– “the main goal is to help people”
– “we were forced to do it”
– “we couldn’t put up with it any longer”
– “a clash was inevitable”
– “it was just a matter of time”
– “we didn’t have a choice, this was the right thing to do” pic.twitter.com/FxDttjqrqh
RT and other English language outlets are totally banned in the West, because the rulers of the West don’t want the people of their countries to understand the logic behind this conflict.
Much of the Western population are such babies, and basically believe that the entire world is like a Marvel Comics movie, that they wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway.
There are people, however, who would not be swayed by the “Russians are just evil and that’s that” narrative if they were allowed to hear the other side.
Even with the censorship, we are seeing normie conservatives begin to slowly back away from this childish narrative.
Kiev openly refused to implement a peace deal with rebels from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics so Russia had no option but to use military force to defend people living there, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior officials “declared that the Minsk agreements cannot be implemented,” Putin recalled, referring to the roadmap to peace in Ukraine brokered by Russia, Germany and France.
The 2014 agreements detailed how Kiev could reintegrate its breakaway regions by offering them a general amnesty, greater autonomy, and representation in the government. Kiev stalled progress on the deal, claiming that it could only proceed with its part after retaking control of the rebel-held areas.
That was while he was shutting down all opposition media and outlawing the use of the Russian language.
Democrats' Orwellian double standard: when Trump (often deservedly) attacks the media, it's outrageous tyranny if not outright fascism. When Zelensky —a Nazi-collaborating Jew—SHUTS DOWN the opponents' media, and imprisons critics, it's a victory for freedom and democracy, and against authoritarianism. Go figure.
So, it was a bit dishonest, to say the least.
Hostilities in eastern Ukraine between government and rebel forces have continued since 2014, when authorities that came to power in Kiev after an armed coup used the military to quash the uprising in the east.
“They publicly refused to [implement the roadmap]. Well, tolerating this genocide that had been going on for eight years was no longer possible,” Putin explained.
The Russian president added that Ukraine, backed by Western countries, was being “turned into a foothold against Russia.”
“They nourished the sprouts of neo-Nazism on purpose. A clash between Russia and those forces was inevitable, they were selecting the right time for an attack,” Putin said.
Russia pre-empted the expected aggression from Kiev by starting its offensive in late February, the Russian leader claimed. He said Moscow will achieve its goals, including the defense of the breakaway republics, which Russia recognized as independent states days before the attack.
The West attempted to retaliate against Moscow with economic sanctions and attempts to isolate it diplomatically and commercially on the international stage. Putin said Russia was too big a country for anyone to really isolate. “We will work with our partners who really want cooperation,” he said.
Yeah, Jake Sullivan and that black guy think China is Iraq and Russia is Libya.
The sheer hubris and incompetence is staggering. The entire American order has become completely disconnected from reality, as they focus on grooming children to become trannies while also imagining they can rule the entire world with heinous threats of brutal violence.
It is important to note that Russia did not start a war in the Ukraine. There has been a war in the Ukraine since the US State Department ran a coup to overthrow the elected government of the Ukraine in 2014, and then started slaughtering people in the east of the country.
There was a signed agreement to stop this slaughter, but the Ukrainian government just completely ignored it.
This is a liberation of a people who were being murdered on a mass scale. Unlike calling a single event a “genocide” – as US leaders are want to do – this was an 8 year campaign to attempt to obliterate a race of people.
— ILRUSSO???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? (@ILRUSSO1) April 11, 2022
Then, of course, there is the much bigger issue of NATO moving into the Ukraine, and Zelensky literally calling for nuclear weapons to be placed inside the country. The slaughter of the people of the Donbass was brutal and unjust, but the NATO movements were an existential threat to the existence of Russia.
Aside from the childlike Marvel Comics narrative, there is zero possibility of framing Russia as the bad guy in this conflict. The West is the aggressor, and that is obvious to anyone who has spent even just a couple hours looking at the background of the conflict.
NOW - China: United States is the "top arsonist" in the Russia-Ukraine conflict "according to strategists." pic.twitter.com/ASjO6ilsJX
The American people are stupid enough to believe this gibberish because they are the same people who are stupid enough to allow their children to be turned into trannies by the American government school system.
