Censorship is the death of Democracy
Free expression is the key to free society, limiting it is the path to dictatorship
Eric Zuesse
Censorship News Concept: Pile of Censored Newspapers On Scratched Old Wood, 3d illustration
cbies, Getty Images/iStockphoto
No democracy can survive censorship. If there is censorship, then each individual cannot make his/her own decisions (voting decisions or otherwise) on the basis of truth but only on the basis of whatever passes through the censor’s filter, which is always whatever supports the censoring regime and implants it evermore deeply into the public’s mind — regardless of its actual truthfulness.
The public does have a mind, as a collective constituting the majority of the residents in the given land, which majority rules any democratic government. If the government doesn’t really represent the majority, it’s no democracy, at all, but instead represents other individuals, the real rulers, who might be hidden.
Consequently, if a democracy exists but a censor somehow becomes allowed, and emerges into existence in a given land, then democracy will inevitably be snuffed-out there, and dictatorship will inevitably be the result — merely because censorship has been applied there, which blocks some essential truths (truths that the rulers don’t want the public to know) from reaching the public.
Nothing is as toxic to democracy as is censorship. Censorship prevents democracy.
If a dictatorship already exists in a given land, then it does so by means of censorship, because only by that means will the public be willing to pay taxes to the regime and to go to war for it and to kill and die for it. Without censorship, none of that could happen, except in an authentic democracy. An authentic democracy has no censorship.
This is why democracy is so rare. Almost every dictatorship calls itself a ‘democracy’. But a government which calls itself “democratic” isn’t necessarily democratic, but more likely it has simply fooled its public to think that it is one (such as the United States has by now been scientifically proven to be — an actual dictatorship).
Anyone who endorses censorship is a totalitarian, a supporter of totalitarianism, even without recognizing the fact. If the person fails to recognize the fact that censorship is applied only in a totalitarian regime, then that person has bought into the most basic belief of totalitarianism: the idea that censorship can be justified in some circumstances. Dictatorships always pump that lie, so as to be able to continue to exist as a dictatorship.
There is no circumstance which ever can justify censorship, unless one believes that dictatorship is, or can be, good instead of bad.
If you think that some censorship is good, then you have bought into the fundamental belief that is promulgated in any dictatorship. It’s a lie, but it fools the majority of people, in a dictatorship.
No writing, nor any other statement, should ever be censored, no matter how vile it is. Indeed, if it is vile, then it needs to be exposed, not hidden; because, if it is hidden, then it will fester until it grows in the dark and finally becomes sprung upon a public who have never been inoculated against it by truth, and therefore the false belief becomes actually seriously dangerous and likely to spread like wildfire, because it had been censored before it became public.
The most deadly infections are those that grow in the dark and then become released upon a population who have no pre-existing protection against it.
Every religion, and every evil regime, seeks to censor-out whatever contradicts its propaganda, and is therefore intrinsically hostile toward democracy, but the danger is always being presented not by the writers and speakers of the propaganda, but by its publishers (regardless of media: print, broadcast, or online) — they are the source of all censorship. They are the censors. The people who select what to publish, and what not to publish, are the censors.
The regime’s media are what perpetrate censorship, routinely, because those media are actually essential arms of the dictatorship, even if they are not directly owned by the government but instead by the clique who actually possess control over the government because they possess control over the mainstream (and much of the non-mainstream) media and thus the public’s mind in a ‘democracy’ in order to make it the dictatorship that it actually is.
Much has been written about how this censorship has been perpetrated in the post-WW-II (post-26-July-1945) U.S.A., such as here, and here, and here, and here. (All of that has been censored-out from the major media — they don’t report that they represent the regime instead of the public.) As a consequence of that censorship against truth, history is being revised to be ‘history’ so as to portray a false ‘reality’ to people today.
And there are numerous other examples of this, by the U.S. regime, each instance, of which lying, is affirmed as being truth by the regime’s agents, but is actually nothing more than vicious lies that are spread by the regime and its agents. What goes on behind the scenes is hidden from the American public, not really in order to protect them, but purely in order to deceive them.
The deception of the American people, and of the residents in all of the U.S. Government’s foreign vassal-states (or ‘allies’) in Europe and elsewhere, is extreme, in all fields of international relations.
Whereas Julian Assange was the world’s strongest enemy against censorship, he has been almost ten years now under some form or another of imprisonment, including solitary confinement and torture, all without ever having been convicted of anything, and all because he is an enemy against censorship instead of a flak for censorship. And Twitter and other ‘social media’ are hiding from the public — censoring — the sheer outrageousness of it all.
(The United States in 2019 ranked #48 out of the 180 nations on the Press Freedom Index. That’s worse than almost all industrialized nations. However, I find the truthfulness of its mainstream-media international news reporting to be worse than that in some countries which rank near the very bottom of the list. I consider the ranking-system to be slanted toward U.S. and allied countries. If anything, U.S. receives far too favorable a “Press Freedom” ranking, and should be listed somewhere near the very bottom — at least as regards truthfulness. But its scoring below almost every other industrialized nation already places it far lower than the country’s myth about itself does, regarding “Press Freedom.” And heroic whistleblowers, such as Assange, experience the very worst of it.)
The solution to the problem of lies is not censorship, it is banning censorship.
On 7 June 2019, the need for this seemed even clearer to me after Russia’s RT headlined on that date “Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’”, and that brilliant lawyer and investigative journalist presented powerfully the case against any censorship at all. As one can see from the accompanying video interview there of him, Greenwald was like a force of nature, in that video, or (to use a different metaphor) a huge dose of mental draino for clogged minds.
This also means that issues of libel and slander are only to be addressed in the civil courts, and not, at all, in the government’s prosecutions, the criminal courts.
