radiofree.asia

Category: Soleimani

  • Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

    Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

    In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

    We don’t talk enough about how completely insane it is that a social media company with billions of users is censoring worldwide political speech about a major historical figure in alignment with US government decrees. Even if you were to accept the ridiculous justifications for designating a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, and even if you were to accept it as perfectly sane and normal for a communications company of unprecedented influence to take its marching orders on censorship from US government dictates, Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.

    I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it absorb. This is a person who shaped the world, whose impact on human civilization will be studied for generations. And the largest social media company on earth is actively censoring discussion about him because the US government said it’s not allowed.

    Whenever I talk about the dangers of online censorship I always get a bunch of propagandized automatons bleating “It’s not censorship! Censorship is when the government restricts freedom of speech; this is just a private company enforcing its terms of service!”

    This line of argumentation is plainly born of sloppy analysis. All the largest online platforms have been working in conjunction with the US government to censor speech, and doing so with greater and greater degrees of intimacy. A monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporation censoring political speech about an important historical figure because the US government says he was a terrorist is about as brazen an act of government censorship as you could possibly come up with. The fact that that censorship is outsourced to a putatively private company is irrelevant.

    The outsourcing of censorship to private corporations is just one more iteration of the way neoliberalism privatizes duties that would otherwise be done by the government. That’s all we’re seeing here. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is government censorship.

    The US government is the single most tyrannical and oppressive regime on this planet. It terrorizes entire populations and works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates, it has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions to preserve its unipolar domination of the planet, it imprisons and tortures journalists for exposing its war crimes, and it aggressively censors political speech around the world.

    Every evil the US accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretence of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The US government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.

    ______________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Why The Main Argument Against Withdrawing US Troops Is Bogus

    Audio recording of this article:

    Former National Security Advisor and literal psychopath John Bolton has a new opinion piece out in Foreign Policy titled “‘Bring the Troops Home’ Is a Dream, Not a Strategy“, which should surprise no one and enrage everyone at the same time. The fact that this reptile continues to be elevated on mainstream platforms after consistently revealing himself to be a bloodthirsty liar is all the evidence you need that we are trapped inside a globe-spanning empire fueled by human corpses.

    John Bolton has pushed for deranged acts of mass military slaughter at every opportunity. He not only remains one of the only people in the world to continually insist that the Iraq invasion was a great idea, but has actually argued that the destabilization and chaos caused by the invasion cannot be attributed to Bush’s war because you can’t prove that “everything that followed from the fall of Saddam Hussein followed inevitably, solely, and unalterably from the decision to overthrow him.” There are harrowing accounts of Bolton threatening, assaulting and intimidating anyone with less power than him if they got in his way; he once threatened to harm the children of former OPCW Director General Jose Bustani because Bustani was interfering in attempts to manufacture consent for the Iraq war.

    In an even remotely sane civilization, such a creature would be driven from every town he entered until he is forced to crawl into a cave for the rest of his miserable life eating bats alone in the darkness. Instead he is given the mainstream spotlight whenever he wishes while truthful and intelligent anti-imperialists are relegated to fringe blogs and podcasts. This would not be the case if we did not live in an empire that is held together by war and war propaganda.

    And now look at me, off on a tangent before my article has even begun.

    Anyway, in his Foreign Policy article Bolton argues that withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan would be a mistake, because it would lead to the nation being overrun by ISIS and al Qaeda.

    “If the Taliban return to power in all or most of the country, the almost universal view in Washington today is the near certainty that al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will resume using Afghanistan as a base of operations,” Bolton writes.

    These are very strange words to have to type, but, John Bolton is right. There is a consensus within the hub of the US empire that that is what will happen. You can tell because that’s what the empire’s media have been blaring all year.

    In a March article from Vox titled “The best case against withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan“, a senior fellow from the military industrial complex-funded think tank Center for a New American Security named Lisa Curtis explains that withdrawing troops can lead to a disastrous terrorist insurgency that will only result in having to send them back again.

    “Let’s look at Iraq,” says Curtis. “When the US withdrew troops, ISIS rose and took over Mosul in 2014. We had to put troops back into Iraq and in even greater numbers, and we had to redouble our efforts to stem the rise of ISIS.”

