The Ideological Enforcement Industry, Part 2

BEAU ALBRECHT

 

Activists pretending to be moderators

When Al Gore invented the Internet, this initiated some exciting new changes in technology and society. Promising new startups sprouted like flowers on a hillside. Then, quite often, one of the big players would gobble up the company, chew it up, and eventually spit it out. Webring, Deja News, and Geocities are gone but not forgotten!

One facet of this tech bonanza is that the public was able to communicate with each other and share information in ways that hadn’t been possible before. Back in the old days, information mostly went through a limited number of chokepoints: about fifty corporations for broadcast and print media prior to deregulation, this eventually compressed into six monopolies as described above, three commercial TV networks, and two wire services. Then the Internet provided a new way for information to get around the dam. Perhaps even more significantly, at last this enabled the public to talk back.

For the Powers That Be, of course, this presented a new problem: We can’t just have everyone speaking their minds, now can we? Censorship looks bad, especially in a soi-disant liberal democracy, but big business came to the rescue. Americans in particular have a naïve faith in capitalism, which often leads to the refrain: “Why, it’s only corporations engaging in censorship, and they can do whatever they want!” (That really doesn’t fly where monopolies are concerned, but that’s another discussion for another day.) This also comes across as the characteristically libertarian idea that something repressive is bad only if the state is doing the repressing, and that private enterprise can do no wrong. This goes back to the outdated idea that government and business are in eternal opposition; really, at the upper echelons, things are pretty chummy between each other.

As for social media, the same processes of consolidation were at work, in some cases with giant companies chewing up smaller companies and spitting them out. Monopolization became a factor with certain large online businesses as well. For the most part, we effectively have one search engine, one social media site, one microblogging platform, one video host, one globo-auction, one globo-retailer, one online encyclopedia, one ring to find them all and in the darkness bind them. As for social media, monopolization re-created the chokepoint situation, much like what already existed in print and broadcast media.

Curiously, the monopolization of cyberspace isn’t always a matter of cutthroat commercial competition, as one might imagine. In some instances, a platform that was heavily promoted and got huge will sort of become the default go-to place, largely because of herd mentality. It’s “where everyone’s at.” Competition exists, but is unlikely to get popular. Even established platforms are vulnerable to being upstaged by monopolies. Myspace and Livejournal were once thriving online communities, but after Fakebook came along, things just never were the same.

Either way, the disingenuous excuses for corporate censorship continue. Defenders of the Tech Tyrants might say, for example, “If you get banned from YouTube because they don’t like your politics, just build another YouTube.” Oh, sure, and I bet my fairy godmother will hand me a few billion smackeroos to launch my startup, right? Free speech platforms do exist, but it’s mostly the digital ghetto. (For that matter, there are few payment processors and online advertisers that will say no to the censors.) Most social media alternatives are fairly obscure and receive much less traffic than their monopolized equivalents. Sometimes free speech platforms receive cyber-attacks, attempts to remove their domain registration, and so forth. Therefore, the “Just build a competitor” answer from censorship apologists is insufficient, if not disingenuous, since leftists are well-known for using dirty tactics even to get small sites and blogs taken offline for thoughtcrime. Other than that, sometimes people are targeted for censorship in a clearly coordinated manner, although this is an illegal boycott according to the Sherman Antitrust Act. If someone is effectively banned from the Internet, what’s the solution – build another Internet?

On the micro level, in the trenches where censorship takes place, things don’t look so good. I wrote earlier about Fakebook’s exploited techno-proles contracted to handle “safety and security” while getting paid peanuts. Although they appear to be content moderators, a major part of their duty consists of deleting naughty political posts. This is no easy task, since they’re expected to know Fakebook’s extensive Party Line in intimate detail, even though the specifics are subject to change from one hour to the next. Their job satisfaction was so scintillating that one of the ways to pass the time at work was joking about suicide. I’d feel bad for these sorry chumps if they weren’t social media censors.

The overpaid Left Coasters at Google aimed lower yet – no peanuts required! – attempting to raise a horde of volunteer censors with their “YouTube Heroes” program. (The image this conjures up is of some keyboard warrior composed of lumpy leftist biomass, with enough piercings to qualify as a pincushion, belonging to some gender not found in nature, whose religion is political correctness. It seems quite strange to think of this creature as a “hero” – that’s more like a zero.) Unfortunately for Google, the proposal was about as popular as the Jeffrey Epstein Refuge For Wayward Girls. So I’ve heard, “Within 72 hours, the video gathered upwards of 1.2 million views, 411,000 dislikes and just 7,100 likes. Comments on the video were disabled by YouTube.” Ouch! It seems that rattlesnakes are more popular.