All censorship needs to be banned. The question therefore becomes: How can this be done? That’s a question I have never seen discussed, perhaps because it is being censored. It’s a very serious question. Any ‘political science’ which exists that has no extensive literature about this question is fake. Perhaps draino for clogged minds is needed especially for scholars.
Things are worse than we know, because censorship exists. Maybe censorship is pervasive.
So: I shall venture a solution to this problem: By law, all media which discuss national and/or international affairs will fire all editors and producers of “news,” but not the employees who have only managerial, presentational, and/or stylistic assignments, and will replace these people (all personnel who select what to present and what not to present) by a randomized algorithm being applied to each topic, so that, if, for example, something is entered into a search-box, then the order or presentation of the findings will be listed either (at the user’s selection) from earliest-posted to latest-posted, or latest-posted to earliest-posted, but not by anything that is chosen or determined by the search-engine itself. (In other words: no search-engine will be allowed to censor.)
On print or broadcast media, every news-piece will be controlled in real time by its audience so as to determine what the questions are and then to bring into the presentation randomly selected scientifically qualified experts regarding each such question.
For example: on the question of climate-change, the experts would be individuals who have terminal graduate-level degrees in each of the related climatology sub-specialties, such as those listed at Wikipedia, but also in essential related fields such as economics (an important climatological sub-specialty that’s not listed there).
If, indeed, over 90% of climatologists agree that man-made global warming is a reality, then the result of this method of selecting the “experts” who will be presented is that that viewpoint will be represented by over 90% of the experts — and this outcome would not be controlled by the given ‘news’-medium, nor affected by its advertisers.
In other words: only the subject-matter and academic qualifications — no governmental positions or background — would qualify individuals as being “experts” on the given topic.
If a terminal degree isn’t a qualification for expertise on a topic, then what is? Aren’t government officials supposed to be relying on them? And if, for example, the topic is Syria, then shouldn’t all individuals who have terminal degrees on Syria be the “experts” who are invited, on a randomized basis, to comment to the public about Syria-related issues?
If that were the case, then — for example — perhaps many Americans would know that the U.S. and NATO “began operations in April/May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria,” “organizing defectors in Syria,” and “smuggle US weapons into Syria, participate in US psychological and information warfare inside Syria” to produce regime-change there, and that Syria had never posed any threat to U.S. national security, yet the U.S. has invaded it for over eight years. And Barack Obama was hoping for such opportunities to overthrow Syria’s Government even when he became President in 2009.
If the American public didn’t know those things at the time, then perhaps America’s censorship was total — which would indicate how absolutely crucial a randomization of the public’s information-sources is, so as to replace the power that the existing mainstrean ‘news’-media have over the public’s mind, in America, and in its vassal-nations (which don’t yet include Syria).
If the public do not have unprejudiced — which means entirely uncensored — information presented routinely to them, then democracy isn’t even possible.
With this method, there still would be a system of exposing lies. But censorship would not be a part of that.
Anyway: that is one proposed way of replacing censorship, and overcoming dictatorship. How many politicians are proposing such changes? Why aren’t any? Are all of them afraid of the dictators? Is there no basis for hope, at all?
Originally published by Strategic culture
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Censorship implies that a government (public servants who usually act like our rulers) are unwilling and scared to have a public debate about a subject.
If the government were not afraid, they would openly discuss any subject, and since we the people are sovereign, we are being denied our basic human right when free speech is banned.
This subject is not rocket/quantum science, it is the behavior of the school playground bullies translated into a complex adult world.
Thankfully in this current digital age that you are experiencing by reading this,
there are ways that we can learn and SPREAD the truth/facts, and offG is just one of many optimistic places.
We may be approaching the “final solution” of a global dictatorship, so time is crucial now and we must act decisively, to spread the truth, using all methods available to us against the rotten evil cabal/cult/cartel/Illuminati/NWO that has already inflicted so much suffering, pain and misery on ordinary people.
Jola Brzeska – brutally slain in Poland in 2011, fighting a multi-billion dollar property scam by the post-Communist mafia linked to the “Liberals”. Abducted, tied up and set on fire – so naturally the police and public prosecutor initially called it suicide … so the CCTV evidence and tire tracks could be wiped.
Just see if AP or Reuters reported the immense gerrymandering and property scam, involving crooked judges and Liberal city officials. Search for Brzeska’s name. AP and Reuters routinely report on how Poland’s backsliding on democracy by attacking allegedly crooked judges … I wonder if the New York Times or Washington Post reported on it in 2011. Doubt it …
My twitter link to geroman seems to have been strangled – anyone else getting that?
Journalism is supposed to be self correcting, the truth should always rise to the top in a competing system. But we dont have journalism, we have 6 like minded corporations controlling 90+% of the media. Let a 100 flowers bloom, break up the cartels. (OK, OK, how are the corporations like-minded? . . . They are all part of an organized talmudic supremacist liars system.)
In fact, the reverse is true for, without censorship we cede control of public information to private corporations and we know where that leads.
Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew explained this with his customary clarity, “The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I’m telling you, that’s not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.” A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Singapore’s censorship regime has made its media among the most trusted on earth: 71% of highly literate, well-traveled Singaporeans trust their media. China’s censorship regime does even better: 80% of Chinese–who are smarter, better educated and more widely traveled than their US cousins–trust theirs.
It’s not censorship per se that’s the problem: everything is censored. It’s the trustworthiness of the censors.