They’re the same people who thought inflation was a conspiracy theory.
May their victory over the forces of evil be swift and decisive.
(Republished from The Daily Stormer by permission of author or representative)
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
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Cancel Everything! Cancel Putin, Cancel Russia
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Regis Tremblay w. Lisa Savage
Cancel Everything! Cancel Putin, Cancel Russia
Lisa Savage, is an antiwar activist, teacher, organizer, and grandmother who knows a better world is possible & is willing to work for it. In this interview, she expresses her frustrations with the seemingly unstoppable advance of idiotic cancel culture, a triumph for malicious propaganda and mass imbecility. In that, she speaks for everyone who has not been intimidated nor brainwashed by the new "woke" brand of demented global imperialism. A commenter says, "Thank you Ms. Savage for a dose of sanity in this insane, post-truth world." And we wholeheartedly agree.
Also our thanks for the estimable Regis Tremblay, a voice of reason, peace, decency, and justice. He and comrade Bruce Gagnon deserve our deepest gratitude.
Apr 4, 2022
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
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Chris Hedges: Silenced by YouTube
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the establishment media is an enabler of endless wars and illegitimate oligarchic power
Jimmy Dore interviews Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges DELETED From YouTube!
EDITOR'S NOTE: an outrage that Chris Hedges has been wiped out from YouTube (Google) and some of the biggest social media platforms. (Besides being long banned from legacy media like the major newspapers, etc.). However, this is not surprising and should not come as a shock. The global capitalist ruling class, led from Washington and London, is in a panic mode, and is using every tool at its disposal: strategic, informational, economic, etc., to disrupt and defeat its class enemies and keep a tight lid on the truth. The official narrative must prevail at any cost. That such efforts will inexorably fail is small consolation. WE know that capitalism and its usual spawn— imperialism and fascism— are all bound to fail; that the social issues they attempt to contain by force and subterfuge are too vast and too structurally INTRACTABLE to be neutralised by superficial maneuvers. So, from that broader perspective, the disappearance of Hedges, a rational and well-informed voice, is a loss for progressive humanity at a perilous moment. That said, there's nonetheless a problem we find with all liberal critics of the Western capitalist establishment, Hedges included. Very often they give with one hand and take with the other. For at heart they are actually enemies of genuine socialism, the only cure to the myriad and painful contradictions of capitalism.
Hedges illustrates the classical limits of left-liberalism and social democracy: left anti-communism, and the absolutist pieties and perfectionist neuroses of most liberals ("all wars are evil", you don't need a proletarian state to defend the revolution, etc.). How can people like Hedges say they understand the motives Putin had to invade Ukraine, and yet condemn his actions as morally equivalent to those of any US presidential butcher? What would he had done if sitting in Putin's place? Hedges and most liberals conveniently forget that there are victims and victims. In America's imperial wars, meddling, sanctions, and naked coups, the object is NEVER morally justified; such acts are by definition international crimes, Nuremberg-class war crimes, despite the usual tsunami of sanctimonious pretexts. So the many victims who suffer under such manufactured events ("wars of choice", etc) perish for the sake of advancing evil. This is not the case with a morally justified military intervention as Russia deployed in 2015 in Syria, to save a government about to be toppled by head-chopping Jihadists and NATO forces inserted in Syria for no better reason than to amplify the already immense power and wealth of tiny Western plutocratic elites. That is pure EVIL. Nor, for that matter, was it evil to launch the special military operation currently unfolding in Ukraine, a zombie state earmarked by a cynical US ruling class to serve as a forward deployment base for its "first-strike nuclear missiles". Yes, Russia is engaged not in a war against Ukraine per se, but a much bigger and dangerous war against the US deep state and its multitude of equally depraved proxies, and the object is to remain sovereign and safe, which is her right under UNO protocols. So to condemn both sides as morally on the same footing is intellectually obtuse if not simply dishonest.
