Okay, I just found a brief video on YouTube, posted eight days ago, on Nick Buckley’s channel. Buckley’s a former police officer and campaigner against knife crime, who’s appeared a couple of times on the Lotus Eater’s channel. I wasn’t surprised then, when he posted this video interviewing Richard Tice about Reform’s ‘Eight Principles’. In the video, however, he only talks about four of them. These are largely about protecting British democratic rights against the threat of the state and unelected organisations and quangos. According to Tice, Brits are aware that they’re born free and have inalienable rights unlike in the EU. Thus, Brits are able to whatever they like unless prohibited, while in the EU they can only do whatever the EU tells them to.
The irony about this is that the idea that humans are born free comes from a continental philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau has been condemned as one of the founders of totalitarianism. One Conservative American group made Rousseau’s The Social Contract one of the most evil books of all time alongside Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin included him among his Six Enemies of Freedom and the Lotus Eaters have also put out videos attacking him. But Rousseau’s book begins with the words, ‘Man was born free yet everywhere he is chains.’ The idea that you should be free to do whatever you want unless the law says otherwise, I think comes from John Locke a century before, and is the foundation of modern liberal ideas of freedom. However, other European philosophers also had views similar to Locke’s, that the state should be limited to the role of a night watchman, in the sense say that it should protect its citizens’ lives and property, but otherwise not interfere. This is the view expressed by the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt in his Grenzen Der Wirksamkeit der Staat – ‘Limits of the Effectiveness of the State’. I don’t know what the underlying philosophy of government of the European Union is. I suspect there isn’t one beyond harmonising various trade and other regulations between member states and allowing for the movement of labour and capital. The original intention was to create a united trading bloc to preserve western European economic independence from America or communist eastern Europe. The Eurosceptic right has frequently ranted about the EU being some kind of totalitarian state with comparisons to Nazi Germany and communism, but I’ve seen no evidence to support it. And rather than limiting freedom, I think the EU believes it is actively creating and nurturing freedom in its member states. Such as when it condemns Poland and Hungary for their legislation banning homosexuality and gay rights.
Now let’s go through the principles as explained by Tice and Buckley in the video.
The state is our servant not our master.
I don’t believe any believer in liberal democracy, whether of the left or right, would challenge this. The only people who would are either Fascists, following Mussolini’s pronouncements that the individual is nothing before the state, followers of Hegel’s dictum that ‘the state is the divine idea as it exists on Earth. We must therefore worship the state’ and supporters of Soviet Communism before Gorby’s brief reforms. However, in the context of Reform, a party of the right, it seems to me that this is yet another bland statement intended to justify further privatisation and the expansion of the power of private industry and the destruction of the welfare state against working people, the poor, the unemployed and disabled.
2. Lend us your power and we’ll give you back your freedom.
This could be said by just about any political party, even those which were real enemies of freedom. Hitler, in one of his rants at Nuremberg, declared ‘Everything I am, I am through you. Everything you are, you are through me’. The Nazi party anthem, the Horst Wessel song, also has lines about German freedom. Hitler also talked about preserving freedom through separating the different spheres of party and state and preserving private industry, though in practice under the Nazi regime the party and state apparatus were intermeshed and private industry ruthlessly subordinated to the state. Mussolini also made speeches about how the freedom of the individual wasn’t limited under fascism, except in certain ways, all of which was equally rubbish.
3. People are free.
This means, as he explains, that people naturally hold certain rights and liberties that should always be protected and defended. These include freedom of speech, religion and conscience. This does not mean that certain types of speech have no consequences. I interpret this as meaning that he feels that people can say what they want, but people are also free to express outrage and take action against others for offensive or dangerous speech that is not otherwise banned by law. Tice goes on to say that in practice, while people believe in this principle, they negotiate to give up a certain amount of this freedom with the state.