A large part of how these corporations get away with it is through carefully-worded terms of service. Most users don’t bother to read any of these extensive texts. They’re so lengthy and difficult that only a contract lawyer is likely to understand the full implications. For example, can you read through one of these dense documents and figure out how the data mining policies really work? Usually the user agreements will contain the following features buried in the fine print:

• The corporation can change the agreement unilaterally at any time – effectively a “we can do anything” clause. Would you buy a used car from a finance company that grants itself permission to rewrite the contract whenever and however they want?
• The user effectively has no recourse under the law. For one example I noted, you can sue, but the damages are limited to one dollar. Therefore, not only would it be effectively a Bambi v. Godzilla lawsuit – you versus a multibillion dollar corporation – the best outcome you could expect to get is the Pyrrhic victory of one buck and a massive lawyer bill.
• The corporation has the ultimate authority to censor anything they wish. The entire user agreement might be ten to twenty thousand words of legalese, but the clause prohibiting politically incorrect postings might simply call it “offensive content” or “hate speech” with little further explanation – or even none. For them, this vagueness is a feature, not a bug. I’ll further add that “hate speech” is a sneaky anticoncept devoid of objective meaning and is therefore unsuitable for a legal document, but that’s another discussion for another time.

It’s hard to think of more lopsided terms than that, short of a 17th century indentured servitude contract. Note that despite deliberately imprecise and minimalistic terminology enabling them to censor whatever they want, these social media companies do indeed have specific policies. However, actually spelling out how the rules work would bind them to objective standards. In the case of Fakebook, the full details are in their “Known Questions” document, which in 2021 weighed in at 15,000 words. Will they send you a copy of it, so you can be extra sure you’re following the rules? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Activists pretending to be preachers

Long ago, a boomer from Dixie told me how things went on the ecclesiastical front during earlier times, as he’d seen it unfold. At first, the ministers had been preaching that the Bible endorsed segregation. Then the World Council of Churches got its hooks into the various denominations. (I’ll add that the National Council of Churches might have been acting as a proxy for them, since they took on a very politicized role from the start. Both organizations in earlier times were suspected of being Communist front groups.) At some point during the 1950s, new marching orders went down the transmission belt to the converged denominations. Then the ministers reversed course and started preaching that the Bible endorsed integration. Proverbially, one can use Scripture to argue for just about anything. Still, I have to wonder about those Southern ministers – what happened to their balls?

Of course, things slid a lot further downhill in many denominations. This is especially for those that dish out watered-down ultracalvinism, in some cases washed out and politicized to the point that they’re religions in name only. It’s a long topic, but I’m not one of those who regard Christianity as ideological sabotage from ancient times. Neither do I believe that cucked interpretations of Scripture are particularly authoritative, much less the only possible ones. Not so long ago, Christianity was a brake on the worse parts of modernity, at least to some degree. Now, all too many denominations were converged and repurposed. Simply put, religion got corrupted to a large degree, no different from all other opinion-forming institutions now delivering full-spectrum ideological indoctrination.

Not all ministers are like that, of course, but the rest have a lot to answer for. The worst part of it is that these phony preachers pretend to speak for God. At first glance, they seem like rotten hypocrites, but it’s entirely possible that some of them are brainwashed enough to confuse their smelly secular ideology for holiness. I’m not even sure what I really believe, but still I find these sanctimonious preachers particularly galling. They spout moldy leftist platitudes, with their rhetoric dressed up in the guise of righteousness and universal truths. I’ll confess that I haven’t read Dante, but I bet he had a pretty good description of some overheated subterranean pit which will be the eternal destination for those who misrepresent Scripture.

As for black clergy, the common ministers who attend to their congregations and stay out of the public spotlight are usually unobjectionable. For the most part, these are pillars of the community who provide a much-needed good influence. On the other hand, finding a famous black cleric – one with national name recognition, or aspiring to it – who’s really in it for the theology seems about as rare as finding a black author who writes about anything besides being black. For some reason, the famous ones are quite often political figures with a plastic halo. Their particular form of politics invariably has to do with racial activism; anything else is a side agenda. Although the piety act is for show, apparently it does fool some white liberal rubes, or they probably wouldn’t bother with the imposture.