Too bad that Jimmy Dore is still innocent about these things. For all the cogent and eloquent analysis about the state of US society, Maybe impressed by CIA-pupil Hanna Arendt, Hedges can never refrain from taking potshots at "authoritarians" and "totalitarians" (i.e., Stalin, the Soviet Union, the Serbs in the Yugoslav civil war, North Korea, the GDR). In this context, read our special pieces on left anticommunism, a form of Fifth columnist posture, and why it matters to realise the role these people play—wittingly or unwittingly— in the class struggle. Here's an apt criticism of Hedges by young revolutionist Rainer Shea:
Hedges of course isn’t pushing a worldview that encourages hostility towards the idea of proletarian liberation in itself. The vast majority of Hedges’ work is some form of condemnation of capitalism and its consequential evils, and he frequently urges people to revolt against the system. Yet despite having stated in one essay that he believes Karl Marx was right about the nature of capitalism, he portrays all of Marxism’s biggest champions as villains and fools. Che Guevara is characterized by Hedges as an incompetent leader who was driven by irrational bloodlust; Lenin and Stalin are characterized as evil dictators; in the fashion of classic anti-communist historical revisionism, Mao is characterized as a perpetrator of “campaigns of genocide and mass extermination” who advanced “totalitarian systems” that were comparable to Nazism. (Rainer Shea, Chris Hedges’ counter-revolutionary advice for revolution).
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Chris Hedges has been effectively silenced by YouTube, with six years’ worth of Hedges’ show, ”On Contact,” deleted from the platform simply because the program appeared on the Russian-affiliated network RT.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
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Indecent Corporate Journos Won't Do the Job, So Citizen Journalists Must
The Jimmy Dore Show • Fiorella Isabel — Craig Pasta Jardula (The Convo Couch) • Mike Prysner & Abby Martin (The Empire Files) • Lee Camp's Redacted Tonight • Caleb Maupin • Jonathan Cook • Jim Kavanagh • Paul Edwards • David Pear • Steven Gowans • Max Blumenthal • Ben Norton • Aaron Maté • Anya Parampil (The Grayzone) • Caitlin Johnstone • Chris Hedges • Alex Rubinstein • Alex Mercouris • Margaret Kimberley • Danny Haiphong • Bruce Lerro • Israel Shamir • Ron Unz • The Saker • Alan Macleod • Eric Zuesse • Ed Curtin • Gary Olson • Andrei Martyanov • Jeff J Brown • Godfree Roberts • Jacques Pauwels • Max Parry • Matt Orfalea • Glenn Greenwald • Rick Sterling • Jim Miles • Janice Kortkamp • Margaret Flowers
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
IMPERIALISM IS ONLY THE DEGENERATE, MONOPOLY PHASE OF CAPITALISM
Joe Rogan interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Aug. 6, 2019, roughly six months before he endorsed the Vermont independent for president.
American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).
For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.
Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.
Although US "liberals" see themselves as people on the left, and their ideological "opponents" on the right confirm such misguided notions by calling Obama a communist, in international terms they are essentially center -rightists or plain conservatives. That's why the US party system is really one party serving just one class: the oligarchy. Except in the most superficial sense, there is no real political distinction between Dems and Rethugs, making all US presidential and congressional elections chiefly an exercise in futility and large-scale self-delusion. Day in day out, the corporate Deep State rules.
—The Editor
When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.
This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist for them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.
The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and has been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.
This is already done deed courtesy of the bipartisan enacted NDAA, and last expanded by none other than Barack Obama.
—The Editor
Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.
And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google's YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google's overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino's prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view shared by numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google's permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.
It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called "disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as "one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive," all caused by Rumble's "allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particularly bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).
The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline. “Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” warned the Post. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be.
This Post attack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world's richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of "grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform:
This Post-manufactured narrative about Substack instantly metastasized throughout the liberal sect of media. “Anti-vaxxers making ‘at least $2.5m’ a year from publishing on Substack,” read the headline of The Guardian, the paper that in 2018 published the outright lie that Julian Assange met twice with Paul Manafort inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and refuses to this day to retract it (i.e., “disinformation"). Like The Post, the British paper cited one of the seemingly endless number of shady pro-censorship groups — this one calling itself the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” — to argue for greater censorship by Substack. “They could just say no,” said the group's director, who has apparently convinced himself he should be able to dictate what views should and should not be aired: “This isn’t about freedom; this is about profiting from lies. . . . Substack should immediately stop profiting from medical misinformation that can seriously harm readers.”
