Saturday 30th of November 2024
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permanently censored by the establishment.......

When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube had censored a long interview Seymour Hersh did with Democracy Now! on the grounds that it did not meet the Google subsidiary’s “community standards” and was, moreover, “offensive,” my mind went in many directions.

 

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

 

I thought of the New York Post case in October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, when Twitter, Facebook and the other big social media platforms blocked America’s oldest daily after it reported the damning, politically damaging contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.

I thought of what we now call “the disinformation industry” and all these diabolic organizations — PropOrNot, NewsGuard, Hamilton 68, et al. — that, stocked with spooks serving in staff positions and as advisers, dedicate themselves to discrediting dissenting writers and independent publications as conveyers of Russian propaganda.

And then I thought of a story a Russian acquaintance told me one afternoon over drinks when I was in Moscow some years back. Leonid was a professor of sociology at Moscow State University and had served the Central Committee and the Politburo in various advisory capacities during the Soviet era. Leonid knew how to ride the waves, let’s say, and he knew whereof he spoke. He also had a wonderful sense of humor and a highly developed appreciation for life’s infinite ironies.

Let me pass on his tale and then make the connection with Hersh’s exposé of the Biden regime’s Nord Stream op and the other cases I have mentioned.

We had been talking about the press, in Russia, in America, in Asia, and elsewhere, trading observations and comparing notes. It was then, in the bar at the old Metropole Hotel, that Leonid related a story he thought I would find useful or amusing or both.

 

Recollection at the Metropole  

During one of the periods of Soviet–American détente in the 1970s, the State Department offered to take two Foreign Ministry bureaucrats on a tour of the United States. They visited five cities — New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco — with the minders from State taking care to show their guests the sort of things minders from State would want Soviet visitors to see. A certain camaraderie developed. It is nice to think about the scene, impossible as such occasions have become.  

When they reached San Francisco and it was time to say farewell, the State Department’s shepherds asked the two Soviets what aspects of American life they found most remarkable. The Sovs seem not to have hesitated before replying.

In the Soviet Union, they said, all the newspapers across 11 time zones say the same thing every day because they are carefully censored. They are told routinely what to say and what to leave out. Here in America the press is free. We have seen no sign of censorship in all the cities you have shown us. And yet wherever we are, when we pick up a newspaper they, too, say the same thing. From New York to California, nothing we have read is ever any different.

There is externally imposed censorship and there is internally imposed censorship, to state the obvious, and the two Soviet bureaucrats were fascinated to see, firsthand and for the first time, the latter at work. Brute censorship is nothing pretty to look at, Leonid, my Russian acquaintance, meant to say. But the invisible kind is just as effective.

Everyone in mainstream journalism knows where the fence posts are, as I like to put it, and if you spend too much time beyond them you won’t work in mainstream journalism very long. I wonder if Seymour Hersh, certainly proven to rank among the great journalists of our time, may have a thought about this.

This question of internalized censorship, commonly known as self-censorship, has long fascinated me. I have watched many times as journalists, surrendering themselves for the sake of their professional careers, train themselves to hear the silent language that tells them what to say and what to leave unsaid. And then, over time, you find them giving vigorous voice to thoughts and beliefs imposed upon them, absolutely convinced these are their own thoughts and beliefs and they have come by them independently.

The modern mind’s eager desire to conform while we remain certain of our originality and individuality: Philip Slater touched on this in his too-soon-forgotten The Pursuit of Loneliness, published in 1970. So did Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom, which appeared in 1941 and could hardly be more pertinent to our time:

“We are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of anonymous authorities like public opinion and ‘common sense,’ which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.”

I have had overbearing editors I greatly wished were more anonymous than they were, but let us set this minor point aside. Fromm and Slater are concerned with the collective psychology from which self-censorship draws for its extraordinary effectiveness. “Compulsive conformity,” Fromm calls it.

We can go back as far as Alexis de Tocqueville to gain a sense of how deeply rooted this conformity is among Americans. When we do, we cannot be surprised or mystified to note what the Soviet visitors noted 50–odd years ago and what we fail to see even as it is before us in plain sight: American media are as rigorously controlled via the mechanisms of internalized censorship as any newspaper in any of the “authoritarian” societies we profess to detest for their lack of freedom.

