictments against Trump and the harsh criminal sentences against his January 6 supporters because if the left would ever move off the sidelines and become a force, they will be subject to similar prosecutions, only in an even more draconian way. Working class forces who effectively take on the bosses will suffer the same treatment.

    McCarthyism of the Left

    Unfortunately, anti-Trump sentiment infects and blinds much of the left milieu. Very few oppose these national security police state attacks on Trump or the lawfare manipulation of the 2024 election. We protest the New York Times’ McCarthyite attack on anti-war activists, but McCarthyism also exists in the left, where people are baited, and fear being baited – not as Reds, but as Trump supporters often simply for not condemning him enough. Consequently, they either participate in Trumper-baiting themselves or are intimidated into not standing up to it. This left McCarthyism is widespread and functions to push people towards voting for the supposed “lesser evil” Democratic Party and towards defending the actions of the national security police state.

    We see this left McCarthyism with cheering the harsh sentences of January 6 defendants, most of who were non-violent. We see it in progressives’ not demanding answers for what the 100-200 undercover FBI and other police agency undercover agents in the crowd were actually doing that day. We see it in their not demanding answers about what the federal agents who had infiltrated the Proud Boys and other groups months before January 6 actually knew of January 6 plans. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, was in regular contact with the Secret Service for months prior to January 6. We see it in progressives’ failure to question the reasons behind the deliberate lack of defense of the Capitol. We see it in progressives not standing up for Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who were non-violent on January 6, and did not even enter the Capitol, but were given 18 and 22 years for a charge often used against radicals: “seditious conspiracy.” These sentences are precedents that will be used against us. But left McCarthyism, fear of being baited as soft on Trump, makes progressives keep their mouths shut.

    Unfortunately, as the Democratic Party shifted far to the right, and now is in open collusion with the FBI and CIA, becoming increasingly owned by the national security state, more and more of the left has capitulated to the identity politics ideology of that Party and the belief that it represents the “lesser evil” to Trump “fascism.” How far this left will degenerate, and how long until there is a national reaction to national security state fixing the 2024 election is unclear. The left is digging themselves into a hole, and giving the police state the opportunity to cover them up when they try to get out of it.

  • By Kristian Erdianto in Jakarta

    Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Security, Politics and Legal Affairs Wiranto – a former high-ranking military officer — has proposed an additional budget of 60 billion rupiah (US$4 million) to fund diplomatic efforts related to the so-called “Papua problem”.

    The proposed budget would be separate from the Coordinating Ministry for Security, Politics and Legal Affairs’ (Kemenko Polhukam) annual budget.

    Wiranto said that the 60 billion rupiah would be used to pay for diplomatic efforts by the government in the South Pacific region.

    “We are pursuing intense soft-diplomacy. I’m heading it up myself, going there, coordinating, and talking to them. We’re proposing an additional budget of 60 billion rupiah”, said Wiranto.

    He was speaking during a working meeting with the House of Representatives (DPR) Budget Committee at the parliamentary complex in Senayan, Jakarta, last week.

    Wiranto explained that just a few years ago as many as seven out of 13 countries in the South Pacific supported Papuan independence.

    All of these countries had voting rights in the United Nations General Assembly.

    Jakarta pursuing diplomatic efforts
    Wiranto claimed many of the South Pacific countries had been receiving “misinformation” about Indonesia’s approach to Papua. For example, a view that the government had neglected development in Papua.

    According to the former ABRI (Indonesian Armed Forces, now call TNI) commander, the government was already pursuing diplomatic efforts with the leaders of two South Pacific countries, Nauru and Vanuatu.

    The national leaders had been invited to visit Papua to “see for themselves” the progress in development there.

    “We’ve been forgetting, we’ve been negligent, that there are many countries there which could potentially threaten our domination. Papua is part of our territory and it turns out that this is true,” said Wiranto.

    The additional budget of 60 billion rupiah proposed by Wiranto would be used for five coordinated activities.

    • 20 billion rupiah to ‘improve Papua’s international image’;
    • 15 billion rupiah to improve Indonesia’s cooperation with the South Pacific;
    • 15 billion rupiah to improve cooperation with South Pacific international organisations;
    • 5 billion rupiah for the management of Australian and South Pacific territorial border security; and
    • 5 billion rupiah to improve Australian and South Pacific territorial border security intelligence cooperation.

    Pacific Media Watch reports: Last month, the Melanesian Spearhead Group decided not to admit the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) as full members of the MSG in spite of it being widely expected to happen.

    The declined membership was seen as a success of Indonesian diplomacy in the region in recent months in the face of mounting allegations of human rights violations by Indonesian military forces.

    Translated by James Balowski of IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was Wiranto Ajukan Tambahan Anggaran Rp 60 Miliar untuk Diplomasi Terkait Papua.

  • It’s been well over a year now since the health scare dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic has had any widespread impact upon the lives of the vast majority of humanity. Since the “fog of war” has lifted, so to speak, there has been very little introspection regarding the knee-jerk authoritarianism imposed upon humanity in the liberal press or mainstream academia. Eerie parallels connect the panic stirred up during the health crisis with the reaction to 9/11. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge and pre-planning for both of these events. In their wake, mass hysteria, government propaganda, tyranny, censorship, and irrational belief systems spawned out of each, supported by ruling class interests and mass media mouthpieces.

    Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by “absent causes”; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams. The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

    A related aspect of what we may call postmodern tyranny is the absence of metanarratives. The establishment props up whatever narrative suits their interest in the moment, but is able to cast them off at the first serious grumblings from the public. From about 2001-2011, the global war on terror dominated; from 2011-2016, it was “regime change” in Syria and Libya with a little ISIS and feigned horror at Russia taking Crimea sprinkled in; from 2016-2020, the overblown Russiagate connection; from 2020-2022, Covid-19; and now the Ukraine-Russia war, in which we are told NATO and the US are completely innocent allies who did not start, provoke, and manipulate the geopolitical chessboard going back decades, and who only want to assist the helpless Ukrainians.

    Yet after two years of being subjected to the tyrannical orders of an authoritarian medical panic orchestrated by the ruling classes, transnational political puppets, as well as the establishment medical “experts” who espoused fraudulent and laughable claims over and over, people worldwide are waking up to the health scare as well as the US proxy war in Ukraine. There are many striking similarities between the 9/11 false flag attack and the Covid-19 global health freak-out. Both events led to mass hysteria and a globalized form of ostrich syndrome, where denial and collective hallucination became the norm, paving the way for deeper imperial tyranny and mass obedience. Recently, many who supported government policies and narratives including lockdowns, travel bans, vaccine mandates, and health passports are asking for “Pandemic Amnesty” regarding their panic-inducing and tyrannical behavior; and admitting they were dead wrong, even as they championed ridiculous and deadly policies and demonized anyone who tried to stand in their way.

    Revisiting the “Catalyst”

    The parallels between government reactions to 9/11 and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are uncanny. Prior to 9/11, a sizable chunk of US citizens would not have put up with domestic mass surveillance. Similarly, prior to the health crisis of 2020, populations would have been very skeptical of mandatory lockdowns, absurd masking rules, and coercive vaccine mandates and propaganda; as well as blocking off access to travel, public spaces, and businesses with vaccine passports. Most interpret this as government exploiting a crisis, rather than governments’ prior knowledge and pre-planning of the events. However, from the start, the ready-made, manufactured hysteria and propaganda suggests a collusion of military-intelligence, industrial, financial, and medical forces of industry and government.

    The economic indicators had been blinking red for months before even January of 2020, going back to the repo crisis of September 2019. Quoting an investor in CNBC from March 2020:

    The virus was the catalyst but it’s not the cause,’ said Christopher Whalen, founder of Whalen Global Advisors. ‘Both bonds and equities were inflated rather dramatically by our friends at the Fed. You’re seeing the end game for monetary policy here, which is at a certain point you have to stop. Otherwise you get grotesque asset bubbles like we saw, and the engine just runs out of fuel.’ [Emphasis mine]

    Reuters concurs, with a major figure at the Fed blurting the quiet part out loud: “Pandemic aid was also ‘banking bailout‘”. The liberal/left site The Intercept sums up the game quite well, explaining that the CARES Act of March 2020 allows for:

    Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

    Further on in the piece, the author notes how the CARES Act calls for an “Exchange Stabilization Fund”. Worth 454 billion, the money is leveraged just like a major bank, allowing for:

    A $4.5 trillion slush fund would be created, equity markets ballooned. The total value of the stock market cratered to 103 percent of GDP, about $21.8 trillion, on March 23. By April 30 it was back to 136.3 percent of GDP, or $28.9 trillion. By that metric, $7.1 trillion in stock market wealth has been created in that period.

    In other words, the US saw the writing on the wall coming from China: the economic slowdown and shuttering of factories which began in January 2020 was finally affecting the US stock market, which had cratered by mid-March 2020. Only the exaggeration of a pandemic, a sloughing off of millions of jobs, and new spigots opening for the banking sector, would allow for corporations to maintain profitability. Debt restructuring was inevitable and the only way to accomplish this was to railroad legislation through Congress, not a difficult task considering our lawmakers are essentially lobbyists for major multinational corporations. Large companies got billions in aid while workers and small businesses fell into ruin.

    Once the medical agenda was set, panic set in, and it turns out overcrowding nursing homes, firing one million medical workers and 40 million total US workers, blaring apocalyptic propaganda non-stop, censoring any talk of vitamin and supplement use, imposing stressful lockdowns, and turning patients away from doctors can have an effect on worldwide mortality. Hardly anyone in the medical community was willing to confront those inconvenient truths, and those that did were censored further.

    It was known very soon after March 2020 what the infection fatality rate would be: a very low percentage, perhaps twice the rate from seasonal influenza. World elites did not care- they had an agenda in hand.  Regardless of the seriousness, capitalist elites wouldn’t have put 40 million Americans out of work and imploded the economy without a plan. And they had one ready-made: a 5 trillion dollar plan. Later on, US elites would not have advocated for coercive vaccine mandates – get the shot or lose your job – unless the word came down from the very highest echelons of the elite, and although many, if not most, of the establishment bought it wholesale, it’s clear that the federal government was not going to leave states to make decisions based off the inputs of local county and state health officials. The word came down from on high; there certainly was obvious collusion to centralize and organize the Covid dogma, yes, a “conspiracy”, because asking the public to “trust the science” only takes you so far when conflicting and contradictory data about the danger of the virus is staring them right in the face.

    Given the unreliability of the initial tests for Sars-CoV-2, the deliberate use of too many PCR cycles per test, and the simple fact that it’s quite probable that multiple benign strains and variants of coronaviruses resulted in positive tests, it’s easy to see how a global pandemic was manufactured at the outset. From the very beginning, government propaganda emanating from the medical, military, and intelligence establishments were obviously coordinated, centralized, and directed to coerce and cow citizens into submission to a globalized, medical cult. Local and national news all parroted the same line, and a global groupthink biosecurity agenda was pushed to the forefront of society. It’s important to remember that before the declared emergency, to “quarantine” involved restricting access to the sick, not the whole of society.

    The language was not only Orwellian, but was written from scripts in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. We were told to “shelter in place”, and doctors and nurses were on the “frontlines” of the fight. These were certainly designed to conjure images of war and create an impassioned atmosphere where dissent was marginalized, repeating the lockstep ideological conformity that occurred after 9/11. Phrases like social distancing and contact tracing entered the lexicon with barely a grumble. Hilariously, after more than a year of putting up with absurd and ever-changing laws, Britain toyed with the idea of offering its citizens “Freedom Passes” for those compliant enough to test frequently, their reward being the “freedom” to leave their own home.

    Canadian and British reporting confirms the unethical propaganda to coerce, scare, and guilt-trip civilian populations. One UK psychologist dubbed their government program “totalitarian”. Every mainstream news outlet in the US from March 2020 to February 2022 resembled a liberal version of the Sinclair broadcasting scandal from 2018, where the media conglomerate, which has a known right-wing bias, made 193 local news anchors repeat the same minute-long script, word-for-word, warning of “false news” and “fake stories” proliferating on social media and mainstream news, echoing Trump’s rhetoric at the time.

    Natural immunity was scoffed at, gathering in public was outlawed, visitors to households were forbidden, a vaccine was deemed to be the only response to the threat, and even health advocates who gave common-sense reminders to take vitamins and supplements were derided as unserious crackpots.

    A pertinent question to think about is this: given the uptick in supposed deaths from Sars-CoV-2 around March 2020, was a global upheaval of lockdowns, travel restrictions, limited movement outside one’s home, and caps on gatherings justified? With hindsight, many if not the majority of Americans now say no. However, the fact remains that many astute observers were calling the bluff of the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the medical and national security establishments from the beginning. Those voices were censored and silenced by a corporatist oligarchy bent on imposing pain on small business and the average citizen. Millions lost their livelihoods and small businesses never recovered.

    Another related question: how and why was the medical establishment so driven to combat an acute health threat caused by the virus Sars-CoV-2, but lies dormant when global poverty is clearly the number one cause of death in the world, followed by cancer and heart disease? We were led to believe the world could be turned upside down to fight a virus, yet nothing can be done to alleviate the leading causes of death, poverty: structural, chronic health issues are off the table, as they are caused by capitalism’s inexorable drive to profit, pollute, and impoverish the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants.

    Even the WHO admits that ¼ of total deaths today are attributable to “unhealthy environments”; i.e., conditions of extreme poverty, preventable disease, starvation, and malnutrition. In 2012 that was 12.6 million deaths per year, but the total is undoubtedly higher today, probably about 20 million.  The WHO also concedes about 2 million people in China alone die from air pollution every year, with about 6.7 million deaths per year worldwide. Where is the outcry and global mobilization to stop these much deadlier problems?

    Could there have been a more rational path, where people over the age of say, 60 or 65, the most likely to be affected, could have been shielded with voluntary plans to restrict interpersonal contact, as well as given access to the best care and medicine, while the rest of the world would be allowed to carry on without draconian measures? Surely medical professionals in the US could have developed a plan in conjunction with governments which allowed for freedom of movement, as in Sweden and Japan. The path, however, was blocked by the national security state in conjunction with unelected health authorities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and global capitalists eager to institute repressive measures and rake in trillions from a restructuring of the world economy. The global economy needed a “Great Reset” to centralize and buy-up small businesses for pennies on the dollar, and the financial system was reeling going back to September of 2019. Disturbingly, this sequence of events is reminiscent of the last time the national security state remade the world, after 9/11.

    The Mask Comes Off

    Many leftists pointed out that the work stoppage from the lockdowns would allow us time to reflect on the inhumanity, overproduction, alienation, and exploitation inherent to capitalism. No doubt this was true. What most overlooked, however, was the ridiculousness of having the poor and working classes keep on working while the remote-working, white-collar privileged classes were offered a respite from the grind of work culture. There was, and is, an inherent inequality and power imbalance in having restaurants and drivers deliver packages and food to one’s doorstep while chastising those same people who refused to mask (even outdoors, absurdly).