Funnily enough, in our ‘Free Media’ here in Austfailia, there was a ‘discussion’ on ABC Radio National this morning, where the topic was, as so often, ‘How Evil is Xi Jin-ping and the Nazi Chinese Regime?’ The interlocutors were united, as ever, in deploring how rotten, corrupt, lying, incompetent etc, the Chinese regime is, under the Evil dictator Xi. And how much the Chinese people were yearning to be Free. I took five minutes before the gorge rose. It was conducted by Doogue, a geriatric feminazi Rightist, who once greeted the eminent Singapore academic, Wang Gungwu, with a cheery ‘ Good morning Professor Gungwu’, and on another occasion repeatedly referred to Sun Yatsen, as ‘Yatsen’.
I’ve just returned from a visit to Oz and was struck by the loss of confidence in its leadership by my wealthy lawyer host and his circle. Though at first incredulous when I told them some simple truths about China, they were nevertheless receptive.
But the idea that China has done all of them a great deal of good for a very long time–and never even spoken ill of, let alone harmed, them–is forgotten when some ‘security’ figure shrieks about China’s’ interference’ in Australia (of which there is zero evidence).
Racism, imperialism, propaganda and intellectual laziness trump common sense, apparently.
I just watched one of the most vicious of all the local Imperial Sinophobes. Peter Hartcher, on the ABC. With two air-headed bimbos simpering agreement, he launched a typically vicious hate-spew at China, Xi in particular, the Evil and incompetent CCP etc, so full of lies and humbug that it was almost self-parodying. Any well informed observer could have made mince-meat of the swine, but no such confrontation will EVER be allowed. THAT is the so-called Free Press that WE Glorious Western White Men possess in our magnificence, and which those hideous ‘mere Asiatics’ never will, until they properly ‘Westernise’ as Liu Xiao-bo said that they must, before they can become ‘fully human’. No wonder he was given the ghastly Nobel Peace Prize.
“No democracy can survive censorship”.
Neither can it survive corruption, from “Big Money” and “Undue Influence” that President Eisenhower warned the World about. Western Democracies today are awash with “Donations”(ie, Bribery). It doesn’t matter whom “the people” vote for…….after the results are known, the “Moneymen” move in, and buy the winners. In the USA particularly, BIG MONEY calls the tune, and the Congress is completely under the influence of Donors(and Dual Passport Owners). Democracy is a sham.
The same applies to Great Britain and here in Australia.
In Austfailia, censorship by denial of airtime or print space is total. The Internet is a;; that is left, and it is assailed by the recidivist liars of the MSM, who do little but lie, as ‘fake news’ or ‘conspiracy theory’. The average imbecile knows NOTHING of just how close is planetary ecological collapse, because the MSM does not mention it or actively denies that anything is amiss. We can go on mindlessly consuming in a ‘society’ bereft of any meaning, forever. I see that the Great Barrier Reef looks like bleaching for the third time in the last five years. Shit happens.
You could reduce giving Australians reason to deny airtime or print space to others by cleaning up your language and varying content.
The Pope of Puerile Pontification. A great supporter of Zionist child-murder who is ‘offended’ by the use of ‘shit’.
Good piece Eric, however, as far as the UK is concerned, there has always been some form of censorship.
The effort to free Assange is tied to a greater fight for social justice. Assange is the US Empire’s “political prisoner.”
Assange’s imprisonment is a warning to all investigative journalists, publishers, and whistleblowers–don’t expose war crimes or high level corruption within the US political duopoly.
Omission, censorship, lies, and misinformation is how the mainstream media news manipulates public opinion. This is also how the military/security/surveillance/corporate state pursues endless wars with little opposition. Any popular figure with an audience of millions who exposes the “truth” threatens the status quo– because the truth unleashes public outrage.
The Russian collusion concoction about the 2016 election was a needed pretext to justify internet censorship. However, the Iowa Primary debacle proves the insidious DNC is a far greater threat to US democratic elections.
It’s imperative untainted data about US foreign policy is NOT censored, inasmuch, as it’s the
working-class who feels the full brunt of imperialist wars. And this will especially be the case, as the Empire gears up for military conflicts against Russia, China, and Iran all inevitably leading to a world war.
Spot on Charlotte.
It seems that humanity, at least some elements of it, is hard-wired to destruct and even self-destruct.
Assange, Manning, clamp down on “fake” / alternative news, rigged elections, and more, are signs of the Evil Empire battening down the hatches as it ramps up for direct conflict with older more stable civilisations.
I would encourage young Bernie supporters to advocate for Assange and all journalists who reveal the truth about US imperialism. If there’s a world war the government will reinstatement the draft, inasmuch, as the all-volunteer military will be insufficient.
“Military men are just dumb stupid animals, to be used as pawns in foreign policy”….Henry Kissinger
Kissinger, would know since he was personally responsible for the death of more than 50,000 US soldiers.
“You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in Churches and schools and newspapers and Legislatures and Congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. “Death before dishonour”. “This ground sanctified in blood”. “These men who died gloriously”. “They shall not have died in vain”. “Our Noble Dead”……….Dalton Trombo.
If by ‘journalists’ you mean the pressitute vermin who infest the MSM, then there is more chance of my flying upside down and backwards to the Moon and back than there is of any of those revealing the truths of power in the West. If there’s a world war we’ll all die rather quickly.
I was referring to Max Blumenthal and the journalists on the GrayZone, Mint Press News, etc….
https://thegrayzone.com/
Study: Medicare for All Would Save
68,000 lives, Half a Trillion Dollars Per year:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/study-medicare-save-68000-lives-half-trillion-dollars-per-year/265032/
That ‘saving’ of half a trillion is loot NOT flowing into the oligarchs’ pockets. What are you-some sort of Commie?
“Censorship is .. the path to dictatorship”
There are some good aspects to Dictatorship. Perhaps that’s why it [dictatirship] is being skipped in favour of Fascism.
