The most important thing to remember is that analysis of any society or leader with no (or inadequate) context is bound to yield highly distorted or erroneous results. Learning about and imagining the actual circumstances in which leaders and societies made the decisions they did is essential to a fair understanding of their actions. What’s more, it’s not accdental that the elimination of historical context is the favorite tool of propagandists. Almost all of anti-communist propaganda in the West—which continues unabated to this day— is grounded in ahistorical presentation of pseudo facts. Trying to understand facts without proper contextualization is simply an illusion. And an exercise in political dishonesty.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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ED CURTIN—Curtis maintains that there is no meaning anywhere (not even in a review); we are all living as if we are on “an acid trip”; and we will never know what the hell is going on in the world because…well, because there is no logic to anything and our brains are scrambled with fragmented memories, fleeting images, and paranoid thoughts just like the movie Curtis narrates in his unemotional, matter-of-fact voice. He doesn’t have to say that he’s cool and everyone else is nuts. The style is the man when the authoritative voice calmly speaks above the din. Quite BBCish.
“Everything is relative,” is the underlying message, except that Curtis fails to spell out the contradiction in this post-modern meme: Everything is relative but the statement that everything is relative. It is absolute. Some people know and others don’t. Next video clip please.
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Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists
41 minutes readGLENN GREENWALD—I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public.
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Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse
54 minutes readGLENN GREENWALD—The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.
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The other great problem with this fantasy is the terrible relationship the Trump administration had with the truth. This president’s lies surpassed a list of more than 20,000 false “facts”, which ended with the assault on the Capitol building in Washington because he and his followers opposed the verifiable reality of an election that Joe Biden won.