Tag Archives: Repression

Bonfire of the Governments, Part Two, by Robert Gore

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wsj.com

Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Part One

Think of an activity that’s essential for a government bent on subjugation: censorship and the suppression of expression. Governments on both sides of the present conflict have further jacked up their efforts to control expression from the plateau reached with Covid. Russia just passed a law imposing a 15-year prison sentence for anyone spreading “fake news” about its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and European governments and lapdog legacy and social media have blanketed populaces with official propaganda. Just as with Covid, questions and deviations from the approved narrative are stifled, censored, and punished.

It was all so much easier back in the post World War II, pre-internet good old days. In the U.S. and Europe, there were several “papers of record” that had been infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and state-licensed radio and television stations. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t even that, just a few official propaganda organs.

Yet even with that degree of control, government repression wasn’t wholly effective. In the U.S. the truth got out about the Vietnam War. The Soviets could stop everything but people talking with each other, albeit in hushed tones. The cynical humor became legendary. (“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”) Humor always contains an element of truth, which is why statists can’t do humor. The number of citizens red-pilled to Soviet corruption and incompetence and the comparative freedom and wealth of the West reached critical mass and the government fell. It took way too long, but it happened.

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Today, there are billions of potential journalists and video producers—anyone with a cell phone and access to the internet—and trillions of text and email communications. People still occasionally engage in face-to-face conversations. The infrastructure needed to monitor all this is complex, gargantuan, and costly. Only algorithms and artificial intelligence can sort through it to identify threats to the state. Once identified, a separate infrastructure is necessary to apprehend, arrest, process, incarcerate and perhaps execute those engaged in wrongthought, wrongspeak, wrongwrite, and wrongact.

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Orwell Was Right, by Matt Taibbi

Somehow the human brain adjusts to telling endless lies and adjusting to blatant contradictions. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

From free speech to “spheres of influence” to our passion for endless war, we’ve become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted

This weekend I re-read 1984, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of doublethink:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.

In the last weeks, Russia took an already exacting speech environment to new extremes. A law was passed that would impose 15-year prison sentences for anyone spreading “fake news” about the Ukraine invasion; access was cut to Facebook and Twitter; stations like Echo Moskvi and TV Rain as well as BBC Russia, Radio Liberty, the New Times, Deutsche Welle, Doxa, and Latvia-based Meduza were effectively shut down; Wikipedia was threatened with a block over its invasion page; and national authorities have appeared to step in to prevent coverage of soldiers killed in the war, requiring local outlets to use terms like “special operation” instead. The latter development is connected to the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issuing a remarkably desperate dictum requiring news outlets to “use information and data received by them only from official Russian sources.”

Russia also appears in the middle of a general crackdown on local media, not so much because those outlets are dissenting, but because they’re more likely to provide indirect evidence of war failures or the effect of sanctions. The desperation to control news has grown to the point where Russian diplomats in foreign countries are pressuring state outlets in countries like Iran to stop using the term “war” to describe what’s going on in Ukraine.

On the flip side, a slew of actions have been taken to crack down on “fake news” and “misinformation” in the West. The big one was the European Union banning RT and Sputnik:

Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube also cut access to all Russian state media, because the EU sanctions also required that internet platforms delist any RT or Sputnik content, even from individuals. The statute reads, “As regards the posts made by individuals that reproduce the content of RT and Sputnik, those posts shall not be published, and if published, shall be deleted.”

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The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West, Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is certainly not the first to point out the fascism of the anti-fascists. From Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.

Police in Canada deployed to dislodge the final truckers and protesters from downtown Ottawa, aimed at bringing an end to three weeks of demonstrations over Covid-19 health rules. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP) (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

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An Increasingly Ominous Response to the January 6 Riot, by Ted Galen Carpenter

January 6 joins Covid as an excuse to impose totalitarianism. From Ted Galen Carpenter at antiwar.com:

Earlier this month, the country marked the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. For one faction in America’s increasingly polarized political system, however, it was not enough to castigate the rioters for their disgraceful, indefensible conduct. It was not even enough to urge the Justice Department to continue prosecuting the individuals involved for trespass, assault, and the other crimes they committed. Instead, the campaign that began the previous year to brand the episode as an outright “insurrection” acquired new fervor. That mentality has now led to measures that threaten important constitutional rights and could herald a new era of harassment and repression reminiscent of the era when Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s influence was at its zenith.