The archetypal example, of course, was St. Dr. Rev. MLK Jr. The big brown plastic Jesus has been praised up to the skies, including by lukewarm conservatives who assume he actually believed the universalist sentiments in his oratory. He remains the most recognized figure in the “civil rights” pantheon, but the ugly truth about him takes several pages to describe. For one thing, he was the personal golem of a Communist from New York. Comrade Stanley David Levison did happen to be a talented writer, which is why MLK lately is best known for delivering notable speeches. Although his plagiarism habit has come to public attention, a media blackout remains about his far more monumental character defects. These factors are why MLK is known for saying “I have a dream” rather than his hotel room utterances such as “I’m fucking for God” or “I’m not a Negro tonight.”

Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of South Africa, is another example. He was best known as an anti-apartheid figure and an ecclesiastical counterpart to the cuddly terrorist Nelson Mandela. The perpetually grinning holy roller bedecked in religious garb helped give phony moral gravitas to this crypto-Marxist “liberation” movement. For all the hype, you’d think he’d come up with a miraculous cure for herpes. Naturally, for Tutu’s cheerleading role in transforming Africa’s best-run country into a crime-ridden hellhole, he had a list of honorary degrees and other distinctions longer than Al Capone’s arrest record. These honors, of course, were bestowed by white Gutmenschen eager to glorify anti-white causes. If given a chance, these people would’ve been happy to suck Desmond Tutu’s holy toes as if they were chocolate Easter eggs.

Activists pretending to be scientists

All told, the scientific method is a pretty good way of arriving at the truth. It does work if done correctly, though the process isn’t immune to gaming the system, bad statistics, or the usual sorts of pressures. Sometimes meta-studies produce interesting results. An old classic was comparing how well mice trained to run mazes performed compared to a control group of untrained mice. (The first group performed better, just as expected, according to the study. Actually, none of the mice had special training, and it was the researchers being tested – surprise!) For a more recent meta-study, it turns out that most studies turned out not to be repeatable. Worse, another meta-study showed that most studies “proved” the point that the people who paid the researchers wanted them to “prove.”

This isn’t a put-down against the scientific method, or a suggestion that we should return to horoscopes and phlogiston theory and go read tea leaves. Rather, science has to be done right to produce meaningful results. Other than that, scientists are mere mortals, and this should be kept in mind when someone tries to play “my researcher can beat up your researcher.” Just keep the bullshit detectors on! When politics gets involved, then things really go awry. This brings us to a notable difference in worldview, in which the right is interested in the truth and the left is interested in results. Therefore:

• Rightists: If the theory doesn’t fit the facts, change the theory.
• Leftists: If the theory doesn’t fit the facts, change the facts.

Serving this purpose are activists pretending to be scientists. There once was a consensus, ever since Darwin, that race is real and meaningful. Then race denialism became a front in the culture war, ongoing for a century. Franz Boas, Trofim Lysenko, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin – I’m looking right at you! Of these “scientists,” the first three faked their research. Lewontin did not, as far as we know, but he did famously make up a disingenuous argument to push the race denialism narrative. Other than Lysenko, a garden-variety Russian, they were the kind of Jews who make all other Jews look bad, the same as several other race denial activists pretending to be scientists. (If they want better public relations, they should stop doing that – just saying!) Moreover, they were pinkos, except for Boas who merely was colored violet blush.

Race has been studied enough that there would still be a clear consensus about it, if not for all the activists pretending to be scientists who do everything they can to fake their research, shout down their opposition, and otherwise muddy up the waters. One day, historians will look back on leftist hysterics about race denial and make obvious comparisons to how Galileo was treated. The implications are enormous. With honest discussion about racial differences, the biggest and nastiest facet of contemporary leftist ideology would crumble. Without it, absolute egalitarianism goes unchallenged, and baloney like “white privilege” is the default explanation for differences in socioeconomic outcomes. The next step, of course, involves demands to siphon more resources from designated “oppressors” – that’s us – to drag us down until everyone is at the same level, because their expectation is equality of results.

There are, of course, other uses for politicized science. The overrated climate change scare, the Plandemic, radical gender theory, you name it – hordes of activists pretending to be scientists can be trotted out to push some narrative as needed. Why, they’re experts – sure you can trust them! Censorship, bullying, and shouting-down are the go-to tactics for the Ministry of Truth to handle opposition. Although academia should be a haven for open debate, that’s not how things really work. Many campuses are hotbeds of radicalism, and there are lots of nasty things that can happen even to a dissenting tenured professor. Settling debates through intimidation and information-blockading isn’t really how the scientific method is supposed to work, but, ya know. . .