The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up. Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported in September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that some of Rogan's shows be removed from the platform, Rogan invited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.
On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Young's music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided with Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested $100 million, by removing Young's music and keeping Rogan. The pressure on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchell issued a similar demand. Allsortsofcensorship-madliberalscelebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify's refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtagurging the deletion of Spotify's app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history's largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.
Obviously, Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. “Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,” claimedThe Daily Mail which, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.
One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it currently seems. “Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week after rock icon Neil Youngcalled out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular podcast, 'The Joe Rogan Experience,’” is how The San Francisco Chronicle put it (that Spotify's stock price dropped rather precipitously contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):
It is worth recalling that NBC News, in January, 2017, announced that it had hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News with a $69 million contract. The network had big plans for Kelly, whose first show debuted in June of that year. But barely more than a year later, Kelly's comments about blackface — in which she rhetorically wondered whether the notorious practice could be acceptable in the modern age with the right intent: such as a young white child paying homage to a beloved African-American sports or cultural figure on Halloween — so enraged liberals, both inside the now-liberal network and externally, that they demanded her firing. NBC decided it was worth firing Kelly — on whom they had placed so many hopes — and eating her enormous contract in order to assuage widespread liberal indignation. “The cancellation of the ex-Fox News host’s glossy morning show is a reminder that networks need to be more stringent when assessing the politics of their hirings,” proclaimedThe Guardian.
Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own.
Indeed, it was once assumed that Silicon Valley giants steeped in the libertarian ethos of a free internet would be immune to demands to engage in political censorship ("content moderation” is the more palatable euphemism which liberal corporate media outlets prefer). But when the still-formidable megaphones of The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and the rest of the liberal media axis unite to accuse Big Tech executives of having blood on their hands and being responsible for the destruction of American democracy, that is still an effective enforcement mechanism. Billionaires are, like all humans, social and political animals and instinctively avoid ostracization and societal scorn.
Beyond the personal interest in avoiding vilification, corporate executives can be made to censor against their will and in violation of their political ideology out of self-interest. The corporate media still has the ability to render a company toxic, and the Democratic Party more now than ever has the power to abuse their lawmaking and regulatory powers to impose real punishment for disobedience, as it has repeatedly threatened to do. If Facebook or Spotify are deemed to be so toxic that no Good Liberals can use them without being attacked as complicit in fascism, white supremacy or anti-vax fanaticism, then that will severely limit, if not entirely sabotage, a company's future viability.
The one bright spot in all this — and it is a significant one — is that liberals have become such extremists in their quest to silence all adversaries that they are generating their own backlash, based in disgust for their tyrannical fanaticism. In response to the Post attack, Substack issued a gloriously defiant statement re-affirming its commitment to guaranteeing free discourse. They also repudiated the hubristic belief that they are competent to act as arbiters of Truth and Falsity, Good and Bad. “Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse,” read the headline on the post from Substack's founders. The body of their post reads like a free speech manifesto:
That’s why, as we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation. While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.
A lengthy Twitter thread from Substack's Vice President of Communications, Lulu Cheng Meservey was similarly encouraging and assertive. "I'm proud of our decision to defend free expression, even when it’s hard," she wrote, adding: "because: 1) We want a thriving ecosystem full of fresh and diverse ideas. That can’t happen without the freedom to experiment, or even to be wrong.” Regarding demands to de-platform those allegedly spreading COVID disinformation, she pointedly — and accurately — noted: “If everyone who has ever been wrong about this pandemic were silenced, there would be no one left talking about it at all.” And she, too, affirmed principles that every actual, genuine liberal — not the Nancy Pelosi kind — reflexively supports:
People already mistrust institutions, media, and each other. Knowing that dissenting views are being suppressed makes that mistrust worse. Withstanding scrutiny makes truths stronger, not weaker. We made a promise to writers that this is a place they can pursue what they find meaningful, without coddling or controlling. We promised we wouldn’t come between them and their audiences. And we intend to keep our side of the agreement for every writer that keeps theirs, to think for themselves. They tend not to be conformists, and they have the confidence and strength of conviction not to be threatened by views that disagree with them or even disgust them.
