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Tag: Censorship

  • Cancelling Art, Dark Mofo and the Offended Classes

    Last week, Australians found themselves delighting in another fit of cancel culture, this time in the art world.  Tasmania’s Dark Mofo art festival prides itself on being gritty but the mood was very much about removing any grit to begin with.  Interest centred on the project of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who had proposed soaking a Union Jack Flag “in the blood of its colonised territories”.  The blood would come by way of donations.  First Nation peoples “from countries claimed by the British Empire at some point in history, who reside in Australia” would furnish the liquid.

    Given what followed, festival organisers might have preferred one of Sierra’s other suggestions: a work that would have involved vast amounts of cocaine.  Social media outrage followed.  People purporting to speak for the offended, while also counting themselves as offended, railed and expectorated.  Festival curator Leigh Carmichael tried to be brave against the howling winds of disapproval.  “At this stage we will push on,” he told ABC Radio Hobart on March 23.  “Provided we can logistically make this work happen, we will.”  He acknowledged that, “These were very dangerous topics, they’re hard, they hurt.”  For criticisms that the work was being made by a Spanish artist, Carmichael was initially clear: to make work taboo for people from specific localities could constitute “a form of racism in itself.”  Then inevitable equivocation followed.  “This artist is about their experience and whether a Spanish artist has the right to weigh in, I don’t know.”

    Within a matter of hours, Carmichael’s position had collapsed: Sierra’s project was cut and put out to sea.  “We’ve heard the community’s response to Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag.”  Grovelling and capitulation before this all powerful community followed.  “We made a mistake, and take full responsibility.  The project will be cancelled.  We apologise to all First Nations people for any hurt that has been caused.  We are sorry.”

    David Walsh, Tasmanian founder of MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) and responsible for running the festival, was open to self-education and reflection, having not seen “the deeper consequences of this proposition”.  He had thought the work “would appeal to the usual leftie demographic.  I approved it without much thought (as has become obvious).”  A bit of old fashioned, censoring conservatism was called for.

    Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes and artistic director of Mona Foma, the museum’s summer festival, felt righteous, firstly, wanting to distance his own outfit as “a completely different and separate organisation” before weighing into rubbishing the cultural sensitivity credentials of the work and the artist.  “Exploiting people while claiming to protest on their behalf is intellectually void.  Stupid programming is aesthetically null.  Controversy outweighing the quality of the work is bad art.”

    The cancellation was approved by the bloated entities across the academy, certain ethnic groups and the professionally enraged.    Critique ranged from the identity of the artist (Spanish, foreigner, coloniser) to the merits of the work itself.  “A coloniser artist intending to produce art with the actual blood of colonised people is abusive, colonising and re-traumatising,” came the social worker assessment from novelist Claire G. Coleman.  “The idea is disgusting and terrible and should not have been considered.”

    If every traumatic, disgusting incident (rape, pillage, massacres, wars, the crucifixion) were to be considered a bad idea for representation, the canvasses best be left empty, the art shows barren.  Never depict, for instance, that Tasmania’s lands are blood soaked by European conquest.  Do not, as Australian artist Mike Parr did in June 2018, bury yourself beneath a busy street of the state capital Hobart to get to the hidden truth.  That way lies trauma.

    The art content commissars were also keeping close eye over how the depiction might have been properly staged, if it was even possible.  Such a contribution can be found in the journal Overland. “Simply stating or depicting that the beginnings of the Australian colony were brutal and bloody for Indigenous people is a passive act,” moaned the very selective Cass Lynch.  She demands, expects. “The concept on its own isn’t active as an agent of truth-telling, it doesn’t contain an indigenous vice or testimony, it has no nuance.  On its own, it leans into the glorification of the gore and the violence of colonisation.”  Blood, it would seem, is no indicator of truth.

    In such convulsions of faux sensitivity to the First Nations, the arts sector (for this is what it has become in Australia, a corporatized, sanitised cobbling of blandness, branding and safe bets) justified not merely the pulling of the piece, but that it should have ever been contemplated to begin with.  In the commentary on Sierra, the Indigenous peoples are spoken of in abstract and universal terms: they were hurt and all have one, monolithic voice; and “white curators” should have thought better in letting the project ever get off the ground.  Thinking in cultural police terms, Paola Balla asked “how this was allowed to be programmed in the first place?  And what structures support white curators to speak of Black traumas?”  Such questions are bound to embolden art vandals across the world keen on emptying every museum for being inappropriately informed about “power structures”.

    Ironically enough, in this swell of ranting about voices and representation, the artist in question was deprived of it.  Sierra, in a statement released on March 25, called treatment of his work “superficial and spectacular” and his own treatment as a “public lynching”.  His quotes had been misconstrued; he had been “left without a voice, without the capacity to explain and defend” his project.  He had hoped the blood-soaked Union Jack would inspire reflection “on the material on which states and empires are built” and reveal how “all blood is equally red and has the same consistency, regardless of the race or culture of the person supplying it”.

    Sierra’s shabby treatment did not go unnoticed.  Parr took issue with the festival organisers’ “cowardice and lack of leadership”.  Michael Mansell, Chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania urged Carmichael to push on with the work.  “The artist challenges Tasmanians about whether Aboriginal lands were peacefully or violently taken, and uses the blood-smattered Union Jack to express his view.”  By all means disagree with the artist and even feel offended “but that cannot justify stifling the artist’s freedom of thought.”  A sinister result had followed from the cancellation of the project.  “The unintended consequence of the objectors is that the discussion about truth telling will now be ignored, put aside.”