I’m reluctant to even comment on this essay. It has all the structural flaws that Ed Curtin’s essay of a couple of weeks ago had …and then some. In trying to bring some sociological and anthropological conceptual framework to that: it ends up just being mocked …hence the reluctance. Without any conceptual framework or structural theory at all though – all you have is a naive realism of radically free individuals. In self-assemblies free from structures and institutions. Individuals in a vague conflict theory of rudimentary self-organised classes – the ‘Regime’ and the ‘Public’ – or the propagandised ‘us’ and the propagandising ‘them’. And some vague resolution theory of ‘correct information’ given by qualified – but ideologically neutral – experts in given fields. Which will unburden our radically free and naturally unbiased cognition from propaganda. Within the structureless empty container of the state. Within the economic void of an invisibilised means of production.
Which seems to suggest: that with corrected, unbiased information flows, strict legal objectivity, and politically ideological neutralility (“Separation of Powers”) …the Public (“We, the People… “) will form the perfected – if still flawed – ethically ideal democracy. Of the ethically ideal type ‘civil society’ of free individuals; within an ethically ideal type democracy; within an ethically ideal type representative state (“The Democratic Republic”); with a symmetric ethically ideal type Social Contract (where the Representatives represent the People – not the Aristocracy) …(“The Constitution” of self-sovereignty); all politically and economically neutral …where the free market serves to distribute goods and services with maximal efficiency on the basis of ability. Pursuant of all this freedom – as an “”unalienable right” – for Life, Liberty, and Happiness …all men were created equal and free. Sound familiar?
This is nothing much more than a re-statement of the political pre-suppositions of an Eternal Return to the Enlightenment Project of radical individualism. One which will presumably serve as the “City Upon the Hill” – as a luminous beacon of the ideal type ethical society of evangelical charity. As the unmatchable absolute moral prototype of hope for all other societies to base themselves on as they develop in its guiding likeness. It seems to me we have been here before? About 300 years ago. And the desolation of humanity and nature is the unvarnished pursuant result.
When you look at the complexity of the modern market society – and how it is structured – a funny thing happens to all that radical freedom …our radical autonomous agency. It disappears into the very design of the ‘democracy’. If we have radical ”free will” autonomy and agency – pursuant of all that imaginary liberty: what do we do with it in a democracy? We give it away to a ‘representative’. Democracies were designed to concentrate liberty in the hands of a Few. Which is the way the (slave owning) Few designed them. Democracies and freedom are antithetical to each other. And market economies even more so.
And antithetical to life and happiness too. But we do like the dream of being radically free and fully conscious agents of of our own independent minds. By which radical cognitive agency we have woken from history in order to think solely for ourselves …outside the cultural milieu. Which- in itself – is the very core tenet of the Enlightenment Project. By which we unwittingly eternally return into unconscious collective enslavement. By thinking we are free to choose unhindered by structures, states, and free market economies that are all co-founded on the the self-same core belief system. All predicated on a radically economically undetermined ‘freedom of will’ and fully conscious cognitive freedom of choice of imagined inauthentic agencies.
Even if the pejoratively named ‘Continental School’ of structural anthropology is to be mocked …and Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci are to be ignored (I dare not even mention the Critical Theory of the even more maligned ‘Frankfurt School’ of ”Cultural Marxism” (even if outside the ‘americanised’ free imagination there is no such thing!)). And if any thought language may play a part is to be subverted: you still need a structural theory. People live is societies set in states set in a globalised market economy set in the environment. To isolate that down to a rudimentary under-theorised sociological lens distorts the interpretative perspective.
Theory is important. It does not have to be radical. John Searle managed to maintain allegiance to the Enlightenment analytical tradition when he wrote about ‘illocutionary speech acts’ and the ‘construction of social reality’. And Lord Giddens is a fucking globalist mate of Blair’s!
Social reality is a lot more complex than to be reduced to just its information flows. Social reality is profoundly not real. It is in pursuit of its own coherence: not truth. Personal autobiographical identities are narrative constructions woven into social institutional narrative constructions. The state is a story that conceals that state from the people …all the people. The deceivers and the decieved are both auto-propagandised in the self-deception of their own rhetoric. Facts do not matter …coherence of socially constructed narratives does. Narrative is anything but univocal: the underlying logic of narrative construction is however univocal …Both Republicans and Democrats believe they alone represent the exceptional and indispensable City Upon a Capitol Hill …with all global eyes upon them.
It is all lies. No one is radically free. No one is anything other than a product of history (actually, histories) …trapped in historical circumstances way beyond any personal autonomy and illusory self-sovereignty. ‘Facts’ are socially constructed ‘realities’ that serve a constitutive purpose of maintaining larger realities …that are the institutionalised reification of ‘facts’. It’s all a fucking big language game we can only quit when we realise the underlying logic – the ‘rules of the game’ – is all and only the narrative construction of radically free independent selves …upon which Capitol Hill is founded.
There is no such thing in real societies …neither the ideological ‘I’ or ‘We’ commodity-form of humanism apply. If and when a putatively free-society realises that: the first thing they will do is destroy all the Tablets of Stone the violent and genocidal lies of democracy where inscribed on. By the deceivers for the dialectically deceived. And so it goes on…
The above is a typical academic’s screed. It creates a straw man of Zuesse. It ignores and distorts what he wrote. It’s verbose, name drops, and uses supercilious diction to rationalize its lack of argumentation. Finally, it contains no evidence to support its claims.
“Verbose”?…..Verbal Diarrhoea more like……..