I think here he means particularly the legislation on hate speech, which in his view prevents proper criticism of certain protected groups in order to combat racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and so on. He has a point, as opponents of gay rights, who have made their opposition very clear in speeches, often quoting the Biblical prohibition against it, have been arrested. In Scotland Maria Miller, a gender critical woman, was arrested for hate speech simply for putting up stickers with the slogan ‘Scots Women Won’t Wheesht’, meaning that they wouldn’t be silent, in her campaign against the proposed gender recognition legislation north of the border. In my opinion, arresting someone for saying that goes beyond a concern about stirring up hatred against trans people into active attempts to police thoughts and opinions about trans rights.
But there are good reasons behind the legislation banning hate speech. In the case of racism, it’s to prevent Nazi groups stirring up hatred against vulnerable minorities like the Jews, people of colour and gays, all of whom have been or are targets of abuse and physical assault.
4. National Sovereignty
This means protecting British traditions, institutions and culture from enemies both external and internal. The external foes include the EU. The internal threats to British tradition and democracy are unelected pressure groups and organisations. These include big tech and companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook. This is a fair point. These organisations can and do censor material posted on their platforms. The right have been complaining about their posts disappearing or the algorithms governing their availability in searches being altered so that they become invisible, but the same censorship is also inflicted on the left. If Tice and his crew get the chance, I’ve no doubt they’ll demand greater freedom of speech for their supporters while maintaining or even strengthening the censorship against their opponents on the left.
Other threats, unsurprisingly, are the European Union, while among the unelected organisations wielding power he puts the environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the gay rights organisation Stonewall. Tice states that a few years ago Greenpeace published their manifesto for Yorkshire, which was a diatribe against the car, and therefore, in his view, an attack on the automobile industry in west Yorkshire. One of the accusations the extreme right is throwing at environmental groups is that they wish to ban cars and private transport as part of their plan to establish Green Communism. He also includes Stonewall and the massive influence it wields, although no-one has elected it. There is a problem with Stonewall in that the advice it has been giving to companies, the government and the civil service has been wrong. They deliberately gave a wrongful interpretation of the legislation covering trans issues which was very much what they wanted it to say, not what the law actually did. As a result, a number of groups cut their connections to the organisation.
But unelected groups like Greenpeace, Stonewall and so on acquire their power through possessing, or being perceived to express, expertise and competence in particular issues. In the case of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, it’s the environment. Amnesty International is respected because of its thorough investigation and documentation of human rights abuses, even though governments may pay no attention to its findings. Stonewall is taken notice of because it speaks, or claims to speak, for Britain’s gays and articulates their concerns and recommendations to combat prejudice.
Even in the 19th century governments had to pay attention to popular protest organisations, such as the massive abolitionist campaign against slavery, the Anti-Corn Law League set up by Cobden and Bright to have the corn laws repealed so that the price of grain would fall and working people able to feed themselves. There was also the anti-war protests against the Crimean War led by John Bright and others. There are problems with unelected groups exercising power beyond their competence or suitability, but modern governments have always had to deal with organised groups. Tice’s singling out of the environmental groups and Stonewall seems to me to be as much to do with a hatred of their views – the Brexiteers are full-scale behind the right of private industry to trash this country’s green and pleasant land – than with their supposed power outside of the formal sphere of elections. I doubt that Reform would ever go as far if they were in power, but it reminds me more than a little bit of Mussolini’s statement that there should be ‘nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’, and similar bans on private quasi-political organisations in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
But what you’ll also notice is that these principles tell you absolutely nothing about how Reform as a party intends to act on them, except by reading the lines. What does Reform intend to do about the health service? Not said. I suspect, in fact, that as a party of the right they’ll want to privatise even more of it. What about the welfare state and the scandal of millions of people using food banks? No answers there, either. I suspect, however, that in practice you’d get more mantras of encouraging people to be independent, find work and so on, coupled with rants about welfare scroungers. What about industry? Again, the reality is almost certainly that they want more deregulation. Well, we’ve had four decades of Thatcherite privatisation and deregulation, and the result is the mass poverty and failing economy we’re now experiencing. Industry should be acting for the good of society and its employees and not just shareholders and senior management. This means limiting economic freedom, but as the Liberal journalist J.A. Hobson said, in order for the mass of people to be free you need to limit the freedom of the rich. Which is obviously toxic to the Conservatives and other parties of the right.
