In this 17 minute long video from the left-wing vlogger Gordon Dimmack, he talks about John Cleese’s decision to move from the UK to the Caribbean. When the papers covered the story a month or so ago, they very much gave the impression that it was all about a feud between Cleese and the Beeb. Cleese was angry at the Corporation for not showing Monty Python and annoyed that it was no longer rated over here as one of the greatest comedies ever. In short, he was going because of personal bitterness.
That appears to be part of it, sure, but from this wider coverage it’s clear that there’s much more to it. Cleese is concerned about the massive corruption in British politics and the major part played in this by the press. Dimmack plays a clip from an interview Cleese gave to Emily Maitlis of Newsnight, in which he talks about how terrible and mendacious the press is. He supports his point by showing Maitlis a graph illustrating a study done by the EU into the trust the citizens of its countries have in their press. Of 33 countries, Britain comes 33rd, with only 23 per cent of Brits saying they trust their media.
That’s damning.
Maitlis tried to get round this by pointing to a statistical outlier, Albania, which is near the top of the list, where 98 per cent of its citizens believe their press to be trustworthy. Albania under Hoxha was a Stalinist dictatorship. After the Fall of Communism it became a mass of seething corruption which destroyed several governments as the economy collapsed through pyramid schemes. So it very probably doesn’t have a remotely trustworthy press. But Maitlis’ remark ignores the greater trust other, stable countries with a history of open, democratic politics, like the Netherlands, have in their media. When Maitlis tries to object to Cleese’s point that the British press is not trusted and untrustworthy, he just laughs in her face.
The conversation then moves on to Cleese’s complaints about Python, which Dimmack supports, although he says he like Ricky Gervaise’s latest comedy, Malcolm. Dimmack then moves to another interview Cleese gave, in which talked more about his departure from these isles. He was going first to Nepal to see the tigers, then going to do another tour of America before finally settling in Nevis, which he and his wife saw and fell in love with. He states that he’s leaving because it’s nearer to his daughter in Los Angeles, and that he does most of his business in America. But he’s also moving because he’s sick of the corruption in British society. He states that he was personally involved in British politics, first for proportional representation and then in the Leveson II inquiry. But these were stifled by the British press. He’s also critical about the banks and their destruction of the economy. He’ll still be interested in British politics, but he won’t return until we get a government that is serious about changing things in Britain for the better. This is possible, but he fears he’ll be away for some time.
To show how genuinely politically engaged Cleese is, Dimmack flashes up a couple of tweets from the great man about Russiagate and sources supporting his belief in Russian involvement in Trump’s election. Dimmack fully agrees with Cleese about the corruption of the lamestream media, and says he has tried to point him in the direction of people, who do tell the truth. Like Max Blumenthal about Venezuela, and Jimmy Dore. People Cleese could more easily contact in America. Dimmack admits that there’s hardly any chance that Cleese will read his tweets, as he’s got 597 million followers. But perhaps if enough people follow Dimmack and tweet to Cleese recommending he look at the above journos of the new media, this may change and Cleese will start supporting them. Which would be great, because Cleese’s support would obviously be highly influential. Dimmack states very clearly that he is trying to change the world, and if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem and should step away.
This is the YouTube video I’ve just posted up on my channel for my book, Crimes of Empire, which I’ve published with Lulu. This book describes how what the media have told us about the West’s military and foreign policy interventions around the world are not part of a general campaign of freeing the world’s peoples from evil and murderous dictators and terrorist regimes, but have been done simply to protect western commercial and geopolitical interests. Here’s the blurb for it I’ve put up on the YouTube page for it.
This is a video for another book I’ve written, Crimes of Empire, which details how many of the foreign interventions the West has carried out since 9/11 have definitely not been to give the peoples of the world democracy and freedom, but very firmly to support American and British economic and geopolitical interests.
This includes the seizure of Iraqi oil reserves and state industries, the very carefully orchestrated Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, the overthrow of Jacob Arbenz’s government in Guatemala because he threatened to nationalise the plantations of the American United Fruit Company and so on.