But what happened to Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview last weekend, to the New York Post in the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and to a lot of independent journalists at the hands of the disinformation industry since this took shape a half-dozen years ago requires us to think anew.

t is commonly said that the emergence of digital media since the mid–1990s, when the first such publications appeared (and when Bob Parry started publishing Consortium News), has brought us into a new era. And we can mean many things by this. Let us not now miss: For all the good these new media have done and for all the doors they promise to open, this new era is to be one of coercive, externally imposed censorship as heavy-handed as anything those visiting Sovs had lived with all those years back.

With the decline of our legacy media into craven subservience to power to an extent no one could have dreamed of a couple of decades’ back, independent media such as Consortium News are where the future of the Great Craft lies, a point I have made severally in this space. But it seems to me the digital platforms on which these media depend have been liabilities as well as assets from the first.

 

Internalized Censorship

Technologies are not value-neutral. Jacques Ellul, the Christian anarchist and many-sided intellect, made this case in The Technological Society, which came out in English in 1964. To put his thesis too simply, technologies are not empty of content other than what is put into them. Implicit in any technology is an affirmation of the political economy and material circumstances that produced it.

In other words, the technologies available to independent journalists are corporate products. They are vital to independent practitioners as means of delivery, but, as we learn by the day now, access to them can be withdrawn at any time. Many of us seem to have missed this contradiction. Now we are pressed to recognize it.  

As we do, we are led to ask whether the promise of independent journalism can be extinguished by way of a totalized system of censorship. Do you think this phrase too strong? Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, the web services company, and an influential figure in Silicon Valley, doesn’t. In the spring of 2022 Andreessen sent out this note via Twitter:

“I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the internet stack. Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients. With only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense.”

I do not know how far we are from the world Andreesson warns us of. But is there an argument that we are headed in the direction he forecasts?

I do not wish to diminish the importance of independent media, a point I hope is by now clear, but to turn these thoughts another way, it is one thing to bully, cancel and otherwise suppress emergent publications and greatly another to censor a legacy newspaper such as the New York Post and a journalist of Seymour Hersh’s stature. My conclusion: The game is getting rough and is likely to get a lot rougher.

There is one other factor forcing the pace of America’s censorship regime that bears mentioning. This concerns the larger context. By the time digital media began to find their place in public discourse, the events of 2001 had forced the American imperium onto its back foot, and it has ever since assumed the hostile crouch of the wounded. As history teaches us, it is at this point that declining nations require the loyalty of all economic, political, industrial, and cultural institutions. Accordingly, the line between the national security state and corporate media has not been merely blurred in the post–2001 era: It is now more or less eliminated, as documents such as the Twitter Files make clear.

Are we surprised? We ought not be. Next question: What are we to do as an era of totalized censorship appears to be upon us? Subscribing to the independent publication of your choice would be a conscientious start.

Portions of this column are extracted from the author’s book, Journalists and Their Shadows, forthcoming from Clarity Press.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.  His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/20/patrick-lawrence-totalized-censorship/

 

GUS LEONISKY DECLINES RESPONSIBILITY (OR CLAIMS INSANITY) FOR DOING THE CARTOON AT TOP.

 

 

 

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the official news......

U.S. President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in Kyiv on Monday, making his first trip to the wartime capital since Russia illegally annexed Crimea nine years ago.

While Biden’s presence provided practical value—he announced an aid package worth $500 million—the historic visit primarily served as a signal of Western resolve to help Ukraine see the fight through, just days before the one-year mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.

Speaking at Mariinsky Palace, the Ukrainian president’s residence, and flanked by a small circle of advisors, a press pool, and security, Biden used the occasion to condemn the Russian invasion and provide a visual symbol that Kyiv is still standing nearly a full year since the Kremlin’s military siege began.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war of conquest is failing,” Biden said. “One year later, the evidence is right here in this room. We stand here together.”

Biden also reflected on getting the call from Zelensky on Feb. 24, 2022, that the Russian invasion was underway. “You said that you didn’t know when we’d be able to speak again,” Biden said. “That dark night, one year ago, the world was literally at the time bracing for the fall of Kyiv … perhaps even the end of Ukraine.”

