Another case where journalism is a crime

Alina Lipp, an independent journalist reporting from Donbass, has had her assets frozen and her father’s assets frozen by the German government as punishment for reporting on Ukrainian misdeeds in Donbass.

She said she has been that she is under a criminal investigation on charges that potentially could result in a three-year prison sentence. She said she was told her own testimony was not wanted.

The video above shows her telling her story. Notice the monument with the children’s toys around it. This is a monument to children killed as a result of Ukrainian bombardment of Donbass, with their names and ages.

Although the video was put up recently, it evidently was made last summer, because that was when she received the notification.

Alina Lipp, who’s 29, is the daughter of a Russian father and a German mother.  She is a member of the Green Party and once hoped for a political career.

Lipp studied sustainable governance at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, focusing on environmental studies.  She hoped for a political career as a member of the Greens party.

But after the change of government in Ukraine, she went in 2016 to see for herself what was going on.  She said she found, among other things, that most of the residents of Crimea considered themselves Russians and were glad to be part of Russia.

I’m not sure of her exact comings and goings.  She has evidently gone back and forth between Germany and Crimea, and Germany and Donbass, a number of times, and also spent time in Russia.  Her dad has meanwhile moved to Crimea.

She set up her own Telegram channel to report from the region.  She said she was the only German journalist reporting from the region.  

Not only the German government, but also most of the German press condemned her reporting, she said, without anyone going to see for themselves.

She is being investigated by the Centre for Combating Internet Hate Crimes of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lüneburg, Germany.

The Composite Eye newsletter reported she is formally charged with trying “to stir up a psychological climate, also among the population of the Federal Republic of Germany, to cause divisions in society and to destroy social cohesion due to at least distorted and sometimes false ideas.”

The prosecutor referred to Lipp’s statements on her Telegram channel, namely for saying the population of Donbass supported Russia’s “special operation,” and for speaking of a genocide in the Donbass region, where a civil war that has been ongoing for the past eight years.

Correctiv, a network of investigators, alleged that Lipp had ties with the Russian Foreign Ministry.  But she rejects the accusation, saying she reports on what she sees.

Germany debates freedom of expression

The following article is from the German Internet magazine Telopolis.  It seems as if a number Germans in high places, like their counterparts in the USA, lack understanding of the basic concept of freedom of speech.

The article was forwarded to me by my Internet pen pal Desdemona, who provided the machine translation into English.

GOVERNMENT’S SCATHING TESTIMONY:

CITIZENS WITH DEFICITS

April 23, 2023  

By Alexander Horn

With the Democracy Promotion Act, civil society is to become a bulwark against extremism. However, it is an attack on citizens, freedom of expression and democracy. A guest post.

With the planned Democracy Promotion Act, the federal government is issuing a devastating testimony to the citizens. Civil society in Germany is currently not the “bulwark against xenophobic and racist activities” that Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (both SPD) want so much.

“Racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism, hostility towards Islam and Muslims, queer hostility, misogyny, sexism, hostility towards the disabled and extremism such as right-wing extremism, Islamic extremism, left-wing extremism as well as hatred and hate speech” are ever-increasing problems, according to the government draft.

In addition, “the spread of conspiracy ideologies, disinformation and denial of science […], but also hate and hate speech on the Internet as well as multiple discrimination and threats are constantly increasing”.

The problem are the citizens?

With the Democracy Promotion Act, the federal government is making it all too clear that it does not trust the citizens to counteract these developments themselves.

On the contrary, the “model of an open, pluralistic and diverse society” that worked some time ago has “come under increasing pressure” in recent years.

The government draft does not show at any point that the “anti-democratic and misanthropic phenomena” addressed have actually increased, nor is an explanation given as to why this could be.

Instead, it is postulated that a situation has arisen “that poses an increasing threat to the free democratic basic order and social cohesion”.

Finally, there is the grave suspicion that the citizens are not only too passive to give social development a positive direction, but that they themselves – or at least a relevant part of them – have become a problem for democracy.

Have the citizens become more susceptible to anti-democratic and misanthropic attitudes, so that, as stated in the draft law, “[a] anti-democratic attitude and a rejection of state institutions is becoming evident in parts of society”?

Julian Assange and the eclipse of liberalism

President Biden is attempting to rally what he calls liberal democratic nations against autocratic China, Russia and Iran. But the Julian Assange case shows that liberalism is a sham in the USA and its vassal allies.

Assange in 2011

The USA under Obama, Trump and Biden has protected high-level officials who commit crimes and atrocities, while prosecuting persons such as Assange who reveal crimes and atrocities.

We got a reminder of this with the recent UK court decision to extradite Julian Assange for violation of the U.S. Espionage Act. The violation consisted of revealing killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. forces.

This is something that Woke Democratic and MAGA Republican leaders in the USA (though not necessarily all their followers) agree on, along with leaders of the UK, Australia, Sweden, Ecuador and other countries.

But if a government can commit crimes, and make it a crime to reveal those crimes, then what stands between the public and a would-be Hitler or Stalin?  And how can any impartial observer take U.S. leaders seriously, when they claim to be defenders of democracy and freedom?