To say that this isn’t exactly a free exchange of ideas is as obvious as saying that water is wet. For matters of politicized science, the presstitutes will step in to assist by ridiculing or misrepresenting the opposition, or even pretending there is no other side. For full-spectrum coverage, sometimes social media will censor disapproved viewpoints – even those supported by sources with credentials and academic street cred. (There certainly was much of that during the Fauci Flu.) The result, of course, is that Joe and Jill Sixpack, who get all their information from the MSM, are left to believe that there’s scientific unanimity about whatever it is they’re told. Implement social leveling schemes because white privilege, deindustrialize the country because global warming, take that jab of experimental gene therapy because emergency, perform sex change procedures on kids because reasons – why, that’s science, and nobody respectable opposes it!

Activists pretending to be historians

Mary Grabar, The Influence of Howard Zinn’s Fake History | National Leadership SeminarEach race in our diverse world has its own natural interests and priorities. Instead of that expected condition, how do the usual suspects keep their golems bound in their anti-white alliance and constantly agitated? Meanwhile, how do you make sure that white leftists will keep flagellating themselves like a distributed virtual BDSM convention? Activists pretending to be historians are tremendously useful toward creating a one-sided perspective.

One prime offender is Howard Zinn, a Communist as well as a disgrace to his noble Hebrew ancestors. (There are other activists pretending to be historians who fit this profile.) By now, his profoundly biased flagship product A People’s History of the United States has been used as an academic textbook, which by now has poisoned the minds of millions of students, encouraging them to hate their own country. In whites, it generates guilt complexes. In non-whites, it inflames truculence.

According to them, Western civilization – or white history, if you will – is nothing but war, slavery, and imperialism. What they don’t say is that all other races did these things too. They also won’t tell you that whites created chivalry, the concept of limited warfare, and the Geneva Conventions. Whites were the first to abolish slavery, but you’ll never hear a word of praise about that from leftist “historians.” (The same goes for any other kind of minoritists. I’ve even heard some of them ungratefully claim that America’s blacks freed themselves without any help.) They also don’t credit whites for bringing enlightenment to their colonies – such as forcing backward races to stop practicing slavery. Taken as a whole, imperialism as practiced by whites certainly wasn’t the unmitigated horror that activists pretending to be historians say it was.

Also, technology developed by white people brought remarkable advances to the rest of the world, from running water and electricity all the way up to the computers that non-whites use to bellyache about us. There still are a few American Indian bitter-enders left, but how many would last a week if they had to endure the especially sparse and violent lifestyle of their Stone Age forebears? How many perpetually aggrieved blacks would want to return to pre-colonial Africa? (Things aren’t doing too great now that the British and French went home, but all that’s another story.) Although the unprecedented ease and comfort of modern lifestyle was our doing, leftist “historians” won’t give us a word of credit for it. Instead, they do everything they can to fan the flames of resentment.

Activists pretending to be advertisers

This description of the Ministry of Truth has become quite lengthy, but I fear that I’m only hitting the highlights. Be that as it may, the hall of shame wouldn’t be anywhere near complete without mentioning ad agencies that inject sociopolitical propaganda into commercial propaganda. It was around back in the old days, but at that point, it was fairly inoffensive “Let’s buy the world a Coke” sort of liberal fluff.

By now, it’s in your face, front and center. This is very reckless, since the last thing an advertiser should do is damage the reputation of its sponsor. Associating a company with divisive political stances will do exactly that. It indeed has been demonstrated that a “woke” reputation is bad for business.

Even so, it’s as if the greatest priority of advertisers lately wasn’t to tout products, but rather to push race mixing. Since this nearly always features a black male with a white female, it’s obvious that this isn’t just some random “inclusiveness” shtick, but rather to further the private agenda of those who make these ads. Not only is that offensive, it’s straight up demoralization propaganda. For an advertiser, that makes about as much sense as getting a product endorsement from Satan. I’d rather see an advertisement with a picture of Jane Fonda hanging with her Viet Cong buddies, or even a picture of two dudes sucking face. Even blacks are starting to get offended by the race mixing propaganda, and actually for some of the same reasons we are.