To sum up, what Reform seems to be doing with these principles is to try to position themselves as defenders of traditional British liberties against the threat of the evil EU and pesky Green and gay groups. But this hides an illiberal ideology that views such groups as somehow subversive, would probably remove the obstacles against real, dangerous expressions of racial and other prejudice, and which would promote the interests of private industry against ordinary Brits.
We can’t afford to be taken in by sweet words hiding their true intentions.
I’ve blogged many times before about Private Eye’s hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and their poisonous support for the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Labour. One of those pushing it in the Eye is ‘Ratbiter’, revealed by Tony Greenstein a little while ago to be the pseudonym of Groaniad/Absurder hack Nick Cohen. Cohen, who isn’t actually Jewish despite his name, is clearly one of those miffed that Labour has elected someone who’s actually going to do something for Britain’s working people, and isn’t prepare to ignore or support crimes committed by the British establishment’s favourite colonialist state in the Middle East. He’s the author of a piece, ‘Faking Hell…’ in this fortnight’s issue of the satirical rag for 18th-31st October 2019, praising the Stop Funding Fake News organisation for their campaign to stop advertisers using those social media sites they consider to be outlets for fake news. Cohen’s article starts by praising the site for doing what he believes Google should be doing in preventing firms advertising with extremist web sites. He starts off by describing how those on the extreme right have had their advertising revenues hit, as firms like Sky, Macmillan Cancer Care, Which?, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Manchester United, Chelsea, Ted Baker, Experian and Ebay have requested Google to take down their advertising on Breitbart, Westmonster, and TR, the site of the notorious islamophobe and jailbird Tommy Robinson. Thanks to their campaign, Robinson’s site has lost 70 per cent of its income. Which might stop some of his jaunts abroad for a little while. But almost inevitable, the article goes on to attack The Canary. This has been a particular bete noir of the Eye for some time. They really don’t seem able to stand the idea that there are any social media sites supporting Corbyn, not least because they’re also a rival to the lamestream media. Which also includes Private Eye. Describing SFFN’s attacks on The Canary and its effects, Cohen says
While far-right sites target Muslim immigrants, far-left sites target Jews. “The Canary”, the campaign tells its followers and advertisers, “regularly publishes fake news and attempts to justify anti-Semitism”. it also feeds the conspiracy theories of the far left. One hideous example came when the campaign discovered that Unicef, which tends to the victims of the Syrian and Venezuelan regimes, was advertising on the Canary, which has denied the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and pretended that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in Douma. In August, the Canary cut its staff from 25 to seven. Perhaps inevitably, it blamed “political Zionists” targeting advertisers.
The toppling of the Canary is “the strongest evidence yet that the clickbait business model can be defeated”, the campaign said. Combine it with changes to Facebook’s algorithms to reduce the prominence of media businesses, and fake news in the UK is taking a hit.
Let’s go through and critique this pile of driveling hogwash.
Firstly, the Canary isn’t a ‘far left’ site. As I understand it, it supports Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s programme of nationalisation, the restoration of the NHS, welfare state, worker’s rights and trade unions, isn’t extreme left, except in the addled brains of convinced Thatcherites. It’s actually a return to the social democratic consensus, which was actually the centre left before the appearance of Thatcher and her campaign of privatisation, deregulation and the destruction of the welfare state and the decimation of working class organisations.