LINKS

The Courage Foundation.  Julian Assange is not the only persecuted truth-teller.

Julian Assange Loses Appeal: British High Court Accepts U.S. Request to Extradite Him by Glenn Greenwald.  Why the persecution and prosecution of Assange is an attack on press freedom and the rule of law generally.

Julian Assange Has a Stroke in Belmarsh Prison by Susan Oliver for The Daily Mail.  [Added 12/15/2020]

There Is No Liberal West by N.S. Lyons.  I agree with Lyons’ eloquent defense of classic liberal principles against woke-ism, but notice that he does not mention people persecuted for truth-telling about militaristic governments and abusive corporations.  Freedom is indivisible.

Civil liberties are for all, not just for good people

Good old Glenn Greenwald remembers what some self-described liberals and progressives have forgotten: that basic rights such as due process of law and the right to a fair trial are meaningless unless they apply to foes and well as friends.

Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles by Glenn Greenwald.

“Those whose worldview is bereft of universally-held principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances, assume everyone else is plagued by this same deficiency.” 

 Democrats Are Profoundly Committed to Criminal Justice Reform—for Everybody But Themselves by Glenn Greenwald.

“Principles of rehabilitative justice, reform of the carceral state and liberalized criminal justice evaporate when Democrats demand harsh prison for their political adversaries.”

US Media Cowers, Not Covers, Chevron’s Persecution of Human Rights Lawyer Steve Donziger by Greg Palast and Zach D. Roberts.

That’s not to say that the threat to the rule of law comes exclusively or even mainly from liberals and progressives.

How worried should we be about a Trump coup?

Alfred W. McCoy, who’s observed many a military coup, thinks that a coup to keep President Donald Trump in power was, and still is, a real danger.

Trump’s attempt came in three stages, he wrote.

First there was a proposal by Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser, to invoke martial law to overturn the election.  

This was taken so seriously that all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, issued an appeal to the armed forces to remain neutral in the coming struggle.  

Then a Trump loyalist in the Justice Department suggested the department intervene to challenge the legitimacy of the election result by charging fraud.  

When Acting Attorney-General Jeffrey Rosen refused, Trump threatened to replace him.  He only backed down when Trump’s own appointees at Justice, including the President’s counsel, threatened to resign as a group.

Finally there was an attempt to use the threat of force to prevent Vice President Mike Pence for certifying the election results.  A crowd of protesters broke through police lines to enter the Capitol (and in some cases were allowed in).  

The Defense Department refused a request by the Mayor of Washington, D.C., to send in the National Guard, which was on stand-by alert.  Finally the Secretary of the Army, bypassing the chain of command, gave permission for the Maryland National Guard to intervene.

Mike Pence, unable to find a legal justification for refusing to certify the vote, did his constitutional duty.

All this shows is that there is still respect for the rule of law in the USA, even among Trump appointees.  US American freedom and democracy aren’t quite dead, although they’re in bad shape. 

But the failure of the Trump coup also shows that he does not have the support of the types of people who support military coups in other countries.  I mean the top levels of the military, the “intelligence community,” the super-rich and the heads of big corporations.  

None of them have any reason to feel dissatisfied with Joe Biden.  I think the outcome would have been very different if the alternative to a Donald Trump had been someone such as Bernie Sanders, who threatened their power and wealth.

Then, too, conditions in the USA are much as if a kind of military coup has already taken place.  

The billionaire class is able to thwart popular and necessary legislation.  People live in fear of losing their livelihoods for saying the wrong thing.  A lawyer is going to prison for the crime of having won a lawsuit against a big oil company.  Torturers have impunity while truth-tellers are punished.

And yet, people whom I respect, argue that there is a real and present danger of something worse.  

And it’s true.  Things could be a lot worse than they are now.  Things haven’t reached the point where I, personally, think I have reason to fear—not yet.

LINKS

American Coup: a Recurring Nightmare? by Albert W. McCoy for Counterpunch.

The Whole Country Is the Reichstag by Adolph Reed Jr.

The 1/6 committee’s threat to civil liberties

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent post questioning the constitutionality of the Select Committee on 1/6’s investigation.  All the abuses of power of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in an earlier are being repeated, this time with the support of self-described liberals. 

The committee’s mandate was to investigate why the Capitol Police were so unprepared to defend the Capitol against rioters, which is a proper and important matter to investigate.  

So is the role of the FBI, which had heavily infiltrated three of the major right-wing organizations, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.  To what degree did the FBI hold back its knowledge, or even possibly help instigate the riots?

What is not a proper topic for investigation is the activities and beliefs of private citizens.  Law enforcement is the function of the executive and judicial branches, not the legislative.  

The executive branch is responsible for investigating and prosecuting federal crimes.  The judicial branch is responsible for judging criminal charges and sentencing convicted criminals.

The investigative powers of Congress are limited to oversight of the executive branch and to research in connection with legislation.  It has no constitutional authority to investigate the activities of individuals just our of curiosity, or the desire to humiliate and punish.

Greenwald points out the extensive legal precedent for this, much of it dating from the McCarthy era.

Truthteller Craig Murray goes to jail

We live in a world in which is you are more likely to be punished for exposing certain kinds of crimes than for committing those crimes.