    The middle and upper class guilty pleasures of living in a consumerist society cocooned at home with streaming TV and take-out overwhelmed the need for solidarity with the poor and working classes, who were in many cases unable and unwilling to shelter or get an experimental injection from a government that has treated the poor and minorities as human guinea pigs or worse for the entirety of its history.

    The felt need for security against an acute contagion, while resisting to grapple with the complexities and culpability of being part of a global-imperial-capitalist death machine, epitomized the Western Left position. Other than the obvious responses: “This is why we need universal health care!” etc., there was barely anyone talking about the number one cause of real pandemics: our proximity to inhumane and unsanitary animal agriculture. The collective, fear-based knee-jerk response was to inhumanely slaughter tens of millions of animals: estimates suggest more than 10 million hens, perhaps 5-10 million pigs, and 17 million mink were killed due to “overproduction”, and in the case of mink, to the possibility of the spread of Sars-CoV-2.

    A Brief Recap of our 21st Century Dystopia

    Twenty three years ago, many people around the world had high hopes as a new millennium dawned. The year 2000 was ushered in, and to untrained eyes, the global outlook looked rosy. The Fukuyaman “end of history” narrative still dominated after nearly a decade of unopposed US dominance in world financial markets and military and political hegemony. There were no major wars among world powers and the global economy provided new avenues of wealth for the middle classes around the world.

    The party didn’t last long. It turned out that globalization, that catch-all term trotted out over and over by both liberal internationalists and conservative realists to defend the seemingly interminable reign of capitalists, had plenty of cracks in the foundation. The notion that Western states were “democratic republics” caring for citizens’ interests began to crumble. The diminishing returns of capitalism as well as brazen corporate and government corruption began to disrupt the confidence of the global middle classes. The consent of the governed could no longer be assured; and as the façade of democratic legitimacy collapsed, Western governments, headed by the US, began to look for a new ideological force to justify neoliberal capitalism.

    World events took a swift turn for the worse starting from the very first months of the new millennium. In March 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, with losses eventually reaching 1.75 trillion in the US alone; this rippled through the world economy. The total loss in market capitalization was estimated to be 5 trillion by the end of the recession in 2002. Over 2.2 million jobs were lost in the US and unemployment continued to climb into mid-2003.

    In November of 2000 the contested Bush-Gore election ran into a stalemate. A judicial coup in the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush 5-4, effectively stopping the recount. There was relatively little public push-back, and the lack of any real resistance from the Democratic party machine solidified the coup, and the “Bush-Cheney junta”, as the late Gore Vidal called it, steamrolled into power.

    The true events of September 11th, 2001 may always remain partially shrouded in mystery, yet some tell-tale signs point to the obvious: a conspiracy in which the US government played an active role in orchestrating the sequence of events we call 9/11. Any cursory look at the “conspiracy theories” and the 9/11 truth movements’ findings shows the glaring holes in the official story. Examining and absorbing all the evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion- the events of 9/11 was a false flag, orchestrated by our own government, and the perpetrators are still at large, much like the JFK assassination.

    Most everyone over thirty remembers what came next, even though most are loath to recall. The Bush regime blamed Al Qaeda before the end of the night, news broadcasts showed the towers falling non-stop, and color coded terror alerts became our “new normal” (we’ll get to the next iteration shortly). An axis of evil was rolled out; any country who vaguely opposed US imperialism was put on the naughty list, and a new “crusade” was decreed, with explicit threats “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Shortly after, the mysterious anthrax attacks swept the nation, and captivated the US, even as it became crystal clear that the type of anthrax used was a highly weaponized version coming from a US biolab, which could only mean it was deliberately stolen and released by high elements within our own government.

    The state of emergency became normalized immediately. A new surveillance state was constructed, the Patriot Act and AUMF allowed for extra-judicial assassination, torture, and spy programs began to expand globally. Officially war was declared against Iraq and Afghanistan; unofficially, Special Forces and black ops spread to approximately 130 nations. The empire was expanding and on the move- especially in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, where control over access to fossil fuels alongside the continuing supremacy of the petrodollar is paramount in maintaining global hegemony today.

    The Permanent State of Emergency/Exception

    Power loves catastrophe: the running theme here being that when non-natural disasters occur, Western governments quickly rally and conspire in order to procure quick profits, maintain control, and flex power over weaker nations.

    In our era, authoritarian regimes have argued for the permanent suspension of the rights of their own citizens, as well as human rights and international law. This concept was popularized by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book, State of Exception. Agamben uses the example of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. By abrogating the rights of their own citizens in response to an emergency, both nominally democratic and dictatorial regimes can use the threat of future catastrophes to install permanent police states, declare martial law, and normalize what used to be considered extralegal into the framework of law in the name of national security.

    The imperial core settled on a tried and true model: programming the public to accept that every catastrophe caused by the capitalist global system is an emergency that must be responded to with an increasingly authoritarian society. Police state tactics, lifted from Nazi Germany, became normalized as the economic, political, and ideological forces backing the War on Terror saw little resistance from a mystified and fearful citizenry. This process is known as a state of exception, originally codified in law by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. A succinct definition can be found here:

    [The state of exception] defines a special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis.

    Nearly every major significant political flash point of the last twenty two years was used as an excuse to broaden and deepen the national security state and corporate rule. This process has effectively disempowered the western masses to such a degree that the majority of Western populations, including many in the middle classes, have effectively neo-feudal, debtor relationships to state and market forces.

    The author Naomi Klein described the new, globalized, neoliberal model quite well in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, where disaster capitalism becomes a force for “creative destruction”, leading entire continents into debt spirals with World Bank and IMF loans while at the same time militarizing and financializing Western economies to serve the interests of Wall Street and the Pentagon while destroying small businesses and parasitizing off the working classes.  Soon after, President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said the quiet part out loud discussing the financial crisis, when he referred to the trillions in public money used to prop up our unregulated banking system. He blurted out:

    You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

    How can we define our time? Again, the phrase postmodern tyranny fits better than describing the present moment as totalitarian or fascist. Those two words have become so overused, interchanged, that they’ve lost much meaning and luster for people today. Although many of the various government responses to 9/11 and Covid certainly have elements of totalitarian, fascist, and dictatorial regimes, the terminology is outdated in a sense. It no longer fits the historical moment and hardly anyone really sees Joe Biden or Emmanuel Macron as totalitarian leaders. No single despot is necessary for the system to continue. We are facing is a dictatorship of money, an oligarchy dedicated to ensuring the smooth movement of capital. We live in a pyramid scheme, economically and socially: a system of petty tyrants consisting of your boss, your mayor, your landlord, your HOA president, etc. In fact, added together there are millions of petty tyrants in the US alone; the bourgeoisie and their millions of enforcers: judges, the police and military, politicians, lawyers, all who serve private property, an unjust hierarchy of labor, and, as we’ve seen, most doctors who were eager to impose and rubber-stamp the petty diktats we’ve enshrined into law.

    2019: Global Protests Mushroom

    Besides well-documented evidence such as US funding of coronavirus research, Event 201, and many other suspicious activities, there is one other piece of circumstantial evidence that ties into prior knowledge and pre-planning the pandemic. In 2019, global protests reached a height unsurpassed in modern history, with one commentator dubbing that year “The Age of Mass Protests”. On December 30, 2019, Robin Wright published a column in The New Yorker entitled: “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe”. One highlight from the piece claims:

    “‘People in more countries are using people power than any time in recorded history. Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challenges to governments today,’ Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, told me. ‘This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent.’”

    The Washington Post dubbed 2019 “The year of the global street protest”. Bloomberg proclaimed that “A Year of Protests Sparked Change Around the Globe“. Massive disruptions to governments occurred in Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Sudan, Algeria, Chile, and many other nations. Ordinary people were becoming a nuisance to the smooth movement of capital. Governments were forced to face challenges they’d been ignoring for decades, as rising food, housing, heating, and materials costs skyrocketed globally. All of a sudden, in January 2020, the looming specter of a “global pandemic” put a stop to all of it, instantaneously.

    The positives for governments were obvious. No more protests. No public gatherings. No more pesky citizens demanding lower prices on goods, for more social programs, and protesting unjust taxes and authoritarian rulers. Without any in-person organizing, the momentum of people power from 2019 quickly died out.

    Shifting the Goalposts: From “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve” to Biosecurity State

    Similar to 9/11, the justification for and continued adherence to official government propaganda rested on total obedience and social conformity: peer pressure at the familial, community, workplace, and public levels all contributed to an atmosphere of hysteria, panic, and paranoia. Shortly after 9/11, the US government shifted priorities from an invasion of Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, to an invasion of Iraq in 2003 which cost perhaps 1 million Iraqi lives, then to a global war on terror (remember US General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Pentagon’s intention was to invade nation’s dubbed as the “axis of evil” and take out “seven countries in five years”). Torture and mass surveillance was sanctioned and cheered, the Patriot Act and AUMF rammed through Congress.

    As soon as the pandemic was announced in March 2020, the goalposts kept moving, from a period where we were told two weeks of isolation would be enough to flatten the curve of infection to nearly two years of absurd rules for masking, lockdowns, public gatherings, household gatherings, vaccines, and passports. The hokum kept piling up, as increasingly illogical “expert opinions” were rolled out to “protect” us, or so we were told. It soon became clear that the lockdowns themselves were killing plenty of people. Many credible “medical experts” who believed in the seriousness of the pandemic were blunt about the lockdowns: they were a form of democide”, with many estimating that approximately one-third of the excessive deaths were caused by the lockdowns. Routine checkups were avoided, nursing homes were overcrowded, the elderly were being neglected, and unnecessary, and over a million healthcare workers were laid off precisely when they would have been most useful, at least according to the official narrative.

    The irrational masking mandates were completely unscientific, especially the outdoor masking requirements in major cities, and, ludicrously, beaches as well as various outdoor recreation areas. Regardless, it wasn’t until December 2021 that a major mainstream medical figure admitted the obvious: “cloth masks are useless” and little more than facial decorations. The mask was the signifier of the good citizen for two years; anyone who disagreed was tarred and feathered without regard for the actual science. Many analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were done with previous viruses. Not to mention the basic fact that the infection and fatality rates were basically the same for the 39 US states that imposed mask mandates versus the 11 that did not.

    The conflation of case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR) in the mainstream media made the disease appear far more deadly than it actually was. The actual chance of young and healthy adults dying from Covid-19 was minuscule.

    Social distancing became de rigueur among the ruling classes, as well as the upper-middle chattering class effete liberals (and sadly, many leftists) even as the chance of moderate to severe illness in health young or even middle-aged people was almost nil. The specter of the postmodern alienated, affluent Western subject, with all their bundles of anxieties and neuroses, began to unspool, implode; a process of involution nurturing the solipsistic narcissism inherent in late capitalism.

    The sociopathic tendencies of our elites, heightened and distilled through centuries of class war in Western culture, spilled out into the open. The upper-middle professional classes, alert to the tendencies of their overlords’ desires to distance themselves from the rabble, were eager to parrot the diktats of their rulers. The upper-class winners condemned themselves to a path of neo-Victorian purity politics. The clean must be segregated from the dirty. The educated believers in “science” are clearly rational; the anti-vax hordes certainly must be acting out of pure self-interest and resentment.  Needless to say, little to no self-examination was made of the panicked overreaction of the well-to-do liberal authoritarians, which frankly fell within a spectrum of agoraphobic and hypochondriac behavior.

    The death rates were complete junk science, overestimated for the sake of juicing up the atmosphere of pandemonium, not to mention the monetary rewards for hospitals and healthcare corporations. As many know by now, “dying with” Covid became conflated with “dying from” the virus, with doctors pressured to include Sars-CoV-2 on death certificates.

    Pushing the experimental vaccine onto healthy children and young adults was completely unnecessary, and harmful. The risks of heart problems outweighed the negligible benefits of the vaccine for the young. This was obvious from the beginning and the medical establishment continued its role as a propaganda arm of Big Pharma rather than objectively viewing the facts. One study showed a laughable, embarrassing efficacy of 12% for 5-11 year olds.

    UN Estimate of Extreme Hunger, Food Insecurity, and Starvation

    Shortly after the lockdowns began in March 2020, the UN World Food Program put out a warning:

    The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection. The estimate was announced alongside the release of the Global Report on Food Crises, produced by WFP and 15 other humanitarian and development partners.

    In effect, the government and private architects of lockdowns were fully prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of younger, poorer minorities in less-developed countries to shield older, richer, whiter populations in developed nations from the very low potential of sickness, and yes, possible death. While many leftists are quick to point out economic “sacrifice zones” where labor violations are the norm and economic exploitation is rampant, they were mainly silent regarding the potential of mass death, starvation, and the explosion of extreme poverty due to lockdown policies. In fact, many leftists gleefully supported lockdowns and restrictions against the unvaccinated; and were either completely unaware or feigned ignorance of the economic devastation they unleashed.

    The Africa  Paradox

    The obvious data sets to look at regarding the efficacy of the experimental vaccines would be the West, with very high levels of vaccination, versus Africa, which had extremely low percentages. While obviously many countries had incomplete information due to lack of resources, it becomes obvious that the vaccines had zero effect on transmission or reduction in deaths. In fact, the mortality rates in African nations are so low that experts simply shrug them off. A holistic view would put the excess deaths from “Covid-19” squarely on the unhealthy lifestyles, toxic food supply, the unregulated chemical industries, and stressful conditions endemic to Western living.

    Agamben’s Laments

    Right off the bat, Giorgio Agamben questioned the motives behind the lockdowns, rightly pointing out that the fear of death and the elevation of science as the new religion had reduced communities and governments to quantifying basic survival – “bare life” – as more valuable than tangible human freedoms. As he put it in a March 2020 blog post:

    Fear is a bad advisor, but it brings up many things you pretended not to see. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country clearly shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is clear that Italians are willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections and religious and political convictions at the risk of falling ill. Bare life – and the fear of losing it – is not something that unites men, but blinds and separates them.

    In May 2020, Agamben expands on the notion of medicine as a modern cult- and its many parallels with Christian dogmas.

    It is immediately evident that we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not with a rational scientific requirement. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country is cardio-vascular disease and it is known that these could decrease if a healthier lifestyle were practiced and if one adhered to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of legal legislation, which decreed ex lege [as a matter of law] what one must eat and how one must live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, love, social relationships, their religious and political convictions.

    Even the mealy-mouthed World Health Organization was forced to admit in October 2020 that lockdowns were extremely detrimental to poor and minority communities globally and should be used as a “very, very last resort”. This did not stop governments and medical advisors from clamoring for more restrictions and shutdowns for seventeen more months, even as Agamben and many others, including many experts who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, were speaking out against political overreach.