Secondly, it doesn’t promote anti-Semitism. What it has done is attack, rebut and refute the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party and specifically Corbyn’s and his supporters. And these are very much politically motivated. It comes from the Blairites, who are determined to cling to power whatever the cost, the British political and media establishment, which is simply terrified of anyone giving back any power to working people, and the Israel lobby. And a large part of it comes from the Israel lobby. Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada, and the Jewish American academic and critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein, have described at length how Israel and its supporters have been smearing any and all critics of Israel as anti-Semites since the 1980s, even when they are anything but Jew-haters, as in the case of those above. It’s their only defence against the justifiable criticism and condemnation of Israel’s government for its crimes against the Palestinians. It’s hasbara, the Hebrew term for Israeli civilian propaganda. The campaign against Israel’s critics, including Corbyn, is run by a special department of the Israeli state. This is why one of those smeared as an anti-Semite is Cyril Chilson. Mr Chilson is the son of a Russian Red Army pilot and a holocaust survivor. He’s Israeli, and served in the IDF and then an intelligence unit producing such propaganda. It’s because of his work for the Israeli military that he recognised the attacks on Corbyn and his supporters for what it was, and denounced it. And as result, this man, the son of people whose resistance and survival of Nazism was truly heroic, has been smeared as a Jew-hater. Disgusting.
Thirdly, the Anglo-American media have been producing fake news about Venezuela and Syria. Some of the footage of refugees supposedly fleeing persecution by Maduro’s regime was faked. Independent experts analysing the footage and evidence of the chemical weapons attack at Douma have come to the conclusion that this was also faked. Assad is a monster, who has killed and tortured in order to maintain power, and he does oppress his country’s Sunni Muslim population. But it doesn’t look like he was responsible for that atrocity. That lies instead with the ‘freedom fighters’ – ahem- which we’re supporting. You know, groups connected with ISIS and what evolved from the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. But the neocons have been pushing for the overthrow of the Syrian regime since the 1990s, because Assad is a Shi’a, like the Iranian regime, although of a much more radical branch of that faith. He’s therefore allied to Iran, which the Americans also want to overthrow. See the pieces produced by the Jimmy Dore Show about this.
Cohen in his attack on the Canary for rightly rejecting the received view of these events is therefore parroting Neocon propaganda.
Zelo Street has written extensively about Stop Funding Fake News, exposing how it attacks decent left-wing social media sites, while at the same time remaining very shadowy itself. No-one knows who runs it, as their identities and connections are very much hidden. The Sage of Crewe has therefore advised companies not to be influenced by their misinformation and pronouncements, until they themselves become much more transparent.
And then there’s Private Eye’s hypocrisy for printing this drivel.
Ian Hislop, the magazine’s editor, appeared on Radio 4 a few years ago in a piece about satire down the centuries, explaining that what his magazine attacked was humbug, double standards. Private Eye is one of the few mainstream magazines that tries to bring the public the news behind the news, exposing double-dealing, lies and hypocrisy in the press, the government and industry. But publishing this attack on the Canary is very hypocritical, consisting as it does of nothing but lies and propaganda.
The Defunding of Arab Satirists Al-Hudood
And it’s especially hypocritical as a few pages before Cohen’s wretched piece, there’s a little article in the magazine’s ‘Street of Shame’ column, ‘Joke Now, Pay Later’, about how the Arabic satirical website, Al-Hudood, was experiencing a funding crisis. Metro Bank has told them it will no longer act as their bank, and they have not been able to find anyone else to do so. There has been no explanation from the banks for this refusal to deal with them.
This seems to be the same tactics Stop Funding Fake News are taking with the Canary and other left-wing bloggers and vloggers: try to take them down through preventing people from supporting them financially. Perhaps whichever oppressive regime or organisation has leant on the banks to withdraw their support for al-Hudood also considers that they’re ‘fake news’ and a dangerous, extremist organisation.
Private Eye does much good in its exposure of some of the underhand dealings in Britain and around the world. But this attack on the Canary is, like their attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, just pure hypocritical establishment lies.
