Giant Killers Tackle Google

Israel Shamir
CROSSPOST WITH UNZ REVIEW
because iconolasts need to be heard

Gigantomachy

The digital giants have taken over the world. Nobody has ever amassed this much power. Hitler would die of envy if shown the greatness of Google. Huxley and Orwell’s protagonists could only dream of what Bezos and Gates do. The latter overthrew the US President and installed one they prefer, and for good reason. The combined net worth of the top 100 ultra-rich people in the US has skyrocketed by $195 billion since Biden took office, according to Bloomberg’s calculations. These giants control the minds of billions. Nations hock their lands and industries to purchase their patent medicines. These giants know our faces, our names, all about us, even the cells we are made of, down to the last protein. Gods have been defeated, gentle Christ and mighty Sabaoth, not to mention angry Allah.  that a thing of which it said, ‘See, this  new’? (Eccl 1:10) No, my jaundiced ancestor was right — it has already been done in the ages before us.

Once upon a time, the giants almost pushed the gods off Olympus. Apollodorus tells us that the gods could not win, until they remembered the oracle that the giants would only be defeated if a mortal man was to help the gods. Only Man can facilitate the gods’ victory over the giants, divined the Greeks in their Gigantomachy, just as the Christians knew only a Son of Man could defeat Death. When the giants had almost defeated the gods, a mortal man, Heracles, stepped forward and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Now we are in dire need of a brave mortal to tackle giants. If there is no Heracles, anyone will do; but the giants have to be defeated. And indeed, unlikely Giant Killers have stepped forward.

The uprising began in rebellious Moscow, where the city arbitration tribunal demanded that Google restore a deleted YouTube account or pay billions of dollars in fines. Impossible, you’d say — Google free to do whatever they want. They shadow-banned Unz.com; its brother giant Twitter banned Trump; there is no way to overturn their decisions, for such companies are private, and private property sacred — otherwise it’s Communism and Gulag; they can do whatever they want, and their smart lawyers have already included their right to unplug you in every one-click contract agreement.

Yet Russia isn’t all that different from any other Western nation. Until this happened, the Russian legal system had refused to consider claims against the tech giants. Russian law did not allow for it. It was enough for the giants to stipulate that all claims should go to London or to some other tame court of their preference for the Russians to meekly submit. However, the giants overreached themselves when they blocked this avenue to sue them in a Western jurisdiction for many Russians. The Russians responded by creating a new law that established the priority of their national law, and required the courts and tribunals to accept and judge the cases if there is no way to sue in the agreed Western jurisdiction.

Malofeev at Tsargrad's office. Guess who the gentleman in the fancy uniform is.

This new law was applied by the Moscow Arbitration Tribunal after Google, in July 2020, deleted the account of Tsargrad, a Christian conservative TV channel and news agency belonging to Konstantin Malofeev, an unusual Russian digital media lord. Slate magazine made a profile of the man some years ago, while he was still planning to create Tsargrad. Slate grossly exaggerated Malofeev’s proximity and importance to Putin, for he is an outsider, but otherwise it gives you the general idea. Malofeev had been sanctioned by US and EU authorities in 2014, but the account of the media company he was the main owner of was blocked six years later, in the summer of 2020. Tsargrad had over one million subscribers when suddenly, and without warning, YouTube deleted its account. At first, they explained their action by asserting that Tsargrad was “breaking the community rules’, as always. Later on, Google claimed they blocked Tsargrad because its owner had been sanctioned.

The Moscow tribunal rejected both claims. (Read here the tribunal decision in full, English translation comes after Russian version) It stated that Google didn’t prove Tsargrad broke community rules; even had that been the case, Google would have had to give six months’ warning before breaking the contract. As for sanctions, the Tribunal ruled that US and EU sanctions are a part of public law of those particular countries, and cannot be applied in Russia; Google has to restore their account or suffer legal consequences.