    Latour’s Dress Rehearsal: Right for the Wrong Reasons

    In a widely cited article from March 2020, French sociologist Bruno Latour asked an interesting question regarding the lockdowns: “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” The problem in his formulation, of course, is that he believes governments innocently imposed the lockdown protocols in response to a clear and present danger; as well as his belief that governments will, in the future, impose lockdowns in response to climate change with reductions in carbon emissions in mind. Rather, we should realize that governments, colluding with the mega rich and multinational corporations, imposed lockdowns in order to profit off the collapse and resurgence of the stock markets, discipline the public in order to accept draconian “new normal” policies, and accelerate the process of biometric IDs, all-encompassing surveillance, a drop in living standards, and advance a social credit system based on rewards and punishments.

    The old panem et circenses method of distracting the masses can no longer hold together an increasingly polarized society breaking into “post-truth” enclaves where distrust and paranoia spawn out of late-capitalist alienation and exploitation. A society in which two of the biggest overarching political narratives are as ridiculous as Q-Anon and Russiagate has no business dismissing the obvious conspiracy and collusion involved in promulgating an exaggerated and manufactured pandemic.

    Latour is correct in claiming that this is a sort of dress rehearsal. Sadly, like many a typical liberal, he assumes governments had our best interest at heart, and are reacting to objective facts and medical realities. In the near future, governments will probably enact travel restrictions and lockdowns not only to reduce carbon emissions, but rather to train citizens to accept food rations, lack of fossil fuels due to high prices and supply issues, lower living standards, and lack of goods and provisions. In this process of disciplining and punishing masses, many will be forced to accept whatever government edicts are enacted, at the risk of job loss, social isolation, or worse, just as we witnessed during the pandemic. The next lockdown could be designed and pre-planned precisely to stave off protests, rebellions, and revolutions which will spring up as the rot in capitalism deepens.

    Medical Tyranny? WHO’s asking?

    A recent report shows that a private foundation set up to finance the World Health Organization, called the WHO Foundation, explains that 40% of donations came from anonymous donors. The potential for conflicts of interest is inevitable, as obviously only individuals and groups connected to Big Pharma would want to anonymize where their slush funds go to.

    A global Pandemic Treaty is being formulated by the WHO in order to force nations to accept the next pandemic, if global elites are so foolish as to try and institute another round of medical authoritarianism.

    Much like 9/11, the lead-up to the Covid-19 “event” as well as its early stages remain clouded in secrecy, misinformation, and a web of lies. We were all shown images of dead Chinese citizens lying in the streets, although it’s unclear if this was from the virus, or even from the city of Wuhan or Hubei province in some cases. We were told the virus originated in a wet market in the city center, although now we know that link has never been proven, and was most likely thrown out as a hypothesis to satisfy public opinion, but more likely was a cynical intelligence ploy, a classic case of misdirection, especially since we know now that a secretive US medical intelligence unit admitted to tracking Covid in November 2019, and possibly much earlier.

    When a global pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, there were around 118,000 global cases and under 5,000 declared deaths. Relatively speaking those numbers were quite low and there was no reason to declare Sars-CoV-2 a public health emergency based on the figures. The estimated death rates were pulled completely out of thin air by a complete fraud, Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College of London, who broke lockdown rules which he helped to implement.

    PCR tests were declared the gold standard even though Kary Mullis, one of its inventors, declared publicly that the tests were not made to prove the existence of active infections. Further, the cycling for the tests was deliberately set too high, which resulted in untold amounts of false positive cases. Death rates miraculously shot up for “Covid-19” because doctors and coroners were pressured to list the disease as a cause of death even without a positive test; any “suspected case” could be listed. Flu, pneumonia, and every other respiratory disease magically disappeared and Covid filled in the gap, boosting the figures.

    Not to mention, the effect of declaring a global pandemic necessarily induced a stress response from the global population, which, along with the late-winter (March-April) time frame in the northern hemisphere, definitely contributed to the excess deaths. In fact, many established medical organizations freely admit that the lockdowns were responsible for a significant percentage (many say up to one third) of excess deaths, yet somehow have managed to absolve themselves of responsibility for clamoring for the lockdowns like trained seals. Along with the loss of jobs, home confinement, and lack of community, it should be noted that just as yelling fire in a crowded movie theater is almost certain to cause some sort of violent event, screaming “pandemic” through a 24/7 news cycle will do the same.

    Much like the daily reporting in the aftermath of 9/11, with nightly news explaining the nation’s risk of terror attacks as red, orange, or yellow, the daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; we all remember the 24/7 circus designed to frighten the population and maintain obedience. In this deliberately instilled, panic-stricken environment, the ruling class fundamentally altered the landscape: following a short downturn in the stock market, the digital economy and tech firms quickly rebounded and boomed- the tech sector, Big Pharma, web services companies, and basically all major corporations tangentially related to providing services on the internet struck gold.

    Within weeks, the need for a vaccine was trotted out. Many seasonal viruses come and go within months, yet somehow the medical establishment was able to figure out that only a vaccine would be able to stop this disease. The pharmaceutical companies were simply trying to profit off a new media-hyped and establishment-protected exaggerated pandemic. The fact that so many corners were cut, with no long-term studies, all to market unproven mRNA technology did not seem to faze at least half of the public, who openly clamored for lockdowns, vaccines, passports, and authoritarian measures which would be unthinkable a few years prior.

    Ridiculous masking mandates came into effect- masking outdoors was mandatory in many cities globally. No scientific basis was ever presented. Vaccine passports were likewise implemented even though natural immunity was found to be 27 times greater in some instances. Were health authorities simply trying to be overly cautious, or were there more sinister agendas at play? Were institutional medical practices imposed simply to make profits for pharmaceutical corporations?

    The simple fact that an unproven, dangerous vaccine was pushed and mandated at various levels- and that it was swallowed so comfortably by so many- simply shows how effective modern propaganda can be. No guns were needed- but you could lose your job, standing in the community, your friends, family, and social relations. A vast social experiment was conducted and anyone who dared to question “the science”, instead of blindly placing trust in a capitalist health system where profits have always taken precedence over people’s interests, was demonized.

    The frenzy around Covid-19 may indeed have had a bit of luck, at least here in the US. It was, of course, President Trump that downplayed the virus at the start. Therefore, anyone else aligning with his views on Covid was seen as a repugnant narcissist, an uncaring dullard willing to put corporate profits over human life. Imagine an alternate universe where Trump or a right-wing, authoritarian, US presidential figure like him took the virus extremely seriously, with Chinese-style lockdowns. Would people still have clamored for mandatory shots, and for friends, family, and co-workers to be excommunicated from society? Probably not, but we’ll never know.

    Vaccine passports threatened to segregate society based on a frankly fascist vision of the clean versus unclean. Anti-vaccine activists and regular people who refused to take an experimental injection were wrongly vilified. As many pointed out, the lack of reduction of transmission in the vaccinated made the whole prospect of compulsory vaccination pointless, unscientific, counterproductive, and just plain wrong.

    In November 2021, the conflict came to a head as Biden, speaking to the unvaccinated, remarked: “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” He proposed a plan for weekly testing or vaccination of all workers in every US company with over 100 employees, as well as a mandate for around 17 million health care workers.

    The Postmodern Subject: Manufacturing the Hyperreal

    The parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19 go far beyond their initial propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, part of the reason contemporary propaganda is so effective lies in the psychological structure of postmodern consciousness. Safety, stability, and security are seen as the final end products of mass civilization. Even one of the great charlatans of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama, was astute enough to note the parallels between the postmodern subject and Nietzsche’s notion of the “last man”.

    Today, the veneer of idealistic concepts such as freedom, democracy, and equality which were supposed to undergird and inspire the collective to greater heights is wearing off in the face of massive global inequality, environmental disasters, climate catastrophe, and vicious media propaganda campaigns. As material living standards stagnate and crumble even in the developed world, increasing numbers of people are forced to compete for the same resources, perpetuating a scarcity-based mindset in the populace. Nearly all socioeconomic questions are framed as zero-sum, binary, black-and-white contests between good and evil where little nuance or questions of morality are allowed into the public arena.

    In this fragile social environment, it’s not surprising that citizens flock to ready-made narratives and propaganda campaigns. Ruling class propaganda is swallowed uncritically, precisely because it obfuscates, masks, and numbs the pain of living in late-stage capitalist collapse. One of the reasons Western liberals and even most of the “Left” fell for the farce that was the over-hyped, medical global Psy-op we call the Covid-19 pandemic is because the postmodern subject has now delved so far into the hyperreal; where symbols, social relations, and even science become cheap imitations of themselves. This is precisely why so many people, at the beginning of the lockdowns in March 2020, remarked that they “felt like they were living in a movie.” Media-induced pseudo-events can no longer be distinguished from severe medical emergencies today, just as twenty two years ago the mass panic after 9/11 produced the same fog of war and irrational hatred of the other.

    Imbued with meaning and purpose, the mask-wearing, jab-taking, “papers-please”, vaccine passport-bearing citizen could now feel a common cause with others in the community; artificially induced feelings of well-being conjured up through media organs and distilled into catchy slogans like “trust the science”. The sign-value of “doing the right thing” became a potent force; and this was weaponized by the establishment to suit various agendas.

    Many of these agendas were, in fact, actual conspiracies to: establish a permanent biosecurity state; set up a soft version of martial law where people’s movements are restricted and tracked; manufacture a false narrative of safe vaccines to bankroll a new industry for mRNA technologies, create a pathway to health passports, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and social credit systems; destroy the working class and middle class small businesses, and psychically prepare the global populace for a fall in living standards, a fall in access to goods, services, and resources, as well as rationing; provide an excuse to ban protests; continue the broad militarization of society, as well as the implementation of a global regime of ideological compliance and obedience.

    Big Pharma, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military and intelligence communities were colluding to fleece the poor and working classes- the fact that one can’t find a smoking gun for each of these interlocking and moving parts of the economy and government doesn’t refute this basic fact. All the while, corporate America continued enriching the one percent who gained trillions during the pandemic. Medical-authoritarian edicts were issued without any actual science behind them. Surveillance and population control have always been at the forefront of elite agendas for managing 21st century life. Global flows of people, information, goods, and revolutionary thought can no longer be stage-managed by tyrannical capitalist elites as conditions deteriorate around the planet. A show must be put on every ten to twenty years.

    The many faces and branding strategies of the global elite come into full view: the “new normal”, “own nothing and be happy”, “mask up”, “follow the science”, and the “lockstep” scenario for implementing planetary tyranny are seen by the ruling class as necessary steps to secure profits and control in increasingly unstable economic and political landscapes. Their techno-feudal dreams are our nightmares as the drudgery of capitalist labor and the vagaries of imperial war continue on. Our masters offer little respite for the masses of humanity, as they’ve imposed a totalizing spectacle. Cult-like behavior dominated after 9/11; overblown fears of terrorism and anti-Muslim racism permeated the country, just as a year or two ago, overblown fears of the virus and authoritarian-based dislike and instant dismissal of anyone skeptical of Big Pharma and the government continued to dominate.

    Even as the narrative has shifted, and the farce that was the reaction to a relatively mild virus receded, the potential for propaganda and fear campaigns against the global collective remains. It is precisely the qualities of postmodernity, such as the end of meta-narratives, de-realization of the subject, hyperreality, the nature of the spectacle, and pseudo-events, guided by ruling class interests, and imposed on us by capitalism, which allow for the recurrence of these paradigm-shifting forces to dominate social life. The parallels of two of the biggest geopolitical events of the 21st century, 9/11 and the Covid-19 health scare, reveal the foundations of global regimes of cruelty, domination, and oppression. And there certainly isn’t much “new” or “normal” about any of it.

  • Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

    This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses.  This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years.  People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

    The United States is very much a psychological society.  Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities.  It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

    Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become.  These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made.  They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

    In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as “the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.  In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

    Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

    We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

    What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

    Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

    That it is all noise, all signal – no silence.  That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

    When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

    These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us.  Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye.  It is screen time in fantasy-land.

    This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin.  Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

    The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

    “Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status.  It’s just great “fun.”  Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot.  “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness.  Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

    There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds.  So many flavors.  Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia.  The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly.  Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

    “Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

    “Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

    What’s up?

    It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

    The instinct of self-defense has disappeared.  “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense.  But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution.  We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage.  Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

    Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
    But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
    and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

    It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

    I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals.  The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had.  His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years.  Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally.  They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, “if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

    The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations.  But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.  In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.  This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.  It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

    The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

    Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

    He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change.  It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary.  This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda.  Freedom has become a slogan only.  We have generally become determined to be determined.

    To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide.  Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one’s own death(s) with courage and hope.  The loss of illusions.  This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

    Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

    To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are.  That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

    To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

    To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

    It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

    Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level.  It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives.  Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now.  Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

    I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died.  The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral.  Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks.  A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show.  But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually.  It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations.  They walked away.  It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference.  As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation.  She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

    I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today.  Rightly so.  The U.S.A. is snapping.  It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us.  Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters.  One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA.  As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?”  And why was he assassinated?  Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed.  He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

    So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

    The short answer is: Rarely.  Many play at it while playing dumb.

    Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist.  Where we exist.  “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.”  Time always tells.

    The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

    I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

    Like a bird on the wire
    Like a drunk in a midnight choir
    I have tried in my way to be free

    It seemed apposite.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • 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.

  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By David Robie

    Two researchers examining responses to conspiratorial pandemic narratives have warned Aotearoa New Zealand not to be complacent over the risk of fringe views over climate crisis becoming populist.

    Byron C. Clark, a video essayist and author of the recent book Fear: New Zealand’s Hostile Underworld of Extremists, and Emmanuel Stokes, a postgraduate student at the University of Canterbury, argue in a paper in the latest Pacific Journalism Review that policymakers and community stakeholders need to be ready to counter politicised disinformation with a general election looming.

    They say that in their case study, Intersections of media influence: Radical conspiracist ‘alt-media’ narratives and the climate crisis in Aotearoa, has demonstrated that “explicit references to US narratives about stolen elections, communist plots and existential dangers to society – many of which bear the hallmarks of American far-right narratives, such as those of the John Birch Society” – are part of the NZ climate discourse.

    The Fear cover
    The Fear cover. Image: HarperCollins

    “Tellingly, these were often linked with wider sets of issues into which the climate challenge was crudely bundled,” the authors say.

    Their paper argues that “complex matters of national importance , such as climate change or public health emergencies, can be seized upon by alternative media and conspiracist influencers and incorporated onto emotionally potent, reductive stories that are apparently designed to elicit outrage and protest”.

    The authors cite examples in the Pacific, saying that they “suspect that a danger exists that . . . the appetite for this kind of storytelling could increase in tandem with growing social disruption caused by the climate crisis, including a large-scale refugee influx on our shores”.

    Such a scenario would need to be covered with “a high degree of journalist ethics and professionalism” to prevent “amplifying hateful, dehumanising narratives”.