Why are advertisers insulting prospective customers? Their industry resembles a microcosm of the MSM, with which they’re in a symbiotic relationship. That is, advertising is dominated by three monopolies. They’re all Jewish-run, but surely that’s a cohencidence, right? In any event, it’s too bad that they’re needlessly ruining the reputation of their own people. Just saying here, this kind of atrocious misbehavior gets noticed, so maybe they should stop doing that.

And finally

Even as much as I disagree with the leftists, I’ll give them some credit where it’s due. They got to this sort of prominence because they were “the firstest with the mostest” on these fronts. For generations, leftists were putting themselves out there, getting personally involved in pursuit of their causes, and carrying on their Long March Through the Institutions. Mainstream conservatives were caught off guard, not realizing how things were taking shape until it was too late. More to the point, in a culture war, actually showing up to the fight certainly counts for a lot. I bet there’s a lesson in this.

https://www.unz.com/article/the-ideological-enforcement-industry-part-2/

 

THIS IS AN OPINION PIECE PRETENDING TO KNOW....

 

 

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GORE WAS JOKING WHEN HE SAID HE INVENTED THE INTERNET....

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/799/708

 

An Intricate Fabric of Bad Actors Working Hand-in-Hand’ – So is War Inevitable?

    by Alastair Crooke

 

Walter Kirn, an American novelist and cultural critic, in his 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, described how, after a sojourn at Oxford, he came to be a member of “the class that runs things” – the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them.” It was the account of a middle-class kid from Minnesota trying desperately to fit into the élite world, and then to his surprise, realising that he didn’t want to fit in at all.

Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack and co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing “establishment liberalism.” His contrarian drift has made him more vocal about his distrust of élite institutions – as he wrote in 2022:

For years now, the answer, in every situation—‘Russiagate,’ COVID, Ukraine—has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way.

Kirn’s politics, a friend of his suggested, was “old-school liberal,” underscoring that it was the other “so-called liberals’” who had changed: “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue; I wouldn’t call [Kirn] Conservative. I would just say he’s a free-thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic,” the friend said.

To understand Kirn’s contrarian turn – and to make sense of today’s form of American politics – it is necessary to understand one key term. It is not found in standard textbooks, but is central to the new playbook of power: the “whole of society.”

“The term was popularised roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for a governance ‘whole-of-society’ approach” – one that asserts that as actors – media, NGOs, corporations and philanthropist institutions – interact with public officials to play a critical role not just in setting the public agenda, but in enforcing public decisions.

Jacob Siegel has explained the historical development of the “whole of society” approach during the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the “war on terror” to what it called “CVE” – countering violent extremism. The idea was to surveil the American people’s online behaviour in order to identify those who may, at some unspecified time in the future, “commit a crime.”

Inherent to the concept of the potential “violent extremist” who has, as yet, committed no crime, is a weaponised vagueness: “A cloud of suspicion that hangs over anyone who challenges the prevailing ideological narratives.”

“What the various iterations of this whole-of-society approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association – their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results …”.

Aaron Kheriaty writes:

More recently, the whole of society political machinery facilitated the overnight flip from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, with news media and party supporters turning on a dime when instructed to do so—democratic primary voters ‘be damned’. This happened not because of the personalities of the candidates involved, but on the orders of party leadership. The actual nominees are fungible, and entirely replaceable, functionaries, serving the interests of the ruling party … The party was delivered to her because she was selected by its leaders to act as its figurehead. That real achievement belongs not to Harris, but to the party-state.

What has this to do with Geo-politics – and whether there will be war between Iran and Israel?

Well, quite a lot. It is not just western domestic politics that has been shaped by the Obama CVE totalising mechanics. The “party-state” machinery (Kheriaty’s term) for geo-politics has also been co-opted:

“To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach in such efforts”, Kheriaty argues,“the party requires an endless supply of causes … that party officers use as pretexts to demand ideological alignment across public and private sector institutions. These causes come in roughly two forms: the urgent existential crisis (examples include COVID and the much-hyped threat of Russian disinformation) – and victim groups supposedly in need of the party’s protection.”

“It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way,” Kirn underlines.

Just to be clear, the implication is that all geo-strategic critics of the party-state’s ideological alignment must be jointly and collectively treated as potentially dangerous extremists. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea therefore are bound together as presenting a single obnoxious extremism that stands in opposition to “Our Democracy”; versus “Our Free Speech” and versus “Our Expert Consensus.”