    There are parallels in this fiasco with previous instances of rage over what can and cannot be depicted in the shallow art lands of the Antipodes.  The cultural police also took issue with Australian photographic artist Bill Henson in 2008 for his portrayals of children as sexual beings.  On May 22 that year, twenty Henson photographs featuring “naked children aged 12 and 13” were confiscated by police from Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.  Jason Smith of the Monash Gallery of Art defended Henson, claiming that his work “has consistently explored human conditions of youth, and examined a poignant moment between adolescence and adulthood”.

    Then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was having none of it.  There were simply certain things you could not touch, that art should not enable you to understand.  Henson had erred into vice.  “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he spluttered.  Rudd found the photographs “absolutely revolting” despite having not seen them.  “Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids.”  Jenny Macklin, Minister for Families at the time, moralised before the Nine Network about how children were “just getting bombarded with sexualised images all the time, and it’s that sexualisation of children that I think is wrong.”  Now, just as then, artists have been put on notice.

    This article was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2021 at 10:55pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Indigenous Peoples, Resistance Art, Social media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We are living through a time of fear not just of the virus but of each other

    Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.

    We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.

    In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.

    Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

    Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

    Too noisy’ protests

    It is therefore far from surprising that the UK’s draconian new Police and Crime Bill – concentrating yet more powers in the police – has arrived at this moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is likely to be too noisy or might create “unease” in bystanders. Protesters risk being charged with a crime if they cause “nuisance” or set up protest encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.

    And damaging memorials – totems especially prized in a time of fear for their power to ward off danger – could land protesters, like those who toppled a statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a 10-year jail sentence.

    In other words, this is a bill designed to outlaw the right to conduct any demonstration beyond the most feeble and ineffective kind. It makes permanent current, supposedly extraordinary limitations on protest that were designed, or so it was said, to protect the public from the immediate threat of disease.

    Protest that demands meaningful change is always noisy and disruptive. Would the suffragettes have won women the vote without causing inconvenience and without offending vested interests that wanted them silent?

    What constitutes too much noise or public nuisance? In a time of permanent pandemic, it is whatever detracts from the all-consuming effort to extinguish our fear and insecurity. When we are afraid, why should the police not be able to snatch someone off the street for causing “unease”?

    The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation – against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest – is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

    From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make our societies less free. Those warnings soon got submerged in, or drowned out by, much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and mask-wearing.

    Binary choices

    What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this kind.

    The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus’ unchecked spread. We are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting everyone else at risk.

    A central fracture line has opened up – in part a generational one – between those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to their children’s development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.

    The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to prise it open and turn us against each other.

    ‘Kill the Bill’

    Where this leads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did so – in another illustration of binary choices that now dominate our lives – in violation of emergency Covid regulations banning protests. There was a large march through central London, while another demonstration ended in clashes between protesters and police in Bristol.

    What are the protesters – most peaceful, a few not – trying to achieve? In the media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as “anti-lockdown”, appealing to the wider public’s fear of contagion spread. But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate, all protest must first be “anti-lockdown” before it can be protest.

    The truth is that the demonstrators are out on the streets for a wide variety of reasons, including to protest against the oppressive new Police and Crime Bill, under the slogan “Kill the Bill”.

    There are lots of well-founded reasons for people to be angry or worried at the moment. But the threat to that most cherished of all social freedoms – the right to protest – deserves to be at the top of the list.

    If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites, and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.

    Speech and protest are intimately connected. Free speech in one’s own home – like free speech in a prison cell – is a very stunted kind of freedom. It is not enough simply to know that something is unjust. In democratic societies, we must have the right to do our best to fix injustice.

    Cast out as heretics

    Not so long ago, none of this would have needed stating. It would have been blindingly obvious. No longer. Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don’t like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a “nuisance” or are “too noisy” in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy – especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

    That is how fear works. The establishment has been using fear to keep us divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers, loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.

    In a time of pandemic, those who are to be feared can encompass anyone who does not quietly submit to those in authority. Until recently there had been waning public trust in traditional elites such as politicians, journalists and economists. But that trend has been reversed by a new source of authority – the medical establishment. Because today’s mantra is “follow the science”, anyone who demurs from or questions that science – even when the dissenters are other scientists – can be cast out as a heretic. The political logic of this is rarely discussed, even though it is profoundly dangerous.

    Political certainty

    Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one’s irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

    But medicine – the grey area between the science and art of human health – is not governed by laws in the way gravity is. That should be obvious the moment we consider the infinitely varied ways Covid has affected us as individuals.The complex interplay between mind and body means reactions to the virus, and the drugs to treat it, are all but impossible to predict with any certainty. Which is why there are 90-year-olds who have comfortably shaken off the virus and youths who have been felled by it.

    But a politics of “follow the science” implies that issues relating to the virus and how we respond to it – or how we weigh the social and economic consequences of those responses – are purely scientific. That leaves no room for debate, for disagreement. And authoritarianism is always lurking behind the façade of political certainty.

    Public coffers raided

    In a world where politicians, journalists and medical elites are largely insulated from the concerns of ordinary people – precisely the world we live in – protest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly test their political and “scientific” priorities against our social and economic priorities.

    That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You don’t have to agree with what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be allowed to say it – and not just in their living rooms, and not months or years hence, if and when the pandemic is declared over.

    The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisis –most especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.

    Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

    Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

    Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science – or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the “responsible” public as they seek to cling to power.

    And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic – and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it – for as long as possible.

    Selective freedoms

    Quite how mercurial are the current arguments for and against protest was highlighted by widespread anger at the crushing by the Metropolitan Police this month of a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard in London. A Met police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

    In the spirit of the times, there has been much wider public sympathy for a vigil for a murder victim than there has been for more overtly political demonstrations like those against the Police and Crime Bill. But if health threats are really the measure of whether large public gatherings are allowed – if we “follow the science” – then neither is justified.