LINKS

Keeping Freedom Alive by Craig Murray.

Craig Murray’s jailing is the latest move to snuff out independent journalism by Jonathan Cook.

‘Domestic terrorism’ war planned before Jan. 6.

The USA Patriot Act was drafted, and in desk drawers, before the 9/11 attacks that supposedly were the reason for passing it.

The same is true of “war on domestic terrorism” legislation.  It was in the works before the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. 

Neither of these “wars” were reactions to events.  They were the result of long-term plans.

As Kit Knightly of the OffGuardian reported back on January 8:

Soon-to-be-President Joe Biden promised a new “domestic terrorism bill” back in November, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is why you’re seeing so much usage of the phrase “domestic terrorism” in the last couple of days. It’s the meme-phrase. The primary talking point for this whole exercise. It was underlined in all the memos sent out to all the media outlets.

That’s why Joe Biden went to such lengths to distinguish “domestic terrorists” from “protesters” in his speech following the riots.

That’s why the Council on Foreign Relations had an interview with a “counter-terrorism and national security expert” published within 24 hours of the incident, in which he spends 4 paragraphs arguing that the people who “stormed the capitol” were domestic terrorists.

That’s why the Washington Post has got an article dedicated to “lawmakers and experts” arguing that the Capitol Hill protest was an act of “domestic terrorism.” And so have Vox.  And Mother Jones.

That’s why ABC had an article about how “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” were a growing problem in America…a week before the riot took place.

And that’s why #TrumpisaDomesticTerrorist is trending on Twitter.

Georgetown University, a well-known spook college, published a paper in September 2020 titled the “The Need for a Specific Law Against Domestic Terrorism,” and op-ed pieces bemoaning the lack of such a law have been dotted through the press going back to last summer and even late 2019.

There was one published yesterday [Jan. 7], in which a “senior FBI official” says “more could have been done” if there had been a “specific law outlawing” domestic terrorism.

Knightly also had an excellent analysis a few days ago of the sweeping nature of the administration’s domestic terrorism strategy.

I don’t have any reason to think that either the 9/11 attacks or the 1/6 riots were anything other than what they appeared to be.

But both events were very convenient to powers that be, for stripping away civil liberties and drumming up support for the surveillance police state. 

And if they hadn’t happened, some other excuse would have been found for the continuing “global war on terror” and the new “domestic war on terror.”

What is the definition of “terror”?  Anything the government wants it to be.

LINKS

Prepare for the new “Domestic Terrorism Bill” by Kit Knightly for OffGuardian on Jan. 8, 2021

Inside Biden’s new “domestic terrorism” strategy by Kit Knightly for OffGuardian on July 1, 2021.

A new ‘war on terror’ is declared

I just got around to reading the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which was released a couple of weeks ago.  It is alarming.

There is no reason to think that the coming domestic war on terrorism will end any better than the George W. Bush administration’s global war on terrorism.

The threat, according to the document, is not primarily from terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan or al Qaeda, but from lone individuals, such as recent mass shooters, and ad hoc groups, such as the pro-Trump protesters on Jan. 6.

To protect society, it is not only necessary to suppress and disrupt inflammatory material on the Internet that might inspire violent action, but to conduct a society-wide educational campaign to counteract terrorist and pro-violence propaganda.

It is necessary to be aware of “inconography, symbology and phaseology” used by many domestic violent extremists, and to use “data-driven guidance” on how to identify them.

This could be used to develop watch lists of “known and suspected” terrorists to bar them from sensitive employment or put them on no-fly lists.

All this requires a coordinated effort involving federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments, but also bringing in civil society, the technology sector, academia and friendly foreign governments.

The document is full of boiler-plate language about the need to respect freedom of speech and other constitutional rights, but I do not take this seriously.  There are too many blurrings of distinctions between beliefs and deeds, between violence and nonviolent civil disobedience, and between actual and potential lawbreaking.

I recall the eclipse of civil liberties in the post 9/11 era, and I also am aware of how government and social media companies work together in the present era to suppress dissident opinion.

Interestingly, the document does not propose any legislation.  As I myself and others have pointed out, the legal and administrative machinery for dictatorship already exists.  All that is needed is to activate it. 

Wokeness and the enemies of free speech

I do not think that wokeness, or political correctness, or cancel culture, or whatever you want to call it, is the only threat to freedom of speech, nor is it the worst one.

I’ll mention Julian Assange, the war on whistleblowers, anti-boycott laws, attacks on journalists, and agricultural, medical and other gag orders, plus the fact that there is a lawyer in New York City who is under house arrest, and literally may go to prison, for the crime of having won a lawsuit against Chevron.

Also, the implications of the pending domestic war on terror.

The importance of wokeness is the failure to defend the principle of free speech by the political faction that historically has been its strongest champion, which leaves progressives and others defenseless against authoritarian government.

I’ve linked to three good articles on censorship below, and hope you have the time and interest to read them, or at least one or two of them.

LINKS

The Most Dangerous Censorship by Edward Snowden.

Some Principles and Observations About Social Justice Politics by Freddie deBoer.