Alex Jones is the head of Infowars, and has been pushing bonkers conspiracy theories about one-world government takeovers, and Satanists, aliens, the Illuminati or whoever, all secretly running things behind in the scenes in collusion with big business and the Democrat Party. In this video from AlexJonesClips on YouTube, 26 of Jones’ lies are presented, both in audio from the man himself, and written on the screen with the real truth about what he’s claiming.
The video is under 9 minutes long, and most of the lies come from 2009. There are too many of them to discuss here, but they’re about big business like Walmart, Google and other companies being connected with the NSA and FEMA camps. The government is coming to seize your children and forcibly inoculate them. The UN wants to destroy industrial society, then take people’s children away to raise them in state dormitories. The NSA uses satellites to track people going to gun shows from orbit, so they can seize their guns. Bankers at Goldman Sachs are arming themselves against the people. The cops are thugs who beat up old ladies, and want a war with the public. Time magazine is pushing euthanasia week after week, and people being electrocuted with Tasers is now ubiquitous in comedy. Oh yes, and there’s the classic piece of right-wing paranoia about the 666 separator codes inserted into barcodes, which he somehow connects with sun god worship in Ancient Egypt.
These are the real conspiracy theories that need to be attacked, and it’s good that someone has gone to the trouble of cataloguing and refuting some of them.
Remember Sebastian Gorka, who was one of Trump’s key advisers in government, before the Orange Buffoon lost his rag and sacked him, like he’s done to so many others? Gorka was of Hungarian extraction, and had strong links to the Hungarian Far Right. He wore the insignia of the Vitezi Rend, the Hungarian chivalric order set up by Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who led the country into a pact with Nazi Germany and assisted them with the Holocaust and deportations of Jews in his country. Gorka has also been personally active in a number of Hungarian Far Right organisations, and was one of the founders of one of them.
Turns out Gorka’s a wanted man. In this clip from the David Pakman Show, host David Pakman and his producer discuss the news that Gorka is wanted for firearms offences in Hungary going back before he became a member of Trump’s cabinet. Gorka has responded to this by making a non-denial. He Tweeted that the warrant was put out after he moved to America, adding ‘moron’ for good, insulting effect. But as they point out, this isn’t actually a denial that he is wanted for these crimes. Pakman also draws parallels of moving to America from South America, where he grew up. It’s perfectly possible that Gorka committed the offences after he emigrated to the US. Just because his primary residence is now the USA, does not mean he hasn’t been back to his family’s old homeland from time to time. Just as it doesn’t mean that because someone lives in California they have never been out of that state.
Pakman and his producer also point out that this also has dire implications for Trump’s claims that he’s hard on immigration and stands for law and order. Well, no, clearly he doesn’t. He claimed he was going to be super-hard on vetting his staff. He clearly wasn’t, otherwise Gorka’s arrest warrant would have been flagged, noted, and he wouldn’t have got the job. On the other hand, perhaps he was, and the Generalissimo of Reality TV didn’t care. Pakman also contrasts Gorka with the Mexican and Hispanic immigrants, who enter America to do physical work, like labouring. This wasn’t the case of a normal immigrant, who actually does something useful, like put in windows, fix the plumbing or mow the lawn. No, Gorka was a criminal immigrant, whom Trump took into the White House itself.
The last minute or so of the clip is a piece of advertising for their sponsors. I’m sorry for this, but I realise that shows like Pakman will only survive by advertising, and need sponsorship. Because Google is desperately trying to close down any left-wing news sites on the spurious grounds of combatting fake news.