    That is not a conclusion any of us should be comfortable with. It is not for governments to select which types of protests they are willing to confer rights on, even during a pandemic. We either uphold the right of people to congregate when they feel an urgent need to protest – whether it be against the erosion of basic freedoms, or in favour of greater safety for vulnerable communities, or against political corruption and incompetence that costs lives – or we do not.

    We either support the right of every group to hold our leaders to account or we do not. Selective freedoms, inconsistent freedoms, are freedom on licence from those in power. They are no freedom at all.

    Fight for survival

    What the UK’s Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the pandemic, which protests constitute a “nuisance” and which do not.

    The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minority – the hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need of protest.

    That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is lost.

    It is unlikely that the aim of the Police and Crime Bill is to keep us permanently locked down – as some fear. It has another, longer-term goal. It is being advanced in recognition by our elites that we are hurtling towards an environmental dead-end for which they have no solutions, given their addiction to easy profits and their own power.

    Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups like Extinction Rebellion – just like the suffragettes before them – believe the majority can only be woken from their induced slumber if they are disturbed by noise, if their lives are disrupted.

    This sane minority is treading the vanishingly thin line between alienating the majority and averting oblivion for our species. As the stakes grow higher, as awareness of imminent catastrophe intensifies, those wishing to make a nuisance of themselves, to be noisy, will grow.

    What we decide now determines how that struggle plays out: whether we get to take control of our future and the fight for our survival, or whether we are forced to stay mute as the disaster unfolds.

    So pray for the “anti-lockdown” protesters whether you support their cause or not – for they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.

    This article was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2021 at 8:55am and is filed under Activism, Authoritarianism, Censorship, Civil Disobedience, Civil Liberties, COVID-19, Fearmongering, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Lockdown, Martial Law, Police, Politics, Propaganda, Propagandists, Protests, Repression, Resistance, UK Hypocrisy, United Kingdom, United States, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Murdoch’s Australia Censors Google, Facebook, Science and Freedom of Speech

    The mendacious Australian Mainstream media, Coalition Government and Labor Opposition demand via a news media Bargaining Code that Google and Facebook pay Murdoch and Nine media huge sums for quoting Links to their “information” for free.

    Google seems to have surrendered to this Australian blackmail and negotiated a private deal to avoid damaging its core Internet operation of quoting Links to information for free.

    Facebook has finally responded to this Australian blackmail by saying that it will not pay, and as a law-abiding organization will accordingly not quote Links to Australian media “information”.

    Murdoch-dominated Australian Media and MPs are censoring Google and Facebook in a qualified fashion – they can escape this Government-imposed censorship if they pay huge sums to powerful Australian media chosen by the Government.

    If US citizen Murdoch’s Australia can censor 2 of the biggest media organizations in the world, what hope is there for the little guy or indeed for democracy in Kleptocracy, Plutocracy, Murdochracy, Corporatocracy, Lobbyocracy and Dollarocracy Australia? In Murdochracy and Corporatocracy Australia Big Money purchases people, politicians, parties, policies, public perception of reality, votes, more political power and more private profit.

    As a scientist and scholar, for 55 years I have been routinely and extensively quoting “links to information” (references to books and scientific papers) in scientific papers (over 100), chapters in 20 books, science-informed humanitarian articles (hundreds), and in 7 huge, science-informed, information-rich books. Indeed this process of documentation is fundamental to reporting scientific or scholarly findings.

    Thus a typical scientific paper (hard copy or electronic) has successive Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, with a final Reference section systematically detailing supporting scholarly references (“links to information”).

    Where will this compulsory Australian monetization of “links to information” and attack on free expression go? Presently it is confined to Murdoch’s Australia blackmailing Google and Facebook into paying huge sums to the dangerously mendacious Murdoch and Nine media that heavily determine the outcomes of Australian elections in an ongoing travesty of democracy.

    However the logical extension of this news media Bargaining Code in free market, neoliberal Australia is for Government to eventually demand similar draconian payments from all scientists, scholars, writers, journalists, publishers (on-line or hard copy), bookshops, library catalogues, and libraries.

    This is a massive threat to freedom of expression in Australia and the world. Even before the Enlightenment scholars were freely quoting Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Euclid and Pythagoras.

    And to make it worse, the variously Stupid, Ignorant and Egregiously Greedy (SIEG as in Sieg Heil) fascoids proposing this government-imposed censorship through compulsory and massive monetization of “links to information” are arguing for further censorship of already significantly censored Google, Facebook and other media.

    These disgracefully mendacious purveyors of “fake news through lying by omission” are now disingenuously claiming that a Facebook that has withdrawn from reporting Australian media will be increasing the relative incidence of “fake news” on Facebook at the expense of “truthful Australian Mainstream media reportage”. What utter self-serving rubbish. Lying by omission is far, far worse than repugnant lying by commission because the latter at least permits public refutation and public debate. Australia’s Murdoch-dominated Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes have an appalling and entrenched culture of “fake news through lying by omission”.

    Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), that is helping the Australian Government censor Google and Facebook, has not taken any action against oligopoly Australian Mainstream media for egregiously deceiving its paying customers via entrenched, massive and anti-democratic “fake news through lying by omission”.

    There is an extremely serious existential dimension to this travesty. The world is existentially threatened by (a) man-made climate change (unless requisite action is taken, 10 billion people will die en route to a sustainable human population in 2100 of merely 1 billion; see my recent huge book Climate Crisis, Climate Genocide & Solutions (846 pages, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany), and (b) nuclear weapons (a post-nuclear holocaust nuclear winter will wipe out most of Humanity and the Biosphere). Indeed one of humanity’s greatest minds, Stephen Hawking has stated “We see great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change” (Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, John Murray, 2018, Chapter 7).

    Yet the effective climate change denialist and pro-nuclear terrorism SIEG fascoids and mendacious Murdoch media proposing this massive imposition on human inquiry have already (a) put Australia among world leaders in 16 areas of climate criminality, and (b) as craven US lackeys strenuously and criminally oppose the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that came into effect in International Law on 22 January 2021 (it prohibits State parties from possessing nuclear weapons or supporting such possession “in any way”).