The aid package Biden announced is expected to shore up Ukraine’s deepening shortage of ammunition, including artillery rounds, Javelin anti-tank missiles, Howitzer artillery guns, and air surveillance radars. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department is also set to announce further sanctions against Russian companies and people backstopping Russia’s war efforts.

Biden’s visit came after intensive and tightly held White House security deliberations, U.S. officials said in a call with reporters after Biden left the country. The Biden administration held debates over the plans with only a small circle of agencies, including the Secret Service and the Defense Department, to plan the visit, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said. Biden made the final decision to travel to Kyiv on Friday after meeting with national security staff in the Oval Office.

Biden is last among major Western leaders to visit Kyiv, after French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The White House is keeping mum about how Biden got in and out of the country until his trip to Poland ends later this week. The Kyiv stopover comes on the heels of the three-day Munich Security Conference, where a U.S. delegation led by Vice President Kamala Harris—along with more than 50 members of Congress—sought to signal U.S. resolve for supporting Ukraine.

Russia was notified about the trip for “deconfliction purposes,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, though air raid sirens sounded across the country—including in the capital—as Biden’s motorcade streamed down the Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central thoroughfare, and even as the U.S. president stepped out to join Zelensky on St. Michael’s Square, where he laid a wreath to fallen Ukrainian soldiers.

Though no U.S. president has visited Ukraine since George W. Bush traveled there in 2008, Biden told Zelensky as they walked up the stairs in Mariinsky Palace that it was his eighth trip to the country, after serving as the top U.S. go-between to the Ukrainians during the Obama administration.

Before the visit, some Eastern European officials were worried that certain NATO member states were weakening in their resolve to aid Ukraine.

“I’m afraid, actually, that some of the countries in Europe are still thinking that this will all go away,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told Foreign Policy in an interview on Sunday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “‘I mean, you know, that’s OK, we’ll give [weapons] to Ukraine right now, but then, you know, we’ll go back to business as usual, and we don’t really have to spend that much on defense.’ And I think that’s the wrong assumption.”

Biden’s visit came as China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, journeyed to Moscow ahead of an expected speech from Putin marking a year since the start of his war in Ukraine.

 

READ MORE:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/20/biden-visits-ukraine-zelensky-russia-war/

 

 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 21 delivered a keynote speech addressing the Federal Assembly. Even though the West targeted Russia's economy, society, and military, it has failed to inflict damage on the nation, according to Putin.

"My personal impression is that that was a very self-confident speech of the president of a country which is not just struggling through a difficult war, but is developing and looking forward into the future with optimism," Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies at Russia’s Higher School of Economics and deputy director of research at the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, told Sputnik. "And the major conclusion that I personally make from this speech, the major impression that I have from the speech is that despite the Western efforts to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, Russia has successfully adapted to the new environment."

 

Confident Growth & Transformation of Economy

Russia has adapted and continues to adapt successfully, economically, socially, and in other dimensions, according to the Russian scholar. The nation is not "enduring" the crisis, but it uses it as a ladder and an opportunity.

Some figures, cited by the president, show that Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) only decreased by 2.1% last year despite the unprecedented restrictions, while the nation's unemployment stands at 3.7%, which is a historic low. At the same time, Russian businesses have established new partnerships and new logistic routes demonstrating resilience and potential for growth. The country's economy grew in the third and fourth quarters of 2022, shifting to new markets and exploring new production capabilities with high added value. "Russia is committed to developing its high tech, its science, and research industries, and so on," Suslov remarked.

 

"Putin claimed and emphasized the proof that despite the shift of the paradigm, Russian economic development is very sustainable, quite dynamic and that a positive future also lies ahead," the Russian scholar stressed. "At the same time, a crucial element of the new context, the crucial implication of the hybrid war which the West conducts against Russia, is that for Russian businessmen and for Russian people, the only place in the world which is truly safe in all dimensions, economic, financial, and physical, is Russia itself."

 

At the same time, the Russian president made it clear that all the objectives set at the beginning of the special military operation will be achieved. Suslov pointed out that judging from Putin's speech, the country's leadership is committed to "a successful and victorious conclusion" of the special military operation, no matter how long it might take.