Considering the January 6 events an insurrection constitutes a wild stretch of the concept. There were no tanks in the streets, armed assaults on multiple governmental institutions, or efforts to either seize or shut down the news media – the cardinal features of a true insurrection. A recent public opinion survey confirms that a majority of Americans rightly reject the use of that term regarding the riot at the Capitol.

However, Joe Biden’s administration is adopting multiple policies that assume that the inflammatory allegation is indisputable. The pace of that ominous process is accelerating and the scope of intolerance is widening. Indeed, far too many players in the executive branch, Congress, and the news media smear as an “insurrectionist” anyone who participated in the much larger peaceful rally on the Mall that preceded the breach of the Capitol, or who merely continues to argue that vote fraud occurred during the 2020 election.

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Since 9/11, the Government’s Answer to Every Problem Has Been More Government, by John Whitehead

It’s a cycle: problem→government→government makes problem worse→more government→and so on. From John Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”—Anonymous

Have you noticed that the government’s answer to every problem is more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty?

The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn.

Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

To the police state, this COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge boon, like winning the biggest jackpot in the lottery. Certainly, it will prove to be a windfall for those who profit from government expenditures and expansions.

Given the rate at which the government has been devising new ways to spend our money and establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems, this current crisis will most likely end up ushering in the largest expansion of government power since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

As chief correspondent Dan Balz asks for The Washington Post, “Government is everywhere now. Where does it go next?

When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control.

This expansion of government power is also increasing our federal debt in unprecedented leaps and bounds. Yet the government isn’t just borrowing outrageous amounts of money to keep the country afloat. It’s also borrowing indecent sums to pay for programs it can’t afford.

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They Are Rolling Out The Architecture Of Oppression Now Because They Fear The People, by Caitlin Johnstone

There’s strength—and rage—in numbers, and our rulers know it. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.”

“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19,” reads a new report from Bloomberg. “People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”

“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine. However, civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of power once the immediate threat has passed,” reads a recent VentureBeat article titled “After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal“.

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As Media Amplifies Unrest in Venezuela and Beyond, Millions Are Quietly Revolting in Colombia, by Alan Macleod and Whitney Webb

Any two-bit demonstration agains the government in a leftist Latin America will probably get picked up by the US mainstream media, but it ignores substantial and long-running protests against governments that are friends of the US government. From Alan Macleod and Whitney Webb at mintpressnews.com:

Despite protests of historic proportions fueled by anger over corruption and a brutal right-wing crackdown, the unrest in Colombia has garnered remarkably little international media attention compared to Venezuela.

Many of the massive anti-neoliberal protest movements that exploded across the globe last year have pressed on into 2020, especially those that rose up throughout Latin America. Many of those demonstrations — clearly newsworthy due to their enormous size, composition, and motives — were and continue to be ignored by prominent English language news outlets, essentially creating a media blackout of these movements.

This trend has been particularly magnified in Latin American countries whose current governments are closely allied with the United States, with Colombia, in particular, standing out. Despite being faced with protests from hundreds of thousands of people fueled by anger over state corruption, proposed neoliberal reforms and a spike in murders of social leaders, the unrest in Colombia has garnered remarkably little international media attention.

In contrast, U.S.-supported right-wing movements attempting to topple socialist governments like those in Venezuela and Bolivia have received a great deal of coverage and open support from both the media and the political class.

It is certainly telling that international media outlets largely ignored the protests of Colombia’s teachers, who were motivated to act largely due to a dangerous wave of violence targeting them incited by the government itself, leading to several murders and hundreds of death threats in the span of just a few months. Colombia’s President Iván Duque’s political mentor Álvaro Uribe, himself president between 2002 and 2010, accused the country’s teachers of brainwashing the youth: “Teachers only teach them to yell and to insult, not how to debate, warping their minds,” he said.

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The Illusion of Control, Part Two, by Robert Gore

The coming chaos

Part One

The US government has gone all in on taxation, redistribution, spending, expansion of its power, ever more intrusive laws and regulations, the increasing curtailment of liberty, debt funding, and debt-based “money” it and the Federal Reserve produce at will. The coercion and fraud implicit in these measures have been poisons on American political culture and are destroying the US economy and way of life.