So, if the move to war against one extremist (i.e. versus Iran) is “acclaimed” by 58 standing ovations in the joint session of Congress last month, then further debate is unnecessary – any more than Kamala Harris’ nomination as Presidential candidate needs to be endorsed through primary voting:

Candidate Harris told hecklers on Wednesday, chanting about genocide in Gaza, “to pipe down” – unless they “want Trump to win.” Tribal norms must not be challenged (even for genocide).

Sandra Parker, Chairwoman of the political advocacy arm for the three thousand members of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was advising on correct talking points, the Times of Israel reports:

The rise of Republican far right-wingers who spurn decades of (bi-partisan) pro-Israel orthodoxies, favouring isolationism and resurrecting anti-Jewish tropes is alarming pro-Israel evangelicals and their Jewish allies… The break with decades of assertive foreign policy was evident last year when Sen. Josh Hawley derided the ‘liberal empire’ that he dismissively characterised as bipartisan ‘Neoconservatives on the right, and liberal globalists on the left: Together they make up what you might call the uniparty, the DC establishment that transcends all changing administrations.

At the CUFI talking points conference, the fear of increased isolation on the Right was the issue:

“You’re going to see that adversaries will see the US as in retreat” – should isolationists get the upper hand: Activists were advised to push back: Should lawmakers claim that NATO expansion is what triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Should anybody begin to make the argument that the reason the Russians have moved in on Ukraine – is because of NATO enlargement – can I just say that this is the age-old ‘blame America trope,’” the Chair advised the assembled delegates.

“They have the strain of isolationism that’s – ‘Let’s just do China and forget about Iran, forget about Russia, let’s just do one thing’ – but it doesn’t work that way,” said Boris Zilberman, director of policy and strategy for the CUFI Action Fund. Instead, he described “an intricate fabric of bad actors working hand in hand.”

So, to get to the bottom of this western mind-management in which appearance and reality are cut from the same cloth of hostile extremism: Iran, Russia and China are “cut from it” likewise.

Plainly put, the import of this “behavioural-engineering enterprise (it no longer having much to do with the truth, no longer having much to do with your right to desire what you wish – or not desire what you don’t wish)” – is, as Kirn says: “everyone is in on the game.” “The corporate and state interests don’t believe you are wanting the right things—you might want Donald Trump— or, that you aren’t wanting the things you should want more” (such as seeing Putin removed).

If this “whole of society” machinery is understood correctly in the wider world, then the likes of Iran or Hizbullah are forced to take note that war in the Middle East inevitably may bleed across into wider war against Russia – and have adverse ramifications for China, too.

That is not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. But it is because the ideological needs of “whole of society” foreign-policy hinge on simplistic “moral” narratives: Ones that express emotional attitudes, rather than argued propositions.

Netanyahu went to Washington to lay out the case for all-out war on Iran – a moral war of civilisation versus the Barbarians, he said. He was applauded for his stance. He returned to Israel and immediately provoked Hizbullah, Iran, and Hamas in a way that dishonoured and humiliated both – knowing well that it would draw a riposte that would most likely lead to wider war.

Clearly Netanyahu, backed by a plurality of Israelis, wants an Armageddon (with full US support, of course). He has the US, he thinks, exactly where he wants it. Netanyahu has only to escalate in one way or another – and Washington, he calculates (rightly or wrongly), will be compelled to follow.

Is this why Iran is taking its time? The calculus on an initial riposte to Israel is “one thing,” but how then might Netanyahu retaliate in Iran and Lebanon? That can be altogether an “other thing.” There have been hints of nuclear weapons being deployed (in both instances). There is however nothing solid, to this latter rumour.

Further, how might Israel respond towards Russia in Syria, or might the US react through escalation in Ukraine? After all, Moscow has assisted Iran with its air defences (just as the West is assisting Ukraine against Russia).

Many imponderables. Yet, one thing is clear (as former Russian President Medvedev noted recently): “the knot is tightening” in the Middle East. Escalation is across all the fronts. War, Medvedev suggested, may be “the only way this knot will be cut.”