This is becoming increasingly rare.
The U.K.'s Royal Society, its national academy of scientists, this month echoed Substack's view that censorship, beyond its moral dimensions and political dangers, is ineffective and breeds even more distrust in pronouncements by authorities. “Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online." "There is,” they concluded, "little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms” and "such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.”
As both Rogan's success and collapsing faith and interest in traditional corporate media outlets prove, there is a growing hunger for discourse that is liberated from the tight controls of liberal media corporations and their petulant, herd-like employees. That is why other platforms devoted to similar principles of free discourse, such as Rumble for videos and Callin for podcasts, continue to thrive. It is certain that those platforms will continue to be targeted by institutional liberalism as they grow and allow more dissidents and heretics to be heard. Time will tell if they, too, will resist these censorship pressures, but the combination of genuine conviction on the part of their founders and managers, combined with the clear market opportunities for free speech platforms and heterodox thinkers, provides ample ground for optimism.
None of this is to suggest that American liberals are the only political faction that succumbs to the strong temptations of censorship. Liberals often point to the growing fights over public school curricula and particularly the conservative campaign to exclude so-called Critical Race Theory from the public schools as proof that the American Right is also a pro-censorship faction. That is a poor example. Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools. Liberals crusaded for decades to have creationism banned from the public schools and largely succeeded, yet few would suggest this was an act of censorship. For the reason I just gave, I certainly would not define it that way. Fights over what children should and should not be taught can have a censorship dimension but usually do not, precisely because limits and prohibitions in school curricula are inevitable.
In sum, censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heyday of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.
Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, “No Place to Hide,” is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of exposés in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
NOTE: Tonight at 7 pm EST, I will discuss the Rogan censorship campaign and the broader implications of the liberal fixation with censorship on my live Callin podcast. For now, live shows can be heard only with an iPhone and the Callin app — the app will be very shortly available on Androids for universal use — but all shows can be heard by everyone immediately after they are broadcast on the Callin website, here.
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Anti-Communist Propaganda Is Based In The Rejection Of Nuance
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
Rainer Shea
Originally run on Aug 12, 2019
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As the world’s poor and working people struggle against a paradigm of neoliberal hyper-capitalism, imperialist corporatocracy, and extreme inequality, the anti-capitalist movement within the first world is split between the factions which support the existing socialist states and [those] which share the capitalist class’ hostility towards them. We need to make sure that the former faction is the one which defines the narrative in the coming years.
This need for global socialists to openly and unapologetically align with the socialist states is prompted not just by the strategic necessity for building alliances with sympathetic foreign governments. It’s a matter of defending the truth, even amid pressure from our virulently anti-communist society to repeat all of the lies about the history of socialism.
The tropes that are used to delegitimize history’s socialist revolutions
One of the ways that anti-communists try to delegitimize the position of Marxists who align with the existing socialist states is by painting these Marxists as unreasonable ideologues. Yet this accusation is always used not in response to a lack of willingness on the part of these Marxists to criticize any aspect of the socialist states, but in response to even the slightest pushback against capitalist propaganda about these countries. Accusations of zealotry and denialism are the rhetorical tools that are used to shut down objections to capitalist propaganda about these countries.
The disingenuous nature of the anti-communist arguments has been shown in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR and the GDR. Despite the stereotype about Marxists like me being uncritical of socialist states, I believe there are legitimate critiques about the USSR’s leadership and their role in the country’s downfall; as Kim Il Sung has assessed, socialism collapsed in Russia and Germany “mainly because they neglected class education and abandoned the class struggle. After assuming state power, Khrushchev weakened the function of the dictatorship of the state as a weapon of the class struggle. As a result, socialism could not be defended in the Soviet Union.” But rather than frame the discussion about the Soviet Union’s fall in the vein of critiques like these, Trotskyites, social democrats, and other left anti-communists have since reinforced capitalist narratives about the event.