Geoffrey:
It would be nice if the ‘Public’ was informed by verifiable, true information. And that then they would form a ‘democracy’ …which is the gist of the proposition. But there is only a vague reference to the ‘state’. And no reference at all to the economy. All these things are radically and interactively linked and make no sense in isolation. You need an overall structure to even consider them. Which is the basis of sociology and social anthropology.
When we do look at them – the ‘Public’ and the ‘Regime’ – as a sociological and economic system: a radically different critique emerges. Of an ideological superstructure and the economic substructure: in a dialectical relation. Which is the basis of Marxian analysis (which Lukacs and Gramsci expanded): which looks at social relations through the lens of relations of economic alienation and cultural hegemony, mainly.
Your underlying supposition is to say this has no relevance or basis in argumentation. Which would be to conveniently sweep away 150 years of alternative critique of capitalism as irrelevant. Perhaps this is what you mean, perhaps it is not? You do not really give any indication of an underlying position at all. At least I tried to qualify my critique by ”name dropping”. And identifying a radical anti-capitalism.
Then you make the old straw man about ”lack of evidence”. You cannot put a society in a lab, vivisect its members, and try to understand sociological structures by looking at slides of their brains. Which is why sociology took an ‘interpretive turn’ away from methodological logical posivitism in the 70s …just before I started to study. The social construction of reality, structural anthropology, speech acts, and Wittgenstein were all the rage. These are not just ‘name dropping’. These are serious areas of study, with plenty of field work to support them. But no dead embalmed society members to try and extrapolate whole societies from pickled brain structures, no. No hard ”evidence”.
So whether we can agree on the relevance of interpretive or ‘anti-positive’ analysis or not: surely we can agree that the above contains none? Sociology needs a conceptual structure and theoretic frame of reference …or else it is just words. People live in structured realities. How those structures are constructed determines the reality …and also the nature of the people as a historical relation. No one can invent a culture or a language. But a culture or a language can and does invent a people.
http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reality.pdf
When I did study: you could lose a grade for being ‘under-theorised’. But ‘atheorised’ or ‘anti-theorised’? I know it is not an exam: but if you want to say something relevant – you have to give it the relevance of structure and theory. And be informed by something of what sociology, philosophy, and structuralism, etc have had to say in the last century or so. It is not all academic screed …much of it is trenchant anti-capitalist critique. Which is why I use it.
You are finally revealing a mischievous sense of humour, BB.
Perhaps I should state more clearly: there is no ‘pure’ democracy. It’s all part of the big package of Enlightenment lies I package under the denotation of the ‘Ideological-I’ …Of the radically conscious and radically free individual author of stuff – like bombing countries into democracies or stone ages, installing dictators, and generally genociding anything they haven’t already genocided. Which no one disagrees with …as they conclude that ‘I’ am different.
Such an absolute differentiation becomes the basis for the next round…
There is so much that Eric has panglossed – a whole 150 years of radical critique – to reach a rather naive romantic conclusion, it would be impossible to put it all back in. No one wants to lose the individual ‘I’: which is the only vector of contagion of the pandemic of hyper-individualism that corrupts even the ecological life-base. But if the regime gives us good information all will be well on the way to some sort of democratic equilibrium? That’s actual BS. Particularly without a state or market economy involvement. It is not like they determine anything, is it?
Still, there are none so deceived than they that deceive themselves. 😉
Lying to yourself begins the process of the jettisoning of wisdom. Auto-lobotomisation.
I do appreciate your contributions, Brenda. Others, plainly, find them challenging.
Brenda is my mother in law. Call me by any other name – even a rude one …but not Brenda!
Things are objectively real. Facts are facts: and objective realities are the totality of known and knowable facts. This is what we like to believe.
Things are socially constructed. Facts are inconveniences. If a fact does not fit the coherence of the social constructions: it does not exist. Or, it is modified to fit the pre-existing narrative construction. It is recuperated into narratives. Narrative construction is the ‘smoothing’ of facts into coherent structures and plausible – or palatable – chains of events …stories told about facts and states of affairs. Which is what history is – a mythologising into grand narratives.
America’s national narrative is well studied and known to all as a secular – or civil – religion. Is it true: or is it socially constructed? What would happen if fact met all that pomp, iconography, ceremonial, ritual symbolism, and institutionalised mythology? Would it result in a pure democracy – for the People, by the People?
Well, maybe …after the civil war, the internal displacement, the intra-national genocides, and all those patriotic gun nutters executing anyone who spoke a ‘fact’.
The essay is haplessly naive to the point of meaninglessness. Societies are dominated by rigidly adhered to institutionalised ideological fantasies that at least enough of the People invest in – with their actual identities – to form a cultural hegemony. Outgroups – Blacks, Hispanics, ‘First People’, etc – are vilified exactly because they do not fit or are perceived to oppose the Big Story of legitimising lies.
Which is to say: the People (or enough of them) would choose to continue believing the Big Story over the facts …for reasons of social cohesion. There is plenty of actual fieldwork to support this rather obvious conclusion. Southern ‘redneck’ culture is still waiting to ‘rise again’ against the hegemonic North!
My conclusions are common sense. Cultures are powerful narrative constructions immune to facts. Are they manipulated and censored? Of course they are …but the shared belief in the cult of Americanism prevails in disparate tellings and retellings …by the People and for the People. Who are the real censors? Democracy is the verification of stories: not facts.
Stories – like the radically free autobiographical accounts – people do not want to be revealed as stories. They cherish the underlying traditional storytelling mechanisms of social constructivism. Because they are objectively certain and real, aren’t they? Which is the nature of the challenge. 🙂
Will Blanche do? You seem to need the kindness of strangers. Don’t we all. I saw, perhaps it was you-who knows?-a quote from Galeano, that the Greeks had it wrong. People are not composed of atoms, but of stories. Reality is just too confronting, particularly in these end times. Perhaps it’s prostalgia, the yearning for some mystic, mythic, future.