The book draws on works by the former Guardian journalist Greg Palast, and William Blum, a long time critic of American imperialism, as well as the new, alternative media on YouTube and the internet. Like The Young Turks, Jimmy Dore Show, Kyle Kulinski’s Secular Report, Democracy Now, Novara Media, and the British conspiracy magazine, Lobster.
I also talk about how we also destroyed Libya to overthrow Colonel Gaddafy. Like Saddam Hussein, he was a brutal dictator, but this was not why he was overthrown. And the result has been that half the country is now occupied by Islamists, who have brought back slavery. In contrast to Gaddafy, who was anti-racist.
And America and Britain have toppled regimes across the world, like Arbenz’s, under the guise of protecting the free world from Communism. But many of them, like Arbenz’s, were simply democratic socialist, or left-liberal.
I mention some of the books I’ve drawn on, such as Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse, which I’ve reviewed on this blog, and the late William Blum’s Freeing the World to Death and Democracy: America’s Deadliest Export, as well as his Anti-Empire Report on the net. I’ve also said that some of it is drawn from RT, which I know is owned by the Russian government, but useful in providing an alternative view, though I state that it, and the mainstream media, should be viewed skeptically. I also recommend the British conspiracy magazine, Lobster, which I make very clear is about real conspiracies by covert groups and the world’s intelligence agencies, rather than stupid and poisonous conspiracy theories about the world being run by the Jews or reptoid aliens.
Mike put up a piece today commenting on the Torygraph’s praise of Roseanne Barr, just as she got her show cancelled for racist tweets about one of Barack Obama’s presidential staff. Barr had described Valerie Jarrett as ‘the Muslim Brotherhood + Planet of the Apes had a baby’. She later apologised for the tweet, but it was too late. The damage had been done, and her show was cancelled.
The Torygraph, however, had issued its own Tweet, stating that Roseanne’s huge ratings showed the bad need for a Tory sitcom in Britain. Mike drew the obvious comparison between the star’s own racism, and that of the Conservative party, shown in its ‘hostile environment’ policy, which has seen 60 + Windrush Brits deported unjustly, their inaction over the Grenfell Tower fire, which seems to many to have a racial aspect, and the suspension of a large number of Tory candidates for racism in the weeks leading up to the council elections.
Mike concluded his article with the words:
So the Telegraph was right to compare Roseanne with the Conservatives – just not in the way the writer had imagined. As for it being a sit-com…
Like Ms Barr’s behaviour, some of us don’t think racism is funny.
In fact, there are several more things that need to be said about this incident, and not just further discussion of Barr’s own bizarre antics and insults to other celebrities and political figures. It also shows the Tory attitude towards television, and the responsibility of the British press for starting rumours about Jarrett in the first place. The Young Turks did a piece on the scandal, and reported that Barr’s comments about Jarrett linking her to the Muslim Brotherhood come from a right-wing conspiracy theory. These emerged on right-wing blogs during Obama’s presidency, and claim that she was secretly working to promote Islam in the US, and wanted it to become ‘a more Islamic country’.
And they’re completely untrue. Jarrett isn’t even a Muslim. And the ultimate source for these stupid rumours, according to Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, was ‘a British tabloid’. Well, I wonder which one that could be. Actually, at one time I would have guessed it was the Sun, but after all the right-wing newspapers libelled Mike as an anti-Semite, it could be anyone of them, including the Heil and Express.
Uygur and Kasparian go on to discuss some of the other insulting and false tweets Barr has made in the past, as well as her rapid changes of political orientation from one extreme to the other. She also made one Tweet, directed at Chelsea Clinton, which said that George Soros had sold out his fellow Jews to the Nazis and stolen their money. This is completely untrue. In fact, it’s the very opposite of Soros’ own attitude. The billionaire financier is of Hungarian ancestry, and he hates Zionism and Israel because Kasztner, the leader of the Zionists in wartime Hungary, did allow the Nazis to deport tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps because he hoped that the Nazis would allow others to emigrate to Israel. Barr also posted another tweet saying that another woman, Susan Rice, had ‘great swinging ape balls’.