    ‘Concerning’ statements
    In an interview with Asia Pacific Report, Clark highlighted how various fringe parties in New Zealand were all making “concerning” statements about climate change as the October 14 election drew closer.

    “New Conservatives begin their environment policy with ‘There is no climate emergency’. Then they pledge to ‘end all climate focused taxes, subsidies, and regulations’,” he said.

    “DemocracyNZ wants to repeal the Climate Change Response Act and veto any new taxes on farming. Elsewhere in their policy they appear to downplay the impact of methane (Aotearoa’s largest source of emissions),” Clark said.

    The FreedomsNZ party had not yet released detailed policy but promised to “end climate change overreach”.

    Clark found the comments from DemocracyNZ on methane particularly interesting as Groundswell recently sponsored a tour by American scientist Dr Tom Sheahen, who — in contrast to the scientific consensus on climate change — made the claim that methane was an “irrelevant” greenhouse gas.

    Dr Sheahen also appeared on the Reality Check Radio show Greenwashed, hosted by former Federated Farmers president Don Nicholson and Jaspreet Boparai, a dairy farmer and member of Voices for Freedom, who was last year elected to the Southland District Council.

    “Greenwashed is the kind of alt-media that could influence how people vote,” Clark said.

    “While none of these parties I’ve mentioned are likely to get into Parliament, if they get, say, 50,000 votes between them, more mainstream parties could look at how they could appeal to the same constituency in the future, as 1 percent of the vote can be the difference between being in government and being in opposition.

    Mainstreaming of misinformation
    “That could lead to the mainstreaming of misinformation about climate change.”

    However, Clark believes Pacific nations are “less susceptible to climate change disinformation as they’re experiencing the direct effects of climate change.

    “In Aotearoa, many people remain insulated from it (notwithstanding events like Cyclone Gabrielle) and many people’s livelihoods, as well as the economies of some regions, are dependent on activity that contributes to the greenhouse effect (such as dairy farming) which makes downplaying the significance of the crisis appealing.”

    But Clark admits that misinformation about covid and the vaccine has spread in the Pacific. Also competition between large powers in the region – such as China and the US — could lead to more disinformation targeting the Pacific, potentially including climate change disinformation.

    I think Pacific nations are less susceptible to climate change disinformation as they are experiencing the direct effects of climate change, while in Aotearoa many people remain insulated from it (notwithstanding events like Cyclone Gabrielle) and many people’s livelihoods, as well as the economies of some regions, are dependent on activity that contributes to the greenhouse effect (such as dairy farming) which makes downplaying the significance of the crisis appealing.

    Targeting the Pacific
    However, misinformation about covid and the vaccine has spread in the Pacific, and competition between large powers in the region (the US and China for example) could lead to more disinformation targeting the Pacific, potentially including climate change disinformation.

    In his book Fear, Clark devoted two out of the 23 chapters — “The Fox News of the Pasifika community” and “Counterspin Media” — to examining the impact of misinformation on the Pasifika community in Aotearoa.

    APNA Television cancelled the Pacific Fox News-style programme Talanoa Sa’o, although the show is still recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

    “Its reach appears to be smaller than it was. Counterspin Media also looks to have a declining reach. The show originally aired on GTV, a network operated by the dissident Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

    “While there has not been any explicit evidence to suggest that Guo or his businesses were funding Counterspin, they have appeared to be struggling since Guo filed for bankruptcy, having to find a new studio.

    Are there any new trends — especially impacting on the Pacific communities, or perceptions of them?

    “The biggest chance in the disinformation landscape since I wrote Fear has been the arrival of Reality Check Radio, which produces 9 hours a day of content on weekdays (unlike Talanoa Sa’o or Counterspin Media, which would produce an hour or two a week).

    “None of their content is designed to appeal in particular to a Pacific audience, however.

    “Another development is organisations like Family First and some evangelical churches campaigning against LGBT+ rights and sex education in schools, with the New Conservatives continuing to campaign on these same issues.”

    Affecting democracy
    Clark remains convinced that mis- and disinformation are going to continue to be an issue affecting New Zealand’s democracy.

    “The networks established during the pandemic remain and are starting to pivot from covid and vaccine mandates to other issues — climate change being a significant one, but also co-governance and LGBT+ rights,” he said.

    “This means journalism will be increasingly important.”

    In a separate paper in Pacific Journalism Review, the journal editor, Dr Philip Cass, examines the impact of conspiracy theories on Pacific churches and community information channels, drawing a contrast between evangelical/Pentecostal and mainstream religious institutions.

    He said that “in spite of the controversial behaviour of [Destiny Church’s] ‘Bishop’ Brian Tamaki, most mainstream Pacific churches were highly alert to the reality of the virus and supportive of their communities”.

    Dr Cass called for further research such as an online study in Pacific languages to gauge any difference between diasporic sources and home island sources, and a longitudinal study to indicate whether anti-vaccination and conspiracy theory messages have changed — and in what way — since 2020.

    Dr David Robie is an editor of PJR and convenor of Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Pacific Journalism Review

    Research on climate crisis as the new target for disinformation peddlers, governance and the media, China’s growing communication influence, and journalism training strategies feature strongly in the latest Pacific Journalism Review.

    Byron C. Clark, author of the recent controversial book Fear: New Zealand’s Hostile Underworld of Extremists, and Canterbury University postgraduate researcher Emanuel Stokes, have produced a case study about climate crisis as the new pandemic disinformation arena with the warning that “climate change or public health emergencies can be seized upon by alternative media and conspiracist influencers” to “elicit outrage and protest”.

    The authors argue that journalists need a “high degree of journalistic ethics and professionalism to avoid amplifying hateful, dehumanising narratives”.

    The latest Pacific Journalism Review . . . July 2023
    The latest Pacific Journalism Review . . . July 2023.

    PJR editor Dr Philip Cass adds an article unpacking the role of Pacific churches, both positive and negative, in public information activities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Several articles deal with media freedom in the Pacific in the wake of the pandemic, including a four-country examination by some of the region’s leading journalists and facilitated by Dr Amanda Watson of Australian National University and associate professor Shailendra Singh of the University of the South Pacific.

    They conclude that the pandemic “has been a stark reminder about the link between media freedom and the financial viability of media of organisations, especially in the Pacific”.

    Dr Ann Auman, a specialist in crosscultural and global media ethics from the University of Hawai’i, analyses challenges facing the region through a workshop at the newly established Pacific Media Institute in Majuro, Marshall Islands.

    Repeal of draconian Fiji law
    The ousting of the Voreqe Bainimarama establishment that had been in power in Fiji in both military and “democratic” forms since the 2006 coup opened the door to greater media freedom and the repeal of the draconian Fiji Media Law. Two articles examine the implications of this change for the region.

    An Indonesian researcher, Justito Adiprasetio of Universitas Padjadjaran, dissects the impact of Jakarta’s 2021 “terrorist” branding of the Free West Papua movement on six national online news media groups.

    In Aotearoa New Zealand, media analyst Dr Gavin Ellis discusses “denying oxygen” to those who create propaganda for terrorists in the light of his recent research with Dr Denis Muller of Melbourne University and how Australia might benefit from New Zealand media initiatives, while RNZ executive editor Jeremy Rees reflects on a historical media industry view of training, drawing from Commonwealth Press Union reviews of the period 1979-2002.

    Protesters calling for the release of the refugees illegally detained in Brisbane - © 2023 Kasun Ubayasiri
    Protesters calling for the release of the refugees illegally detained in Brisbane . . . a photo from Kasun Ubayasiri’s photoessay project “Refugee Migration”. Image: © 2023 Kasun Ubayasiri

    Across the Tasman, Griffith University communication and journalism programme director Dr Kasun Ubayasiri presents a powerful human rights Photoessay documenting how the Meanjin (Brisbane) local community rallied around to secure the release of 120 medevaced refugee men locked up in an urban motel.

    Monash University associate professor Johan Lidberg led a team partnering in International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) studies about “the world according to China”, the global media influence strategies of a superpower.

    The Frontline section features founding editor Dr David Robie’s case study about the Pacific Media Centre which was originally published by Japan’s Okinawan Journal of Island Studies.

    A strong Obituary section featuring two personalities involved in investigating the 1975 Balibo Five journalist assassination by Indonesian special forces in East Timor and a founder of the Pacific Media Centre plus nine Reviews round off the edition.

    Pacific Journalism Review, founded at the University of Papua New Guinea, is now in its 29th year and is New Zealand’s oldest journalism research publication and the highest ranked communication journal in the country.

    It is published by the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) Incorporated educational nonprofit.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Over five hundred and twenty-five days ago, between the evening of February 13 and afternoon of February 14, 2022, four men were arrested for their participation in Freedom Convoy protests at the Alberta border town of Coutts.

    They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder of police officers in support of a plot to overthrow the Government of Canada. They have been dubbed the ‘Coutts Four.’

    The accused are self-employed fisherman Chris Carbert, who ran a landscaping and fencing business with nine employees. A Lethbridge, Alberta, resident, 42-year-old Carbert is a single father who has been raising his son since the boy was nine-months-old.

    Another Lethbridge resident, and best friend of Chris Carbert since public school, is 49-year-old Chris Lysak. He is an electrician and father of two girls.

    A third member of the ‘Coutts Four’ accused of conspiracy to commit murder is 41-year-old Jerry Morin. He is a lineman who grew up near Vulcan, Alberta. The CBC states he resided in Olds, Alberta, at the time of his arrest. The fourth accused of these serious charges is Anthony “Tony” Olienkick. Tony, age 40, took part of the clean-up in High River, Alberta, after the 2013 floods.[1] He has a gravel truck and is self-employed, and the CBC has reported his home is in Claresholm, Alberta.

    The Coutts Four have been denied bail. They have remained in custody for over 525 days with a trial date yet to be set. More pretrial motions will be heard between July 25 to 28 by the crown and defence lawyers at the Lethbridge court house. Since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, kingdoms and democracies have allowed those charged with a crime to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. With that provision has come the right to be granted bail and to a speedy trial. When citizens are accused of a crime and left to rot in prison without having their day in court, their spirits can be broken and be persuaded to agree to plead guilty even when they are innocent.

    Bail Is Granted to Those Accused of Having Committed Murder, and Lesser Charges in Canada

    In Canada, when someone is charged with committing a crime, they are released on bail. This includes for those charged with murder. For example, on September 2021, 31-year-old Umar Zameer was released on bail after being charged with first-degree murder of Toronto Police Constable Jeffrey Northrup.[2] In April 2022, Marlena Isnardy was released on bail after while awaiting her trial for the charge of murdering 27-year-old Matthew Cholette in Kelowna, British Columbia.[3] A case of double murder in the city of Mission in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, concerned the deaths of Lisa Dudley and her boyfriend Guthrie McKay. Accused of first-degree murder, Tom Holden was released on bail.[4] And in March 2023, 22-year-old Ali Mian was released on bail as he awaited trial to answer to charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of an armed intruder, 21-year-old Alexander Amoroso-Leacock.[5]

    But the Coutts Four are not granted bail

    Meanwhile others charged of first and second-degree murder are out on bail. What is going on here? Does the RCMP have a case that proves the accused pose a danger, if released on bail, and plan to violently overthrow of the government? Or, are their applications for bail being denied as part of political theatre within a larger government narrative to justify invocation of the Emergencies Act?

    In 1166 the Assize of Clarendon ruling under England’s King Henry II established the tradition of habeas corpus (in Latin: “that you have the body”) which gave those charged with a crime a right to appear in court to defend themselves. The 1166 judgment declared, “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.”[6] And, in the Magna Carta, section 38 states “No bailiff (legal officer) shall start proceedings against anyone [not just freemen, this was even then a universal human right] on his accusation alone (on his own mere say-so), without trustworthy witnesses having been brought for the purpose.”[7] Habeas corpus rights are part of the British legal tradition inherited by Canada. The rights exist in the common law and have been enshrined in section 10(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that “[e]veryone has the right on arrest or detention … to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.” While section 9(c) of the Charter states that a protected right of Canadian citizens is “freedom from arbitrary detention or imprisonment.”[8]

    Former Toronto Police Sergeant Detective, Donald Best, points out that it is almost unheard of in Canada for an accused to be denied bail.

    Does the denial of bail mean the four must be guilty? Consider the way the RCMP gathered evidence.

    The Mounties alleged that other unknown persons were still at large and connected to the plot to overthrow the government.

    Yet, the RCMP didn’t fingerprint and DNA test the firearms and other items that might have originated with ‘other unknown’ suspects. If you are an investigator, you want to identify who else might be involved in a plot. If you have a weapon, getting the fingerprints and DNA evidence can point to the identities of other persons that are suspects in the larger plot. Yet, the RCMP didn’t bag each item where it was found, and protect each item for its secure transit to a forensic lab. Best wrote on his website, “Failure of police officers to adhere to fundamentals of exhibits collection and protection doesn’t just potentially weaken the prosecution’s case, it can also deny exculpatory evidence to the defense. Many times, I have seen otherwise good officers get ‘tunnel vision’ about a suspect or an investigation, and begin to pay attention only to evidence that supports their theory of the case and the crime. These officers become so focused that they will even deliberately exclude evidence that doesn’t support their vision of events.”

    Best points out in the RCMP photo of the cache of weapons ‘discovered’ by the Mounties, “Items have been arranged on the floor with five of the long-guns rather precariously leaning against the table for display. No (investigator) would normally position or store firearms in such a manner where a bump of the table might cause them to fall…” A photo of the cache of weapons “had a national impact and was used by both the media and the government as justification for invoking the Emergencies Act, and the police operations to arrest and clear Freedom Convoy protesters in Ottawa.”[9]

    Background

    In January 2022 Canadian mainstream media and politicians described an unruly mob headed for Ottawa. On January 26, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians there was a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” coming to Ottawa in a “so-called freedom convoy.”[10] Protesters began arriving in Ottawa on January 28, with the majority arriving the following day.


    Source: OffGuardian

    Protest leaders worked with Ottawa Police Service Police Liaison Teams to ensure emergency lanes in downtown Ottawa remained open. On two occasions, an Ontario court ruled the protests in Ottawa could proceed. The second ruling, on February 16, 2022, took into account the protesters adhering to the February 7 injunction against honking of horns. There was no looting, no acts of actual physical violence, no smashing of windows. Numbers of police remarked about the lack of criminality. Nonetheless, inflammatory rhetoric coming from politicians and the media depicted the protesters as “terrorists,” “mercenaries,” “hillbillies,” “white supremacists,” “Nazis,” “insurrectionists,” “an unruly mob,” and more.[11]

    Protest leaders held press conferences welcoming an opportunity to meet with government leaders, including public health officials. They wanted to have a discussion about the pandemic measures.