There’s a lot in that, Richard. The metaphysical and mythological signification of stories is that they will have a happy ending …or lead somewhere other …with some metaphysical reward. When that Monotheistic Monomyth breaks down … …oh, dear.
and remember: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL!
this also applies to medical choice [ mandvax and such] , and women’s rights that are being erased by transgender.
and abortion rights.
most people would rather have it though. for them as have a different opinion 😉
As others have said, the lies by the state, via the MSM are key.
Was this ever on the BBC?
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1ec_1420640263
Fake as £9 note.
What is it? I don’t like random snuff footage.
The fake Charlie Hebdo event.
Do you see anyone being shot??
I don’t.
Do you see anyone being shot??
I do. And I know what you are referring to, the bullet hitting the pavement a few inches away from the policeman’s head.
Look at 17 seconds on the second video. Yes, you can see the puff of concrete to the right of his head, therefore appears the gunman missed. But if you pause at 17s then it’s clear that the angle of the gun is directed straight at his head. The bullet will have gone in and we can see as it bends and riccochet on the pavement. Ceretain types of bullet won’t explode the head.
Whatever happened, it was “highly likely” a Mossad operation to keep the French government in check, immediately after they announced support for Palestine.
Actually I recall that th Bataclan or Jewish quarter attacks were after that announcement, can anyone clarify?
I suppose you think Woolwich was real too?
False flags come in all flavors – with or without victims “perpetrated” by any variety of patsy, committed, framed, drugged, etc. Sandy Hook is actually a case of a provable negative — zero deaths, the school was mothballed, etc.
“How many politicians are proposing such changes? Why aren’t any? Are all of them afraid of the dictators?
Well that’s an easy question, they aren’t afraid of dictators, they are wannabe dictators.
They are servants of the real power-money.
It has been interesting to note how the recent ad by Scandinavian airlines (SAS) has provoked a backlash in public opinion in Scandinavia. The commercial went out of its way to denigrate all things Scandinavian drawing attention to the fact that anything of any value came from outside of the nordic bloc.
So we can forget about Ibsen, Strindberg, Abba, IKEA, Kierkegaard, Social-Democracy, high living standards and the rest. Self-loathing seems now to be de rigueur just south of the Arctic circle, combined with a predispostion to welcome strangers from alien cultures.
Unfortunately there is a tendency for highly differentiated for cultures to clash- different language, different religion, different cultures, don’t mix. Sweden, which has an open door policy, is a social prototype of the anti-sovereignist policy and is suffering the consequences of this open door policy – just ask Swedish women. Now why does the name Soros keep coming up? Well of course the globalist fuhrer and his Open Society network stands against borders, which means standing against nations and standing against sovereignty.
The whole episode has been a crude propaganda exercise on behalf of the globalist elites in an effort to make citizens to be ashamed of their countries and their cultures. Globalization is good for you and you’ll have it and like it! The trouble – for the PTB – is that it is so crude and transparent that it has backfired.
Very, very naïve about climate change Mr Zuesse.
The way climate change ‘experts’ are selected, particularly in academia, is through winning lots of grant income to confirm the IPCC mantras, not to sceptically examine the hypotheses of the day. In other words, they are not scientists, as they have already hard-wired into their public pronouncements the answers that their paymasters want from them. They are paid propagandists, exactly the sort of folks you proclaim to despise.
You really do need to grow out of your childish belief that scientists are honorable, truthful people. They are in the main money-seeking charlatans selected for precisely those qualities. You know, fiddling data, eliminating rural weather stations to replace them with urban heat islands etc etc etc.
In other words, treat scientists exactly like you propose treating the public media.
This schizophrenia of yours about who censors and who does not really is not acceptable.
I worked amongst scientists for 20 years and believe you me, they are not saintly icons of religious purity.
And Economists the modern shamans of bs.
Now you’re talking REAL pseudo-science.
Any “scientist” who fails to sing from the Global Warming hymn sheet will find his tenure and funding in jeopardy.
So most sing for their supper.
A surprising number of honest ones still expose this hoax for what it is.
Paranoid rubbish, The only ‘surprise’ about the tiny cabals of denialist ‘scientists’ is how few of them there really are, considering the money on offer from the fossil fuels behemoth and Rightwing ideologues, and how brazen are they in piping the tune for which they are paid. And who pays the planet’s ice-caps, glaciers, sea ice and permafrost for ‘pretending’ to melt?
It’s a shame to see so many otherwise intelligent people painting their faces, playing their bongo drums and falling into line behind Little Greta to serve globalist corporate interests. So that valiant eco warriors like Mark Carney can raid the pension funds and transfer trillions of wealth upwards. Or Goldman Sachs can make billions peddling Hot Air Certificates instead of CDS/ MBS/ Derivatives garbage. Follow the money. Pure astro turfing.
What a load of bollocks. There is orders of magnitude more money involved in the anthropogenic climate destabilisation denial industry, and in the assets of the fossil fuel Moloch than could ever be involved in academic and scientists being paid salaries. And, in reality, not paranoid refusal to face facts, the IPCC mantras have consistently downplayed the gravity of the situation, in an attempt to achieve ‘consensus’ with omnicidal criminal regimes like that of Suadi Arabia, the USA and Austfailia.
Just another Rabbit Hole for the Deplorables and Great Unwashed to charge down, like Identity Politics.