The consequences are financial, and exponential. For the first week of non-compliance, Google would have to pay a little over one thousand dollars, nothing to speak about there. But afterwards, the fines double each week, and in half a year’s time Google would have to pay over $70 billion! Exponential fines can be very threatening. Can the Russians make Google pay? Yes! Google (google.ru) has a few billions on their accounts in Russia, all eminently liable to be seized. On the other hand, if Google restores the blocked account, they won’t have to pay a cent. Stories related to this historical decision are filed here (in Russian).

Anyway, Malofeev had been sanctioned by the US and EU over six years ago, when he was allegedly supporting the Russian rebels in Donbas (he says he ran a humanitarian mission). Why, all of a sudden, did Google freeze his account in 2020?

There is an honest answer to this question, but Google’s cagey lawyers would never admit to it. In 2020, encouraged by their meteoric rise to the top of the pandemic-troubled world, Google and the other giants unleashed their might to erase ideologically unacceptable (for them) media. They carried out a large-scale ideological cleansing of pro-family, Trump-friendly, conservative, Christian sites and accounts, and of sites that didn’t support the paradigm of gay and trans, anti-male, anti-white woke propaganda. The sites that doubted the official Covid narrative were also banned or shadow-banned. They forbid their clients to trust in God, summed it up a Russian observer. The timing of the cleansing was connected with the US Presidential elections of November 2020. The giants planned to remove Trump and install Biden by hook or by crook. Accounts that were likely to disagree with this massive fraud planned by the giants were deleted. Didn’t this constitute meddling in the important elections? For sure, but it was the giants, not the Russians, who meddled, and they even had the FBI on their payroll.

Not only did American accounts suffer in this purge; the giants cleansed Russian accounts, too. Though there aren’t many Russian-reading voters in the US, the giants didn’t want to take any chances. They planned and executed probably the first complete global takeover of discourse in human history. Tsargrad was one of the smothered media voices.

 

Alexander Dugin speaks at Tsargrad

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Malofeev offered Trump his support in regaining access to the discourse snatched by the Giants. In his touching letter to Trump (read it here in full, the English version comes after Russian) he wrote: “Mr President, it is clear to me that the US elections were stolen from you and your voters, and that Big Tech’s efforts to repress this information  is both a moral outrage and a prosecutable crime. The death of democracy in America hurts every country in the world, Russia included. I, and many other Russians are ready to help you in your fight for free speech any way we can. Use our court system, and seriously consider my offer to partner in building future platforms. Let’s join forces and decisively go on the offensive against the free-speech haters in Big Tech. Let’s build superior free-speech platforms for people in all countries.” (Too bad Malofeev —if sincere—has also been taken in by an unprincipled grifter.—Ed)

At the press conference, he called for Trump to accept his assistance in his fight against the giants. Mr Malofeev is a maverick, by Russian or by any standards, but so was Trump. Anyway, who but a maverick would enter a melee against fearsome giants? Only Real Men are able to do it. Though my own views are very far from theirs, I’d say God bless anybody who would save free speech from being smothered by Giants.

P.S. Iran Revelation
(and naked speculation)

For a long time, our readers have wondered why President Putin is so friendly with Israel. A possible explanation was provided last week by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. His seven-hour-long recording (allegedly made for the Oral History project) had been leaked by a Farsi émigré site based in London. In this leak (it had been acknowledged by Mr Zarif who said he was quoted out of context, while Zarif opponents allege he himself leaked it) Zarif reveals that, in his view, Russia does not want Iran to normalise its relations with the West and  is trying to undermine the Vienna talks. As long as the US  is out of the nuclear deal and Iran continues to be sanctioned, Tehran remains in the Russian sphere of influence, he said. In the al-Jazeera report, Russia actively tried to undermine the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because she would not benefit from Iran enjoying normalised ties with the West, according to the diplomat. “Russia doesn’t benefit if our ties with the West are normalised”, he said.