Last year, Barr’s politics were extremely left-wing. At the elections she put herself up as a Green party candidate, and appeared on The Young Turks, saying that existing American politics weren’t nearly left-wing enough, and there was a need for a new left-wing party. Now she appears to have swung completely round through 180 degrees, and is a fan of Trump. At one time, she was a supporter of the Palestinians, before turning to support Israel. She’s also made some very anti-Semitic comments herself, despite also being Jewish. And she also once dressed up a Hitler to bake cakes showing people going into gas ovens. Uygur says that he doesn’t know whether that was right-wing, left-wing or what. I honestly don’t know either, except that it’s massively tasteless and offensive.
The two suggest that Barr’s weird behaviour can be explained by her having been in a severe car accident when she was 16, which so traumatised her that she spent several months in a mental hospital. If that is the cause of her strange rants and zigzagging across the political spectrum, then she’s mentally unbalanced and needs help.
But she’s been very strange for a long time. Way back in the 1990s, one of the Ab Fab team – Joanna Lumley or Jennifer Saunders, if I remember correctly – described working with her in America. According to whichever British star it was, Barr herself never acted in rehearsals. She was pushed around everywhere in a wheelchair, and watched while another actress went through her lines, until it was time for her to act on camera.
As for the Telegraph claiming that Britain needs a Tory sitcom, this seems to be linked to the Conservative press’ attitude that television is dominated by the Left. The Daily Mail in particular has published any number of articles claiming that this is the case. It’s all part of their tactic of working up rage over a non-existent issue in order to boost the Tory party and attack the Labour party and the broader Left. And I think they’ve been fans of Roseanne and other American comedy shows for some time, because of their Conservative, anti-welfare bias. I can remember when Bread, about a family where most of the characters were on the dole, was on British TV in the 1980s. It was very popular, and the Mail and Express hated it because it was about unemployed people content to be supported by the state. They praised instead American sitcoms, which saw unemployment and surviving on state benefit as a mark of shame.
I don’t think there is an anti-Tory bias in British television comedy. It either really does try to be impartial, or there’s actually a pro-Tory bias. One of the two responsible for Dad’s Army, Perry and Croft, for example, wrote a piece in the Radio Times attacking the miners during the Miners’ Strike for their hostile treatment of strike breakers. Which shows their personal political bias, even if it doesn’t say anything about that of the shows they wrote for.
The Torygraph seemed to believe that a Conservative sitcom would be popular, but that’s simply a matter of speculation. It’s not actually clear whether such a show would work in the slightly different political culture on this side of the Atlantic. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. The Torygraph isn’t interested in quality, popular programming so much as increasing the already considerable pro-Tory bias of the British media. And they haven’t yet understood that the reason why people are turning to alternative sources, is because people are increasingly fed up with that same Tory bias.
Roseanne Barr might have had a hit show on American TV, but she was clearly a deeply troubled woman with very unpleasant, racist opinions. Which don’t make her a model for anyone’s comedy, except for racists like those in the Tories.
It’s isn’t just Rachel Maddow. They go on to talk about how the whole of the American mainstream media, including MSNBC, has been corrupted by corporate power, and now reflects nothing but establishment propaganda. Just like the corporatist, Clintonite wing of the Democrats. They also talk about the terror Black and Latino neighbourhoods are living in, thanks to Trump, ICE and the anti-immigrant rhetoric. They conclude by discussing how whole neighbourhoods in Houston and elsewhere in Texas have been gutted by Hurricane Harvey, but aren’t receiving any help, because they’re working class areas and only the business and affluent centres are prioritised. And the immense environmental damage that has been caused by Big Oil, but which goes unchallenged and undocumented, because Big Oil owns everything in those areas, right down to schools and hospitals.
Abby Martin is the courageous and fiercely intelligent host of The Empire Files on TeleSur English and previously, RT. This series unflinchingly exposes what the American military-industrial complex is doing across the world through coups, ‘regime change’ and foreign wars and military interventions. Including the real situation in Israel, where the Israelis have subjected the indigenous Palestinians to nearly 70 years of massacres, brutality and ethnic cleansing.
She also shows how ordinary Americans are being exploited at home, as big business seeks to strip them of welfare, workers’ rights and shift the tax burden on to them, while further destroying any affordable healthcare provision and privatising the public schools. She was so much a threat to the American establishment, that half the report concocted to show that RT was just a propaganda operation being used by Putin to destabilise America was about Martin personally.