What happened to Glenn Greenwald? Trump happened – and put the left’s priorities to the test by Jonathan Cook.

The USA is haunted by the specter of fascism

There are certain resemblances between the present-day USA and Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic.

We have an ineffective government that’s unable to deal with major problems or rein in its military.

We have increasing numbers of Americans who’ve given up on trying to change things by means of politics.

Many see no point in voting or following politics. Others think the only hope for change is in street protests.

Along with this is a loss of confidence in all sources of authority—government, religion, science, academia and journalism—and a hunger for something new.

Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times wondering whether the history of the Weimar Republic could repeat.  I think there are other, more likely ways that American democracy could break down, which I will get to.  But let me examine the Weimar script first.

While there are similarities, there also are big differences between Germany 90 years ago and the USA today. 

American political parties don’t have paramilitary auxiliaries.  Neo-Nazis and avowed racists are few.  Compare the turnout for the “unite the right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 with the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.

But all this could change if there was a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, particularly if it was accompanied by a humiliating military defeat.

Here’s how things could play out.  This isn’t a prediction, just a possibility.

In the wake of economic collapse, the streets of American citizens are filled with rioters, including extreme radicals and extreme nationalists.  A nationalist demagogue is elected President, and industrialists and the military look to him to restore order.  Congress votes him the power to impose martial law, which he does.  Martial law is never revoked.

The fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s arose from a breakdown of social order and a fear of Communist revolution.  The same conditions could arise in the United States, except that revolutionaries wouldn’t necessarily be Communists and the President who imposes permanent martial law wouldn’t necessarily be a nationalist or a right-winger.

∞∞

The conservative Christian blogger Rod Dreher sees another path to totalitarianism—a kind of low-level bloodless Stalinism in the name of what’s called identity politics or “anti-oppression” or “wokeness.”

Individuals have every right to define themselves on the basis of race, sex, gender or any other attribute, and band together with others to defend their rights and advance their interests.  I would never deny that people are held back by prejudice, and have a right to organize to overcome discrimination.

The problem is that believers in wokeness have embedded themselves in institutions, and demand not only that people subject to those institutions passively accept their ideas, but actively endorse them. 

They also demand a certain kind of way of saying things, so you can get in trouble by saying  “all lives matter” instead of “black lives matter.”

That’s how the new ideology resembles Stalinism and Maoism.  They, too, demanded not only passive acceptance, but enthusiastic support expressed in a prescribed vocabulary and a required show of penitence for not measuring up.

A recent public opinion poll showed that six in 10 Americans have political opinions they’re afraid to share and three in 10 fear that their political views could harm their job prospects.  Half of all strong liberals would fire a business executive known to have donated to the Trump campaign; three in 10 strong conservatives would do the same to a Biden donor. 

I don’t equate this to Stalin’s mass executions or the Gulag.  But I do think there’s a widespread and well-founded fear of getting into trouble by inadvertently saying the wrong thing or offending the wrong people, and I do see people afraid to speak their minds as I think free Americans ought.

Some people make a practice of searching social media to find things that people have said that could be considered objectionable, and then using this information to attack their reputations and careers.

Dreher fears the emergence of a social credit system like the one in China, where everyone’s every move is tracked through surveillance technology and social media, and people are rewarded or punished according to the acceptability of their behavior.

The passing scene: March 26, 2021

Here are links to some articles I found interesting, and maybe you will, too.

The US Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, Is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics by Glenn Greenwald.

“A letter from House Intelligence Committee members demands answers from the DNI about illegal breaches of the wall guarding against CIA and NSA domestic activity.”

When the CIA was chartered in 1947, it was prohibited from spying on Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid it would get involved in politics.  In the 1960s, the CIA was caught spying on U.S. political activists.  Now it is happening again in the name of a “war on domestic terrorism.”

A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views on the First Amendment by Matt Taibbi for TK News.

“Columbia law professor Timothy Wu wonders if the First Amendment is ‘obsolete’ and believes in ‘returning this country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s’.”

There is a contradiction between the view of Timothy Wu, an appointee to the National Economic Council, that anti-trust enforcement should be a priority in the Biden administration, and his view that Facebook, Google and other social media companies have a responsibility to protect the pubic from false statements.  These companies need monopoly power in order to carry out that mission.

If you give a private corporation or government agency the power and mandate to monitor communication to separate truth from lies, what you’re doing is giving that corporation or that agency a monopoly on lying.

Biden Team Prepares $3 Trillion in New Spending for the Economy by Jim Tankersley for the New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas.)

“A pair of proposals would invest in infrastructure, education, workforce development and fighting climate change, with the aim of making the economy more productive.”

The consensus in the Biden administration appears to be that President Obama was too cautious in fighting the 2008 recession, and that they will not repeat that mistake.

Good!  But can he overcome Republican opposition in the Senate?  What about monopoly power, financial fraud, international competitiveness and other problems that can’t be solved simply by flooding the economy with money?  Still, it’s early days and a good start.

Does Biden Really Want to End the Forever Wars? by Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn for The New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas) 

“If he does, he must work with Congress and go far beyond narrowing old permission slips for conflict.”

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: If a headline asks a question, the answer is “no.”