    Could dialogue lead to a breakthrough, a win-win? Even when unions and management are in tough negotiations during a strike, there can be a breakthrough with an unexpected way forward to resolve matters. Face-to-face dialogue was always a first step to learn if there was a way forward. A 73-page plan by the Ontario Provincial Police included recommendations that the federal government enter into dialogue with the protesters. The government did so in 2020 when First Nations protesters disrupted rail service, ferry sailings, pipeline construction and blockaded an Ontario highway. But in 2022, the Liberal government was in no mood for dialogue. Policing agencies and even the Ontario Attorney-General had suggested the federal government engage in dialogue with the protesters. But the protesters were depicted as impossible, unreasonable people, incapable of participating in discussion.

    *****
    On the 31st of January 2022, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau addressed the nation regarding the Freedom Convoy protest movement at a Press Conference from an undisclosed location which was broadcast live. 

    He portrayed the protesters as violent people, racists and more.

    On the 2nd of February, he added another layer with a tweet. (Below, See this)

    Are the protesters really what he claims them to be?

    I was there for four days with my camera, I never saw or witnessed anything close to what he describes. 

    Is it possible this is all made up? If it is, what is the purpose? (Jean Francois Girard)

    VIDEO

    At 4:30 p.m., February 14, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to crush the protest. Bank accounts of some hundreds of protesters were frozen.

    Yet, in an effort to defuse the situation in downtown Ottawa, on February 12, 2022 protest leaders came to an agreement with the City of Ottawa to remove seventy-five percent of protest vehicles from the city between February 14th and 16th. By 12PM, February 14, 102 vehicles had been removed, according to Serge Arpin, City of Ottawa Chief of Staff to the Mayor.[12] There were other Freedom Convoy protests that emerged during the Ottawa protests. Yet, in relation to the justification to invoke the Emergencies Act, in Windsor, Ontario, protesters and police reached an agreement to clear the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge by late on February 13th. The charges against protesters in Coutts, Alberta, across from Sweetgrass, Montana, were dealt with under the existing laws of the land on the February 14.

    “Comments made publicly, by public figures and in the media (about Ottawa protests) … were not premised in fact” – Supt. Patrick Morris (Ontario Provincial Police Intelligence)

    After the Emergencies Act was invoked, it triggered a mandatory inquiry as prescribed in 1988 legislation passed in Parliament. A Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) was held over six weeks in Ottawa during the fall of 2022. But the justification for invoking the Emergencies Act began to unravel as police and intelligence officers gave testimony. At 1:00 PM on February 14, 2022, prior to the Emergencies Act invocation, an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) “Operational Intelligence Report” described  the Ottawa protest. “The mood today was again calm, festive, and family oriented. Speakers were again telling people to walk away from agitators and thanked the police for remaining calm. Many of the speakers were promoting love and peaceful protest, some even taking quotes from the Bible. Speakers were also wishing everyone a happy Valentine’s.” The memo noted there were “children on Wellington Street playing hockey.”[13]

    Supt. Patrick Morris, “the foremost authority in the Province of Ontario regarding Intelligence” with the OPP testified before the POEC. He said of the protest, “ … the lack of violent crime was shocking …. If there was an actual threat, then there would have been an investigation, and if it was an actual threat, I assume the Ottawa Police Service would have laid a charge for uttering threats.”

    Morris testified,

    I was concerned by the politicization and I was concerned by hyperbole and I was concerned by the affixing of labels without evidence to individuals’ movements et cetera.” Morris elaborated in his testimony that his letter reflected his concern about “comments made publicly, by public figures and in the media that I believed were not premised in fact …. I was leading the criminal intelligence collection of information and the production of criminal intelligence in relation to these events. So, I believed I was in a unique situation to understand what was transpiring. So, when I read accounts that the State of Russia had something to do with it; Or that this was the result of American influence, either financially or ideologically; Or that Donald Trump was behind it; Or that it was un-Canadian; Or that the people participating were un-Canadian and that they were not Canadian views and they were extremists; I found it to be problematic, because what I ascertained from my role … I did not see validation for those assertions …. I did not see information that substantiated what was being said publicly and via the media. And I found that the subjective assertions sensationalized … and exacerbated conflict …. So the labelling was problematic to me.

    Morris further stated in a letter before the POEC, “I do not know where the political figures are acquiring information on intelligence on the extent of extremist involvement.” He was emphatic, “I want to be clear on this. We produced no intelligence to indicate these individuals would be armed. There has been a lot of hyperbole around that.”[14]

    OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique, with a certificate from the University of St. Andrews in Terrorism Studies, also testified. He agreed that, “based on all OPP intelligence and the intelligence provided by the RCMP and federal intelligence agencies to the OPP…there was no credible threat to the security of Canada.” Carrique confirmed it “would be my understanding” that in order to invoke the Emergencies Act, there needs to be a “credible threat.” He agreed that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protected citizens’ rights to assemble and protest. He agreed that this includes protesting government policies. Carrique also concurred that the trucks that were arriving in Ottawa in late January 2022 “did so at the direction of police officers.”[15]

    Incendiary Allegations Made About Coutts Early into the Protest

    If the comments made publicly by politicians and the media about the protests in Ottawa were “problematic, being controlled and one-sided,” was this also the case in Coutts? On February 1, 2022 Alberta Premier Jason Kenney spoke to the press and residents of the province. He stated that he’d “received reports in the last hour of people allied with the protesters assaulting RCMP officers, including in one instance trying to ram members of the RCMP, later leading to a collision with a civilian vehicle in the area. This kind of conduct is totally unacceptable. Assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply doing their job to maintain public safety and the rule of law is completely unacceptable. And without hesitation, I condemn those actions …. ”[16]

    But in a documentary titled Trucker Rebellion: The Story of the Coutts Blockade, Rebel News reporters Kiane Simone and Sydney Fizzard learned that Premier Kenney’s statements were not accurate. Simone spoke on his cell phone with RCMP Corporal Curtis Peters. The officer clarified, “There were no physical altercation(s) between RCMP officers and protesters. Yesterday, when we had protesters go around and breach the road block set up on Highway 4 to the north, there was some public safety concerns and officer safety concerns that took place there. Vehicles travelled through, drove through fields to get around the road block and then onto Highway 4. They were travelling southbound on Highway 4 in the northbound lanes. And that was happening at the same time we had a few vehicles leaving the protest and travelling northbound in the northbound lanes. So, we had a traffic-meeting head-on on the double-lane highway there. And we did have a collision take place. A head-on collision occurred as a result of all this between a person trying to reach the blockade and a person who was just travelling north on the highway. And fortunately, it was a relatively minor collision. But a confrontation which led to an assault took place as a direct result of that collision.”

    Kiane Simone asked, “was that an assault on an RCMP officer?” Peters replied, “No. That was an assault between two civilians, between a protester and a civilian.” Kian Simone pressed, “So, Jason Kenney’s statement was not true at the press conference.” RCMP Corporal Peters emphasized, “I can tell you what I just told you, sir. You can have my name. It’s Corporal Curtis Peters. I’m the spokesperson here. My badge number is 5-2-9-5-7.”[17]

    The Coutts Four in the Headlines

    On February 14, 2022 the RCMP issued a press release regarding arrests in Coutts. It included a photo of an RCMP vehicle in the background, and a table in the foreground. Leaning against, on and below the table were weapons the RCMP said it “discovered” in “three trailers associated to this criminal organization.” The weapons they seized included 13 long guns, several handguns, multiple (three) sets of body armour, a machete, and high-capacity magazines. The press release did not name any of the individuals or the charges against them.[18] Global News carried the story later that day, and a reporter spoke to Alberta RCMP Supt. Roberta McHale. She said, “There was a heavy stash of weapons and these weapons were brought by people who had the intent on causing harm.” She announced that the RCMP were investigating a range of charges, including conspiracy to commit murder. McHale added, “This was a very complex, layered investigation, and some people might ask why it took so long. These investigations aren’t necessarily easy.”[19]

    On February 17, 2022 the Toronto Star ran this headline: “Father of accused in alleged Coutts blockade murder conspiracy says son was radicalized online, as others dispute RCMP narrative.” Mike Lysak, whose son Chris is one of the Coutts Four, was reported to have expressed his frustration watching his son “fall further and further into an online world of COVID-19 misinformation.” The Toronto Star claimed Mike Lysak said his son had become involved in the Diagolon group.[20] But, Granny Mackay, a guest on the Good Morning with Jason podcast, rejects that narrative. She has let me know that after the Toronto Star ran their story, Mike Lysak was upset. He said the newspaper twisted his words.

    Global News had reported on February 15 about tweets by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network which stressed that RCMP had seized “a plate carrier with Diagolon patches.” The tweets described Diagolon as “an accelerationist movement that believes a revolution is inevitable and necessary to collapse the current government system.” Deputy Director for Anti-Hate, Elizabeth Simmons, warned about Diagolon. “A lot of them claim to be ex-military and … have some kind of military training.” She added, “this is a very anti-Semitic group. It’s rife with neo-Nazis.” She pointed to the February 3, 2022 arrest in Nova Scotia of Jeremy MacKenzie on firearms charges.[21]

    A Global News story on February 3, 2022 described Jeremy MacKenzie as the “creator of Diagolon.” An RCMP warrant to search MacKenzie’s home in Pictou, Nova Scotia on January 26, 2022 referred to a video where MacKenzie spoke about “Diagolona.” RCMP contended that MacKenzie intended to create a new nation from Alaska to Florida made up of the provinces and states with the fewest pandemic restrictions. MacKenzie, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran of the Afghanistan War, attended some of the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa. But his firearms charges are not related to the Freedom Convoy. MacKenzie had a firearms license, but it was alleged he had an over-capacity magazine.[18] At the time the news story was reported, the Freedom Convoy protests were less than a week old. But, the headline, “Man who attended Ottawa protest convoy arrested on firearms charges,” inferred that the people protesting on Parliament Hill were violent. And now, here were followers of Jeremy MacKenzie in Coutts who were allegedly also violent.[22]

    Radio-Canada reported on February 17, 2022 about the names of those who were charged. Chris Carbert and Chris Lysak were described as people who have ties to Jeremy MacKenzie, of the “American-style militia movement” Diagolon, a “neo-fascist, white supremacist” and “violent insurrectionist movement.” The news story contended it was the aim of Diagolon to “establish a white nationalist state … that would run diagonally from Alaska through westerns Canada’s provinces, all the way south to Florida.” The news story cited a Facebook post in October 2021 by Carbert where he said he was “prepared to die in protest of government mandates.” Carbert apparently posted, “I’ll likely be dead soon and likely will be front page news … I will die fighting for what I believe is right and I mean this.” He added in another post, “I won’t live long. I’ve come to terms with this.” Radio-Canada stated that “Carbert has prior convictions for assault, drug trafficking and two drunk driving convictions.” However, Granny Mackay has learned from Chris Carbert that he was never convicted of assault. Another man picked a fight with him in a bar. Carbert was given a conditional sentence. He has no record of an assault conviction. The drug charge in question concerns getting some ecstasy for a friend when he was in his early 20s. Both happened prior to 2004. Jerry Morin posted on February 13, 2022 “This is war. Your country needs (you) more than ever now.”[23]

    On April 25, 2022 the CBC reported that crown prosecutors Aaron Rankin and Matt Dalidowicz stated that the plan was to try all four men in one trial. Daldiowicz told the CBC that the cases for Carbert, Olienick and Morin were “moving quickly.” But there were complications with the Lysak case.[24] The Lethbridge Herald reported on June 10, 2022 that three of the Coutts Four had been denied bail, with Jerry Morin awaiting his bail hearing.[25]

    In early September 2022, some of the contents of the Information To Obtain search warrant by RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley was made public in the press. The warrant in question was the one granted by an Alberta judge to allow RCMP officers to search properties. This was due to Checkley’s urgent request and belief that a serious crime was about to be committed. In the ITO, Checkley swore before the judge, “I have reasonable grounds to believe that (Tony) Olienick, (Chris) Carbert and (Jerry) Morin were part of a group that participated in the Coutts blockade and brought firearms into the Coutts blockade area with the intention of using those firearms against police.” The officer attested that “I believe (these protesters were) arming themselves for a standoff against police.”[26]

    On November 30, 2022 the Calgary Herald ran the attention-getting headline “Some Coutts protesters wanted to alter Canada’s political system.” Allegedly, in conversations with undercover officers, RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley stated Anthony “Olienick described (Christopher) Lysak as a hitman, sniper and gun-fighter.” Checkley emphasized that Jerry “Morin said it was World War Three and that stripping freedoms and making everyone slaves was warfare.”[27] The next day, the CBC ran a story about how the Coutts Four were making calls while in custody directly to their bosses in “the extremist network called Diagolon.” It was inferred that bosses outside of Coutts who were directing the Coutts Four to agitate for a new order.[28]

    On the Good Morning with Jason podcast, a woman named Danielle who has attended the pretrial motions in June 2023 spoke about the media coverage. A regular guest on the Good Morning with Jason show, Danielle observed “ever since Christmas (2022) mainstream media has been very, very quiet about this. Global News hasn’t reported a single thing on it (since December 2022). There’s been absolute crickets.” Jason Lavigne spoke to a staff member of the Western Standard in Alberta, who is also a friend. In addition to the publication ban requested by the defense to protect the jury pool process, there is also some sort of gag order related to the media. Lavigne’s contact at the Western Standard, who he spoke with in July 2023, is not at liberty to discuss this any further.[29]

    Coutts Protests, Arrests, on the A-list to Justify Invocation of Emergencies Act

    Testimony by numbers of government officials at the POEC pointed to the protests at Coutts as being on the A-list of events triggering the Emergencies Act. Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, raised the alarm about the protests in Coutts in the context of discussing the conversation about whether to invoke the Emergencies Act. “We were seeing the results of the law enforcement activity and what was happening at Coutts and we were seeing the size of the stash of firearms and ammunition that were found in Coutts amongst the protesters. So, this was new and I would say relevant information in terms of just the nature of the threat that we were worried about in terms of the risk for serious violence.”[30] Charette testified that “the situation at Coutts was more complex … It looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed; looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed …. The quantity of weapons and ammunition that was discovered by the RCMP conducting that law enforcement activity was more than I would have expected. So that, to me, indicated a seriousness and a scale of the illegal activity that was either contemplated at Coutts or people were ready to engage in at Coutts … that was beyond … my prior expectations …. ” When discussing the Freedom Convoy protests across Canada, including Coutts, Janice Charette warned of insurrectionist intentions. “There was talk of overthrowing the government and installing a different government with a governor general …. ” [31]

    Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, Nathalie Drouin, was asked if she knew that the protesters in Coutts intended to leave the area. “Well, I was not aware of that. No, that’s not true. I have heard about the potential breakthrough in Coutts. …prior to the enforcement action, we didn’t know about the cache.”[32] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained one of the reasons invoking the Emergencies Act was on the table “was (the) presence of weapons at Coutts …. ” Trudeau complained that once Premier Jason Kenney removed “a number of mandates” in Alberta, “the occupation at Coutts seemed to be emboldened … ‘Let’s keep going.’” Trudeau also revealed under cross examination that he had been considering invoking the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests “from the very beginning.”[33]

    National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister, Jody Thomas, reflected in the decision-making process on the road to invoking the Emergencies Act. Regarding “acts of serious violence,” can that include “the violence that people … of Ottawa were experiencing on the streets, … the inability of the Town of Coutts to function, is that a line? … There is a spectrum of activity and behaviour and threat in there that we need to understand …. ”[34]

    One of the Liberal cabinet ministers who cited the situation in Coutts as a catalyst in the A-list of reasons to invoke the Emergencies Act was Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. He testified that “not knowing exactly how it was that the operation in Coutts was going to play out at that time, and bearing in mind the sensitivities, the fact that the situation was combustible, that the individuals that were involved in Coutts were prepared to go down with a fight that could lead to the loss of life, that if that had happened and that occurred, it still remains an open question in my mind as to whether or not it would have triggered other events across the country. And so that’s why I – in my mind, it was very much – it was a threshold moment.”[35]

    In her testimony before the POEC, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke about the protests in Coutts as accelerating the sense that the government had to respond decisively to the Freedom Convoy. She recalled that on February 12, 2022 when “we heard from the RCMP Commissioner about concerns that there were serious weapons in Coutts. …that really raised the stakes in terms of my degree of concern about what could be happening in this sort of whack-a-mole copycat situation across the country.” [36] Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Bill Blair, also echoed this view in his testimony before the POEC on November 21, 2022.