I’ve already put up a three-part blog post about a previous 30-minute long segment from the Jimmy Dore Show, in which he and Martin discuss her work and the crimes of American imperialism. I think this segment may have been part of the same interview, but the two have been edited and split into separate parts.
The two begin by discussing how MSNBC, the formerly liberal network, is now just the mirror image of the right-wing Fox Network. Martin is particularly unimpressed by the way MSNBC tried to discredit Bill Binney by calling him a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Bill Binney was the NSA official, who constructed the ‘Thin Spread’ mass surveillance software keeping tabs on people’s electronic information and communications. He’s been praised by Edward Snowden, one of the other whistleblowers on the use of mass surveillance software by the intelligence agencies. They then talk about the lies and propaganda about RT, and how the government is trying to shut it down by having it register as a foreign agent. Martin states that MSNBC is now just the other arm of Fox News, but just parrots Democrat propaganda.
As for Rachel Maddow, one of the lead presenters on MSNBC, and a staunch supporter of Killary and the corporatist Democrats, Martin states that she’s a careerist hack. However, she and the other hacks with her realised that they have to double down and try to explain away why Killary lost to Trump. But they’re so trapped in the elitist bubble, that they have absolutely no idea. One of the reasons Clinton lost was because she didn’t bother going to certain states, like Wisconsin. Martin and Dore joke about whether it was Putin, who stopped her going there. Did he steal her map, hack into her computer and wipe the entry for it?
They then move on to the question of the future of journalism. Martin states that journalism has always been antithetical to business, this is why it’s been corrupted by government and folded into big business conglomerates through mergers. It’s why Martin herself joined RT. She talks about how it was a long time before she realised how compromised journalism actually was, however. She talks about how she went on tour with John Kerry. But journalism hasn’t just been corrupted by the Democrats, nor the Republicans. She states that the future of journalism lies with us, referring to alternative media and the power of the internet. She states that now we don’t need to get a press handout from Monsanto to talk about what they’re doing, or get a statement from the government: they can just talk to the government’s victims.
She then goes on to talk about ‘fake news’, and how this is being hijacked by the establishment to close down alternative media. Bill Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century, has said that he’s going to set up a thinktank to combat ‘fake news’. She and Dore also talk about how the alternative media are being forced to brand themselves to survive, so they have to set up Patreon accounts so people can fund them. But she has a lot of hope for citizen journalism. There is just a need to invest in it, and to follow those journalists we admire. We have to create our own networks. The Intercept, which has done some good work, was forced to rely on a billionaire, and now they have to go begging for money.
Martin then turns to Project Censored, which she praises as a very good, worthwhile alternative to mainstream journalist training. She advises aspiring journos not to go to journalism school, as they will just get into debt up to their behinds, and will be hit over the head with how to be journalists. Only to get a job as an unpaid intern at the end of it. Project Censored, on the other hand, takes in anyone, and you can go in at different levels – as a researcher, or writer, for example. Every year they published the five most censored stories. One of these is that there are 3,000 towns in America, whose water has a higher lead content than that of Flint in Michigan. She and Dore then discuss the alternative, drinking bottled water. Martin refuses to drink most of these brands, because they’re all owned by Nestle. Nestle owns the majority of water bottling plants. They just suck out the aquifers of local towns, which get nothing in return, except for a councillor, who’s on their payroll. And this is apart from the slave labour involved in their chocolate. She states that there is now only one party, and that she has always advised against voting for the lesser of two evils.
This is a very short video from the Iranian state news service, Press TV. It’s about a couple of minutes long. It was put up on the 2nd of November 2017, just a couple of weeks ago, and reports the call by the Palestinian authority for Britain to apologise for the Balfour Declaration, and recognise an independent Palestinian state.
It was the Balfour Declaration that pledged Britain to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine ‘without prejudice to the Arabs’. This part of the Declaration was soon broken, and while Britain tried to give at least the appearance that it was maintaining an even hand between the Jewish settlers and indigenous Arabs, in fact it favoured the European Jewish colonialists.