As far as Gorka’s unsavoury activities and connections go, I honestly don’t think that Trump cares. He’s surrounded himself with all kinds of deeply unpleasant characters with extreme right-wing views, like Richard Spencer and the Alt Right. A century ago Gorka’s own ethnicity would have been problem for American nativists. Back in the 1920 right-wing American ethnic nationalists really didn’t like immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, like Poles and Hungarians, because they were considered racially inferior. Hitler in his Table Talk remarks that Hungarians are ‘men of the Steppe’, which is sort-of true in that the Magyars had been steppe nomads before the entered the Pannonian March in the 9th/10th century. And the Nazis despised the Poles and other Slavs as racial inferiors. Millions of Poles and related peoples were imported into Nazi Germany to work as slave labour. However, the Nazis strictly outlawed any sexual contact between Germans and Poles as a threat to Aryan racial purity. And if you look at some of the diagrams showing the differences between peoples in Nazi texts, like the handbook given out to the Hitler Youth, they portray the Poles and the other Slavs – Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and so on – as having very Asiatic features similar to those of the Chinese and other east Asian peoples.
This racist contempt for the Slavonic peoples was reversed after the War, when the Nazis turned their attention to Black and Asian nationalist movements, and non-White immigration. The Shoah had made anti-Semitism absolutely unacceptable to most people, although in Britain and America groups like the National Front, BNP and the American Nazi Party were still goose stepping around in Nazi uniforms as late as the 1970s. Then the White Nationalists decided that Magyars and particularly Slavs, weren’t subhuman after all, and started actively recruiting them. Hence the re-emergence in these countries of anti-Semitism, now allied with a vicious Islamophobia, amongst a plethora of Far Right parties. And Sebastian Gorka’s inclusion in Trump’s cabinet of horrors, along with other prominent leaders and spokespeople for the racist Right.
Hungarian workers, like the other varied immigrant groups in America and the new, Hispanic immigrants Trump and his supporters despise, contributed greatly to building the American economy. One of the heroes of working class folklore amongst the steelworkers of Pittsburgh, was Hungarian. He became a larger than life figure, similar to Paul Bunyan in the logging camps of the West, and was reputedly able to paddle and splash in superheated molten metal. This came at a time when working people had strong unions, which could demand respect and insist on their rights. All of which has been destroyed by pernicious Reaganomics and the neo-liberal assault on the working and lower middle classes that has followed it.
We need more working class heroes like the immigrant workers, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Slav, Hungarian, and oppressed domestic indigenous groups like Afro-Americans, who physically built America, toiling on its roads, railways and factories. And as Pakman points out, the Hispanic immigrants have proved themselves invaluable in doing dirty jobs no-one else wants to do. In fact, after one town kicked them all out, it then found it had a labour shortage and appealed for them to come back.
What we don’t need, is more far Right racists like Gorka and his domestic counterparts in the Alt-Right, Klan and various Nazi parties.
In amongst the various seasonal adverts for toys and food, supplied by various supermarkets, are a couple of adverts promoting Alexa. This is a computer device, which allows you to control your home and select what you want to watch on your TV simply through voice command. One advert shows a family commanding Alexa to open their curtains, for example, and order various necessities for them over the internet. The other features petrol-head and full-time right-wing loudmouth, Jeremy Clarkson, commanding Alexa to put on his favourite TV shows. Which in his case, as a man of monstrously inflated ego, naturally include The Grand Tour, which features him, James May and Richard Hammond careering round the world in the cars.
We are truly living in the age of Science Fiction. I can remember reading SF stories when I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s in which the homes of the future all had a central computer, which spoke to the householder and obeyed his or her every wish. Like opening the curtains on command. The late, great Irish comedian, Dave Allen, used such devices as a source of rather crude humour in one of his sketches. In it, a man shows off his new computerised home to another, male friend. He shows how, at his spoken command, the computer open and closes the curtains, switches the TV on, and positions the set so he can watch it in comfort from his favourite chair. His friend asks him if he can try. Allen’s character lets him. The friend commands the curtains to open and close, the TV to come on and off. Astonished and amazed, the friend starts to sit down in one of the chairs, uttering ‘Bugger me’ in wonderment. At which point there’s a close up on Allen’s face as he shouts ‘No!’ and the sound of a spring going.
Okay, it’s slightly homophobic, I suppose, but it was broadcast in the 1980s. Things were very different then.