    I am a forthright, much-published, half-century career scientist and humanitarian writer, and have been trying for decades to inform my fellow countrymen of these horrendous realities. However in the last dozen years I have been rendered “invisible” in the land of my birth and sole allegiance, Australia, by mendacious Mainstream gate-keepers acting for malignant, racist and anti-science foreign interests. I won’t give up, and am very encouraged that half a million of my fellow Australians signed the petition launched by former PM Kevin Rudd for a Royal Commission into Murdoch media in Australia.

    Science-informed Australians will utterly reject Murdoch media and the dangerously anti-science Coalition, vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last. Please inform everyone you can.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 9:40am and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Corporate Globalization, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Social media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos

    Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content.  As the company notice to those trying to share material went: “In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook generally restricts the posting of news links and all post from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted.”

    As with previous thugs of mercenary trade (the Dutch East India Company and its British equivalent come to mind), Facebook is keen to make the rules it likes, and ignore those of the commonweal.  It is a plundering pioneer in the world of surveillance capitalism, which has led to what Shoshana Zuboff calls an “epistemic coup” with “unprecedented computational concentrations of knowledge and power” gathered by extracting data elitists.  These elitists, in turn, trash such concepts as the rule of law and democracy in the name of profits.

    As she explained in her keynote speech at last year’s EU Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment panel, “These corporations are not publishers, they are not distributors, they are not merely adtech providers; they are indiscriminate, radically indifferent all-you-can-eat extractors of everything forever, all for the sake of prediction that become more lucrative as they approach certainty.”

    Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code is one such proposed imposition on these extractive qualities, though it does little to actually redress the central principles Facebook and Google operate under.  The Code, as it stands, is a compendium of defects sold as politics rather than sound structural change. In it, the Australian government hopes not to restrict surveillance capitalism so much as redirect it.

    According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the Code would “address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms.”  It’s all a problem of revenue: the fourth estate is dying, having lost its classified advertising base; the Australian government, unenthused by ideas of creating funding schemes or taxing Big Tech, has come to the conclusion that these giants will subsidize and ultimately regenerate old media outlets.  To do so, it proposes making companies reach, through good will negotiations, bargains by which revenue can be distributed.

    While making wild presumptions of what platforms such as Facebook do with the news (referrals, shares and so forth), the government will also require these Silicon Valley hulks to notify media organisations of any change in their search algorithms and abide by an arbitration mechanism.  Disputes on the amount of revenue will then go to an arbitration body.  Such scenes promise to be messy: media moguls hunkering down to discussions with such amoral practitioners as Facebook.

    The blocking of news content on the Facebook platform precipitated a range of consequences, some of them possibly surprising to Zuckerberg and his crew.  The Facebook pages of news organisations were immediately emptied of content.  Australia’s ABC put it like this: “If you search for the Facebook pages of (for example) ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, and the BBC, you’ll see a blank feed saying ‘No posts yet.’”

    This was not all.  The draft Code has a definition of news content of some breadth, which purports to be any material that “reports, investigates, or explains issues that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate”.  When approached for comment on the issue, Facebook confirmed it has pushed its own reading to the limits, citing a lack of clarity.  “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.”  Not that the law has been implemented, but Facebook has been quick on the draw.  Snottily, the company promises to “reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted.”

    Government pages were also caught up in the dramatic scrub, including the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Queensland Health and an assortment of commercial and retail outlets.  The blocking of content on the bureau’s site was considered particularly galling, given cases of flooding in Queensland and fire danger in Western Australia.  “Warnings need to get to as wide an audience as possible as a matter of safety,” tweeted ABC weather presenter Nate Byrne.  “Shocking.”

    Smaller community news outlets, trade unions, homeless charities, and various local controlled health services were also enveloped in the information clean. Indigenous communities have been particularly bruised. According to the National Indigenous Times, “Indigenous health and media groups fear Facebook’s pushback will have a dangerous impact on regional and remote communities during [the] wet season and the COVID-19 epidemic, with concerns communities will not have access to vital updates on flood warnings or the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations.”

    The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services saw the issue of blocking content on its site as a matter of rights, restricting an invaluable means of connecting with the community.  “This is a human rights issue, silencing the voices of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people, our representative peak bodies.”

    In going for the Australian throat, Facebook has resorted to a different approach from that other giant of amoral propensities, Google.  Google has repeatedly threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia for similar grievances against the draft Code. But the company has been aggressively negotiating and buttering up Australian media outlets for its News Showcase.  The Australian government sees this as a triumph, a strange interpretation given the positively pyrrhic nature of any such outcomes.  Google can well argue to have come out better in the deal, its business model left intact.

    The time has come to reconsider the very operating rationale of such companies in an effort to address their singular monopoly position.  Solutions are not merely to be found in government regulation and antitrust approaches.  The very allegiance shown to such platforms by their captive users will have to change.  The time has come to save the human project from surveillance capitalism.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2021 at 5:54pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Facebook, Google, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Culture of Slavery v the Culture of Resistance

    Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balinea et convivorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.

    (They adopted our dressing fashion, and begun wearing the togas; little by little they were drawn to touches such as colonnades, baths, and elegant talks. Because they didn’t know better, they called it ‘civilization,’ when it was part of their slavery.)

    — Tacitus, Agricola

    Introduction

    The general problem of culture today is its ability to facilitate and support negative aspects of society through encouraging escapism, diversion and ignorance regarding many important issues of contemporary life, such as economic crises, repressive legislation, poverty, and climate chaos. Or worse still, the use of culture to promote elite views of society regarding power and money, as well as imperialist agendas through negative depictions of a targeted ethnic group or country.