Zarif also offered a very different version of Russia’s entry into the Syrian war. The late General Soleimani, who was assassinated by the Americans last year, visited Russia in 2015 and met with President Vladimir Putin to discuss intervening in Syria’s civil war in support of President Bashar al-Assad. It was previously accepted that Putin had been talked into the war by Soleimani. Zarif provides a completely different account, saying it was Putin who convinced Soleimani to bring Iranian troops to Syria, rather than Soleimani convincing Putin to intervene. “Putin entered the war with air power, but also brought Iran into the war with ground forces. Until then we had no ground forces there,” Zarif said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, gestures as he and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif enter a hall for talks in Moscow, Russia, in late 2019.

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If this conspiratorial interpretation  is right, it would explain Russia’s positive attitude to Israel, for no country and no politician has done as much as Israel's Netanyahu to keep Iran estranged from the US. But for Israel's opposition, Iran might have forfeited the Axis of Resistance in the Obama era. So Israel should be cherished by Russia, indeed! Likewise, Israel was loved by the US military industries as her might inspired Arabs to buy American hardware.

Simple-minded Jews explain the US drift to make up with Iran by the influence of John Kerry. “Kerry’s daughter Vanessa  married to an Iranian national and physician. His best man at the ceremony was the son of Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Zarif was also Kerry’s chief counterpart in the nuclear deal negotiations. Cozy crew! Look no further why Kerry hates Israel”, says Investment Watch Blog. They would be furious if their political positions were explained by having their relatives in Israel! It seems that some American patriots (like our colleague Philip Giraldi) would prefer to downgrade the special relations with Israel and to upgrade relations with Iran. Washington lawyer Reed Rubinstein, in the Jerusalem Post, suggests that the Biden administration “permits or supports a new intifada if Israel refuses to accede quietly to a new Iran deal or takes ‘unapproved’ steps to defend itself against the Iranian threat.” It is one possible reading. “This would be a catastrophic mistake and horrific breach of trust” – whines the lawyer. What ‘trust’, buddy? International politics is a cutthroat business. Perhaps Iran will cross over to the US, while the Jews will move their sympathies to Russia. 

However, one should not make too much out of the partial leak of Zarif’s talk. It could mean that Zarif would like to play Gorbachev on the Islamic Republic and bring Tehran into the Pax Americana. Then he would have invented such a story implying that Iranians would make peace with the US on Washington’s conditions but for perfidious Putin. And in observed reality, Russians were always publicly supportive of JCPOA, and approving of Iran making peace with Israel and the US.

Jews and plotters

Putin and Lukashenko

In the recent plot against Belarus President Lukashenko, there is a curious detail totally missing in press reports. The trump evidence of the plot  a tape purporting to be a recording of a conversation between a Belarusian general and the chief plotter, lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, who has Belarusian and American citizenships. In Belarus, Zenkovich was an opposition activist, a well-known member of the Belarusian Popular Front. He left for the US in the mid-2000’s, where he began to build his career as a lawyer, saidthe US Embassy. The general apparently was used to trap the lawyer, who actively looked for potential accomplices in the Belarus Army. In the tape (5:05), the lawyer tries to convince the general to join the plotters by saying: “I am supported by US Jewish capital. I have excellent relations with the American Jewish Committee. This  an NGO headed by three hundred of the wealthiest Jewish families of America. It  the Jewish Lobby of America”.

This article was first published at The Unz Review. 

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Since the overpaid corporate media whores will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality. After systematically corrupting the entire media, thereby hijacking the mainstream narrative, corporate power, led by the US, has practically killed democracy wherever it managed to survive, including in the US itself, easily one of the most heavily propagandised nations in history. The consequences of this disgraceful situation can be seen everywhere, and that's why the fight for the truth has never been so vital. We stand on the edge of an ecological abyss precipitated by a cancerous industrial system devoid of any moral restraints. Furthermore, dripping hypocrisy, the West has unilaterally declared war on China, Russia and Iran, which threatens a nuclear confrontation, plus other nations like Venezuela or Cuba that also dare to resist the tyrannical diktats emanating from Washington. It's clear that war, ceaseless propaganda, and the immiseration of labor is the chosen solution of the empire managers to the capitalist system's incurable crisis, a crisis rendered all the more intractable by the computer revolution which has only deepened capital's legendary "overproduction" contradiction. 

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