Greenwald on the threat to freedom of speech

During the previous four years, Democratic leaders and pro-Democratic newspapers and broadcasters aligned with U.S. intelligence agencies to undermine the Trump administration. 

Now that Democrats are in power, the alliance continues.  It’s highly improbable that the Biden administration will dial down any of the covert wars now being waged by the United States.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald, who got his start as a civil liberties lawyer, has the facts.

I’m not a supporter of Donald Trump.  As one who believes in historic American ideals of freedom and democracy, I’m concerned about the large fraction of the 74 million Trump voters who endorse mob violence or believe in the crazy Q-Anon conspiracy theory.

But trying to suppress people’s basic rights is not a good way to refute their belief that there is a conspiracy to suppress their basic rights.

Also, progressives and left-wingers are naive if they think the social media crackdown is going to be limited to their enemies. 

Donald Trump was a very bad President.  I’m glad he’s no longer in office.  But I don’t believe in attacking historic constitutional liberties in the name of preventing Trump supporters from destroying historic constitutional liberties.

LINKS

Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment by Glenn Greenwald.  “In their zeal for control of on-line speech, House Democrats are getting closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.”

The freedom of speech dilemma

The new documentary movie, “The Social Dilemma,” is about social media companies whose business plan is addiction.   We discussed it in the drop-in discussion group of First Universalist Church of Rochester, N.Y., last Tuesday.

This is a real problem I’ve written about myself, and little of what was presented is new to me.

The Internet itself has inherent addictive aspects, to begin with.  Social media companies use artificial intelligence and behavioral psychology to make their offerings more addictive. 

They combine AI and psychological expertise with surveillance technology to target individuals who are susceptible to certain types of advertising and propaganda.

Since their aim is “engagement,” it is more profitable to generate fear and anger than contentment because the negative emotions have more impact.  For the same reason, it often is more profitable to steer people to sensational fake news than dull but accurate news.

All this is generally understood.  [Update 1/30/2021. Then again, the movie itself may be an example of what it complains of.]

So why are there so many calls for the social media companies to take on the role of Internet censors?  If Facebook and Google are the sources of the problem, what qualifies their employees to decide which news sites I should see and which I shouldn’t?

It is not as if they have given up on a business model in which profits are made by enabling propaganda by exploiting surveillance and addiction.

What the social media companies seem to be doing is cracking down on everybody—right, left or off the spectrum—who dissents from the official view.

Experts quoted in the film say that, because of the social media companies, there is no agreement on what is true and what isn’t, and they also say the very concept of objective truth is disappearing. 

But these are two very different things.  It is not only possible, but very common, to have agreement based on lies or false beliefs. 

There was an official consensus in 2002, supported by, among others, the New York Times, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. 

As a result of those lies, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East lost their lives; millions became homeless refugees. 

Popular journalists who questioned the WMD lies, such as Phil Donahue, were canceled.  They have never been rehabilitated. 

Those who went along with the lies flourished.  They have paid no penalty, even in reputation.

The consequences of the WMD lie were many times greater than the Pizzagate conspiracy theory lie.  Spreading the Pizzagate story endangered innocent lives, I’m not trying to justify it, but, in fact, nobody died as a result.

More recently the so-called mainstream media spread baseless claims that Donald Trump is a secret agent of Vladimir Putin.  Trump is many bad things, but that charge was absurd.  The media also spread baseless claims to smear Julian Assange.

Maybe you doubt the Russiagate and Assange claims were fake news.  Fair enough.  But how can you be sure if you don’t have access to the arguments on the other side?

What most critics of the social media companies, including the producers of the movie, don’t get is that there is one thing worse than producing competing versions of reality that nobody can agree on.

The worse thing is the social media companies working hand-in-hand with government to produce a common propaganda version of reality based on official lies.  This is what is going on right now.

If liberals or progressives think a government and corporate crackdown on “fake news” is going to be limited to actual white supremacists or neo-Nazis, they are very naive.

The storming of the Capitol

Nearly half of all registered Republicans and roughly one-fifth of registered U.S. voters think the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was justified.

Max Blumenthal, who was one of the few reporters to mingle with the protestors, found that they were disproportionately former military, former police or current police.

This is bad news.  Coups and revolutions succeed when police and troops turn against the government.

I do not predict or fear a coup or revolution anytime soon.  What I do fear is a low-intensity insurgency that will provide an excuse for a crackdown like that following the 9/11 attacks, except that hard-core MAGA Republicans rather than Muslims will be the targets.

The equal or possibly greater danger is the alliance of progressives and WOKE Democrats with the FBI, CIA and the rest of the national security establishment and with Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media companies to set limits on freedom of expression.  Only the naive will think that the crackdown will be limited to the extreme right.

I confess that I underestimated the threat posed by Donald Trump.  I always thought he was too lazy and disorganized to become any kind of dictator.  I thought the danger of Trump was that he would be a kind of John the Baptist who would pave the way for a real dictator to come—someone with Trump’s demagogic talents, but without his self-destructiveness.

What I failed to see were his ability to stir up rage, both among his supporters and his enemies, and the strength of the Trump cult, which may well live on after Trump the man passes from the political scene.