    The mayor of Coutts, Jimmy Willet, also testified before the POEC on November 9, 2022. A text was entered as evidence from Mayor Willett to CTV reporter Bill Graveland. In it the mayor described the protesters in Coutts as “Domestic Terrorists.” But told Graveland in the text “You need to find someone in a protected position to call these guys what they are, Domestic Terrorists. Won’t be me. They are right outside my window. I would be strung up, literally. Just a thought.” He stated that his wife saw some protesters “moving heavy hockey bags” and said “it’s guns.”[37] Why the mayor’s wife presumed the hockey bags contained guns has not been followed up by any reporters.

    Jeremy MacKenzie and Diagolon

    On Tom Marazzo’s Meet Me in the Middle podcast in June 20, 2023, Jeremy MacKenzie spoke about his February 3, 2022 arrest in Nova Scotia. “They tried to play it up that I was in hiding. I had lawyers who were trying to talk to these people. What is going on. They flew four RCMP officers on their own planes and flew it from Saskatchewan to Halifax, where I spent six days in solitary confinement. And then flew me out to Saskatchewan in chains and ankle and arms and belly chains. And then I did two and a half months in jail in Saskatchewan before I could get bail. I have no criminal record. Never convicted of anything. And there was a murder while I was there, a woman stabbed another woman at a dance club. She was out on bail the next day. But, I’m too dangerous to be let out. And if it wasn’t for my lawyers and my legal team, I’d probably still be in there … on a common assault charge.” The common assault charge relates to an incident in Saskatchewan in November 2021, and not anything connecting MacKenzie to the Freedom Convoy protests. He told Tom Marazzo on the podcast that sixteen months after the protests in the winter of 2022, “I still to this day have not been asked a single question by the RCMP or CSIS … regarding any of this (Diagolon).” MacKenzie asserted that the government of Canada needed a scapegoat to justify invoking the Emergencies Act.[38]

    At the POEC, MacKenzie testified from his prison cell in Saskatchewan Correctional Centre. MacKenzie confirmed that in January 2021 he drew a diagonal line on his cell phone from Alaska, through Alberta and Saskatchewan, through the Dakotas, down to Texas and across to Florida and named it Diagolon. It became a brand name for followers on his podcasts. He made a plastic goat figurine, named Philip, the vice-president of Diagolon. Philip, he explained to his viewers was a demonic time-travelling, cocaine addict. He pointed out that the official narrative about Diagolon as “militia” and “extremist, has come from the largely government-funded Canadian Anti-Hate Network. MacKenzie observed how Anti-Hate posts scary articles about Diagolon which both the media and the police take at face value.[39] While in Ottawa, Jeremy MacKenzie posted that he wanted any of his followers at Freedom Convoy protests “If there’s a speed limit (go) slower than that. Don’t even litter. Don’t sit. Don’t even throw a snowball. Don’t give anyone any excuse to point at you and say, ‘Look what you’ve done.’”[40]

    In his testimony, MacKenzie confirmed that he had met Chris Lysak in person at a meet-and-greet in Saskatchewan in the summer of 2021, and at a BBQ where people were having steak on the grill. MacKenzie spoke to Lysak sometime after the charges for conspiracy to commit murder. He confirmed that the patches on some tactical vests looked like Diagolon patches. But that anyone could have made them and sold them. “I really can’t speak to their origins,” stated MacKenzie. Though he did not claim that the RCMP might have planted the Diagolon patches on the tactical vests discovered among the weapons cache in Coutts, MacKenzie stated “law enforcement (in) Canada has a history of things like this taking place. It’s not outside the realm of possibility … Could it be planted? … I would leave that open to possibility.”[41] During POEC testimony, it was confirmed that Jeremy MacKenzie has no criminal record.

    A reasonable person might conclude that an organization whose vice-president is a plastic goat figurine that does time-travelling and has a narcotics addiction should not be taken seriously. Anymore, than a friend at a bar having one too many announces “one day I’ll be Prime Minister.” How might the United States government view an attempt to trigger the secession of 26 states from Alaska, and Idaho across to the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Florida?

    But police and intelligence in Canada in 2021-2022 took every statement on Jeremy MacKenzie’s podcasts at face value. If Jeremy MacKenzie read the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, would Canadian law enforcement issue an all-points-bulletin to be on the lookout for a little girl with blonde hair on charges of breaking and entering, and damaging personal property of the Bear family?

    What Sparked the Protests?

    As I have written in previous articles, the Freedom Convoy protests began in response to the Canadian government ending the truck driver exemption from vaccination in order to cross the Canadian border. [42] Truck drivers had enjoyed an exemption since the start of the pandemic were hailed as heroes by Prime Minister Trudeau. No data about COVID-19 spread and truck drivers was presented to the House of Commons Health Committee in January 2022. The infection fatality rate for Covid-19 was about 0.25%.[43]


    Source: Children’s Health Defense

    For truck drivers entering the United States, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh clarified the Biden Administration’s new regulations. “The ironic thing is most truckers are not covered by this, because they’re driving a truck, they’re in a cab, they’re by themselves, they wouldn’t be covered by this,” Walsh said. Though often framed as equivalent to Canadian mandates for truck drivers, American mandates were less restrictive. The US Administration mandate exempted workers “who do not report to a workplace where other individuals such as coworkers or customers are present.”[44] And there were no vaccine requirements for truck drivers entering Mexico. Canadian truck drivers were not being deprived of making a living due to regulations in the United States. During the pandemic, with other nations concerned about healthy economies and supply chains, Canada was an outlier in its vaccine restrictions for truck drivers.

    Original Search Warrant Listed Only Mischief Over $5,000, No Mention of Weapons or Conspiracy to Commit Murder

    A Search Warrant was issued on February 13, 2022 to RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley. The search was granted, effective 10PM, February 13th, due to the officer’s sworn oath that he had reasonable grounds to suspect “Mischief Over $5,000.” The warrant was not issued on “weapons charges” or “conspiracy to commit murder.” The search stated officers could search for “Documents and data related to planning organization and operations of the protest group’s security for the Coutts blockade.” A question the lawyers for the Coutts Four need to determine is if it is legitimate to have a search warrant for a minimum charge; if the RCMP believes a far more serious crime is about to unfold, but not name it in the search. Donald Best, a former Sergeant (Detective) with the Toronto Police, highlights that in order to get a search warrant, there are affidavits and likely photos presented to the judge to support the Information To Obtain search. [45]

    Behaviour of Those Arrested Resembled Ordinary Citizens, Not Domestic Terrorists

    On the Good Morning with Jason podcast, a local woman named Danielle, summarized the arrests of the Coutts Four. The first person to get arrested was Christopher Lysak at 9PM, on February 13, 2022, “in front of Smuggler’s” Saloon, in Coutts. This was in front of many other protesters. When Anthony Olienick learned that Lysak might have been arrested, “he began videotaping and posting online saying he wished the cops would put their guns down and come and have coffee with us.” What Olienick did not do was head off and grab a bunch of guns and start a standoff with the police. Then Olienick was arrested about 9:50 PM. This was “in amongst the protesters.” Danielle reports that “Chris Carbert was sleeping in his trailer when they (RCMP) did the raid on the property …. He also knew the other two had been arrested.” Yet, Carbert chose to go to bed. He didn’t try to overthrow the government. He was arrested around 12:30 AM on February 14, 2022. Later that day, after having gone to work in Calgary, Jerry Morin was arrested by the RCMP about 12PM. At the time of his arrest, Morin knew the other three had been arrested. All of the Coutts Four were unarmed when they were arrested. None of them were running or hiding.

    Retired police sergeant Donald Best flags several problems with the timeline of arrests. “This is all politically driven. They (several Liberal cabinet ministers) knew about it in Ottawa before the warrant went down. We saw that from the Commission (POEC). … that means the politicians on the political side of this were involved in the creation of, and the timeline, and the date and time of execution; and if all that is true, and I believe it is … these men deserve to see their day in court. And they deserve to be out with an ankle bracelet, or whatever.[46]

    Commenting on the cache of weapons displayed by the RCMP on February 14, 2022, local gun owner Zach Schmidt made these observations. “This is not what I would be choosing if I were to hypothetically (try) to take down the RCMP.” There were about 50 RCMP vehicles in the Coutts vicinity and so about a hundred officers …. This just looks like someone’s basement was raided. Numbers of the guns are rifles that would be better for hunting deer. There are no sniper rifles, no precision rifles. They’re just run-of-the-mill hunting guns …. ” Donald Best added, “When the RCMP were investigating the multiple shooting in Nova Scotia (in 2022), the lead investigators refused to release the types and photos of the weapons involved. Why? Because they’re in the middle of an investigation. They want to know where they came from. Contrast that with the RCMP action in Coutts.”[47]

    There are some instances in the past where the RCMP have created a threat, or impeded ongoing investigations. On July 1, 2013 there were reports that a plot to bomb the British Columbia legislature had been averted by the RCMP. Offices acting undercover, with the support of over 200 staff working to prevent the plot, saved the day and caught the plotters red-handed. Or so the public was led to believe. When the case went to court it turned out that the RCMP was in the spotlight, and uncomfortably so. The CBC headline reported, “RCMP entrapment of B.C. couple in legislature bomb plot was ‘travesty of justice,’ court rules: John Nuttall-Amanda Korody’s convictions had been stayed due to entrapment, abuse of process.”[48]

    In her verdict, Justice Catherine Bruce wrote, “Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor the sufficient motivation to do it themselves.” Bruce made clear that the RCMP had not foiled a pre-existing plan. The couple in the RCMPs crosshairs were not terrorists. They were not people with capacities that terrorists might want to recruit. Said Bruce, “This is truly a case where the RCMP manufactured the crime.”[49]

    Writing for The Tyee, Bill Tieleman asked:

    Why did the RCMP create the July 1, 2013 B.C. Legislature bomb plot and train and equip a hapless, methadone-addicted, developmentally challenged couple to undertake terrorist actions? And why did the RCMP also break Canada’s laws in doing so? Money. Lots and lots of money. John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were freed Friday after three years in jail thanks to a stunning decision that saw a respected judge condemn the RCMP in the strongest terms possible, while overturning a jury’s guilty verdict on terrorism changes because the Surrey couple were “entrapped” by police, who also committed an “abuse of process.”…

    So why did the RCMP take such obviously reprehensible actions? What was their motivation in turning two sad, naïve recovering heroin addicts who barely left their basement apartment into Canada’s most famous terrorists? To get government money for its huge operations. The RCMP has a $2.8-billion annual budget and more than 29,000 employees. It depends on the federal government for its funding – and counterterrorism dollars depend on results, as I wrote in The Tyee in 2013 after covering the first court appearances of Nuttall and Korody. The RCMP is also competing with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for financial support, so it is highly motivated to show public success. And in the RCMP’s Departmental Performance Report one of the major “expected results” is “Terrorist criminal activity is prevented, detected, responded to and denied.”

    In the absence of real terrorist plots to foil, the case of Nuttall and Korody indicated the RCMPs work can include manufacturing plots in order to foil them. From the success of these sting operations, the RCMP gets favorable media coverage and a subsequent boost in future yearly budgets. As long as they don’t get caught. [50]

    In the past, the RCMP have engaged in policing to advance the political agendas of those in the federal government. The Halifax Examiner ran this headline in June 2022: “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki tried to ‘jeopardize’ mass murder investigation to advance Trudeau’s gun control efforts.” The paper reported:

    “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki “made a promise” to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office to leverage the mass murders of April 18/19, 2020 to get a gun control law passed.” RCMP in Nova Scotia were left out of the loop regarding numbers of victims and release of information. The article detailed how “Contravening the agreed protocol, throughout the early hours of Sunday evening, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki agreed to a number of one-on-one interviews with reporters. At 7:36PM, CBC News quoted Lucki as stating there were 13 victims; at 7:40PM, CTV reported Lucki had said 14 victims; and at 7:56PM, the Canadian Press quoted Lucki as having confirmed 17 dead, including the gunman. The public and the press corps were both confused and alarmed.

    “So how does it happen that Commissioner Lucki …. ?” Mass Casualty Commission lawyer Krista Smith started to ask Communications director Lia Scanlan during an interview last February. “I don’t know, ask National Headquarters,” retorted Scanlan. “The commissioner (Lucki) releases a body count that we (Communications) don’t even have. She went out and did that. It was all political pressure. That is 100% Minister Blair and the Prime Minister. And we have a Commissioner that does not push back.” [51]

    During the FLQ Crisis in the fall of 1970, the RCMP was found to have engaged in illegal activities. As the McDonald Commission Report of 1981 found, the RCMP forged documents, was involved in the theft of the membership list of the Parti Quebecois, several break-ins, illegal opening of mail, and the burning a barn in Quebec.[52] The McDonald Commission recommended revisions to the War Measures Act. These were tabled by Perrin Beatty in Parliament in July 1988 as the Emergencies Act.