Control, illusory or otherwise, requires resources. Government produces nothing, so the resources must be taken or borrowed. The economic grave it’s digging for itself is the greatest threat to the US government’s control. Taxation discourages production. Regulation throws sand in the economy’s gears and can stop it entirely. Steadily mounting debt and its consequent debt service exact an increasing toll. Most US debt funds consumption, which generates no offsetting return, not production, which potentially does.

Monetary flim-flam—the central bank using its created-at-will debt to buy the government’s created-at-will debt—is embraced in some particularly deluded quarters as a panacea, but it’s really a perpetual motion snare. Nothing is created or produced, so it’s tempting to say the central bank-government fiat debt exchanges have the same economic effect as two people exchanging twenty-dollar bills.

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Let’s Talk About Saudi Arabia, by Michael Krieger

Any close examination of Saudi Arabia and its government yields the question: why would the US ever want to crawl into bed with these corrupt, ruthless, double-dealing kleptocrats? From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

All wars require casus belli, ostensible justifications. After all, despite humanity’s long history of vicious warfare, interstate combat often requires a government distant from its working class to motivate its people to kill and die for distant institutions and esoteric ideologies. That said, Washington doesn’t exactly have a strong track record of honesty regarding its rationales for war. Few Americans know or care much for their own history…

Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting…It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting.

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

It’s fall 2019, and nearly twenty years into a series of disastrous and murderous forever wars sold to the public as a necessary response to 9/11, we’re being instructed to prepare for another one. Replace the Q with an N at the end of IRA and you know what I’m talking about. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone considering much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been actively scheming for some invented justification to take out Iran (and many others) for decades.

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Hurricane Barry Proves Terrorist Threat Is A Hoax, by Paul Craig Roberts

It’s been almost eighteen years since 9/11, and terrorists have had innumerable opportunities to inflict huge damage on American infrastructure and murder thousands, hundred thousands, or millions of people. Yet it hasn’t happened. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

What Hurricane Barry tells us as it floods an already flooded New Orleans is that the “terrorist threat” that the US allegedly faces is a hoax.

What do I mean?  Think about it this way.  Terrorists, if such exist, have had ample warning about New Orleans’ precarious position with the swollen Mississipi river in flood stage for the longest period in recorded history.  What would terrorists be doing as I write?  They woud be setting off explosives to breach one of the levees and watch the Mississippi river wash New Orleans away.  

This is simple child’s play for terrorists who, if you believe the US government, are so clever that they outwitted airport security four times in one hour on the same morning, hijacked 4 airliners, and brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers and part of the Pentagon.  

Indeed, there are any number of dams and levees that could easily be breached with chaotic results.  The same for power sub-stations and cell phone towers.  “Airport security” is a pointless exercise as terrorists can kill far more people by exploding their bombs in the crowds waiting to clear TSA than they can by blowing up an airliner.  The easiest way for terrorists to cause mayhem is to empty boxes of roofing nails during rush hour on all major arteries in all major American cities.  It would take weeks to clear the roads of the hundreds of thousands of cars. Life in the major cities would come to a standstill.  People couldn’t get to work, school, or hospital. Food deliveries could not be made.  Those without provisions would lose a lot of weight and some would starve to death.  

All of these acts are far easier and far less complicated to arrange than the 9/11 attack.  Yet not a single one of them has occurred.  Other than TSA terrorizing US citizens, what terrorist acts have we experienced?  School shootings, assuming they are real and not stage productions, are not done by Muslim terrorists.

The absence of Muslim terrorist attacks in America is puzzling in view of the mass slaughter, maiming, orphaning, and dislocation of millions of Muslims by the US government for almost two decades.  This absence of retribution must seem strange to Americans who are accustomed to extreme demonization of Muslims.

The war on terror is a hoax used (1) to justify Washington’s destruction of 7 countries in whole or part during the first two decades of the 21st century, (2) to create a domestic police state and achieve the acquiescence by US citizens in the loss of their Constitutional protections, and (3) to create fortunes for favored operatives of the police state, such as Michael Chertoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff ), the director of Homeland Security who became rich selling scanning machines to TSA.