All of this could have been averted if there had been sufficient security at the Capitol on Jan. 6.  The Capitol police were too few in number to block the invasion, and some of them were sympathetic to the invaders. 

I generally believe in Heinlein’s Rule, which is to never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.  But if somebody did make a decision to allow the invasion to happen, what was their purpose?  Did they sympathize with MAGA Republicans?  Or did they want to create an excuse for a crackdown?

LINKS

The Storming of the Capitol by Peter Moskos for Cop in the Hood.  [Added 1/25/2021]

Breach of Capitol Was a Military Operation, an interview of Max Blumenthal, founder of the Grayzone, for Black Agenda Report.

After the Capitol Riots, the Last Thing We Need Is Another War on Terror by Spencer Ackerman for The Daily Beast.

Julian Assange and journalistic hypocrisy

Rod Dreher on the coming soft totalitarianism

Communism and Naziism were different from plain old run-of-the-mill tyrannies.  They were totalitarian, not merely authoritarian.

An authoritarian ruler is content with passive obedience.  Silence is enough to buy safety under authoritarian rule.

A totalitarian regime demands active and sincere support, without mental reservations.  Totalitarianism aspires to control not only your outward actions, but your inner thoughts.

The rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s was new and frightening.  But after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War Two and the breakup of the Soviet Union following the Cold War, totalitarianism was seemingly defeated for good.

But the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, in his new book, LIVE NOT BY LIES: a Manual for Christian Dissidents, warns of the danger of a new form of totalitarianism.

The danger, in his view, consists of two converging forces: (1) the rise of what’s called “cancel culture” or “political correctness,” which seeks to punish people for unorthodox words and thoughts, and (2) the rise of surveillance technology, which gives the powers that be new tools for tracking down what you’ve said and thought.

You might say both fears are exaggerated.  Where is the equivalent of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps?

Dreher interviewed Christian dissidents who suffered under Communist rule, and they in fact see the seeds of a new totalitarianism in the USA and other Western countries.

It would be a “soft” totalitarianism, enforced by economic pressure and the pressure of public opinion.

People really do fear for their careers if they go on record as saying something unacceptable, even with the best of intentions.  It’s not just Christians or conservatives who suffer.  So do liberals or progressives who make a misstep.

It’s customary nowadays to search social media for things people may have said in the past that’s unacceptable now. 

Meanwhile high-tech companies such as Amazon offer services based on connecting everything in your life to the Internet.  This of course creates a record of everything you do. 

This information is sold to advertisers, marketers, bill collectors, insurance companies, credit rating agencies and anybody else with an interest in knowing about you, and also used to manipulate your mind.

It would be naive to think that your political and religious opinions are excluded from this, or that police and intelligence agencies don’t have access to this information.  We see a preview of what might happen in China’s social credit system.

I recommend Dreher’s book.  His fears are not exaggerated.  In fact, it is even broader than he makes out.  It is not just religious people and conservatives who are targeted.  Anybody of influence who is anti-war or anti-corporate is a target for cancellation.

And this is against a background in which the federal government asserts new powers to start wars, imprison whistleblowers, order assassinations and pressure social media companies to censor all those who depart from the official view.

I do not argue that you should be concerned about these issues rather than Dreher’s issues.  All these things are forces converging on the same outcome.

It’s the USA that’s on trial, not Julian Assange

If a government has the power to commit crimes and to punish those who reveal those crimes, there is no barrier to any form of tyranny.

In Wikileaks, Julian Assange created a means by which whistleblowers could reveal crimes and not be caught, and an example for others to follow.  He is one of the greatest heroes of our time.

By forgiving war criminals and prosecuting Assange, the U.S. government is acting like a dictatorship.  The governments of the U.K., Sweden, Ecuador and Australia are acting as if they are ruled by this dictatorship.

LINKS

The Idea Behind WikiLeaks: Julian Assange as a Physics Student by Niraj Lal on Consortium News.

The Stalinist Trial of Julian Assange: Which Side Are You On? by John Pilger.

CIA Torture Victim Backs Assange at Extradition Trial by Kevin Gosztola for Shadowproof.

Julian Assange US Extradition Show Trial of Journalism at the Old Bailey by John Kendall Hawkins for Antiwar.com.

Assange on Trial: Solitary Confinement and Parlous Health Care by Binoy Kampmark for Counterpunch.

The Guardian’s deceit-ridden new statement betrays both Julian Assange and journalism by Jonathan Cook.

Julian Assange is fighting for us all

Julian Assange is being abused and prosecuted and prosecuted for the crime of making the U.S. government’s crimes known.

If a government can commit crimes in secret and imprison or execute those who reveal its crimes, there is no limit to tyranny.

People like Assange stand between the public and absolute power.  That is why they are considered so dangerous.

LINKS

For Years, Journalists cheered Assange’s abuse | Now They’ve Paved His Way to a US Gulag by Jonathan Cook.  An important article.

The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange.  An important video.

Democracy, the military and the para-military

The U.S. Army has been used many times in American history to intervene in strikes, disperse protestors and even enforce court orders to desegregate schools.