    A Bloomberg article from this month titled “Biden’s Afghan Pullout Is Risky Politics and Geopolitics” conveys the same message:

    “And once the U.S. is out of Afghanistan, on grounds that it needs to focus on other priorities, it will inevitably become harder to summon the top-level attention and political will needed to stay on top of emerging threats. This is what happened in Iraq in 2013-2014: Midlevel officials were warning, publicly, that ISIS was on the march, but only after a third of the country had fallen did the issue reach the top of the Barack Obama administration’s agenda.”

    A Financial Times article a few days back titled “Biden’s risky Afghanistan withdrawal” says the same:

    “Biden himself is well aware of the risks. It was he, in 2011, who took charge of America’s final pullout from Iraq. Within two years US forces were sucked back into the region by the rapid spread of Isis across Iraq and Syria. Then, as now, the temptation to proclaim an end to America’s ‘forever wars’ trumped the benefits of retaining a US footprint to insure against new deterioration.”

    We hear this same narrative over and over and over again whenever there’s talk about withdrawing US troops from a region, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria: this is going to be Obama’s disastrous Iraq withdrawal all over again. Obama withdrew the troops in the early part of his term, but by 2014 Iraq had become so overrun by Islamic State that they needed to return to fight them off.

    This is because it has been Beltway Church doctrine ever since the rise of ISIS that Obama was wrong to withdraw troops from Iraq, and it is Beltway Church doctrine because there was a frenetic push to indoctrinate that narrative into Washington policymakers from day one.

    As soon as it became feasible we had malignant warmongers like Dick Cheney penning op-eds about how bad and wrong the troop withdrawal was, effectively screaming “SEE??? It’s ALWAYS wrong to end wars!” to ensure that a reduced global military presence never becomes the new normal for the US empire. From that day onwards Obama’s Iraq withdrawal has been used to hammer home this narrative that withdrawing troops from anywhere is “risky” and irresponsible. There was a manic, almost orgasmic delight among warmongers at the fact that at last, at long long last, they finally had some evidence that scaling back military expansionism is bad.

    The problem? It’s bullshit.

    It’s bullshit for a couple of reasons, firstly because the US is not withdrawing from Afghanistan; it’s just privatizing the occupation. Mercenaries, special forces, CIA operatives and airstrikes will remain. And that’s assuming there’s even a troop withdrawal at all; as we sit here the US is actually beefing up its military presence in anticipation of Taliban retaliations for remaining in Afghanistan beyond the agreed-upon May 1 deadline, the logic I suppose being something like “We need to add forces to Afghanistan before we leave Afghanistan because we have to kill all the people in Afghanistan who want us to leave Afghanistan before we leave.” In any case the warmongers aren’t actually worried they’ll lose control of Afghanistan, they’re just worried about people becoming too peace-happy; they threw all these melodramatic fits when Trump sought withdrawals that never happened as well.

    Secondly, it’s bullshit because the warmongers are lying about why the US re-entered Iraq in 2014.

    The US didn’t re-enter Iraq in 2014 to stop ISIS, the US re-entered Iraq in 2014 to stop Qasem Soleimani from stopping ISIS.

    This is not a secret. In 2014 the commander of Iran’s Quds Force was already helping to beat back Islamic State in Iraq, and Iraqi officials reminded the world after his assassination last year at the hands of the Trump administration that Soleimani had played a key role in early victories in that fight. Iraq’s Sunni leaders had already been openly saying that they would turn to Iran for help if the US didn’t take the lead in defeating ISIS, and Iran was already demonstrating a willingness to put Soleimani’s notoriously effective fighting forces to work on that endeavor.

    If the United States had been a normal country, and not the hub of a globe-spanning empire bent on indefinite global domination, the obvious choice in that moment would have been to let the people in that part of the world sort out their own affairs in whatever way seems best to them. Because the United States is the hub of an empire that cannot tolerate the idea of another power being dominant in an oil-rich region it seeks to control for geostrategic reasons, allowing Iran and Iraq to become allied that closely was unthinkable.