In fact the British government has refused to apologise for the Declaration, and said that it was ‘proud of it’. This little bit is accompanied by everyone’s favourite braggart, Old Etonian, and lethally incompetent ego maniac, Boris Johnson. He’s shown chuntering away, but it’s silent so normal folks don’t have to put up with his god-awful braying, blustering voice.
The clip also includes a brief interview with Richard Silverstein in Seattle, who notes how the Declaration led to the disinheritance of the Palestinians, and describes the recognition of an independent Palestine as ‘a no-brainer’. He believes that the importance of the Balfour Declaration was overstated, and says that there isn’t much of a case for paying reparations to the Palestinians, as Britain didn’t pay the Israelis for what they had suffered under the Mandate either. He also puts Palestine into the wider context of colonial politics and oppression, saying that Britain treated the Arabs in Palestine the same way it treated its other colonial possessions in India, across the Middle East and Africa.
Political and Corporate Corruption in Iran
I’ve previously refrained from putting material up from Press TV, because I heartily despise the Iranian government. It’s an extremely authoritarian state, which oppresses ordinary working people and its constituent ethnic minorities for the benefit of the mullah-merchant princes. These are members of the ulema, who also have extensive links to the merchants of Tehran bazaar and their own business interests. There’s a special term in Farsi, the ancient language of Persia, for the merchant-mullahs, and the ulema currently running the country definitely don’t like. I think they had the last journo or political dissident jailed for using it. There is also a massive underground Christian church in Iran, which, unlike its Chinese counterpart, is very much unknown in the West. It’s very heavily persecuted, contrary to various Hadith and passages in the Qu’ran, where Islam’s Prophet states that ‘there should be no compulsion in religion’. And I shall blog about that little injustice further, as it says as much about the cynical use of religion by the American military-industrial complex to advance their interests.
Iran Diverse and More Tolerant than Expected
I am also very much aware of the bloodcurdling nature of the Iranian rhetoric about Israel, and how former president Ahmedinejad’s speeches have been very plausibly interpreted as advocating the complete destruction of the state of Israel. However, Iran’s remaining Jewish community is quite well treated. I also understand that the country’s ancient Zoroastrian community, who were the country’s official religion under the Persian Empire, is also tolerated and respected. About three per cent of the Iranian population are Armenian Christians, who historically took refuge in Iran to escape persecution elsewhere in the Middle East.
It’s a very diverse country ethnically. Only 51 per cent of the country speaks the official language, Farsi. Other ethnic groups include Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, Reshtchis and various tribes speaking languages related to Turkish. The Iranians I’ve met have been very relaxed and matter of fact about the different religious monuments and places of worship that are scattered across their ancient nation. I was asked a few years ago by a Shi’a Muslim Iranian friend if I’d ever seen the Christian churches, that had been built around the Black Sea. There is an Anglican church, whose membership is composed of indigenous Iranians in Tehran, and I personally know people, who have been sent Christmas by Muslim friends, which they purchased in this church.
In short, whatever I think of the mullocracy, the country itself has always struck me as modern, tolerant and cultured. The last should come as no surprise. This is the nation that produced the great poets Firdowsi, who composed the epic history of the Iranian nation, the Shah-Name, and Saadi. Looking through the library, I found an English translation of the latter illustrated by none other than Private Eye’s Willie Rushton. Iran’s government are not its people.
The Balfour Declaration against Wishes Diaspora Jews
But I’ve decided to reblog this piece, because what it has to say about the Balfour Declaration is important. With the Declaration, Britain gave away land, which was not ours to give, and which we had absolutely no right to give away. I’ve already blogged about the way the majority of Britain’s Jewish community at the time were dead against the Declaration. They had absolutely no wish to move once again to another foreign country. They wanted to be accepted for what they were – Brits, like everyone else. The only difference is that they were of a different religion, Judaism.