So it’s interesting that the top military brass was leery of supporting President Trump’s plan to intervene in the Black Lives Matter protests.

I can understand why they might not have wanted to be identified with one of American history’s most divisive figures.  But there is another possible reason why they hesitated.

Roughly 21 percent of American soldiers are African-American, compared to just under 14 percent of the total population.

If I were an Army general, I would not want to test whether black American troops, and their white and Hispanic barrack-mates, would be willing to put down a movement whose goal is to end police abuse of black people.

But, as it turned out, Donald Trump didn’t need the career military.  The federal government has 132,000 personnel with military-grade weapons.

Since they lack rigorous military discipline, codes of conduct or a tradition of staying out of partisan politics, they serve his purposes better than the career military would.

In Portland, Oregon, unidentified men are grabbing people off the streets, throwing them into unmarked cars and taking them off to unknown locations.

They are not protecting government property or private property.  They are not restoring order.  They are putting down a rebellion.

Presumably we in the United States are not at the point where we can expect people in unmarked cars to dump bullet-riddled bodies into the street and speed away, as in the Dirty Wars in Argentina and  other Latin American countries.  I wish I could say I was confident that we would never get to this point in the USA.

Portland is just the beginning.  The Department of Homeland Security reportedly plans to send its para-militaries into Chicago and other U.S. cities.

The likely result will be to broaden and intensify the conflict.  Revolutionaries and fascists have a common objective—to widen conflicts so that everyone will have to choose one side or the other.

LINKS

Who Are These Guys? by Doug Muder for The Weekly Sift.

Trump’s police state attack in Portland, Oregon by Patrick Martin for the World Socialist Web Site.

President Trump sending federal police agents into major American cities by Kevin Reed for the World Socialist Web Site.

Border Patrol’s Dream of Becoming a National Police Force Is Becoming a Reality by Jenn Budd for Southern Border Communities Coalition.  [Added 7/22/2020]

TRUMP’S SECRET POLICE: A HISTORY LESSON by Peter Daou [Added 7/22/2020]  Trump is building on precedents set by Bush and Obama.

Civil liberties and “cancel culture”

One might expect the liberal-left to be among the strongest defenders of free speech at work, and of the right of workers to say what they wish, but too many have enthusiastically called upon employers to fire workers for alleged reactionary speech outside of the workplace, in effect cheering on at-will termination of employment, and embraced the multibillion-dollar human resources department–organized and employer-supervised “sensitivity training” industry, imposing top-down workshops, where workers are petrified they might say the wrong thing.

How this enhancement of the semifeudal powers of bosses to deliver 24/7 monitoring of workers’ speech is going to advance the trade union movement is a mystery.

The Threat to Civil Liberties Goes Way Beyond “Cancel Culture” by Leigh Phillips for Jacobin magazine.

The rising tide of censorship

Michael Moore was interviewed on Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiots podcast about the campaign to suppress the film, “Planet of the Humans,” a critique of the environmental movement.

It actually was taken down from YouTube for a few days because of a bogus concern about copyright.  Moore is a successful celebrity and was in a position to fight back.  As he pointed out, a younger filmmaker, in the same position as Moore when he made “Roger and Me,” wouldn’t have been able to do so.

Taibbi pointed out on his web log that this is part of a growing pattern of censorship.

The significance of the Moore incident is that it shows that a long-developing pattern of deletions and removals is expanding. The early purges were mainly of small/fringe voices on either the far right or far left, or infamously fact-challenged personalities like Alex Jones.

The removal of a film by Moore – a heavily-credentialed figure long revered by the liberal mainstream – takes place amid a dramatic acceleration of such speech-suppression incidents, many connected to the coronavirus disaster.

A pair of California doctors were taken off YouTube for declaring stay-at-home measures unnecessary; right-wing British broadcaster and trumpeter of shape-shifting reptile theories David Icke was taken off YouTube; a video by Rockefeller University epidemiologist Knut Wittknowski was taken down, apparently for advocating a “herd immunity” approach to combating the virus.

These moves all came after the popular libertarian site Zero Hedge was banned from Twitter, ostensibly for suggesting a Chinese scientist in Wuhan was responsible for coronavirus.

In late April, the World Socialist Web Site – which has been one of the few consistent critics of Internet censorship and algorithmic manipulation – was removed by Reddit from the r/coronavirus subreddit on the grounds that it was not “reliable.” The site was also removed from the whitelist for r/politics, the primary driver of traffic from Reddit to the site.

Then in early May, at least 52 Palestinian activists and journalists were removed from Facebook for “not following community standards,” part of a years-long pattern of removals made in cooperation with the Israeli government.

On May 13, human rights activist Jennifer Zeng noted that YouTube was automatically deleting Chinese-language references to terms insulting to the Chinese government, like gongfei, or “communist bandit.” Congressional candidate Shahid Buttar complained an interview with Walker Bragman about Democrats supporting surveillance powers was removed by YouTube.

Evan Greer of the speech advocacy group Fight for the Future had a post flagged by Facebook’s “independent fact checkers”—in this case, that noted pillar of factuality, USA Today – dinging him for a “partly false” claim that the Senate had voted to allow warrantless searches of browsing history.