In its reflections on the fall of the USSR and the GDR, the Trotsky-aligned World Socialist Website has shifted the blame away from Khrushchev and defaulted on the standard Trotskyite scapegoating of “Stalinism.” One WSWS piece from 2009 even blamed “imperialism and its Stalinist agents” for the socialist movement’s failures, an incredibly ironic statement given how Trotskyism itself has been a massive ideological servant of neoconservative imperialism. These attempts from the Trotskyists to blame the shortcomings of Russia's revolution on Stalin and other Marxist-Leninists have given rhetorical ammunition to the pro-capitalists who seek to demonize all of history’s existing socialist states.
The anti-communist propaganda that’s been put out by Trotskyite groups like the International Socialist Organization-which attacked virtually all socialist governments as “not truly socialist”-has guided other leftist strains which seek to delegitimize communism and its achievements. The social democrat group the Democratic Socialists of America has stated in its official stance on the fall of the USSR and the GDR that “We applaud the democratic revolutions that have transformed the former Communist bloc.” Their justification for outright celebrating the return of capitalism in these countries is that “Just because their bureaucratic elites called them ‘socialist’ did not make it so,” a line of reasoning that’s been reinforced by Noam Chomsky’s take on communism; Chomsky has claimed that the Soviet system created a dynamic where “You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right.”
These arguments rely on a lack of nuance, even as anti-communists accuse their opponents of being the ones who won’t look at the socialist states in a balanced way.
It’s true that the Soviet leadership partly failed in its efforts to build socialism; the communist historian Bruce Franklin wrote about the Soviet post-Stalin political class that “internally, they restored capitalism as rapidly as they could. By the mid-1960s, unemployment had appeared in the Soviet Union for the first time since the first Five Year Plan. By the end of the 1960s, deals had been made with German, Italian, and Japanese capitalism for the exploitation of Soviet labor and vast Soviet resources.”
Again, these kinds of criticisms are legitimate, and communists like Franklin and Kim Il Sung have articulated them. But the view of the USSR and the GDR that the DSA promotes is one which ignores the massive increases in living standards that these countries achieved, and that falsely attributes the exploitative aspects of their economic systems to socialism itself rather than to the pro-capitalist reforms. It’s a view which portrays the grievous losses in employment, social services, and working class political power that occurred in these countries as worthwhile because of the “democratic revolutions” that the fall of the Eastern Bloc is supposed to have represented. It’s a view which basically characterizes any systemic imperfection within a socialist state as a justification for destroying that state. Its purpose isn’t to constructively critique the socialist projects, it’s to paint them as an evil force that leftists should oppose with more ferocity than we should oppose capitalism itself.
How these tropes are being used against the modern socialist states
Chomsky: Wittingly or unwittingly, behavng much like a Trot, he has become "controlled opposition".
This is the logic that anti-communists are now applying to China, the DPRK, and the other modern countries which have substantially established socialism. Chomsky, whose views about the currently existing socialist states are in line with the mainstream American left, has boycotted Chinese Marxism conferences because of China’s justified enforcement of its laws against unauthorized unions, participated in the “Stop Repression in Hong Kong” campaign based on the misleading anti-communist narratives that Hong Kong’s capitalist factions have created, and claimed that “The North Korean dictatorship may well win the prize for brutality and repression” without bothering to look into the DPRK’s deeply democratic political structure or the totally unproven nature of the claims of north Korean human rights abuses.
The reasoning behind the attacks against these socialist countries from Chomsky and other left anti-communists comes from the same place as Chomsky’s simplistic vilification of the Soviet political class. As Michael Parenti has written in response to Chomsky’s statement about the typical Leninist becoming “an ideologist of the right”:
In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communistsdid not “very quickly” switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union’s waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin’s violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.
Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.
