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Channel / Source:
Caitlin Johnstone
Published: 2022-04-16
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io7_omX1YIg
how much are we prepared to sacrifice to help the U.S win a propaganda war against Putin there's a very important question that we all need to be asking ourselves at this point in history and that question is as follows how much are we as a society willing to sacrifice so that the US government can win a propaganda war against Vladimir Putin let me explain one severely
under discussed aspect of the latest round of escalations in Silicon Valley censorship which began at the start of the Ukraine war is the fact that it's an entirely unprecedented order of censorship protocol while it might look similar to all the other waves of social media purges and new categories of banned content that we've been experiencing since it became mainstream Doctrine after the 2016 election that Tech
platforms need to strictly regulate online speech the justifications for it have taken a drastic deviation from established patterns what sets this new censorship escalation apart from its predecessors is that this time nobody's pretending that it's being done in the interests of the people with the censorship of racists the argument was that they were inciting hate crimes and racial harassment with the censorship of Alex Jones and
Q Anon the argument was that they were inciting violence with the censorship of covid Skeptics the argument was that they were promoting misinformation that could be deadly even with the censorship of the hunter Biden laptop story it was argued that there was a need to protect election Integrity from disinformation of potentially foreign origin with censorship relating to the Ukraine war there is no argument that it's
being done to help people there is no case to be made that letting people say wrong things about this war kills ukrainians Americans or anyone else there is no case to be made that disputing claims about Russian war crimes will damage America's Democratic processes it's just well we can't have people saying wrong things about a war can we ask a properly brainwashed liberal why they support
the censorship of someone who disputes U.S narratives about Russian war crimes in bucha or Mario Paul and they'll probably tell you something like well it's disinformation or because it's propaganda or how much is Putin paying you but what they won't be able to do is articulate exactly what specific harm is being done by such speech in the same way that they could when defending the censorship
of covid Skeptics or the factions responsible for last year's riot in the Capitol building one argument you'll get if you really press the issue is that the United States is in a propaganda war with Russia and it is in our society's interest for our media institutions to help the United States win that propaganda War cold Wars are fought between nuclear Powers because hot Warfare would risk
annihilating both Nations leaving only other forms of War like psychological warfare available there's no argument that this new escalation and censorship saves lives or protects elections but there is an argument that it can help facilitate the long-term Cold War agendas of the United States but what does that mean exactly it means if we accept this argument we are knowingly consenting to a situation where all the
major news outlets websites and apps that people look to for information about the world are geared not toward telling us true things about reality but toward beating Vladimir Putin in some weird SCI War it means abandoning any Ambitions of being a truth-based civilization that is Guided by facts and instead accepting an existence as a propaganda-based civilization geared toward making sure we all think thoughts that hurt
moscow's long-term strategic interests and it's just absolutely freakish that this is a decision that has already been made for us without any public discussion as to whether or not that's the kind of society we want to live in they jumped right from We're censoring speech to protect you from violence and viruses too we're censoring speech to help our government conduct information Warfare against a foreign adversary
without skipping a Beat the consent manufacturing class has helped pave the way for this smooth transition with their Relentless and ongoing calls for more and more censorship and for years we've been seeing signs that they see it as their duty to help facilitate an information war against Russia back in 2018 we saw a BBC reporter admonish a former high-ranking British Navy official for speculating that the
alleged chemical weapons attack in Duma Syria was a false flag a claim we now have mountains of evidence is likely true thanks to whistleblowers from the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons the reason the reporter gave for her objection to those comments was that we're in an information war with Russia given that we're in an information war with Russia on so many fronts do you
think perhaps it's inadvisable to be stating this so publicly given your position and your profile isn't there a danger that you're muddying the waters the BBC's Anita McVeigh asked Admiral Adeline West after his comments we saw a similar indication in the mass media a few weeks later in an interview with former Green Party candidate Jill Stein who was admonished by CNN's Chris Cuomo for highlighting the
completely uncontroversial fact that the U.S is in extremely egregious offender when it comes to interferences in foreign elections you know that would be the case for Russia to make not from the American perspective Cuomo said in response to Stein's entirely accurate remarks of course there's hypocrisy involved lots of different big state actors do lots of things that they may not want people to know about but
let Russia say that the United States did it to us and here's how they did it so this is fair play which is the same as saying forget what's factually true don't say true things that might help Russian interests that's Russia's job our job here on CNN is to say things that hurt Russian interests we can trace the main streaming of the idea that it's the
Western media's job to manipulate information in the public interest rather than simply tell the truth back to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential win and what was arguably the most significant political moment in the U.S since 9 11 in its aftermath the consent manufacturing class came to the decision that Trump's election wasn't a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control in October 2020 during
the hunter Biden laptop Scandal the spectators Stephen l Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton's 2016 loss that it was their moral duty to hide facts from the public which might lead to Trump's re-election for almost four years now journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the but her emails dilemma Miller writes those who reported dutifully
on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids table focusing so much on what was at the time a considerable scandal has been written off by many in the media as a blunder they believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the White House by focusing on a
nothing Burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Trump's foibles it's an error no journalist wants to repeat once journalists accepted that their most important job is not to tell the truth but to keep people from thinking bad thoughts about the status quo system it was inevitable that they'd start enthusiastically cheerleading for more internet censorship they see it as their Duty which is
why now the leading proponents of online censorship are corporate media reporters but it shouldn't be this way there is no legitimate reason for the Silicon Valley proxies of the most powerful government on Earth to be censoring people for disagreeing with that government about a war yet this is exactly what's happening and it's happening more and more it should alarm us all that it's becoming increasingly acceptable
to silence people not because they are circulating dangerous disinfo or even because they're saying things that are necessarily false but solely because they are saying things which undermine the U.S infowar people should absolutely be allowed to say things which disagree with the most powerful Empire in history about a war they should even be allowed to say brazenly false things about that war because otherwise only the
powerful will be allowed to say brazenly false things about it free speech is important not because it's nice to be able to say what you want but because the free flow of ideas and information creates a check on the powerful it gives people the ability to hold the powerful to account which is exactly why the powerful work to eliminate it we should see it as a
huge huge problem that so much of the world has been herded onto these giant monopolistic speech platforms that conduct censorship in complete alignment with the mightiest power structure in the world this is the exact opposite of putting a check on power how much are we as a society willing to give up for the US government and its allies to win a propaganda war against Putin are
we willing to commit to being a civilization for which the primary consideration with any piece of data is not whether or not it is true but whether it helps undermine Russia this is a conversation which should already have been going on in mainstream circles for some time now but it never even started so let's start it