    In this, some would call a neo-feudalist age, we see echoes of an earlier feudalism with its abuse of power and wealth that the philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to deal with and rectify. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

    It was led by philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire. Their concerns about injustice, intolerance and autocracy led to the introduction of democratic values and institutions, and the creation of modern, liberal democracies.

    A painting of the 1840 Anti-Slavery Conference. The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, by Benjamin Robert Haydon (died 1846), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1880 by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Oil on canvas, 1841. 117 in. x 151 in. (2972 mm x 3836 mm). This monumental painting records the 1840 convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which was established to promote worldwide abolition.

    However, a new movement in the arts and literature arose in the late 18th century, Romanticism, which emphasized inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, aristocratic society and politics, and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism became the basis of many subsequent cultural movements whose common feature has been anti-science and individualism.

    The Romanticist influence can be seen in ‘mainstream’ mass culture and high culture in terms of its emphasis on formal experimentation or emotions over sociopolitical content. Romanticist reaction stressed “sensibility” or feeling, and tended towards looking inwards. It was a movement whose ideas have come to dominate much of culture today.

    Weighing scales, planets, and fractals

    Romanticism is portrayed as having left and right aspects. If we picture a weighing scale with opposing ideas, for example,  we can have the radical opposition to fascism (Romanticist Expressionism) on one side and the radical right of National Socialism on the other side. However, what if this weighing scale was on one side of an even bigger scale? On the other side of that bigger scale would be Enlightenment ideas.

    Little weighing scale on one side of an even bigger scale

    We rarely get to see the Enlightenment side of the larger scales. We live in a society where we are generally presented with the small scales two sides to everything (the bi-party system, good Nazis [only following orders] v the bad Nazis [gave the orders], this ‘good’ person v that ‘bad’ person, good cop v bad cop) but the reality is that they are usually different sides of the same coin. Similarly, on the smaller scale, the left and right aspects of Romanticist ideas are also two sides of the same coin, because what they both have in common is their rejection of science and reason.

    Yet, on the big scales, the Enlightenment side we find progressive politics, the left opposition who were the first to be put into the concentration camps in the 1930s, the community workers, writers, and activists who work diligently today for change in the background are all squeezed out of the large, dominant media-controlled picture.

    The problem with this skewed picture is that understanding what is going on becomes as difficult to ascertain as the movements of the planets were to the ancients. Seeming to go in all sorts of strange directions, the ancient Greeks called the planets ‘planeta’ or ‘wanderers’. The movements of the planets were perplexing in a geocentric (earth-centered) universe. It was only with the application of modern science, putting the sun at the center of a solar system, that the odd movements of the planets suddenly fell into place and made sense. We have the same experience of ‘revelation’ or understanding when science is applied to many different difficult problems in various aspects of history, philosophy and society itself.

    ‘Planets appear to go in one direction, take a looping turn, and then go in the opposite direction. This appears because of the differences of our orbits around the Sun. The Earth gets in an inside or outside track as we pass them causing a planet to look as if it had backed up and changed direction. They wander around the sky.’

    The word ‘science’ comes from the Latin word ‘scientia‘ meaning ‘knowledge’ and is a systematic exploration that allows us to develop knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.  The development of science has allowed us to determine what is truth and what is falsehood. Truth is defined as the property of being in accord with fact or reality and the application of science allows us to verify truth in a provable way.

    In this sense truth is like a fractal. Fractals are geometrical shapes that have a certain definite appearance. When we magnify a fractal we see the same shape again. No matter how much we magnify the shape, the same geometrical patterns appear infinitely. Truth is similar to a fractal in that whether the truth of something is held by one person, a group of people, a community or a nation its essence remains the same on a micro or macro level.

    ‘Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. Fractals exhibit similar patterns at increasingly small scales called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry.’

    The heliocentric view of the universe remains true even if only one person believes or many believe, even in the face of powerful forces. For example, Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism led him to be investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, where he was found guilty of heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The truth eventually came out and Galileo was pardoned by the Roman Catholic church (359 years later).

    Contradictions and falsehoods

    It has often been said that the truth will set you free. We live in a society of contradictions and falsehoods where lies, cheating and deception contradict reality. However, many refuse to see the truths of modern society, while others are actively involved in creating the deceptions that maintain the status quo. We know that people are ‘unfree’ and we accept many different levels of this condition: captivity,  imprisonment, suppression, dependency, restrictions, enslavement, oppression.

    We may even see this condition as applying to others and not to ourselves. But if we examine closely and truthfully our own position in the societal hierarchy we may recognize our own powerlessness: the contradiction between our view of ourselves and the reality of our situation. Although we vote and we recognize the social contract by rendering taxes to the state, the fact is that very little of substance changes and generally things seem to get worse.

    As I have written elsewhere, the fact is that we are triply exploited: we are taxed on wages, alienated from wealth created (profits), and we pay interest on the money borrowed from the wealthy to pay for the capital and current expenditure needed for the maintenance of society and fill in the gap created by the wealthy in the first place.

    How is this system of exploitation maintained? Aside from the obvious threat of imprisonment for nonpayment of taxes, and the existence of police and army to enforce the laws of the state: the most influential, and sometimes most subtle tool, is through culture.

    The culture of slavery

    Culture has a long history of use and abuse, from the bread and circuses of Roman times to the social media of today.

    In modern society mass culture helps to maintain this system of exploitation and keeps people in general from questioning their position in the societal hierarchy. The middle classes are lulled into thinking they are free because of better wages making for an easier life, while the working class work ever harder to achieve the benefits of the middle class: higher education, higher status, higher wages. (It has been suggested that the middle class are essentially ‘working class people with huge debts’; e.g., large mortgages.)