I’ve also read the same thing about Hungarian Jewry, in a book I borrowed on the history of Judaism a couple of decades ago from one of my aunts. The book’s author, if I recall correctly, was a Christian priest, who admired the Jews and hated anti-Semitism. It stated there that most Hungarian Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century considered themselves ‘Magyars of the Israelitish religion’. You can see that by the way Stephen Fry talks about his Jewish grandfather. He was a Hungarian Jew, but Fry always talks about him as a ‘Magyar’ – the ethnic Hungarians’ term for themselves. Georgy Ligeti, the avant-garde composer, whose weird pieces Lux Aeterna and Atmospheres formed part of the sound track to Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, is also of Hungarian Jewish heritage. He has said in an interview that his family’s surname was originally something very German or Yiddish, but that they changed it to a Hungarian equivalent out of patriotism and national pride. Which disproves so much of that awful, vile bilge Viktor Orban and his wretched Fidesz party are either claiming or insinuating about the country’s remaining Jewish population.
And I’ve blogged before about how Tony Greenstein, one of Zionism’s greatest critics, has pointed out that the Yiddish-speaking Jewish masses in pre-War Poland supported the Socialist Bund, and wanted to be accepted as equal citizens with the same rights as their gentile Polish compatriots. Britain’s Jews were not isolated in wishing to remain in their ancestral European countries. They were part of the mainstream. A mainstream that the Israel lobby in the Tories, the mainstream media, and spurious anti-racism groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the squalid, malicious libellers of the Jewish Labour Movement in the Labour Party, are desperately trying to conceal and obscure. Heaven forfend if you try to mention this, or that the Zionists occasionally collaborated with Nazis and their fellow-travellers to persecute diaspora Jewry. They get terribly upset and start ranting that you’re an anti-Semite.
Suppression of Alternative Media by Western Neoliberal Elite
I also reblogged this because it was from Press TV. I despise the Iranian government, but I also heartily despise the way the American political-military-industrial caste is now trying to suppress alternative news sources. This means going after RT, because, er, they actually do their job as journos and cover issues like racism, growing poverty, the crimes of empire and the exploitative nature of capitalism. And so they’ve created another Red Scare, in which RT is the secret hand of Vladimir Putin corrupting American politics. And the Tories over here are doing exactly the same.
The Censorship of Alex Salmond by the Beeb
Alex Salmond now has his own show on RT in Britain. I can’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t, and at least one good reason why he should: the Beeb heavily censored and deliberately misquoted and then edited out his own words at the Scots independence referendum t’other year. Nick ‘Macclesfield Goebbels’ Robinson asked Salmond if he was worried that the big financial houses would leave Edinburgh for London if Scotland got its independence. Salmond gave him a full answer, stating that he was not worried, and was confident that this would not happen. He quoted various sources from within the financial sector.
Oops! Salmond wasn’t supposed to do that. So over the course of the day, the footage was carefully edited down so that it first appeared that Salmond gave only a cursory reply without much substance. Then it was edited out completely, and ‘Goebbels’ Robinson blithely told the camera that Salmond had not answered his question.
Which was a sheer, blatant, unashamed lie.
Apart from this, Salmond as the former leader of the Scots Nats is in a particularly good position to take up a job for RT. Scotland has always had particularly strong links with Russia. I can remember attending an academic seminar on this when I was hoping to do a degree in Russian at one of the unis in Birmingham. That went by ’cause I didn’t get the grades. I can also remember being told by an aunt, whose husband was Scottish, and who had very pro-Soviet opinions, that the Russians were particularly keen on the works of Rabbie Burns. It was part of the curriculum when they learned English.
This has not stopped Theresa May urging Salmond not to take up the job. Which just follows all the Tories, like Boris Johnson’s equally demented father, who criticised the Labour party because some of their MPs and activists appeared on RT. While conveniently ignoring the various Tories, who had.
So more hypocrisy and scaremongering. No change, there then!
Galloway and Press TV
George Galloway also has, or had, his own show in Press TV, and is an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights. I’ve been wary about him ever since he launched the Respect party, and the way the media monstered him when he saluted Saddam Hussein for his indefatigueability. But I’ve developed a considerable respect for him since then, because so much of what I’ve heard him say about the neoliberal elites and their warmongering attempts to start a conflict with Russia is absolutely correct.