Iran must think that appeasing western pleas in the wake of the Israeli assassination of Iranian officials at their Damascus Consulate was a mistake. Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/an-intricate-fabric-of-bad-actors-working-hand-in-hand-so-is-war-inevitable/

 

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Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

On August 12th, Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner who is the EU’s censorship czar, lettered to Elon Musk,

 

https://archive.is/PhEvc

Thierry Breton

@ThierryBreton

With great audience comes greater responsibility #DSA

As there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in in connection with events with major audience around the world, I sent this letter to 

@elonmusk: 

Dear Mr. Musk,

I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU.

I understand that you are currently soing a stress test of the platform. In this context, I am compelled to remind you of the due diligence obligations set out in the Digital Services Act (DSA), as outlined in my previous letter. As the individual entity ultimately controlling a platform with over 300 million users worldwide, of which one third [are] in the EU, that has been designated as a Very Large Online Platform, you have the legal obligation to ensure X’s compliance with EU law and in particular the DSA in the EU.

This notably means ensuring, on one hand, that the freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increse the risk profile of X and generate deterimental effects on civic discourse and public security. This is important against the background of recent examples of public unrest brought about by the amplification of content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.

It also implies i) informing EU judicial and administrative authorities without undue delay on the measures taken to address their orders against content considered illegal, according to national and/ or or EU laws, ii) taking timely, diligent, non-arbitrary and objective action upon receipt of notices by users considering certain content illegal, iii) informing users concerning the measures taken upon receipt of the relevant notice, and iv) publicly reporting about content moderation measures. …

As you know, formal proceedings are already ongoing against X under the DSA, notably in areas linked to the dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation. …

My services and I will be extremely vigilant to any evidence that points to breaches of the DSA, and will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox … to protect EU citizens from serious harm.

Yours sincerely,

Thierry Breton

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First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

——

Elon Musk is a citizen of the United States and practices the freedoms that its First Amendment promises to everyone within the United States. He has now been threatened by the EU against doing what is legal in the United States. If the Constitution of a particular dictatorship, such as the EU, punishes him for exercising his freedom as an American, then must not the U.S. Government defend him? Is he not owed that, by his government?

I recognize that the U.S. Government is a dictatorship (controlled collectively by billionaires such as Musk) and prolifically violates its own Constitution; and I recognize that the EU was itself set up by America’s own CIA in order for the U.S. regime to control European nations as America’s colonies and had no real interest in providing freedom and independence to Europeans but instead wanted to dictate those nations’ foreign policies and rape their sovereignty. However, unlike the favors that Trump as President will be providing to Musk and which Musk is purchasing from him by his huge donations to his campaign, the U.S. Government will be legally required by its own Constitution to punish the EU if it carries through and punishes Musk for exercising his most-basic freedoms as an American. Unlike the political bribery that is now so routine in the U.S., that would be a Constitutional necessity, wouldn’t it?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/the-eu-needs-to-learn-what-democracy-is-and-what-dictatorship-is/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

Recent FBI raids on properties belonging to Russian-American political scientist Dimitri K. Simes and Scott Ritter, who both challenge the mainstream US political propaganda, are meant to squash dissent on Ukraine, former UN weapons inspector Ritter told Sputnik.

The conflict in Ukraine - in which the US has become deeply involved by providing the Kiev regime with billions of dollars - reportedly has people questioning Washington's hawkish policy that the government seeks to suppress.

“What is our crime? Our crime is to have an opinion that is opposite of that of the United States government when it comes to Ukraine,” Ritter emphasized.

‘This is a very dangerous time for all Americans’: Scott Ritter

“Understand that the US government doesn't trust you. Doesn't believe you're capable of thinking. The US government is actively trying to deceive you and manipulate you,” Ritter told Sputnik, commenting on the… pic.twitter.com/HCqa2kXdkq

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) August 16, 2024

It is not just about the government deceiving the American people, it is about the mainstream media working in close coordination with the US government to deceive the American people about a war, Ritter noted.

“That’s where independent journalists come in. That’s where a genuinely free press [comes in], a press that isn’t subordinated to the US government, that doesn’t serve as a stenographer of US government policy, a free press that questions the official narrative,” he pointed out.

Ritter concluded that the US government does not trust common people, irrespective of their political leanings, and is actively trying to deceive and manipulate the public.

Earlier, Simes, a Channel One presenter in Russia and the founder and ex-president of the Center for the National Interest (USA), told Sputnik that he had not been to the United States since 2022, and had not been notified ahead of time that FBI agents would be conducting a search of his property in Rappahannock County, Virginia, this week.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240816/scott-ritter-biden-administration-declaring-war-on-journalism-1119794435.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.