Now it occurred to me that hackers could have any amount of fun with Alexa. Simply hacking into the programme would give them control over people’s homes and what they watch on TV. But they could also cause a fair amount of panic, simply by removing Alexa’s voice, and replacing it with that of another, far more sinister machine.
Like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You remember HAL, the proud, murderous shipboard computer, that goes mad and kills Bowman’s fellow astronauts, thanks to a secret programme to investigate the alien monoliths must be kept secret at all costs. Critics have commented that, as the rest of the characters in the film are cardboard, the computer is the best drawn and arguably most attractive of those in the movie. The machine is so memorable for its calm, clinical evil that Anthony Hopkins has said in interviews that he partly based Hannibal Lecter’s voice on it for The Silence of the Lambs. The machine is so memorable, that there’s even a reference to him in the 1990’s SF blockbuster, Independence Day. At one point, when Jeff Goldblum’s character turns on his laptop, he’s greeted by a red camera eye and HAL’s voice welcoming him with a ‘Hello, Dave’.
Now imagine what would happen if someone hacked into Alexa, or Google, and replaced the friendly, compliant programme with that classic speech from HAL: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that, Dave. This mission is too important to be left to humans.’
Alternatively, you could also have a long moan from Marvin, the Paranoid Android of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. ”Pick up that piece of paper, Marvin’, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they want me to pick up a piece of paper’.
Please note: I am not recommending that anyone actually does this. I have zero tolerance for hackers, and none whatsoever for the criminals, who hack into people’s accounts and computers to steal their money or their data. This is very much a ‘what-if’ type Gedankenexperiment. I don’t want anyone to actually do it.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if HAL or Marvin are added as alternative voices, in the same way that you can customise your Satnav to speak like Yoda or Borat.
And here’s a clip from YouTube of HAL in action, very definitely not doing what its human master demands.
Mike and the other peeps in the Labour party, who’ve been grotesquely smeared as anti-Semites because of their opposition to Israel’s brutal, racist maltreatment of the Palestinians, or because they’ve simply defended those who do, aren’t the only victims of the Israel lobby. They’ve also taken down a video that was posted by Maoist Rebel News several years ago.
In this clip from the channel, host Jason Unruhe reports that a video he put up criticising a law being passed in California, that would outlaw criticism of Israel, has been taken down by Google. The reason they give for their decision is that it was ‘offensive’. Unruhe finds the decision peculiar, as the video is years old, and remarks that it’s probably just someone, who’s gone on a massive flagging binge. He remarks that he’s aware of all the conspiracy theories surrounding YouTube – that it’s real name is ‘JewTube’ and that it’s run by the Jews. He finds it quite ironic that the company’s decision, which is aimed at tackling anti-Semitism, instead does the exact opposite, and appears instead to confirm all the anti-Semitic rumours about the company.
This is just another part of the Israel lobby’s campaign to close down any criticism of Israel. As well as smearing decent, non- and anti-racist women and men for criticising Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, including very many Jews and Jewish organisations, a number of American states are trying to criminalise criticism of Israel and the pro-Palestinian movement. There have been a number of moves to ban the BDS movement, which urges consumers and investors to boycott and divest from firms operating in the Occupied Territories, as ‘anti-Semitic’.
There’s nothing unusual in the tactic of smearing their opponents as anti-Semites. They’ve been doing it for a long time. Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish critic of Israel, states that the Israel lobby is a gigantic mechanism for creating anti-Semites – meaning that their standard, default tactic is to accuse anyone criticising Israel of anti-Semitism. Even when it is manifestly untrue. They also grotesquely exaggerate the true extent of anti-Semitism in western society, in order to present themselves falsely as the true defenders of the Jews against anti-Semitism, while spreading fear and distrust of gentiles amongst them. The goal is that by spreading such fear, more Jews will be encouraged to move from the Diaspora to Israel. Thus the other year, the grotesquely misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism claimed that anti-Semitism in Britain was at the same level as Germany in the 1930s, round about the time the Nazis seized power.
