Tag Archives: Dissent

A History of Dissent, by Joe Lauria

Posted on January 5, 2023 | Leave a comment

Dissent is essential for both progress and freedom. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

The Western establishment doesn’t appear to understand how Western journalists could exercise their own agency and judgment to critique U.S. foreign policy without them being agents of a foreign power, writes Joe Lauria.

Thomas Paine by Gutzon Borglum, parc Montsouris, Paris. (couscouschocolat from Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France/Wikimedia Commons)

The United States was founded by dissenters. The Declaration of Independence is one of history’s most significant dissenting documents, inspiring people seeking freedom around the world, from the French revolutionists to Ho Chi Minh, who based Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France on the American declaration.

But over the centuries a corrupt centralization of American power seeking to maintain and expand its authority has at times sought to crush the very principle of dissent which was written into the United States Constitution.

Freedom to dissent was first threatened by the second president. Just eight years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, press freedom had become a threat to John Adams, whose Federalist Party pushed through Congress the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. They criminalized criticism of the federal government. There were 25 prosecutions and 10 convictions, under the Sedition Act. The acts expired and some repealed by 1802.

The Union then shut down newspapers during the U.S. Civil War.

Woodrow Wilson came within one vote in the Senate of creating official government censorship in the 1917 Espionage Act. The 1918 Alien and Sedition Act that followed jailed hundreds of people for speech until it was repealed in 1921.

Since the 1950s, McCarthyism has become the byword for one of the worst periods of repression of dissent in U.S. history.

The closest we’ve come to Wilson’s troubling dream is the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security, which after heavy criticism was disbanded.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Liberty, Politics, Tyranny

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WHICH Scientific Consensus? by L. Reichard White

Posted on April 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s manufactured narrative and consensus, and then there’s science. From L. Reichard White at lewrockwell.com:

I bet you’d be surprised to discover the overwhelming true scientific consensus is that the official COVID-19 narrative is, shall we say to be polite, “flawed.” If we weren’t being polite, words like “bogus,” “dishonest,” “fake,” “malarkey,” “nonsense,” “B.S.” might show up.

The evidence for that true scientific consensus — as opposed to the “flawed” one you hear incessantly from Main Stream Media (MSM) — comes from but is not limited to these 13,986 medical and public health scientists and these 42,587 medical practitioners. As of April 11, 2021, that’s 56,573 scientists in all and growing. This doesn’t include the additional three-quarters-of-a-million+ concerned citizens, who, along with the scientists, all signed The Great Barrington Declaration, dissing the flawed official COVID-19 narrative.

And there are also other groups such as the 1,500+ members of the World Doctor’s Alliance who are telling us to “STOP the biggest health scam of the 21st century.“

That’s more than 58,000 scientists, doctors, and an additional 3/4 million concerned citizens, but forget the concerned citizens for now.

So why haven’t you heard from the 58,000+ dissenting doctors and scientists? In fact, since we’re supposed to “follow the science,” why haven’t you heard from them every day?

Either by design or by opportunism — “Never let an emergency go to waste,” — the folks who want to control everyone either created or grabbed COVID-19 as a golden opportunity.

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Posted in Governments, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

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They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

They don’t care as long as most of the people stay fooled most of the time. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it’s just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda.

I get comments from people every day wagging their fingers at my criticisms of western imperialist agendas against nations like China or Iran saying “If you lived over there you wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the government the way you criticize western governments!”

It is true that dissidents are permitted to criticize the government systems of the US-centralized empire to an extent, but only to an extent. Yes, as long as my criticisms of capitalism, oligarchy and imperialism remain relegated to the fringes of influence I am indeed permitted to express my views unmolested. If however I somehow ascended to a position of significant mainstream influence I would be targeted and smeared until my reputation was ruined or I had a psychological breakdown and went away. You may be certain of this.

The managers of empire do not work to crush and silence all dissent like a conventional totalitarian regime would do. They are much more clever than that.

In a society that maintains the illusion of freedom in order to prevent outrage and revolution, it does not serve rulers to stifle all dissent. Just the opposite in fact: their interests are served by having a small number of dissidents hanging around the fringes of society creating the illusion of freedom. If Johnny Hempshirt over there is allowed to stand on a soapbox and criticize the US war machine, then the US must be a free country.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Imperialism, Politics

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The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on February 17, 2021 | 1 comment

There are a lot of people out there trying to shut up anyone who deviates or questions the party line. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

Any strategy that successfully manipulates public opinion is bound to be repeated, and we can now clearly see how the tobacco industry’s playbook is being used to shape the public narrative about COVID-19 and the projected post-COVID era.

In 2011, after many years of raising awareness regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and industrial agriculture, we decided we needed a new game plan. Educating people through our newsletter was great, but we realized the best way to expose Monsanto — a leading GMO advocate and patented seed owner at the time — was to get them to engage directly and ensure national attention.