    Discrepancies in Disclosure Pointed to During Pretrial Motions

    Pretrial motions were heard at the Lethbridge, Alberta courthouse between June 12 and 29. At one point, there was an animated discussion between the judge, lawyers for the accused, and the Crown. One of those attending was a local woman named Danielle, who spoke to Jason Lavigne on his podcast on July 13, 2023. She described how “the Crown kept talking about the solicitor-client privilege.” A lawyer for one of the accused stopped them after a while. This lawyer said ‘Listen. This might not be the case that there’s evidence of unlawful activity. We’re talking about disclosure that has been discovered.’” Danielle described how the Crown had dumped thousands of pages of disclosure at the last minute on the defence. There was mention of “inadvertent disclosure” on a number of occasions. Danielle told Jason Lavigne, “I don’t believe they (defence lawyers) were supposed to have found it. I think she kind of found it. And she got excited that she found it. And then everybody got a lot more excited after the content of that was more apparent to them. Again, we’re not privy to exactly what’s in that conflict of disclosure. The Crown mentioned that due to the content, the disclosure conflicted not only about the disclosure. It is also in regards to two of the crown prosecutors …. This application (by the defence) coming up, (two) Crown prosecutors are going to have to be witnesses. So, they (the prosecutors who are representing the case for the Crown) are going to be part of the hearing.” This opens up the possibility that some Crown prosecutors may be defendants at some point in relation to this case.

    Danielle described to Jason the importance of this moment during the pretrial motions. The defence made an application to the court during disclosure. It related to the cross examination of one of the witnesses as the case against the accused was being built. Danielle, stated, “There were notes. There were scribbled notes in one book. And there were scribbled notes in another book from the scribes that were hired for this person (witness). And there was also another scribe that had been hired that had … typed notes. … it was discovered that the typed notes were never submitted to the defence counsel. However, the witness had testified “I’ve given the Crown everything that I have.” So, it was discovered that there was a large pile of typed notes. What was problematic is the content of the scribbled notes, and the content of the typed notes contain crucial discrepancies. The defence was excited about this inadvertent discovery. What can explain these discrepancies? Were the typed notes exculpatory evidence helpful to the defense? [53]

    Another guest on the Good Morning with Jason podcast Margaret “Granny” Mackay has also attended the pretrial motions in June. She also witnessed the astonishing developments in the court house that Danielle described to viewers of the podcast on July 13, 2023.

    On the Good Morning with Jason podcast on July 24, Danielle discussed notes she took from the pretrial motions on June 29. That day one of the Crown prosecutors agreed to recuse themselves from the case. [54]

    A Facebook group has sprung up under the name Alberta Political Prisoners. The RCMP and the Crown present themselves as having a solid case to convict the four accused on conspiracy to commit murder. But this may not be the case. It’s plausible that the case for the Crown is thin at best, as has been the case for the Trudeau governments justification for invoking the Emergencies Act. After over five hundred days without bail, more people are starting to pay attention to this case that’s been largely ignored by the media.

    Chris Carbert has been leading a Bible study in the remand centre early into his custody. Jerry Morin has been leading other inmates in yoga classes. One of the guards told Morin after he’d been in custody for a few weeks, “This is weird. We were expecting a lot of different behaviour from you. We thought that you were a white supremacist.”[55] The four men in custody on conspiracy charges are looking less like insurrectionists, and more like political prisoners in Justin Trudeau’s Canada.

  • Published on Global Research. This article was originally published on Propaganda in Focus.
  • ENDNOTES

    [1] “High River residents grateful for yard cleanup months after flood,” CBC, June 1, 2014. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/high-river-residents-grateful-for-yard-cleanup-months-after-flood-1.2661368

    [2] Lieberman, Caryn, “Suspect charged in connection with death of Toronto officer granted bail,” Global News, September 22, 2021.https://globalnews.ca/news/8212220/umar-zameer-bail-jeffrey-northrup-toronto-police/

    [3] Geleneau, Jacqueline, “Kelownna woman charged with murder released on bail,” Kelowna Capital News, April 28, 2022.https://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/kelowna-woman-charged-with-murder-released-on-bail/

    [4] “Accused in Mission double murder released on bail,” CBC, October 17, 2013.https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/accused-in-mission-double-murder-released-on-bail-1.2101838

    [5] McDonald, Catherine, “Milton, Ont. Man accused of murdering armed intruder released on bail,” Global News, March 2, 2023.https://globalnews.ca/news/9523161/milton-man-home-invasion-shooting-bail/

    [6] Henderson, Ernest F, “Assize of Clarendon, 1166,” in Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, (London, George Bell and Sons, 1896). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/assizecl.asp

    [7] Magna Carta, 1215, Section 38 https://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/magna_carta_1215/Clause_38

    [8] “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Constitution Act of 1982, 1982. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html

    [9] Best, Donald, “Denying Bail to Coutts Four is a Political Decision and Act,” Donaldbest.ca, July 8, 2023 https://donaldbest.ca/denying-bail-to-the-coutts-four-is-a-political-decision-and-act/

    [10] Gilmore, Rachel, “’Fringe minority’ in truck convoy with ‘unacceptable views’ don’t represent Canadians: Trudeau,”Global News, January 26, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8539610/truckerconvoy-covid-vaccine-mandates-ottawa/

    [11] Farrow, Anna, “I Saw A Mob; It Wasn’t the Truckers,”Catholic Register, January 31, 2022 https://www.catholicregister.org/opinion/guestcolumnists/item/33985-i-saw-a-mob-it-wasn-ttruckers

    [12] “Mr. Serge Arpin, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, October 17, 2022, 194-329. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/d ocuments/Transcripts/POEC-Public-HearingsVolume-3-October-17-2022.pdf

    [13] Wilson, Pete, “Police Called Convoy Protest ‘Calm, Festive’ on Same Day Emergencies Act Was Invoked: Internal Memo,” Epoch Times, November 3, 2022. https://www.theepochtimes.com/police[called-convoy-protest-calm-festive-on-same-dayemergencies-act-was-invoked-internalmemo_4839848.html](https://www.theepochtimes.com/police-called-convoy-protest-calm-festive-on-same-day-emergencies-act-was-invoked-internal-memo_4839848.html)

    [14] “Supt. Patrick Morris, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, October 19, 2022, 184-305. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/d ocuments/Transcripts/POEC-Public-HearingsVolume-5-October-19-2022.pdf

    [15] “TDF Litigation Director questions OPP Supt. Carson Pardy,” The Democracy Fund, October 21, 2022. https://www.thedemocracyfund.ca/tdf_litigation_di rector_questions_opp_pardy

    [16] Joannou, Ashley, “Kenney calls for calm, says RCMP officers assaulted at Coutts border,”Edmonton Journal, February 2, 2022. https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/kenney-calls-for-calm-says-rcmp-officers-assaulted-at-coutts-border-crossing

    [17] Simone, Kiane and Fizzard, Sydney,Trucker Rebellion: The Story of the Coutts Blockade, Rebel News, August 19, 2022. https://rumble.com/v1glv1z-trucker-rebellion-the-story-of-the-coutts-blockade.html

    [18] “Alberta RCMP make arrests at Coutts Border Blockade,” RCMP, February 14, 2022. https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2022/alberta-rcmp-make-arrests-coutts-border-blockade

    [19] Gibson, Caley, “RCMP arrest 13 people, seize weapons and ammunition near Coutts border blockade,” Global News, February 14, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-protest-weapons-ammunition-seized/

    [20] Leavitt, Kieran and Mosleh, Omar, “Father of accused in alleged Coutts blockade murder conspiracy says son was radicalized online, as others dispute RCMP narrative,”Toronto Star, February 17, 2022. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/02/17/father-of-accused-in-alleged-coutts-blockade-murder-conspiracy-says-son-was-radicalized-online-as-others-dispute-rcmp-narrative.html

    [21] Tran, Paula,“Anti-hate experts concerned about possible neo-fascist involvement at Alberta trucker convoy,” Global News, February 15, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8621125/canadian-anti-hate-network-concerned-diagolon-coutts-border-protest-diagolon/

    [22] Bell, Stewart, “Man who attended Ottawa protest convoy arrested on firearms charges,” Global News, February 3, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8593064/ns-man-ottawa-convoy-protest-firearms-charge/

    [23] “The Coutts 13: New details on the men and women arrested at border blockade,” Radio-Canada, February 17, 2022. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1862953/the-coutts-13-new-details-on-the-men-and-women-arrested-at-border-blockade

    [24] Grant, Meghan,“4 men accused of conspiring to murder RCMP officers to be tried together: prosecutors: Chris Lysak, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin charged after Coutts protests,” CBC, April 25, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-border-protest-conspiracy-to-murder-trials-1.6430369

    [25] Shurtz, Delon, “Bail denied for accused in Coutts conspiracy case,”Lethbridge Herald, June 10, 2022. https://lethbridgeherald.com/news/lethbridge-news/2022/06/10/bail-denied-for-accused-in-coutts-conspiracy-case/

    [26] Martin, Kevin, “Arming for a standoff against police,” Regina Leader-Post, Regina, SK, September 8, 2022. https://www.pressreader.com/canada/regina-leader-post/20220908/281711208483474

    [27] Martin, Kevin, “Some Coutts protesters wanted to alter Canada’s political system,”Calgary Herald, November 30, 2022. https://calgaryherald.com/news/crime/some-coutts-protesters-wanted-to-alter-canadas-political-system-court-documents-say

    [28] Ward, Rachel and Grant, Meghan, “Bosses of Alberta men accused in plot to murder Mounties still under investigation, court docs suggest,” CBC, December 1, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-blockade-border-ito-documents-unsealed-1.6670025

    [29] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 515,” Good Morning with Jason podcast, July 13, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4wdeUOWqnQ&t=44s

    [30] “Ms. Janice Charette, Sworn, Ms. Nathalie Drouin, Affirmed,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 18, 2022, p. 163. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-26-November-18-2022.pdf

    [31] Ibid, pp. 183-184.

    [32] Ibid, pp. 296-297.

    [33] “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Affirmed,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 25, 2022, 52, 76, 42. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-31-November-25-2022.pdf

    [34] “Ms. Jody Thomas, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 17, 2022, p. 225. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-25-November-17-2022.pdf

    [35] “Minister Marco Mendicino, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 22, 2022, p. 168. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-25-November-17-2022.pdf

    [36] “Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 24, 2022, https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-30-November-24-2022.pdf

    [37] “Mayor Jimmy Willett, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 9, 2022, pp. 29, 31-32. https://publicorderemergenncycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-20-November-9-2022.pdf

    [38] Tom Marazzo, “Jeremy MacKenzie Interview,” Meet Me in the Middle podcast, June 21, 2023.https://rumble.com/v2v7xfk-tom-marazzo-jeremy-mackenzie-pt-1-excerpt-2-meet-me-in-the-middle-podcast.html

    [39] “Mr. Jeremy Mitchell MacKenzie, Affirmed,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 4, 2022, pp. 151-152, 157, 218. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-17-November-4-2022.pdf

    [40] Ibid, p. 164.

    [41] Ibid, p. 176-193.

    [42] McGinnis, Ray, “Justin Trudeau and the Politics of the Possible,” Propaganda in Focus, December 14, 2022. https://propagandainfocus.com/justin-trudeau-and-the-politics-of-possible-the-emergencies-act-inquiry-in-canada-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda/

    [43] Ioannidis, John P. and Axfors, Catherine, “Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 in community-dwelling populations with emphasis on the elderly: An overview,” Stanford University, Stanford, CA, December 23, 2021.  https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.0[8.21260210v2.full.pdf](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.08.21260210v2.full.pdf)

    [44] Kimball, Spencer, ““Labor secretary says most truck drivers are exempt from Covid mandate, handing industry a win,” CNBC, November 5, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/labor-secretary-says-most-truck-drivers-are-exempt-from-covid-mandate-handing-industry-a-win-.html

    [45] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515,” (See note 29).

    [46] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515,” (See note 29).

    [47] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 506,” Good Morning with Jason, July 4, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR9C2w2DXso

    [48] Proctor, Jason, “RCMP entrapment of B.C. couple in legislature bomb plot was ‘travesty of justice,’ court rules: John Nuttall-Amanda Korody’s convictions had been stayed due to entrapment, abuse of process,” CBC, December 19, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/johnnuttall-amanda-korody-2018-1.4952431

    [49] Proctor, Jason, “Terrorists or targets? Appeal Court to decide fate of B.C. couple accused in bomb plot,” CBC, December 18, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/nuttall-korody-entrapment-terrorism-1.4951447

    [50] Tieleman, Bill, “BC Terror Trial Verdict a Scathing Indictment of RCMP Management,” The Tyee, August 2, 2016.  https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/08/02/BC-Terror-Trial-Verdict/

    [51] Henderson, Jennifer, “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki tried to ‘jeopardize’ mass murder investigation to advance Trudeau’s gun control efforts,” Halifax Examiner, June 21, 2022. https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/policing/rcmpcommissioner-brenda-lucki-tried-to-jeopardize-massmurder-investigation-to-advance-trudeaus-gun-controlefforts/

    [52] McDonald, D.C.,Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – second report, volume 2: freedom and security under the law, Privy Council Office, 1981. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/471402/publication.html

    [53] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515” (See note 29).

    [54] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 526,” Good Morning with Jason, July 24, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSUplSQ3PDA

    [55] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 509,” Good Morning with Jason, July 7, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac00IscReIs&t=3215s

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Misinformation reports produced by digital platform providers like Meta, Twitter and TikTok under the voluntary industry code are “not working to provide transparency”, the communications watchdog has argued in a new report. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has also called for industry association – the Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) – to extend…

    The post Big Tech misinformation reports ‘not working’: ACMA appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • 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.

  • Misinformation laws proposed by the Albanese government to hold social media platforms to account for harmful content on their platforms could inadvertently be “abused” to the detriment of free speech, according to Facebook parent company Meta. Fronting a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday, local policy representatives from the company raised early concerns with the draft legislation…

    The post New misinformation laws could be ‘abused’: Meta appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • China recently passed the Foreign Relations Law, which lays out foreign policy with an aim to “multipolarity.” The West is freaking out about it saying that it is a power grab. We have a guest to break down the anti-China rhetoric today. Carl Zha is the host of the “Silk and Steel Podcast” focusing on China, history, culture and politics. He explains how this is a reaction to Western sanctions and why the West is having a fit about it.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats. The German businessman in the seat beside me, obviously a nervous flyer, immediately adopted the “brace” position. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and shouted into his ear like a drunken redneck, “WE’RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL! GOING DOWN!”

    And so began my latest trip to London. This time, I wasn’t there to talk to “the Left” or to hunt down endoparasitoid xenomorphs. I was there on Serious Conspiracy Theorist Business, which I explained to the chirpy MI6 operative posing as a “survey taker” that followed me out of Border Control asking questions about my “nation of residence” and my “experience with the passport scanners,” and so on. She was wearing one of those rubber “Mission Impossible” masks that made her look like a middle-aged British woman. I waited for an opportunity, head faked, juked right, and lost her in the crowd. As I entered the “Arrivals” lobby, I turned and shouted in her general direction, “NOT MY FIRST RODEO, MR. PHELPS!”