The Anti-Muslim Right and al-Jazeera
The Republicans in America and the anti-Islamic right also hated Al-Jazeera. The Qatar-based broadcaster is supposed to be another source of evil propaganda and disinformation, this time covering for ‘radical Islam’. I think this might be because Al-Jazeera, like RT and Press TV, are showing us in the West what we are doing in the Middle East. Like the hundreds of thousands our bombs are killing, and the millions, who are being thrown out of their homes and forced into refugee camps and exile. The masses, who don’t have food, water, electricity and medical care, because the secular welfare states that have provided this have been destroyed in pursuit of big profits by the multinationals. Just like their people are being persecuted and butchered by sectarian killers, and their women and children enslaved by those savages in ISIS as Daesh tries to roll back the gains they have made. And yes, there has been a Muslim Feminist movement. Just like there has been one in Christianity and Judaism. But you count on Tommy Robinson and the English Defence League not to tell you that. Just as you can count on ISIS, with the backing of the Saudis, in trying to destroy it. Or at least leave it severely restricted.
The War on Domestic Alternative News
And once the elite have finished with the alternative news networks, they’ll try and finish off domestic American and British alternative news sources. Like The Young Turks, the Jimmy Dore Show, the David Pakman Show, Sam Seder’s Minority Report and Democracy Now! in the US. As well as the alternative, left-wing bloggers and vloggers, Google and Facebook are trying to marginalise as ‘fake news’. They’ve even developed algorithms to take traffic away from these sites. I’ve a very strong suspicious Mike’s been hit with it over here, as have several other bloggers. If I remember correctly, they’ve even tried to censor Tom Pride of Pride’s Purge, claiming he wasn’t suitable for children as his material was ‘adult’. It was, but only in the sense that you had to be a mature adult, who actually thought about the issues, to read it.
And once the people at the margins are suppressed, the elite are going to go for the mainstream.
And all we can expect from the mainstream broadcasters is more propaganda denying the reality of poverty, of climate change, of the misery created by the destruction of the welfare, the privatisation of the NHS over here and the refusal to implement single-payer in America, and the sheer, catastrophic lies about how climate change isn’t really occurring.
And as the media gets censored, the brutality of the police and the military will get worse. Black Lives Matter has raised the issue of the cavalier way some cops kill Blacks for the slightest of reasons. But recent arrests and brutalisation of White protesters have also demonstrated that this casual thuggery is also moving towards the White population as well. Counterpunch a few weeks ago put up a piece about a secret US forces report, which predicted that in the next couple of decades, US policing would become more militarised. The army would be used to quell the riots and disturbance that would break out thanks to poverty and increased racial friction.
Orwell’s going to be proved right. In 1984 he asks what the future will be like. The chilling, famous reply is: a jackboot stamping on a human face. Forever.
Without any alternative media to protest, because they’re all in jail or hiding on trumped up charges of treason.
Instead, we’re going to be treated to the lies of shills and hacks like ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg. And fed racist, Tory drivel by the Murdoch media, the Weirdo Barclay Twins and Paul Dacre.
This shows how desperate the government is about people getting news from alternative media and the internet, news and opinion that very definitely isn’t approved by Tory Central Office and the shills for big business. In this short video, RT reports that the government is considering defining Facebook and Google as ‘media outlets’, as this would allow them to impose the same kind of tough regulations imposed on broadcasters. The programme’s host talks to Neil Wallis, described as a ‘media commenter’, and a spokesman for the Christian advocacy group, Christian Voice, for their views.
Wallis states that this is a gross intrusion into freedom of speech, and states that it is unworkable, and cannot and should not work. He admits that there have been ‘gross excesses’ on Google and Facebook, and that the two should be doing more to crack down on dubious content like fake news or terrorism. However, the legislation goes too far in threatening to impose censorship. He also makes the point that such regulations would be extremely difficult to impose. He states that he makes dozens of Tweets during the day, often retweeting stories. Each of these would constitute under the kind of legislation the government is proposing a new publication, and someone would have to monitor them. In short, it would simply be too cumbersome and difficult to monitor and regulate the sheer amount of online posting.
