P. GREANVILLE—Since we are talking here about the global plutocracy’s megaphone, ably directed by an army of hidden persuaders, the money and resources—public and private—for the manufacturing of elaborate lies are inexhaustible. In 1984 Orwell envisioned a shameless tyranny with a “Ministry of Truth” in charge of manufacturing lies and escapist fantasies 24/7. Orwell, who despite his participation in the Spanish Civil War as an anarchist sympathizer was actually no real lefty (but a reactionary snitch who made a blacklist of leftists for the British government), aimed 1984 and his equally famous satire Animal Farm at the Soviet Union. Orwell thought —or asked us to believe—that in the Soviet Union mankind had met the ultimate perfidy. He was alarmingly wrong then and he would be triple wrong today, if, surmounting his class prejudices and temperament, he had examined with equanimity the true history of the world since the end of WW2, and the consequent rise of the Anglo-American empire to global supremacy.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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Caleb Maupin’s Rebuttal to Biden’s “State of the Union”
5 minutes readCALEB MAUPIN provides an impassioned—and irrefutable—rebuttal to the Biden 2022 state of the union exercise in lies and futility.
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‘Russian Propaganda’ Is The Latest Excuse To Expand Censorship
24 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda,” US Senator Mark Warner tweeted on Friday.
Since then YouTube has announced that it has suppressed videos by Russian state media channels so that they’ll be seen by fewer people in accordance with its openly acknowledged policy of algorithmically censoring unauthorized content, as well as de-monetizing all such videos on the platform. Google and Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta both banned Russian state media from running ads and monetizing on their platforms in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Twitter announced a pause on ads in both Russia and Ukraine.
“Glad to see action from tech companies to reign in Russian propaganda and disinformation after my letter to their CEOs yesterday,” Warner tweeted on Saturday. “These are important first steps, but I’ll keep pushing for more.”
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Disturbing news: at least 50% of Americans now endorse censorship—by the government or Big Tech
17 minutes readP. GREANVILLE—Inhabiting a clusterfuck of ignorance and disinformation, Americans are woefully ill-equipped to distinguish truth from falsehood. Granted, the desire to expunge the lies from the national debate is valid and healthy, but that train left the station a long time ago. It left the station when Americans —mostly in the immediate postwar period—the “Eisenhower years”—dropped their guard to concentrate on living the American Dream, brushing aside the need to understand real politics. They did not see that the postwar affluence was the product not so much of capitalism’s wonderful design—long enshrined by hucksters as “the American Way of Life”—but of a historically brief and exceptional moment in which the United States had found itself as the sole global industrial superpower, with all rivals in ruins.
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MATT EHRET—After seven years of civil war in East Ukraine, 14 thousand casualties, broken peace deals and countless appeals by those living in the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics for independence from the Nazi-infested militias embedded in the Kiev defense forces, Russia decided to finally recognize the East Ukrainian republics as sovereign nations. A few days later, Russia unleashed a program of de-militarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine featuring targetted military strikes that (as of this writing) have annihilated over 74 military bases, US biolabs and entrenched radical neo-nazi forces that have been entrenched in the Ukrainian military since 2014.
But despite this completely understandable humanitarian intervention which is provably NOT an annexation, we see endless instances of western sock-puppet statesmen denouncing Russia’s “imperial ambitions and antagonism to western democratic values.”