Carl,
I'd be delighted if you forward my articles to the ACB list because more people
will see them. I would prefer, however, that you delete my name and email from
these forwarded messages. I don't want to debate these folks or receive hate
mail from them.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 10:50 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Building the Iron Wall
Miriam and All:
Sorry. I was preparing to send Chris Hedges article along to the ACB Chat
List, and forgot to change the recipient. I did not want to upstage you,
Miriam, I just enjoy some of the defensive reactions Chris Hedges articles
receive from folks who love to label and trash, rather than to listen and think
independently.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/19/18, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From Carl Jarvis.
Once again I post an article with the hope that it will cause us to
debate the content, not to trash the author, Chris Hedges. Labeling
Hedges as "Radical", as some do, does not change the content of his
article. It merely alters how we see it. And that is the beauty of
good censorship, to twist the minds of the reader without touching the
content being presented. If we condemn the author, we never give
serious attention to his thoughts.
And so, I present, for your consideration, the following:
****
On 3/19/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Building the Iron Wall
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, along with 18 members of the House of
Representatives-15 Republicans and three Democrats-has sent a letter
to Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding that the Qatari-run
Al-Jazeera television network register as a foreign agent under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The letter was issued after
Al-Jazeera said it planned to air a documentary by a reporter who
went undercover to look into the Israel lobby in the United States.
The action by the senator and the House members follows the decision
by the Justice Department to force RT America to register as a
foreign agent and the imposition of algorithms by Facebook, Google
and Twitter that steer traffic away from left-wing, anti-war and
progressive websites, including Truthdig. It also follows December's
abolition of net neutrality.
The letter asks the Justice Department to investigate "reports that
Al Jazeera infiltrated American non-profit organizations." It says
that the "content produced by this network often directly undermines
American interests with favorable coverage of U.S. State
Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, including
Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's
branch in Syria."
"American citizens deserve to know whether the information and news
media they consume is impartial, or if it is deceptive propaganda
pushed by foreign nations," the letter reads.
The ominous assault on the final redoubts of a free press, through an
attempt to brand dissidents, independent journalists and critics of
corporate power and imperialism as agents of a foreign power, has begun.
FARA, until recently, was a little-used regulation, passed in 1938 to
combat Nazi propaganda. The journalists Max Blumenthal and Ali
Abunimah do a good job of addressing the issue in this clip on The
Real News Network.
Those who challenge the dominant corporate narrative already struggle
on the margins of the media landscape. The handful of independent
websites and news outlets, including this one, and a few foreign-run
networks such as Al-Jazeera and RT America, on which I host a show,
"On Contact," are the few platforms left that examine corporate power
and empire, the curtailment of our civil liberties, lethal police
violence and the ecocide carried out by the fossil fuel and animal
agriculture industries, as well as cover the war crimes committed by
Israel and the U.S. military in the Middle East.
Shutting down these venues would ensure that the critics who speak
through them, and oppressed peoples such as the Palestinians, have no
voice left.
I witnessed and was at times the victim of black propaganda campaigns
when I was a foreign correspondent. False accusations are made
anonymously and then amplified by a compliant press. The anonymous
site PropOrNot, replicating this tactic, in 2016 published a
blacklist of 199 sites that it alleged, with no evidence, "reliably
echo Russian propaganda." More than half of those sites were
far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were
progressive, anti-war and left-wing. They included AlterNet, Black
Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout,
CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. PropOrNot charged that
these sites disseminated "fake news" on behalf of Russia, and the
allegations became front-page news in The Washington Post in a story
headlined "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during
the election, experts say." Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg
wrote in that article that the goal of "a sophisticated Russian
propaganda effort," according to "independent researchers who have
tracked the operation," was "punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton,
helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American
democracy."
To date, no one has exposed who operates PropOrNot or who is behind
the website. But the damage done by this black propaganda campaign
and the subsequent announcement by Google and other organizations
such as Facebook last April that they had put in filters to elevate
"more authoritative content" and marginalize "blatantly misleading,
low quality, offensive or downright false information" have steadily
diverted readers away from some sites. The Marxist World Socialist
Web Site, for example, has seen its traffic decline by 75 percent.
AlterNet's search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News is down
72 percent, and Global Research and Truthdig have seen declines. And
the situation appears to be growing worse as the algorithms are
refined.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post and the founder and CEO
of Amazon, has, like Google and some other major Silicon Valley
corporations, close ties with the federal security and surveillance
apparatus. Bezos has a
$600 million contract with the CIA. The lines separating
technology-based entities such as Google and Amazon and the
government's security and surveillance apparatus are often
nonexistent. The goal of corporations such as Google and Facebook is
profit, not the dissemination of truth. And when truth gets in the
way of profit, truth is sacrificed.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN have all imposed or
benefited from the algorithms or filters-overseen by human
"evaluators." When an internet user types a word in a Google search
it is called an "impression" by the industry. These impressions
direct the persons making the searches to websites that use the words
or address the issues associated with them.