The spokesman from Christian Voice states that there should be greater regulation, because too often material is posted on the web by anonymous individuals, of whom nothing is known. He also makes the point that people posting in haste may make far more extreme statements than they would otherwise do face to face. He therefore thinks it is fair to pass legislation that would require people using the two companies only to post the type of comments that they would make in a face-to-face conversation.
He is, however, concerned by the government’s statement that they wish to examine particularly the issue of religion on the Net, and LGBTQ rights and issues. The spokesman states that if this means limiting what can be said about Islam or homosexuality, then it is an infringement of free speech.
This looks very much like the Tories getting worried about people passing on uncensored and unspun news over the internet, bypassing the censorship and bias of the mainstream broadcasters and the rightwing press. And in order to justify their censorship, they’re trying to use the pretext yet again of protecting people from cyberbullying, online radicalisation by Islamist terror groups, and, I would assume, the threat to children from online pornography. The report doesn’t mention the last, but that’s been one of the major concerns that has been used to justify previous attempts to regulate content on the internet, such as that imposed by David Cameron’s wretched government.
The Neil Wallis interviewed by RT has the same name as the former editor of the News of the Screws, Neil ‘Wolfman’ Wallis, who used to turn up regularly along with the sordid little rag he edited in the pages of Private Eye’s ‘Street of Shame’ column. If that’s the case, then Wallis probably isn’t the best spokesman for press freedom, on the grounds that his publication regularly abused it to invade the privacy of various celebs and other, more ordinary people, whose private lives should have been no concern of anybody except themselves. The most egregious example of this spectacular lack of journalistic ethics and integrity was the phone-hacking scandal, but the Screws had been at the bottom end of the journalistic barrel doing pretty much the same type of pointless muckraking for most of its existence. Think of Mahmoud Mazher, the ‘Fake Sheikh’, who went around trying to get celebrities and politicians to make indiscreet comments or otherwise catch them out. In his guise as an Arab dignitary, he tried to get George Galloway to say something vile in support of the Holocaust. Galloway was wise to him, having recognised Mazher’s 7 ft tall driver and bodyguard, nicknamed ‘Jaws’ because of his immense height and mouthful of gold teeth. Galloway’s an ardent critic of Israel and its barbarous oppression of the Palestinians, but he’s not an anti-Semite. When Mazher tried prompting him into praising the Shoah, Galloway replied instead that the Holocaust was an horrific crime against humanity. And so the ‘Fake Sheikh’ went off unsatisfied.
But even if it the same Neil Wallis, he still has a point, despite his own and his former newspaper’s squalid and sensationalist brand of journalism. Such regulation would be a further, damaging attack on freedom of speech.
It’s clear that the spokesman for Christian Voice is in general far more supportive of such legislation, except where it touches what can be said about Islam and homosexuality. This probably reflects his own bigoted views against a competing religion and same-sex attraction. However, even there he has a point. A few years ago, it was reported that Christianity had overtaken Judaism as the most persecuted religion in the world. And very many of the countries that persecute Christianity, especially severely, are Muslim. With the increase in Islamphobia and racism in the West, there is a need to protect Muslims and their religion from bigotry and prejudice. However, this should not be used to limit reasonable criticism, including rejection of Islam, or any other religion or ideology.
The same should be true of any discussion of homosexuality. Prejudice against homosexuals should be condemned, as should any attempts to encourage discrimination or violence towards them. But people should be allowed to object to homosexuality as a simple matter of free speech.
Danielle La Verite is an alternative media broadcaster, who appears to have her own radio show. She specialises in politics, discussing government and establishment cover-ups, particularly those protecting high-level paedophiles. In this video she puts the boot into Iain Duncan Smith. She points out the many lies on his CV, and how he was sacked from every company he worked for. She then asks the obvious question of how such an incompetent has been allowed into government. Her harshest criticisms are naturally for his vicious attacks on the poor and unemployed in his welfare reforms. She questions his motives, and even his mental health for the immense suffering he has knowingly inflicted.
Warning: La Verite does not mince her words, and the language is frequently strong and obscene. I still thought it was worth posting despite these caveats. After all, IDS is vicious, cruel, mean-spirited and incompetent. He fully deserves every criticism, regardless of the colour of the language it’s framed in.
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