This stereotype is now being used to delegitimize the authority of Xi Jinping and his colleagues in the Chinese Communist Party. The propaganda tropes are the same as the ones which were directed against the Soviet leadership, as is the goal of breaking up a large and powerful socialist country which threatens American hegemony. The campaign to destroy the PRC resembles the one to destroy the USSR so much that this passage from a 1969 U.S. memorandum on sowing discord within Russia might as well be re-used almost verbatim for today’s China:
The primary objective is to stimulate and sustain pressures for liberalization and change from within the Soviet Union. The neuralgic points of this disaffection—desire for personal and intellectual freedom, desire for improvement in the quality of life, and the persistence of nationalism in Eastern Europe and among the nationality groups in the Soviet Union—are the main issues exploited by these projects. A secondary objective is to enlighten important third-country elites, especially political leaders and the public opinion shaping professions, about the repressive nature of the Soviet system and its imperialistic and self-aggrandizing foreign policy.
Just as the perpetrators of Western imperialism misleadingly painted the USSR as “imperialist” to rationalize their sabotage of it, they’re now claiming that China poses an imperialist threat to justify their campaign to strong-arm China into submission.
The rejection of nuance is central to all of the arguments for China being imperialist, from the Western myths about China’s “neo-colonial” actions in Africa to the denunciations of China’s protective military involvement in Syria and Venezuela to the false characterizations of China's socialist state foreign loans as being tools for exploitation. Any kind of foreign involvement by China is portrayed as imperialist by the country’s adversaries.
The other big parallel between the campaigns against the PRC and the USSR is the narrative that China’s government is completely undemocratic and unwilling to give its people any freedoms. This is the theme of the “pro-democracy” Hong Kong protests that have been promoted in the Western media throughout the last several months. Like the other “color revolutions” that the U.S. has been involved in, there’s a side to the story which negates the sinister view of the government that the protests are supposed to vindicate.
China is no dictatorship. Many leaders in Western democracies have been governing for far longer and with far less support than Xi Jinping has been, and China is still capable of voting Xi out of another term in the next election. There’s a good argument that China’s scrapping of presidential term limits has made the country more democratized rather than less, since China’s old system of term limits was made to ensure that the political class would be focused on present conditions instead of on future elections. The president himself also shares most of the central government’s power with the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, whose members are installed through a process of political gaming within the CCP that’s similar to the multi-party system of bourgeois democracies. The difference is that within the CCP, all members are expected to uphold the goals of Marxist-Leninism.
The ordinary participants in this democratic political process enjoy a form of democracy in the workplace, one which is almost infinitely superior to the tyrannical corporate structure that the majority of American workers are subjected to. The American Prospect has assessed that “[labor] organizers [in China] allow the Communist Party to respond either favorably or neutrally to their actions, rather than repressing them.” This was demonstrated in 2010, when a strike by workers in the Chinese Honda plant was met not by action from the local police but by an agreement to pay the workers 32 percent more; another example is when China’s City Watch factory workers won fair compensation in while the state-owned media reported on their 2011 strike.
These aspects of China’s economic system are ignored by the Western media, which always tries to portray China’s government as an oppressor of working people. Headlines about suicide nets in China’s factories are a common trope in these characterizations, but the existence of the nets isn’t an inherently good or bad thing; they’re simply a workplace safety measure. The powerful rhetorical imagery of the suicide nets creates a very one-sided atmosphere of discourse around China’s economic system. It creates an emotionally charged facet to the reality that there are varying forms of workplace ownership in China, and that sometimes the interests of the workers and the owners clash. Rather than demonizing the CCP as an evil force that makes workers commit suicide, we should be talking about the material complexities of China’s socialist project and offering constructive advice on how conditions for China’s people can be improved.
On the question of the amount of civil liberties that these Chinese voters and workers have, the best source to seek out isn’t the litany of alarmist American headlines which fearmonger about supposed unrestrained Chinese mass surveillance and “totalitarianism.” It’s actual Chinese people who’ve been interviewed about how democratic they consider their society to be.
“Democracy, as China purposes, is letting everyone be in power,” one Chinese woman said in an interview with the media outlet Asian Boss earlier this year. “As someone who’s part of the current generation, received an education and seen it while growing up,” said another Chinese citizen, “China is called ‘The People’s Republic of China.’ We are a country that’s governed by the people. Since we’re governed by the people, of course we’re democratic!...I’m not jealous about the ‘democracy’ in other countries. They shouldn’t be defining what democracy is.”