"Putin did not identify any time frame for the conclusion of the special military operation, but he did emphasize that Russia is absolutely committed to fulfillment of all its purposes," Suslov noted. "So without question, Russia considers this special military operation in particular and the hybrid war that the West conducts against Russia in general as a very long-term reality, a part of the new context that will surround Russia for the observable future. Again, despite this context and in the context of this new reality, Russia will continue to develop successfully."

 

 

Putin Nailed It When Criticizing the West

The West is likely to react aggressively to Putin's speech, especially because many of the issues he touched upon were spot on, Sputnik's interlocutors said.

"It will be criticized because of the statement that the West has started attacking Russia in 2014, arming the Ukrainian forces and deploying NATO armaments to the borders of Russia," Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels, told Sputnik. "It will be discounted as weak on the economy because it does not recognize the negative effect of sanctions. It will be considered aggressive because it does not abide by the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine. It will be considered threatening because of freezing [New] START."

The West has found itself in an awkward position given that the sweeping sanctions repeatedly slapped on Russia since the start of the Ukraine operation have not only failed to disrupt the country's economy, but backfired on the US and its allies, according to the observer.

"Sanctions have greatly weakened Europe and made it more energy-dependent on the US," echoed Tony Kevin, former Australian ambassador to Poland and Cambodia and former carrier officer of the Australian Foreign Ministry, the author of two books on Russia, Return to Moscow (2017) and Russia and the West (2019).

 

"Russia has dealt easily with sanctions because of its resources, its trusting and growing trade links with the Global South and Global East, and its own capacities for efficient import substitution. The West has been trapped in its own false narrative that it remains at the center of the world economic order, when it clearly no longer does. Both the US and Europe are increasingly economically dysfunctional, and Russia can safely look East and South. The West has lost the power to harm Russia," Kevin told Sputnik.

 

 

"It is a clear message to the US, UK and NATO that should they supply long-range armaments to Ukraine, Russia will move forward the line of security in Western territories, potentially targeting areas deeper in the EU. It is a normal military response to a threat," Raffone emphasized.

 

Furthermore, Putin should not come for the West like a bolt from the blue, given that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Russian officials have been saying similar things for weeks, according to Kevin.

"It is obviously essential commonsense - whatever long-range targeted missiles the West gives to Kiev, so much wider a demilitarized zone has to be created beyond the four newly incorporated provinces in order to protect all their territory from future attack from a possible future revanchist Kiev state," he said. "Note that Putin is not making territorial claims beyond ensuring future security of the four provinces. He says nothing about invading all of Ukraine, he leaves such matters to the Russian military command to do whatever has to be done."

 

 

Suspension of New START

Russia's decision to suspend – not to withdraw, but to freeze – the New START Treaty also stems from clear logic, according to the observers.

During his speech, the Russian president cited several examples of Washington's attempts to overhaul the post-WW2 world order, agreed by major allied powers in Yalta in February 1945. Putin referred to the US' unilateral withdrawals from milestone strategic weapons treaties as well as instances when the West has resorted to outright cheating by expanding NATO towards Russia's borders and deploying massive ballistic missile installations in Europe under the guise of an illusionary nuclear threat from Iran.

Vladimir Putin drew attention to the fact that New START and previous nuclear arms reduction treaties were closely connected to limitations on the deployment of ballistic missile installations in Europe. During the Soviet era, this threat was capped by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) signed between the United States and the Soviet Union which limited Moscow and Washington’s ability to build ballistic missile interceptors. However, George W. Bush unilaterally tore it apart in 2002, thus opening the door to a potential arms race.

Furthermore, the Russian president pointed out that the principle of reciprocity when it came to mutual inspections of nuclear sites under New START was not fully observed by the US. Moreover, NATO's two other nuclear powers, the UK and France, have never been bound by the treaty. On top of that, the West has openly proclaimed Russia's strategic defeat as its primary goal.

 

"I think it is tactical and shrewd to suspend New START," Kevin said. "It sends a strong signal. Putin is saying to the West - 'why should we engage in renewed strategic arms limitation talks with you when since 2014 at least, probably earlier, you have systematically betrayed our trust in you, and you have set out deliberately to use Ukraine as your proxy weapon to destroy our nation? (…) After the special military operation ends, you need to rethink your basic attitudes to sharing the planet’s sovereignty with Russia, China and the Global South. You are still trapped in your hegemonic post-colonial fantasy narrative which means you cannot see clearly what needs to be done to restore a stable global strategic balance. You need to go back to basics.'"