Before the algorithms were put in place last April, searches for
terms such as "imperialism" or "inequality" directed internet users
mostly to left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites. Now they are
directed primarily to mainstream sites such as The Washington Post.
If you type in "World Socialist Web Site," which has been hit
especially hard by the algorithms, you will be directed to the
site-but you have to ask for it by name.
Searches for associated words such as "socialist" or "socialism" are
unlikely to bring up a list in which the World Socialist Web Site
appears near the top.
There are 10,000 "evaluators" at Google, many of them former
employees at counterterrorism agencies, who determine the "quality"
and veracity of websites. They have downgraded sites such as
Truthdig, and with the abolition of net neutrality can further
isolate those sites on the internet.
The news organizations and corporations imposing and benefiting from
this censorship have strong links to the corporate establishment and
the Democratic Party. They do not question corporate capitalism,
American imperialism or rising social inequality. They dutifully feed
the anti-Russia hysteria. An Al-Jazeera report on this censorship
begins at 14:07 in this link.
The corporate oligarchs, lacking a valid response to the discrediting
of their policies of economic pillage and endless war, have turned to
the blunt instrument of censorship and to a new version of red
baiting. They do not intend to institute reforms or restore an open
society. They do not intend to address the social inequality behind
the political insurgencies in the two major political parties and the
hatred of the corporate state that spans the political spectrum. They
intend to impose a cone of silence and the state-sanctioned
uniformity of opinion that characterizes all totalitarian regimes.
This is what the use of FARA, the imposition of algorithms and the
attempt to blame Trump's election on Russian interference is about.
Critics
and investigative journalists who expose the inner workings of
corporate power are branded enemies of the state in the service of a foreign
power.
The corporate-controlled media, meanwhile, presents the salacious,
the trivial and the absurd as news while fanning the obsession over Russia.
This
is one of the most ominous moments in American history. The
complicity in this witch hunt by self-identified liberal
organizations, including The New York Times and MSNBC, will come back
to haunt them. When the voices for truth are erased, they will be
next.
The steps to tyranny are always small, incremental and often barely
noticed, as Milton Mayer wrote in "They Thought They Were Free: The
Germans 1933-1945." By the time a population wakes up, it is too
late. He noted:
"
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or
thousands will join you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the
last and the worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after
the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been
sufficiently shocked. If, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43
had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows
of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it
happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of
them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by
the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and if you did not
make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step
D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of
them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown
too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly
more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and
you see that everything, everything has changed and changed
completely under your nose. The world you lived in-your nation, your
people-is not the world you were born in at all.
The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses,
the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the
cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because
you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is
changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who
hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is
transformed no one is transformed.
Now
you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.
The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but
in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Despots, despite their proclaimed ideological, national and religious
differences, speak the same language. Amoral, devoid of empathy and
addicted to power and personal enrichment, they are building a world
where all who criticize them are silenced, where their populations
are rendered compliant by fear, constant surveillance and the loss of
basic liberties and where they and their corporate enablers are the
undisputed masters.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Qatari government is
seeking to improve relations with the Trump administration by forging
alliances with right-wing Jewish organizations in the United States.
It has promised Jewish leaders, the paper reported, not to air the
Al-Jazeera documentary about the Israel lobby. Al-Jazeera in 2016
shut down Al-Jazeera America, which broadcast to U.S. audiences. With
no broadcaster in the U.S., the program would have reached few
American viewers even if Al-Jazeera had put it on the air.
Haaretz reported that Jewish organizational leaders who have visited
Qatar in recent months include Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization
of America; Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Jack
Rosen of the American Jewish Congress; Rabbi Menachem Genack of the
Orthodox Union; Martin Oliner of the Religious Zionists of America;
and attorney Alan Dershowitz.
"What these leaders share is that none of them are considered critics
of the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel or the Trump
administration in Washington," Haaretz correspondent Amir Tibon wrote
in the newspaper.
The despotism of the United States and the despotism of Israel have
found an ally in the despotism of Qatar. Professed beliefs are
meaningless. Israel is bonded with the regime in Saudi Arabia and the
Christian right in the United States, each of which is virulently
anti-Semitic. Dissidents, including Jewish and Israeli dissidents,
are attacked as "self-hating Jews" or anti-Semites only because they
are dissidents. The word "traitor" or "anti-Semite" has no real
meaning. It is used not to describe a reality but to turn someone
into a pariah. The iron wall is rising. It will cement into place a
global system of corporate totalitarianism, one in which the old
vocabulary of human rights and democracy is empty and where any form
of defiance means you are an enemy of the state. This totalitarianism
is being formed incrementally. It begins by silencing the demonized.
It ends by silencing everyone.
"You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand," Bob Dylan
sang in "Ballad of a Thin Man." "You see somebody naked and you say,
'Who is that man?' You try so hard but you don't understand just what
you will say when you get home. Because something is happening here,
but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times
best selling author, former professor at Princeton University,
activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,.
Chris Hedges