    However, in general, people work in a globalized system of exploitation in states that support and maintain it thus making wage slaves of the 99 percent.

    Slaves in chains during the period of Roman rule at Smyrna (present-day İzmir), 200 CE.

    The traditional definition of slavery is ‘someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is treated like property.’ Modern slavery takes on different forms such as human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labour:

    Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation. Women and girls comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25% and account for 10 million of all the slaves worldwide.

    While this may apply to the most extreme cases in modern society, the majority of workers have no control over the wealth they produce:

    One of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the worker’s will is, by law, “subordinate” to the employers. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how. This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission — also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit.

    The investors and the shareholders benefit the most, while the employees receive wages of varying levels according to the demand for their particular skill-set.

    We are encouraged to accept this way of life and there are plenty of different state methods to make sure that we do. However, culture is an important tool of soft power, in particular, mass culture.

    The role of mass culture is absolutely essential for the creation, maintenance, and perpetuation of a broad acceptance of the ever-changing forms of technological ‘progress’ and geopolitical shifts in modern capitalist societies, particularly as the global financial crisis (corporate and national debt) deepens.

    Culture on three levels

    To do this, modern mass culture operates on three different levels. The first level is creating acceptance through diversion and escapism and turning people into passive consumers. Secondly, through the overt representation of elite ideology. Thirdly, and more controversially, through covert manipulation of mass culture to benefit the agenda of elites.

    In the first case, consumption becomes inseparable from the ideas of enjoyment and fun. Earlier twentieth century theorists of the Frankfurt School saw consumers as essentially passive but later theoreticians such as Baudrillard saw consumption as an unconscious social conditioning, consuming culture to achieve social mobility by showing awareness of the latest trends in mass culture.

    Secondly, overt representation of elite ideology is evident in mass culture that glorifies the upper classes and promotes racism and militarist imperialism. In particular, mass culture depicting historical and contemporary events can be portrayed from an elite perspective.

    Thirdly, conscious manipulation of the masses using psychological means, and more controversially, predictive programming. In the 1930s Edward Bernays was a pioneer in the public relations industry using psychology and other social sciences to design public persuasion campaigns. Bernays wrote:

    If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.

    ‘For Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry creates false needs to keep us purchasing products we do not actually need by manipulating our psychological impulses and desires.’

    Another form of mass manipulation is the concept of predictive programming. Predictive Programming is the theory “that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events.”  It is by its nature hard to prove yet the many extraordinary coincidences between events depicted in mass culture and later actual events is, at the very least, disconcerting. For example, the film The Manchurian Candidate depicting the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, was released in 1962, a year before the assassination of J F Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, an emotionally disturbed ‘communist sympathizer’ who declared his innocence and believed he was being used as a ‘patsy’.

    Thus, these three levels allow elites to control how the past, the present, and the future is depicted in mass culture, according to national and geopolitical agendas.

    Cultural producers

    In their defense, the role of cultural producers has never been easy, and the more money or support that is needed for a cultural project, the harder it is to maintain an independent position.

    While with modern production methods and technology it is easier to produce books, films and music independently of the major producers and distributors, in the past elite pressure, censorship, and imprisonment were common.

    Pushkin, for example, in his Ode to Liberty, exclaimed with indignation:

    Unhappy nation! Everywhere
    Men suffer under whips and chains,
    And over all injustice reigns,
    And haughty peers abuse their power
    And sombre prejudice prevails.

    However, later during the time of Nicholas I, he changed and ‘adopted the theory of art for art’s sake’:

    According to the touching and very widespread legend, in 1826 Nicholas I graciously “forgave” Pushkin the political “errors of his youth,” and even became his magnanimous patron. But this is far from the truth. Nicholas and his right-hand man in affairs of this kind, Chief of Police Benkendorf, “forgave” Pushkin nothing, and their “patronage” took the form of a long series of intolerable humiliations. Benkendorf reported to Nicholas in 1827: “After his interview with me, Pushkin spoke enthusiastically of Your Majesty in the English Club, and compelled his fellow diners to drink Your Majesty’s health. He is a regular ne’er-do-well, but if we succeed in directing his pen and his tongue, it will be a good thing.” The last words in this quotation reveal the secret of the “patronage” accorded to Pushkin. They wanted to make him a minstrel of the existing order of things. Nicholas I and Benkendorf had made it their aim to direct Pushkin’s unruly muse into the channels of official morality.

    Pushkin’s contemporaries, the French Romanticists, were also, with few exceptions, ardent believers in art for art’s sake, the idea of the absolute autonomy of art with no other purpose than itself.

    In the twentieth century, Ars Gratia Artis (Latin: Art for Art’s Sake) would become the motto for the American media company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to designate art that is independent of political and social pressures.

    Of course, while some believe that art should not be politicized, others think that if art was not a social endeavor, then it would be used as a commercial item only available to the rich; e.g., a profitable escapist product while simultaneously maintaining and promoting a conservative mindset.

    ‘During the Cold War period, films were an important factor in the persuasion of the masses. They would be used in various ways, to present the ideal image of their country and to distinguish a national enemy, to name a few.’

    However, any thoughts of art as a progressive tool were soon quashed by the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) in the USA, a body which was set up in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and any organizations with left wing sympathies.

    Dialectic of Enlightenment

    Not long after, a theoretical analysis of consumerist mass culture was published in a book by Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) in 1947 entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment in which they coined the term the Culture Industry. For Adorno and Horkheimer “the mass-media entertainment industry and commercialized popular culture, which they saw as primarily concerned with producing not only symbolic goods but also needs and consumers, serving the ideological function of diversion, and thus depoliticizing the working class.”

    They believed that the production of culture had become like a “a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.— that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.”

    Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood 1937-38 oil on canvas; 56×84 in. (142.2×213.4 cm)

    More significantly, Adorno and Horkheimer also believed that the scientific thinking the Enlightenment philosophers had developed “led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance.”