    So, as usual, the narrative that westerners were fed about US troops being in the Middle East to “fight terrorists” was a lie. It was about geostrategic control of the world and its resources, just like it always is.

    The so-called “war on terror” has never been about defeating violent extremist factions, it’s been about keeping the nations in the region from relying on Iran and its allies to defeat them, and about justifying endless military expansionism in a key geostrategic part of the world. It’s been about ensuring the US power alliance is the dominant military force in the Middle East, not Iran and other unabsorbed powers like Russia and China.

    Qasem Soleimani was the best argument against the “war on terror”, and was the leader best suited for bringing the region out of danger from violent extremist factions like ISIS and al Qaeda.

    That’s why he is dead now.

    The world does not need the US empire to police it. People can sort out their own problems around the world if they were only allowed to. Iraq and its neighbors can sort out their own problems, as can Afghanistan and its neighbors. The only violence at risk of coming toward America and its easily-defended borders is the direct result of the US empire’s relentless aggression and belligerence that has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. There is no reason we can’t all just let each other be, collaborating and trading in peace without all these invasions, occupations and toppling of sovereign governments.

    The empire’s need to control the world’s affairs is like a macrocosm of the human ego, which also exists out of a fear that something bad will happen if I can’t remain in control of it all. But the world is forever out of control, and attempts to reign it in can only lead to disorder and suffering. Our species will not survive if we cannot collectively learn to relinquish the impulse to control, both within and without, and let life dance to its own beat on this beautiful blue world.

    _____________________

    I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • What If EVERYONE Threw Shoes At Bush? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The US didn’t re-enter Iraq in 2014 to stop ISIS, they re-entered Iraq in 2014 to stop Soleimani from stopping ISIS.

    This is important to note right now, because that’s the main argument we’re hearing against withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan: “Oh the terrorists will take over and we’ll just have to go back like in 2014.” They didn’t have to go back in 2014; the people who actually live in the Middle East could’ve resolved it on their own if there wasn’t a world-dominating empire trying to control everything.

    The “war on terror” has never been about defeating violent extremist factions, it’s been about keeping the nations in the region from relying on Iran to defeat them, and about justifying endless military expansionism in a key geostrategic part of the world. It’s been about ensuring the US power alliance, not Iran, is the dominant military force in the Middle East.

    Soleimani was the strongest argument that the “war on terror” isn’t actually necessary. And that’s essentially why he’s dead now.

    ❖

    I’m thinking of writing a horror story about a dystopian world where weapons manufacturers are allowed to pay large amounts of money to agencies called “think tanks” which circulate narratives designed to convince government policymakers to start wars that profit the arms industry.

    It’d be just like those other dystopian horror novels about giant corporations butchering the poor for money, except instead of selling human flesh they’re selling the weapons used to kill them.

    What do you think? Too out there and unbelievable?

    ❖

    In tyrannical regimes they don’t let political dissidents speak. In free democracies they just refuse dissidents any influential platforms and use algorithms to keep revolutionary ideas from being heard by a significant number of people.

    ❖

    The US has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century and its Secretary of State spends all day tweeting about how other countries are human rights abusers.

    No other government has done this. No other government has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since the turn of this century. Yet when you say this, you get accused of “whataboutism”. No, idiot, distracting from the world’s very worst offender is the “whataboutism”.

    ❖

    Even if all US narratives about China were 100 percent true (and they aren’t), Washington would still be a far, far worse human rights offender than Beijing and in no position to criticize human rights abuses at all.

    ❖

    Every time George W Bush makes news headlines and it’s not because of a war crimes tribunal, it’s a reminder that laws are for the little people.

    ❖

    What if EVERYONE threw their shoes at George W Bush?

    ❖

    ❖

    In a remotely sane world creatures like John Bolton would not be given mainstream platforms for decades on end, they would be driven out of every town they enter until they’re forced to crawl into a cave eating bats in the darkness for the rest of their miserable lives.

    The simple fact that this reptile keeps getting platformed is by itself complete evidence that our world is dominated by psychopaths. You never see anti-imperialists on the mainstream media, but John fucking Bolton gets the spotlight whenever he wants it. That’s how bat shit crazy our world is. The status quo has no legitimate claim on anything ever.