“I think there are restrictions on our democracy,” admitted another citizen. “Sometimes we need to use a VPN to receive foreign information, and some news is blocked. In this regard, I definitely think China should be more open. But I think China is gradually becoming more open. Compared to the Cultural Revolution, China is more open now.”
This criticism of Chinese censorship-one which was openly articulated to an interviewer in public-isn’t something that would take place in the repressive dystopia that China’s detractors describe the country as. A similar criticism can be made of north Korea, which makes a lot of information inaccessible to its residents by blocking out the global Internet in favor of an online network that mainly features content created from within the DPRK itself. But both of these countries otherwise allow information to come in and out of its borders in a fairly open way, and this openness both in their political speech and in their electoral systems has made them into highly functional societies.
The DPRK has a multi-party system that’s tremendously more democratic than what we have in the United States, and that’s delivered the country’s people universal healthcare, free food and housing, and guaranteed employment. China’s anti-poverty programs of recent decades have been so successful that poverty is coming close to no longer existing in China, with the country’s current extreme poverty rate hovering below 1%. After both of these countries overcome the economic war that the capitalist world is waging against them, as well as complete their efforts towards transitioning to green energy, they’ll stand as paragons of Marxist social development in a world that’s been ravaged by capitalism and imperialism. They and the other countries which will undergo worker’s revolutions in the coming decades are going to define where civilization goes next. They’re what will replace the dying American empire and the failed experiment of neoliberal globalization.
The capitalist class is afraid of such a change happening, so it’s doing all it can to break apart the socialist states and the global movement that seeks to proliferate their anti-capitalist agenda.
Manufacturing regime change for China and its allies
All of these slanted portrayals of China and the DPRK (along with the propaganda against additional socialist governments like Cuba and Venezuela) come from a place of bad faith. They eschew helpful critiques of the socialist states that can lead to positive reforms, and direct people’s attention towards how these states can be destroyed altogether.
The consistently negative framing of China’s political and economic systems that we see in the Western press is a tool for shutting down productive discussions about socialism, and for making the topic into an exercise where anyone who critically supports China is denounced as an atrocity apologist. This highly emotional aspect to anti-communist propaganda is exacerbated by manufactured atrocity stories like the baseless claim that China has imprisoned “1 million” Uighur Muslims, a piece of disinformation which is comparable to the false claim from Nazi propagandists about Stalin having starved Ukraine.
The arbiters of America’s regime change campaigns are relying on these kinds of demagogic anti-communist claims to manufacture consent for their goals. Our government is working towards regime change in China, the DPRK, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and (in a subtler way) Cuba, and such propaganda is the imperialists’ instrument for controlling the narrative about them. Kim Jong Un, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, and the Cuban leadership have all undergone the same kinds of character assassinations that Xi has, and their countries have all also been maligned as dictatorships that keep their people in poverty.
In the paragraph above, I’ve hyperlinked articles that debunk the propaganda about all of these countries. I urge people to share these articles around, along with the section within this essay that refutes the capitalist lies about China. We need to fight an information war against capitalist and imperialist propaganda, or else the U.S. will continue to be enabled to sabotage both the socialist countries and their non-socialist allies; America’s war campaigns against Russia and Iran ultimately have the purpose of weakening China, and of weakening the communist movement in the process.
The global communist movement has strong and growing support; Stalin’s approval among Russians has hit a record high of 70%, there’s a strong force of pro-Chinese protesters within Hong Kong, and four in ten Americans now have a positive view of socialism. These kinds of developments are what’s provoking the global capitalist oligarchs to organize right-wing protests in Hong Kong, destabilize Venezuela and Nicaragua, and move towards a renewed campaign against communism within the U.S. We can help overcome this global war on communism by countering the lies about the existing socialist states.
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Rainer Shea uses the written word to deconstruct establishment propaganda and to promote meaningful political action. His articles can also be found at Revolution Dispatch.