    Adorno and Horkheimer believed that because the rationalization of society had ultimately led to Fascism, science and rationalism provided little optimism for future progress and human freedom.

    However, this view of the history of science and its relationship with human emancipation is, according to Jeffrey Herf in ‘”Dialectic of Enlightenment” Reconsidered’, one that ignores many progressive movements and changes brought about by Enlightenment ideas, and that Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modern society and politics simply reduced modernity to technology, science, and bureaucracy. Herf outlines many of the events, institutions, laws, rights, treatments and other human benefits that Adorno and Horkheimer (and others) had ignored:

    In Weber’s sociology, Heidegger’s philosophical ruminations, or Dialectic of Enlightenment, the panoply of ideas and events associated with the 1688 revolution in Britain, the moderate wing of the French Revolution, and the ideas and institutions that emerged from the American Revolution, and then from the victory of the North in the American Civil War, are simply absent. As a result of this paucity of historical specificity, Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modernity during World War II was a very German caricature that did not include ideas about the extension of citizenship, British antislavery, American abolitionism, feminism in Europe and the United States, and the rule of law. Theirs was modernity without liberal democratic ideas and institutions, the rule of law, and the freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, and of religion or unbelief. […] Dialectic of Enlightenment presented modern science as primarily an exercise in the domination of nature and of human beings. Theirs was a view of the history of the scientific revolution that left out Galileo’s challenge to religious authoritarianism and Francis Bacon’s liberating restatement of the role of evidence in resolving contentious issues. From reading Horkheimer and Adorno — as well as Heidegger and Baumann — one would conclude that modern science was first and foremost a source of control, and would have no idea of how modern medicine, unthinkable without the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, had come into existence.

    Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer’s view leaves us with an almost Nietzschian nihilism, that knowledge is impossible, and life is meaningless because to try and improve society will fail and ultimately only increase oppression. Without action, Nietzsche predicted a society of ‘the last man’, the “apathetic person or society who loses the ability to dream, to strive, and who become unwilling to take risks” and slave morality characterized by pessimism and cynicism. A society which has not only lost its ‘will to power’ but also its will to revolt.

    The culture of resistance

    Throughout history, oppression has been met with resistance in many forms such as uprisings, rebellions, and insurrections.

    ‘Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

    (The Peasants’ Revolt, also named Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death pandemic in the 1340s, the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years’ War, and instability within the local leadership of London.’)

    The resistance often starts with strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience, leading to mass movements of people who ultimately reject the old system of governance and change it for a new system which can be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist. The rise of resistance seems to generally develop in three stages, each affecting culture in very different ways. These different stages could be called criticism, substitution and implementation.

    Irish Citizen Army group outside Liberty Hall. Group are lined up outside ITGWU HQ under a banner proclaiming “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland!”. Photo taken in early years of WWI.

    Resistance often begins as criticism of the policies or nature of government, or the state. This can be aesthetic or intellectual resistance appearing, for example, in various art forms. Critiques can be of an ideological nature, or simply to highlight social problems and issues. Resistance can take the form of criticism of officially sanctioned culture through demonstrations and boycotting.

    It may also take a violent form, for example, the blowing up of colonial statues in Ireland (see my comprehensive list of statues blown up in my blog post here). The blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin in 1966 was celebrated subsequently in two different ballads which became immensely popular, an aesthetic critique arising out of a violent ‘critique’.

    On a formal level resistance can also be ‘form-poor’ as struggle without help from educated or trained professionals is left to amateurs.

    Substitution

    Gradually, a new ideology, a different reading of history, a new set of artists and writers produce culture which eventually substitutes the old culture with a new culture as the movement gathers momentum.

    The less costly forms like art, music, ballads, books etc. can become very popular and important elements of the resistance itself. The more expensive cultural forms are difficult to produce in the new culture; e.g., cinema, theatre, opera, TV etc., (unless, of course, if the format is changed like in community theatre substituting for state theatre).  Digital equipment can be vastly cheaper to use for the making of movies for mass viewing assuming that the outlet for presentation, the internet, is not closed off through censorship.

    Implementation

    The final stage is implementation, whereby popular resistance takes control of the state and is able to implement progressive culture as state policy. This is particularly important for the most costly art forms which also gain access to state finance and auditoriums. It allows movies, for example, to cover ignored themes such as histories of resistance, or to show past events from more radical perspectives than the previous elite mindset and agendas.

    These different levels of cultural change: criticism, substitution, and implementation can be a long process or all come together in a short span of time.

    The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789, during the French Revolution.

    I have tried to show in my previous examination of ten different art-forms (see: art, music, theatre, opera, literature, poetry, cinema, architecture, TV, and dance articles) that since the Age of Enlightenment there has been a strong vein of radical ideas relating to social progress. Over the centuries radical culture has looked at the plight of the oppressed using different forms such as naturalism, realism, social realism, and working class socialist realism.

    The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization would have universal application globally. They also believed in the idea that empirical knowledge should be the basis of society and that with these ideas political and societal change would strengthen civilization itself. While social progressivism, as a political philosophy, is reformist in nature, it also has the potential to snowball into more radical action through discussion around questions as to who runs the state and ownership of the means of production.

    The form and content of the culture of resistance has many aspects. Some emphasize change on the community level, developing the skills, community spirit, and artistic sensibilities of the community members whether they be producers, creators or observers. An important element of this strategy for social change is encouraging critical thinking through participation in active dialogue. General themes for discussion have been, for example, gender equality, human rights, the environment and democracy.

    The Bash Bush Band musical protesters at Bush’s 2nd inauguration, Washington DC.