The new Chinese surveillance state

Shoshana Zuboff warned us of the perils of American surveillance capitalism, and Edward Snowden of the American surveillance state.  But China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, is creating a surveillance system that leaves anything else far behind.

I recently read WE HAVE BEEN HARMONIZED: Life in China’s Surveillance State, by a German journalist named Kai Strittmatter, about how the components of the new system are now being put into place in different parts of China.

The components are:

A unified Internet service that combines the functions of a smart phone and a credit card, and allows for tracking of all electronic communication and all financial transactions.

A video surveillance system using facial recognition software that allows for tracking of all public behavior.

An artificial intelligence system capable of integrating all this information.

Algorithms that give people a “credit score” based on the government’s approval or disapproval of their behavior.

This is something like the two-way television sets in George Orwell’s 1984 and something like the East German Stasi’s real-life eavesdropping and surveillance system.

Both the fictional and the real system were limited by the human inability to keep track of everything all of the time.  The Chinese government’s hope is that advanced computer technology can overcome these limits.

At the same time, China is still an old-fashioned Soviet-style police state.  Dissidents are treated the same as in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.  The new controls do not replace the old.  Instead they are layered on top of them.

China, according to Strittmatter, is a virtually cashless society.  Payments are made through the WeChat app on the TenCent smartphone service or the Alipay app on the Alibaba service.  All transactions and all calls are monitored.

Certain words and phrases are forbidden in electronic communication. including “I do not agree,” “my emperor,” “Animal Farm” and “Winnie the Pooh”—the latter a nickname for the tall, stout, benign-looking  General Secretary Xi.

A law imposes three years in prison for anyone who posts a harmful rumor on the Internet, if it is shared 500 times or viewed 5,000 times.  There was a wave of arrests in 2013 for spreading false rumors.

Strittmatter saw a video surveillance system at an intersection that showed the faces of jaywalks on a huge screen, together with their names, home addresses and ID numbers.  These systems do not exist everywhere in China, but they are examples of what might be.

He saw a video surveillance system in a collage classroom that monitored whether students were paying attention.  It also recorded their facial expressions, which were fed into a system that supposedly could evaluate their feelings and emotions.

Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, a leading Chinese search engine company, told Strittmatter that his goal was to insert artificial intelligence into every aspect of human life.

The Chinese government plans to use this data to set up a “social credit” system which will give each Chinese person a score for “social truthworthiness.”  Strittmatter saw such a system being tested in the small city of Rongcheng.

Update of the famous ‘they came for’ quote

There’s a famous quote attributed to a German pastor about the failure of respectable people to resist the Nazis.

• First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist.
• Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
• Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew.
• Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.

Caitlin Johnstone, noting the silence of the mainstream press about the arrest of left-wing reporter Max Blumenthal, updated the quote for our time.

• First they came for Assange, and I did not speak out, because I was a mainstream western journalist with no intention of ever upsetting the powerful.
• Then they came for Blumenthal, and I did not speak out, because I was a mainstream western journalist with no intention of ever upsetting the powerful.
• Then they came for all the other dissident journalists, and I did not speak out, because I will never be a dissident journalist.
• They never came for me, because I have chosen to serve power.

LINK

Mainstream Journalists Who Refuse To Defend Dissident Journalists Are Worshippers Of Power by Caitlin Johnstone.

Max Blumenthal Arrest Exposes Hypocrisy of Western Media and Human Rights NGOs by Joe Emensberger for Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR)  [Added 11/1/2019]

Reporter shackled, caged, denied a phone call

This is disturbing.

Max Blumenthal, the editor of the news site The Gray Zone, was arrested on the morning of October 25 on a fabricated charge related to the siege of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC that took place between April and May.

A team of DC police officers appeared at Blumenthal’s door at just after 9 AM, demanding entry and threatening to break his door down.  A number of officers had taken positions on the side of his home as though they were prepared for a SWAT-style raid.

Max Blumenthal

Blumenthal was hauled into a police van and ultimately taken to DC central jail, where he was held for two days in various cells and cages.  He was shackled by his hands and ankles for over five hours in one such cage along with other inmates.  His request for a phone call was denied by DC police and corrections officers, effectively denying him access to the outside world.

Blumenthal was informed that he was accused of simple assault by a Venezuelan opposition member. He declared the charge completely baseless.

“This charge is a 100 percent false, fabricated, bogus, untrue, and malicious lie,” Blumenthal declared. “It is clearly part of a campaign of political persecution designed to silence me and the The Gray Zone for our factual journalism exposing the deceptions, corruption and violence of the far-right Venezuelan opposition.”

The arrest warrant was five months old.  According to an individual familiar with the case, the warrant for Blumenthal’s arrest was initially rejected.  Strangely, this false charge was revived months later without the defendant’s knowledge.

“If the government had at least told me I had a warrant I could have voluntarily surrendered and appeared at my own arraignment. I have nothing to fear because I’m completely innocent of this bogus charge,” Blumenthal stated. “Instead, the federal government essentially enlisted the DC police to SWAT me, ensuring that I would be subjected to an early morning raid and then languish in prison for days without even the ability to call an attorney.”

Source: The Gray Zone