    ❖

    The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world and it’s insane that we’re not talking about it all the time.

    ❖

    The day the world ends will start like any other. People will go to work, argue with strangers online. No one will expect it. Then there will be a miscommunication, misfire, miscalculation or malfunction which leads to a nuke being deployed among heightening cold war tensions.

    The end of the world won’t be the result of some epic Hollywood struggle between good guys and bad guys. It will be the result of garden variety human stupidity. Someone being a little careless amid the day-to-day management of the US empire’s struggle to maintain global hegemony.

    It will be a stupid mistake, just like all the other stupid mistakes humans have made since we first stood upright. Only difference is we won’t be around anymore to recognize and appreciate how stupid this particular mistake was, and to learn from it, and to grow.

    ❖

    There are mountains of evidence that the US and its allies bombed Syria on false grounds in 2018, and yet people who point this out get called “Assadists” and “atrocity deniers”. For scrutinizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth using evidence and journalism.

    The entire argument that the OPCW scandal is fake boils down to a bizarre conspiracy theory that OPCW investigators collaborated with Damascus and Moscow to spin Douma as a false flag for some reason. This would’ve been laughed out of the room if it weren’t backed by the empire.

    It’s freakish that you get accused of war crimes denial when actually trying to get a war crime solved. The facts are in, the Douma incident needs to be ripped wide open, and Aaron Maté needs to be showered with awards for his excellent work exposing this scandal. It’s crazy that it’s 2021 and people are still acting like you’re a treasonous freak if you believe the US power alliance might lie and manipulate about a government it openly wants to topple, whose country it has been bombing and occupying, right next door to Iraq.

    ❖

    It will never stop fascinating me how full online discussion forums are of accounts who spend their time supporting the foreign policy objectives of the most powerful and destructive government on earth while pretending they’re brave, up-punching rebels.

    ❖

    Someone could publish all the darkest secrets of the western empire online and within hours the imperial narrative managers would have everyone convinced that the leaks don’t matter because the person who published it knows somebody who knows somebody who is anti-semitic.

    ❖

    White supremacism is a lot easier to see when you zoom the camera all the way out and look objectively at the way resources, bombs, and human labor are moving on the world stage as a whole.

    ❖

    The majority of people get that the news is at least somewhat bullshit; the problem is there’s no consensus on why. Is it incompetence? A liberal conspiracy? The plutocratic class protecting its interests (ding ding)? Our job is to clarify both that the MSM lies to us, and why.

    If people understand that plutocratic and imperialist interests are being protected by the billionaire media, they know what lies to watch out for. Otherwise all the confusing white noise leaves them screaming at the TV about trans people trying to destroy society or whatever. There’s so much bullshit swirling around that it’s hard to know which way is up. The key is to help people figure out what way’s up, using simple pointers, so they can orient themselves to truth and reality.

    ❖

    Watch this video if you’re unsure why I focus on US politics over Australian politics:

    ❖

    People are so kind to me. I’m basically a digital street busker, relying entirely on reader donations, and I somehow wound up on the kindest, most generous online street corner where people give me money to do what I love full time. I’m really lucky, and I’m very, very grateful.

    ❖

    The internet is a consciousness-expanding substance and our rulers are working to censor it for the same reason they censored psychedelics: dysfunction and awareness cannot coexist.

    It’s also the same reason abusers work to isolate their victims and cult leaders seek to isolate their members: outside eyes bringing consciousness to their abusive dynamics makes the abuse much harder to perpetuate.

    It’s also the same reason the ego tries to convince us not to look too hard at its nature. At every level of the human fractal it’s a struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness, and between those forces who would benefit from each.

    ❖

    People fail to live their lives in awe, wonder, delight and deep peace for the same reason people keep consenting to abusive governments: our lives are ruled by narrative. And the solution to both is the same: intense curiosity about what’s going on underneath the narratives.

    ❖

    Governments are made up and their economies are collective hallucinations and their money is imaginary and our society is pure narrative construct and the individual self is an illusion.

    Have a nice day.

    ____________________

    I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.