    Others have taken a more radical approach of examining human conflict and its sources. They look at human conflict from a social perspective and see society in terms of conflicting economic classes. By portraying economic classes in conflict they hope to evolve or expand a working class consciousness or at least an understanding of, and empathy with, oppressed groups. Radical artists, writers, composers etc are encouraged to take a scientific approach and work against superstitions and blind practices. As radical cultural producers they try to present the truth and inspire wide-ranging social and political activism.

    Future of culture?

    Modern resistance, often in digital form on the internet today, is now subject to a creeping censorship as big tech tries to slow down the efficacy of the internet at making widely available different perspectives on many different issues. At the same time, big tech tries to portray technological progress as social progress, and is at the forefront of liberal campaigns for individual rights at the expense of mass movements for collective or group rights. Such group rights allow for organizations to speak for, and negotiate on behalf of, trade unions, trade associations, specific ethnic groups, political parties, and nation-states.

    However, internet censorship and the gradually increasing power of the state (through police, courts, and prisons) using current and new legislation will be able to continue unabated, that is, unless the slave culture that facilitates it is shaken off and a new culture of resistance is born.

    Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/. Read other articles by Caoimhghin.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2021 at 10:22am and is filed under Censorship, Civil Unrest, Culture, Ecological Socialism, Enlightenment, Exploitation, Feudalism, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Marginalism, Media, Propaganda, Resistance, Romanticism, Slavery, Working Class.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Canadian Media Refuses to Publish Op-ed by Venezuelan Foreign Minister

    Despite claims to objectivity and fairness, when it comes to Canadian interference in other countries’ domestic affairs, there’s long been only one side to the story reported in the dominant media.

    Even so, the pro-Ottawa slant on Venezuela is shocking.

    Recently Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza published an op-ed titled “Regime Change with a Human (Rights) Face: Trudeau’s Venezuela Policy”. The commentary notes, “Relations between Venezuela and Canada are currently at their worst point. Although previous Canadian governments did not hide their dislike for our policies aimed at reclaiming sovereignty over our natural resources and prioritizing social policies, none had so actively imitated the U.S. regime change policy as much as the current Trudeau Administration.” Arreaza criticized Canadian sanctions on Venezuela and noted that “Canada was the only country in the world that specifically forbade Venezuelan diplomatic missions” from allowing Venezuelans to vote during the May 2018 election. Venezuela’s former vice president also invited Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne to meet to discuss restarting diplomatic relations.

    Few saw Arreaza’s op-ed since it was published in The Canada Files, an upstart left-wing website. But, the article was submitted to a number of major daily papers. Apparently, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and others didn’t consider criticism by the foreign minister of a country of 30 million, that’s had diplomatic relations with Canada for seven decades, important enough to offer their readers. Blind to the irony, they would likely justify their decision on the grounds that Venezuela’s government is authoritarian and suppresses oppositional voices!

    In September lawyer Andrew Dekany published a long article arguing that Canada’s first round of sanctions on Venezuela contravened Canadian law. Licensed to practice in Ontario, Dekany wrote that the August 2017 sanctions weren’t in accordance with Canadian legislation stating that international sanctions be adopted only as part of international alliances. As such, the Trump administration aided the Trudeau government by creating the US-Canada “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela” to conform to the existing sanctions legislation. In a Venezuela Analysis article titled “Do Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela Violate Canadian Law?”, Dekany writes, “there is no reason for Canada to ‘create’ this association but for its desire to help the U.S. out [by sanctioning Venezuela], having failed to persuade the one obvious organization (Organization of American States) which it had democratically joined to, among other things, act in such a way.” I couldn’t find any mention of Dekany’s arguments in any major Canadian media. (The Toronto Sun published an op-ed on the subject by Dekany in 2017.)

    An April 2019 Center for Economic and Policy Research report written by prominent economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot concluded that 40,000 Venezuelans may have died in 2017 and 2018 as a result of US sanctions. The intensity of the US sanctions, as well as their impact on Venezuelans’ ability to eat and access medicine, has grown significantly since then. A search of Canadian Newsstand, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail elicited two mentions of Sachs and Weisbrot’s findings (A Halifax Chronicle-Herald story titled “Four million Venezuelans have fled crisis: UN” mentioned it at the bottom of the story and an op-ed in the Hill Times by Canadian Foreign Policy Institute director Bianca Mugyenyi.)

    Since the fall of 2017 Canadian taxpayers have been paying a hardline pro-corporate, pro-Washington, former diplomat hundreds of thousands of dollars to coordinate the Liberal government’s bid to oust Venezuela’s government. There’s been total silence in the dominant media about Allan Culham’s role as Special Advisor on Venezuela.

    As Arreaza pointed out in his op-ed, the Trudeau government’s Venezuela policy took a sharply belligerent turn after Donald Trump became president and Chrystia Freeland replaced Stéphane Dion as foreign affairs minister. In reaction to Freeland’s January 2017 appointment an official at the US embassy in Ottawa claimed Justin Trudeau appointed her to promote the interests of Washington. In July 2019 researcher Jay Watts disclosed a dispatch from the US embassy in Ottawa to the State Department in Washington entitled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.” Uncovered through a freedom of information request, the largely redacted cable also notes that Trudeau’s government would be “Prioritizing U.S. Relations, ASAP.” Despite all kinds of fawning coverage of Freeland, the dominant media has completely ignored the US cable.

    In A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation I detail extreme media bias in favour of power on topics ranging from Haiti to Palestine, investment agreements to the mining industry. Considering the pattern, the Venezuelan coverage is not surprising.

    But, the growth of left and international media, as well as social media bubbles, makes it is easy to forget how few Canadians are actually receiving this critical information. Canadian media rejecting a commentary by the foreign minister of a country of 30 million is a reminder of just how biased foreign policy coverage is.

    This article was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2020 at 10:54am and is filed under Canada, Censorship, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.