To that end, Mercola.com funded the signature gathering in California that initiated Proposition 37, the right to know what’s in your food by ensuring proper GMO labeling. We spent more than $1 million for the Prop 37 initiative, plus several million dollars more for GMO labeling initiatives in other U.S. states in the following years.

This initiative forced Monsanto to engage with the public directly to defend their toxic products and dangerous business practices, all while receiving national coverage in the process.

The Monsanto Case

Monsanto spent tens of millions of dollars attacking anyone in their way, but they did so indirectly, just like the tobacco industry did before them. This is the core take-home of what I’m about to describe next.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Crime, Cronyism, Government, Horseshit, Law, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

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The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, by Brendan O’Neill

Posted on December 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

JK Rowling discovers a harsh truth about the left she’s always championed: deviations from orthodoxy are not permitted! From Brendan O’Neill at spiked-online.com:

The persecution of women who question transgenderism has got to stop.

Standing up for women’s rights is a risky business these days. Just ask JK Rowling. She has had merry hell rained down upon her over the past 24 hours. She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists. Her crime? She defended the right of a woman to express her opinion about sex and gender without losing her job.
The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, the ceaseless online abuse of her over the past day and night, exposes how unhinged, hateful and outright misogynistic the transgender movement has become. Rowling’s sin was to tweet in defence of Maya Forstater, the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable. That is, a man cannot become a woman, and vice versa. This week, an employment tribunal outrageously upheld Ms Forstater’s sacking and in the process it decreed what it is acceptable for people in the workplace to think and say. The judge said the kind of views held by Forstater are ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’. This essentially gives a green light to the harassment, isolation and expulsion from the workplace of anyone who questions the transgender ideology.

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Suppressing Dissent Guarantees Disorder and Collapse, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on December 6, 2019 | Leave a comment

If people aren’t allowed to dissent, the pressure builds until things blows up. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The frantic efforts of am exploitive elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime’s path to collapse.

Regimes that are losing public support always make the same mistake: rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust–the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many– the regime reckons the problem is dissent: if we suppress all dissent, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way.

What the regimes don’t understand is dissent is the immune system of society:suppressing dissent doesn’t just get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists; it also gets rid of the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. Suppressing dissent dooms the society to sclerosis, decline and collapse.

Dissent is the relief valve: shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line fall in one of two ways: 1) the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power or 2) the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economy, Government

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An Officer’s Path to Dissent, by Major Danny Sjursen

Posted on January 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

The politicians who send our military off to wars and the populace that generally cheer them on rarely ponder what those wars do to the men who fight them. From Major Danny Sjursen at truthdig.com:

Maj. Danny Sjursen gathering coordinates to set up an airstrike while under fire during a patrol in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. (Danny Sjursen)

For a while there, I was a real star. High up in my class at West Point, tough combat deployments in two wars, a slew of glowing evaluations, even a teaching assignment back at the military academy. I inhabited a universe most only dream of: praised, patted and highly respected by everyone in my life system and viewed as a brave American soldier. It’s a safe, sensible spot. For most, that’s enough. Too bad it was all bunk. Absurdity incarnate.

The truth is, I fought for next to nothing, for a country that, in recent conflicts, has made the world a deadlier, more chaotic place. Even back in 2011—or even 2006, for that matter—I was just smart and just sensitive enough to know that, to feel it viscerally.

Still, the decision to publicly dissent is a tough one. It’s by no means easy. Easy would be to go on playing hero and accepting adulation while staying between the lines. Play it safe, stick to your own, make everyone proud. That’s easy, intellectually immature—the new American way.

When you take the journey of dissent, you lose friends, alienate family, confuse confidants and become a lonely voice in your professional world. I’ve spent years sitting in military classrooms from West Point to Fort Knox to Fort Leavenworth as the odd man, the outlier, the confusing character in the corner. It’s like leaving the church, becoming an atheist, all while still living in the monastery. Still, the truth is that the military is more accommodating than one might suspect. I wrote a critical book, published some skeptical articles, but it’s not as though anyone ever outright threatened me. The pressure is different, more subtle: veiled warnings from superiors, cautious advice from mentors.

To continue reading: An Officer’s Path to Dissent

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Posted in Government, Military, Morality, Psychology, War

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The Silencing of Dissent, by Chris Hedges

Posted on September 25, 2017 | Leave a comment

SLL, which has been known to dissent from time to time, takes a keen interest in efforts to silence dissent. From Chris Hedges at truthdig.com:

The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”

No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.

The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced with gusto by “liberal” media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC, has unleashed what some have called a virulent “New McCarthyism.”

To continue reading: The Silencing of Dissent

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Cronyism, Government, Media

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