 

NATO's request that Russia provide access to its nuclear sites to the bloc's representatives amid an all-out hybrid war waged by the alliance against Moscow was an attempt to "normalize" the West's modus operandi, according to Suslov. If Russia bowed down and continued to comply with the New START agreements despite the West openly naming it as an "adversary" and pledging to bleed it white would have been a step in the wrong direction, the scholar suggested.

 

"It would send a message to the United States and to the rest of the world that the American policy of hybrid war against Russia is absolutely okay," Suslov said. "It was absolutely necessary for Russia to send a message that it will not agree to this idea of normalization of this hybrid war. And it is absolutely necessary to prove and to at least launch a dialogue in the United States to make them conclude that their actions vis-a-vis the Ukraine conflict really undermine strategic stability, that these are not two separate things. Hopefully there will be such a dialogue in the United States. Hopefully they will now understand that strategic stability and their national security, which is inseparable from strategic stability, is in question. So that might compel them to change their current policy vis-a-vis the Ukraine conflict."

 

According to Suslov, Putin's decision was "necessary" and "stabilizing." At the end of the day, it's not the suspension of New START that could heighten the risk of nuclear confrontation, but Washington's relentless efforts to inflict strategic defeat on Russia, to wipe Russia off the list of great powers, to weaken it irreversibly with all possible moves – "this is the major threat of nuclear war, because this policy which the United States conducts creates an immense risk of direct military clash between Russia and NATO, Russia and the United States," the Russian scholar concluded.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://sputniknews.com/20230221/putins-speech-from-russias-economic-growth--military-advancements-to-new-start-suspension-1107672755.html

 

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

MAKE A DEAL PLEASE:

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON AGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

 

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more for less.....

 

NATO majors float Ukraine negotiations plan – WSJ

 

UK, France and Germany reportedly offered weapons and security commitments as a way of starting talks with Russia 

London has proposed giving Kiev even more weapons and security guarantees just short of membership in the US-led military bloc, in order to encourage negotiations with Moscow, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Paris and Berlin reportedly support the initiative and have already advised President Vladimir Zelensky to talk, though he has refused.

Though French President Emmanuel Macron has publicly called for “a military offensive which pushes back the Russian front in order to open the way for a return to negotiations,” he has privately advised Zelensky to make “difficult decisions,” according to officials who spoke to the Journal.

Over dinner at the Elysee Palace earlier this month, Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Zelensky he needed to start considering peace talks, according to people familiar with the conversation. London, Paris and Berlin would not comment on the record. 

“We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable,” a senior French official told the Journal. “And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.”

As a way to encourage Zelensky, the outlet said, British PM Rishi Sunak has put together a plan to give Kiev “broader access to advanced military equipment, weapons and ammunition,” to be considered at the NATO summit in July. 

“The NATO summit must produce a clear offer to Ukraine, also to give Zelensky a political win that he can present at home as an incentive for negotiations,”an unnamed British official told the outlet. If Moscow sees that the West is prepared to support Kiev even more, maybe it will be persuaded it can’t achieve its military objectives, the official added.

France and Germany support the initiative and see it as a way to “boost Ukrainian confidence” and give it an incentive to start negotiations with Russia, according to unnamed officials from both countries.

Sunak’s plan does not include stationing NATO forces in Ukraine or offering Kiev “Article 5”commitments to intervene in case of an attack, the officials said. Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Melnik said it was a good first step, but that Kiev needed “a clear commitment that it does not exclude NATO membership, which is the only solution for a lasting peace.”

On Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry listed its conditions for the diplomatic solution of the conflict, which included the West ending its “supply of weapons and mercenaries” to Kiev and Ukraine returning to neutrality after being demilitarized and “denazified.”

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that Russia is winning the logistical war of attrition, leaving it unclear how much the US-led bloc could spare for Ukraine in terms of weapons and ammunition.

Zelensky has rejected any negotiations with Moscow, saying on Friday that “There is nothing to talk about and nobody to talk about over there.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/572032-macron-scholz-zelensky-negotiate/

 

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