What is a feature of the west’s MSM propaganda machine is not necessarily what they do say, it is rather what they don’t say. Lies by omission. I watched a report on BBC news about the humanitarian situation in Yemen. There was a reporter who had obviously been briefed on what to say among a large group of Yemenis who were complaining about the lack of food (or that at least seemed to be the case). Apparently the Houthis were blamed for this situation of stopping food supplies and the brave humanitarians of the US, UK and Saudi Arabia (sic) were falling over themselves to help the long suffering people of Yemen. Yeah, right. I think in the trade that this is called ‘framing’. It is a presentation devoid of facts with no objective comment and commonly used in advertising and political propaganda.
It was Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was to develop the methodology of mind control. His book ‘Propaganda’ was eventually to become known as Public Relations in order to make it less crude and more palatable. He argued that:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
That’s about right. There is nothing new under the sun apparently.
And that leads neatly to “Inverted Totalitarianism”
Wolin explains that the constitutional imaginary “prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable and constrained”. Wolin understands the power imaginary as a quest for power that is rationalized by fear of collective mortality. The power imaginary may “undermine or override the boundaries mandated in the constitutional imaginary” through fears of a dangerous enemy:
To lie about a grave humanitarian catastrophe that is killing thousands of innocents may be Evil, but it’s all in a day’s work for the vermin of the Western MSM.
I do know that the MSM in Australia is simply a brainwashing machine, staffed almost entirely by stupid, ignorant, hypocritical dastards, who all say exactly the same things, more or less. The range of allowable opinions is these days so straitened as to be quite hilarious. The brain-washers compete to invent ever more lurid lies, eg the hard Right twit who the other day declared that the Nazi Chinese had ‘arrested’ numerous whistle-blower doctors and scientists, in their efforts to hide the CoVid 19 outbreak, because, well because they are Evil (and ‘mere Asiatics’ to boot). When the occasional dissenting voice appears, for one time only be assured, the presstitutes are both shocked by the Thought Crime, which seems incomprehensible to them, and frightened that they are appearing with such a Badthinker, and guilt by association may hinder their further climb up the greasy pole of ‘success’.
“ Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’”, and that brilliant lawyer and investigative journalist presented powerfully the case against any censorship at all.”
Greenwald may be brilliant and investigative, but it is not the brilliancy we need. Even though he says that he does not like ‘censorship’ and is ‘investigative’, he is very much into ‘privacy’, reason why he censored and did not investigate 98.5% of the Snowden files. Greenwald is a wolf in sheepclothes, a Chomsky of the new century, and it surprises me that Zuesse doesn’t see this.
We also do not live in an age of censorship, as long as we can read alternative viewpoints on the web. TPTB may not be fond of it, but since the possibility is offered, I do not think that they really care about censorship. The emperor that did not wear any clothes also did not care that people could see he ran naked. All they care about is Power. Information is not power, the jackboot is.
So the question is why people accept the reality that is offered through the MSM, even if there is no censorship? – Maybe they don’t and this backed by Gallop polls that show that believe in journalists, politicians and the law is at very low levels. But why should TPTB care.
To me, I agree with Philip K Dick who said (through one of his novels) that WE STILL LIVE IN THE EMPIRE. The Roman Empire that is, that continues to prosper through bread and circus.
More on Greenwald, Naomi Klein and all those other compatible lefties that may make you feel good, but are no good
https://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/?s=Greenwald&submit=Search
Aaahh…. The Rancid Honeytrap! Excellent Willem. He hasn’t posted anything for a couple of years tho.
Milosevic sent me links to this site ages ago, and Sassy Sourstein (author?) has a fantastic wit.
Few of his articles on the Fake Left, found myself laughing out loud.
Oh, on that very subject, Louis Proyect replied to one of Sassy’s articles on Syria, and Sassy’s reply to Proyectile was: ‘LOL, eat shit you fucking imperial shill’.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Has he got another blog, or has he given up writing?
Sassy is also good, but the best was Lorenzo. (https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com) Was kind of shocked recently that his website was taken down. I don’t know why, but fortunately it’s all in my memory.. I hope that Tarzie and Sassy will not take down their websites. There is lot’s of information there to be found
When you come on sites like this, you get lots of knowledge and info from other commenters.
And links to the most obscure, yet searingly brilliant sites that you probably wouldn’t have found yourself.
Just tried that link to Lorenzo and the message came up ‘The Authors have deleted this site’.
Agreed about the amount of info at Tarzie and TRH… Cheers W.
The ‘rancid honey-trap’. Is that the one baited with Hillary Clinton?
Okay, I think you’re living up to your surname (??) but The Rancid Honeytrap is one of the most witty, cutting, sarcastic, hilarious, in your face brilliant blogs I’ve ever read. Anywhere.
Authors name is Sassy Sourstein, and he (queer Marxist) has ripped to shreds the feminazi’s, the fake left (Proyectile and his ilk) celebrity activists (like Bono) the identity politics zombies, and he absolutely nails it on Syria amongst other things.
Unfortunately, he hasn’t written anything for 2 years, and seems to have given up.
It looks good Gezzah. Another great, now defunct, site is Rigorous Intuition. Do you know it?
I thought The Rancid Honeytrap had started up again as he posted 2 articles on Feb 21st and 19th or so.
Thought it was a couple days ago. Got slightly excited. Then looked at the date… 2019. Nothing since.
His cracking wit reminds me of someone… name on the tip of my tongue, think he’s in Aussie as well. Cough.
No, hadn’t heard of the site Rigorous Intuition, in fact a lot of sites I’ve never heard of. The Internet is a vast, almost endless space….
That sums Greenwald up nicely. The disappearing of the Snowden revelations was a MAJOR act of bastardy.