    I don’t know what was up with all the shouting. I’ve been experimenting with different types of medication for this sinus condition I’ve had for months. My Sinus Specialist diagnosed me with “long” or possibly “permanent Covid,” or some yet-to-be-named debilitating syndrome caused by some other bio-weapon that produces cold-and-flu-like symptoms and has a survival rate of 99.8 percent. So, maybe it was bad reaction to my meds. Whatever it was, I was feeling jumpy.

    And the climate-change apocalypse didn’t help. Emerging from the Tube in Westminster was like walking into an enormous open-air sauna. Bodies were lying all around on the sidewalks. AFP photographers in hazmat suits were taking pictures of the carnage. Herds of corpulent American tourists staggered through the streets in semi-fugue states sweating profusely and thumbing their phones like an invasion of alien albino hippos trying to call up to their UAPs and arrange for immediate emergency extraction. I pushed and shoved and elbowed my way down Tothill Street to my pod hotel, checked in, and proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the maze of identical Kubrickian hallways that eventually led me to my luxury pod, and cleaned myself up for the night’s festivities.

    What was I doing back in London in the middle of a heat wave? Well … OK, I’m allowed to tell you about it now. As you are probably aware, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand were doing this public event last Thursday …

    … but that’s not what I was really there for.

    Not that the Thursday event wasn’t fun. It was. Despite the rather pricey tickets, there was a good size house and spirits were high. Russell Brand was in top form, pouring out torrents of intellectual free-association like an English Neal Cassady and nailing the punchlines of all the jokes. Michael was also firing on all cylinders. He worked the house like a seasoned politician, whipping the crowd into a veritable frenzy of anti-totalitarian fervor. Stella Assange took the stage at one point and briefed us on the official crucifixion of her husband, which, sadly, now looks like a fait accompli. Matt, who had just made it to London that morning, and so was jet-lagged and delieriously sleep-deprived, dispensed with the speech he had rewritten on the plane, and just winged it, and somehow pulled it off … because that, as they say, is show biz.

    Here’s the money part of Matt’s speech, which he paraphrased in London (emphasis mine):

    What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

    Early the next morning, Michael, Matt, and a secret cabal of international journalists, editors, organizers, political satirists, academics, and other Very Serious People whose names I am not at liberty to mention gathered in an undisclosed location and spent the better part of the day sharing harmful misinformation and strategizing about how to defeat (or marginally disrupt) the network of governments, Intelligence agencies, global corporations, NGOs, and so-called disinformation experts known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. There were delegates from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and other nominally sovereign countries.

    This heretofore clandestine meeting was conducted in what appeared to be a WWII-era air-raid shelter that had been converted into a private BDSM club under military-level OPSEC protocols (i.e., the meeting was conducted according to the protocols, not the architectural conversion). I’m not entirely sure why that was. We weren’t doing anything even remotely illegal. However, given that I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art of my book, and the IRS’s sudden interest in Matt, and Kit Klarenberg’s recent experience in Luton, perhaps the abundance of caution was warranted. The last thing we needed was the UK Thought Police goose-stepping in like Basil Fawlty and dragging everyone off to Room 101.

    Anyway, that’s what I was actually there for. I had never met most of the people in attendance, except online on the double-encrypted Russian-backed dark-web conspiracy-theorist channels where we hatch our right-wing-extremist plots to defend people’s rights to freedom-of-speech and engage in other harmful anti-Democracy behaviors. I’m still not sure who I actually met in London, as we were all wearing identical Mickey-Mouse masks and speaking through portable voice modifiers. (In any secret meeting like this, you have to assume you’ve been infiltrated!)

    After the obligatory arguing about the agenda, we settled in and shared our country reports, which, unsurprisingly, were all variations on a theme. I won’t go into all the details. Michael Shellenberger’s non-profit has been tracking those developments. Matt Taibbi and Racket News are reporting it. Other alternative media outlets are reporting it. Millions of people all around the world are talking about it, writing about it, and arguing with each other about it. Your Twitter feed is probably full of it. Alex Gutentag just published a huge article about it.

    So, what is it, exactly, that is going on?

    The thing that was horrifying about listening to my colleagues reporting on the state of things in their countries — or, rather, the thing that should be horrifying but is becoming a mundane fact of life — is that more or less the same totalitarian program is being rolled out in countries throughout the world. The censorship. The official propaganda. The criminalization of dissent. The pathologization of dissent. The manipulation of our perception of reality. The coordinated transformation of the world into a smiley-faced neo-Orwellian police state in which politics no longer matters because society has been divided into two basic classes; i.e., “the normals,” who are prepared to mindlessly follow orders and parrot whatever official propaganda they are fed, and “the deviants,” or “extremists,” who are not.

    Seriously, all satire aside, think about the implications of that.

    As you sit there in whichever nominally sovereign country you’re sitting there reading this in, ask yourself, “how and why is this happening?” Then ask yourself, “why is it happening now?”

    If you do not have answers to those questions, it might behoove you to attempt to come up with some. That is basically what I’ve been trying to do — in a satirical and sometimes not so satirical manner — in these Consent Factory essays for the last seven years. I’m not going to summarize it all again here. I’ve done that, repeatedly, in my essays and books. I did it the last time I visited London to give a talk at the Real Left Conference.

    I did it again at this gathering in London. It did not go over all that well.

    The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.

    I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …

    That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.  [The New York Times Magazine]

    If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.

    The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.

    And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

  • United Nations chief António Guterres recently called out mis- and disinformation as a “grave global harm”, while launching a key report on the issue. The report is part of a series of UN policy priorities and calls out mis- and disinformation as dangerous and deadly, with hate speech on digital platforms being linked to violence…

    The post AI will turbocharge disinformation while lax regulation is the norm appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Hayden Donnell, RNZ Mediawatch producer

    RNZ is investigating how online stories about the war in Ukraine, supplied by an international news agency, were edited to align with the Russian view of events.

    A staff member has been stood down while other stories are audited. It has also prompted an external review of RNZ’s online news publishing.

    The alarm was raised after a story was published by RNZ on Friday about the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which contained significant amendments to the original copy by the international wire service Reuters.

    The alarm was raised after a story was published by RNZ on Friday about the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which contained significant amendments to the original copy by the international wire service Reuters.

    The original story by its Moscow bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge said:

    “The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.”

    But when republished on RNZ.co.nz, that passage adopted a more “Kremlin-friendly” framing.

    “The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian elected government was toppled during Ukraine’s violent Maidan colour revolution. Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum, as the new pro-Western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine, sending in its armed forces to the Donbas.”

    RNZ's edits to a story about an escalation in the war in Ukraine.
    RNZ’s edits to a 9 June 2023 story about an escalation in the war in Ukraine. Image: BusinessDesk/RNZ

    ‘False account of events’
    RNZ’s 4pm news bulletin on Friday said the version published by RNZ “included a false account of events” and RNZ was investigating how the story was “changed to reflect a pro-Russian view”.

    RNZ corrected the story online, adding a footnote which said it was “taking the issue extremely seriously.”

    The "war talk" Reuters article on 9 June 2023 bylined Guy Faulconbridge that sparked the inquiry
    The “war talk” Reuters article on 9 June 2023 bylined Guy Faulconbridge that helped spark the RNZ inquiry. Image: RNZ screenshot APR

    Late on Friday, RNZ said an investigation was under way into “the alleged conduct of one employee” who had been “placed on leave while we look into these matters”.

    “We are auditing other articles to check whether there are further problems,” the statement said.

    RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson said the inappropriate editing of the stories to reflect a pro-Moscow perspective was deeply concerning and would be addressed accordingly.

    Other stories in the spotlight
    Another RNZ.co.nz story on the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam described the 2014 Maidan Revolution as a “coup” — pro-Russian language which did not appear in the original Reuters text.

    These stories repeat false claims that Russia’s annexation of Crimea happened after a referendum on the move. The invasion was underway before the vote was held.

    “Colour revolution” is sometimes used to describe protest movements backed by foreign powers with the intention of regime change.

    Describing the 2014 revolution in those terms or as a “coup” aligns with the official Russian perspectives, but contradicts the Ukrainian view.

    The assertion that ethnic Russian citizens were suppressed by the Ukrainian government has also been used by Russia to justify the invasion of Ukraine, but there is scant evidence for his claim. The BBC’s Kyiv correspondent called it “demonstrably false” in 2014.

    One of the RNZ disclaimer editorial notes on audited reports
    One of the RNZ disclaimer editorial notes on audited reports . . . this one was on the report originally published on 26 May 2022 and republished today with “balanced” quotes. Image: RNZ screenshot APR

    An RNZ News footnote now says the story was “edited inappropriately and has been corrected” and “we are investigating.”

    Other Reuters stories on rnz.co.nz with similar editorial alterations came to light on Friday. RNZ added footnotes explaining they had been “edited inappropriately and had been corrected.”

    One about the first large-scale air strikes in nearly two months had said “Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine claiming that a US-backed coup in 2014 with the help of neo-Nazis had created a threat to its borders — and had ignited a civil war that saw Russian-speaking minorities persecuted.”

    That example was from late-April — and it is surprising no-one noticed the inflammatory additions to it until Friday’s revelations prompted a look-back.

    RNZ confirmed late on Friday night “the alleged conduct of one employee” was under investigation. Mediawatch understands this is a member of RNZ’s digital team.

    The statement said the staffer had been “placed on leave while we look into these matters – and audit other articles to check for further problems”.

    In a further statement in Saturday evening, RNZ said 15 inappropriately edited stories had been identified and corrected so far.

    Chief executive Paul Thompson said an external review of RNZ’s online news publishing processes would now be carried out by experts “to ensure these are robust”. The results of the review would be made public, he said.

    Outside sources
    Reuters is aware of the issue but has not responded to a request for comment.

    An online user in the US who noted “Russian propaganda . . . on the Reuters wire today under the byline of its Moscow bureau chief” said a Reuters representative told them language appearing on RNZ’s site “was not written by Reuters or Guy Faulconbridge.”

    Reuters’ website terms and conditions warns: “You may not remove, alter, forward, scrape, frame, in-line link, copy, sell, distribute, retransmit, create derivative works . . . without our prior written consent.”

    Mediawatch also asked RNZ if it was permitted to alter copy supplied by Reuters.

    “There will be no comment until that investigation is completed and any appropriate action taken,” RNZ replied.

    International news agencies such as Reuters supply news on a commercial basis to clients.

    The terms of agreements with media organisations vary, but commonly allow media customers to edit text for length and to permit the addition of relevant details specific to the territory in question.

    Significant changes not permitted
    Passages of text can usually be included in or added to stories published by client media companies, but significant editorial changes are generally not permitted where the published story is attributed to the agency.

    RNZ’s editorial policy contains a section on material from “external sources” but doesn’t specify news agency suppliers.

    “Staff may not ‘lift’ material from other news organisations with which we have no supply contract without independently authenticating the information before use,” it says.

    “We should be aware of the dangers involved, particularly if the material is controversial.”

    RNZ’s editorial policies also say audiences “should not be able to detect a presenter or journalist’s personal views”

    “Staff will have opinions of their own, but they must not yield to bias or prejudice. To be professional is not to be without opinions, but to be aware of those opinions and make allowances for them, so that reporting is judicious and fair.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    On June 8, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an “exclusive report” citing anonymous US officials, stating that China agreed to pay cash-strapped Cuba several billion dollars to allow it to build an eavesdropping station. To understand what this news means to Washington, which has become so sensitive about China-related issues, we can refer to the “Chinese made cranes,” “corn factories,” and “balloon incident” that the US hyped up earlier this year. The nature of these events is somewhat similar, though the severity cannot be compared with the “Cuban eavesdropping station,” but they have all caused a stir in the US.

    Cuba is only about 160 kilometers from Florida. If China really builds surveillance facilities there, will Washington’s politicians still be able to sleep? The WSJ called it “a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the US,” which immediately reminded people of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War – the Cuban missile crisis. Other US media outlets quickly followed suit, and the members of Congress who have made being anti-China their political careers also took action. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a joint statement solemnly stating that building a spy base will pose a “serious threat to our national security and sovereignty.” As a result, the tension suddenly increased, and these people obviously wanted to escalate the situation.

    John Kirby, spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said before the WSJ article was published that he couldn’t comment on the details of the report, but stated that the US was monitoring the situation and taking steps. After the article was published, Kirby clearly stated that “this report is not accurate,” so there were obvious contradictions. The Pentagon also said that the media reports are “not accurate.” To be honest, the denials by the White House and the Pentagon were somewhat surprising. It may be that the quality of the WSJ’s information is so poor that officials cannot publicly endorse it. Cuba stated that the article was “totally mendacious and unfounded information,” and China pointed out that “spreading rumors and slander” is a common tactic of “hacker empire” the US.

    The WSJ is a habitual and repeat offender when it comes to spreading rumors about China. Not long ago, it created a major international rumor by saying that China proposed recognizing the “occupied territories of Ukraine as part of Russia.” Because it was so absurd, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba immediately refuted the claim and clarified it. There are many such examples. However, not only does the WSJ not take responsibility or pay the price for these false accusations, it instead thrives in stirring American public opinion and goes further down the road of spreading rumors. It is hard to believe that there was no US official tolerance, encouragement, or feeding of these rumors. People suspect that this is a case of one person playing the good guy and the other playing the bad guy. In fact, rumors have become a handy tool and weapon for the US to contain and suppress China, and they are very cheap.

    These rumors and hype often appeared at a moment when a turning point in China-US relations seems imminent. Just as the US media revealed that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken might visit China in the next week or two, the WSJ’s rumors came out, as was the case with the “balloon incident” in February. This once again made people realize that there is a force, a black hand, secretly causing damage to bilateral relations and pushing the two countries toward confrontation. When the US government uses rumors, rumors in turn also manipulate and influence the US government. The reason why the White House and the Pentagon refuted the story this time may be because they are afraid that if the rumors are allowed to ferment, they will lose control and become passive. However, the US government’s ability to control this dark political force is becoming weaker and weaker.

    From this incident, it can also be seen how difficult it is to bring the US back to a normal and rational state of understanding toward China. In fact, the US has been carrying out activities such as global surveillance, building military bases near China’s territory, and conducting close reconnaissance along China’s coast in recent years. After the false news that “China is building an eavesdropping station in Cuba” came out, some American scholars even said that China is prepared to do the same in America. This is very ironic. If those lawmakers who get nervous and lose sleep at any sign of “China wanting to cause trouble near the US” can show a little empathy and think about how the US’ actions would make Chinese people feel, China-US relations would not have reached the current difficult situation.

    The US has repeatedly expressed its hope of avoiding conflict and confrontation with China, but if something goes wrong internally every time there is a sign of an easing in bilateral relations, then this has become a major uncertainty that China-US relations face, and it is also a huge risk that the US cannot avoid. The WSJ has become a professional rumormonger against China, which is not only a media outlet degrading itself, but also a footnote to the pathological environment in Washington.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.