Syria a good example. It is all about perception of events and how people have gathered that perception. Yes,our old friend propaganda pops up again and the use of certain words which normalises crime and wrong doing. Words and terms like ‘humanitarian intervention’ to describe support for terrorism and war crimes.
The press index – quite right. Slanted to the west I suppose the West being the all powerful in the world. Imperialism disguised by liberal platitudes – and for example corruption (described last year by Jeremy Hunt as having a correlation with freedom or otherwise of a press) substituted with western words like lobbying, efficient tax systems etc.
In the ‘ less developed’ world corruption is corruption – in the West corruption widespread but people think otherwise because the word corruption not used.
People on mass calling for ban on opinions they don’t like – calling others useful idiots for Assad etc – but John Sweeney who makes these claims is right and we dont need the OPCW , experts and sceptics because he’s watched a few Al Qaeda videos. John Sweeney after a few bottles of wine on the BBC expense account knows best – end of discussion.
So the state has cleverly zapped the will of people to recognise and fight propaganda, corruption and censorship, using language which normalises crime and instead purges free thought and speech by placing that under the umbrella of crime.
Philip Scofield ‘coming out’ and the press spend the day repeating clips of him crying on TV treating this just as seriously as the Twin Tower coverage on 11/9/2001. People falling ‘over themselves to identify themselves with his bravery’ (self indulgence more like)
Is there any hope? There’s always hope. But this won’t come from our elected, sorry i mean unelected, politicians – or our free, sorry I mean controlled press – or our transparent, sorry I mean our corrupt, institutions.
They say, one step to recovery is turning the TV off to ween yourself off it all to get perspective back. Thats all fine, until you go shopping – the background radio blaring out ‘ Hi, Philip Schofield here – Im gay and by the way we at webuyyourcar.com will buy your car for a good, I mean not good, price.
People with degrees are still people, and are subject to other biases and, yes, corruption. For instance, the Amerikastani actress Mayim Bialik is a neuroscientist but is also a zionazi and anti-vaxer. How can you believe anything she says on neuroscience isn’t tainted by her zionazi and scientifically illiterate vaccination views?
The only censorship I would encourage would be on ad hominem and on excess quantity. Just give each writer BTL a daily letter counter like on Twitter ~ 500 words should do it.
I would specifically leave lies as they expose its writer best.
All Australian media are under censorship regarding a ‘mystery prisoner in Canberra’. Nobody knows who he is, what he (she?) has done, what the secret court is which convicted to an unknown time in incarceration. The foxes are guarding the henhouses.
Hopefully a writing group will pick up the idea to have a short story competition that imagines and speculates on the man – let’s say he is a man. How old is he? What ethnicity is he, does he speak a second or third language? What did he study? For whom did he work? Is he married and does he have children?
But the real creativity comes in when imagining WHY he was taken out of circulation.
Which beans could he spill? The Timor-Leste deception? The Crypto AG deception? A military operation that was illegal and is not yet known? Using soldiers as medical guinea pigs? Supporting Crimea being Russian? Revealing an Australian/US spook network in China to China? Trying to assassinate Duterte? Is there a cover-up re MH 370? How many, many lovely possibilities! And the winner gets? Jail for breaching censorship, even unknowingly?
I had a laugh when the hard Right, ‘Christian’ fanatic, former military thug, Andrew Hastie MP, was raving on in typical fashion against TikTok the other night. Apparently the Evil Nazi ChiComms of the’ Chinese Communist Party’ (say it was a sneer!)control the app and will use it to control our children’s minds-such as they are. That’s ‘ liberal democracy’ for you-barking mad, racist and paranoid.
To turn democracy over to technocrats is contradictory on its face. To allow technocrats the control of information is to guarantee pervasive censorship.
If you want a vision of he future, imagine a boot stepping on a human face- forever.
I prefer JK Galbraith’s vision over the future more than Orwell’s dystopian viewpoints.
The new Industrial State is the state that flourishes through technology, and the only the State can continue to flourish is to develop an educated mass of people.
Nobody gets ‘bad’ through learning math and physics even though propaganda tries to convince us that scientists are mad or nerds and do not really have a place in society.
The tendency of ruling elites to authoritarianism is rooted in human nature, obviously. I certainly agree a good long-term solution to the danger of authoritarianism is education, specifically a democracy where children from an early age are taught not just math and science, but also liberal arts, morality, ethics, etc.
I agree
What ‘democracy’? The USA? The UK? Australia? Oops-a little accident!
It was good until you suggested that only those with “terminal degrees” i.e. some “authority” actually know anything about the subject. In other words do what they’ve been constantly doing here with the media and that is turn the discussion over to “experts” or “pundits” in other words the “authorities” on the subject which is just another form of censorship.
Better experts than the Dunning-Kruger fraternity.
I don’t even know who Dunning-Kruger is or are if this is plural. So if you prefer “experts” then you must agree with the Hugo award winning science-fiction fantasy classics known as the NIST and FEMA reports on the collapse of the WTC Towers which was written by “experts” many holding PHDs (which should really stand for Piled High and Deep) and MAs ( probably Masterbating in class) who claimed that a nominal amount of jet fuel causing fires that couldn’t have burned any hotter than 800 degrees F and a lack asbestos were the culprit.
I mean if you believe that then there’s a bridge just down from where the Twin Towers once stood that you might be interested in buying or maybe some ocean front property in Nevada?
“Experts”? Plaaaaaleeeez! Anyone who’s studied basic science and structural engineering knows these guys are full of shit and were writing fiction instead of a “factual” report.
Slightly off topic but there’s no censorship here, just the terrifying Truth>>
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6BmbvTvFQ3g
Stealing that, thanks…..
Artists borrow-great artists steal.