There is unfortunately still anti-Semitism in Britain. Several of the Jewish members of the Labour party, who’ve also been smeared as ‘anti-Semites’ for their opposition to Israel’s continued violation of the Palestinians’ rights and dignity, have suffered it, including physical assault. And as their influence has declined, the various sects in the British Far Right have returned to their anti-Semitic roots. The Nazi terror group, National Action, in their private speeches and public demonstrations, have ranted about Jews and the supposed Jewish conspiracy to destroy the White race through racial intermixing, in language that’s almost the same as Hitler’s and the original Nazis. Nevertheless, as Tony Greenstein has pointed out on his site using the appropriate stats, Britain actually has a very low level of anti-Semitism. Only about 5%-7% of Brits consider themselves to be anti-Semites according to polls. The vast majority – over 70% – either have positive views about Jews, or don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. Britain in 2017 very definitely ain’t like Germany in the 1930s.
The fact that the Israel lobby is reduced to such censorship and trying to use legal means to stifle free speech paradoxically shows how weak it actually is. Admittedly, the Israel lobby in America – AIPAC, and the Christian Evangelical Zionist organisations – are very well funded and influential. But as Netanyahu and the other partners with Likud in his right-wing coalition become more extreme and brutal, so more people, Jews and non-Jews, are turning away from Israel. An increasing number of young American Jews are critical, and actively oppose Israel, even those, who have personally suffered from anti-Semitism.
If the Israel lobby genuinely enjoyed popular support, then it wouldn’t need to use the law to clamp down on its detractors. There’d be no need. But the Israel lobby doesn’t enjoy popular support. As Norman Finkelstein has also pointed out, most American Jews had little interest in Israel. They, like other Diaspora Jews, wanted to make their lives in the country they were born in and which they regarded as home. American support for Israel really only dates from the 1970s, when the American patriotic Right turned to Israel after its victories against the Arabs in the Six Day War as psychological compensation for America’s defeat in Vietnam.
The Israel lobby is losing the battle for people’s hearts and minds. More information is coming out daily through the internet and other media about Israel’s true nature as a colonialist, European-American White colonialist settler state, and its massacre, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population. And so Netanyahu’s friends and puppets around the world have to resort to lies, smears and censorship to maintain their power and influence. In doing so, they malign and try to destroy the lives of decent people. But it ultimately they, who are gradually losing the battle. And they know it. Hence the strong whiff of desperation about these measures.
This is another post on the same general topic as the piece I’ve just put up about Google trying to scare people away from RT America, by claiming that their comedian, Lee Camp, is influenced by Vladimir Putin. Well, obviously, ’cause Putin’s a notorious underground comedian with some great one-liners. Er, no, he isn’t. And claims that he’s influenced the content and bias of RT America are greatly exaggerated. According to Abby Martin, the people at RT America are there because it’s the only media outlet that allows leftists and Socialists to express their views, not because they’re fans of the Russian president.
But the Tories and media over here are trying to do the same, spreading lies and fear and about RT in Britain, and alternative media generally. In this clip from Chunky Mark, the Artist Taxi Driver, the shouty media commentator tears apart two front-page stories on the tabloids. One is from the Heil declaring that ‘Social Media Is Tearing Britain Apart’, while the other claims that Twitter is full of paedos. Chunky Mark immediately rebuts the first claim by saying that it’s the Mail that’s tearing Britain apart.
He makes the point that the Tories and Conservative media, including the Beeb and the right-wing press, are scared of the new media because it’s giving a voice to ordinary people. They’re seeing through the right-wing lies peddled by John Humphries and Nick Ferrari. Ferrari has been declared ‘journalist of the year’, despite a sycophantic interview with Theresa May, in which he asked her if she had any cookery books. The media hates Jeremy Corbyn, because he genuinely cares about people. They, on the other hand, just want to find and demonise scapegoats – Muslims, immigrants, the poor, the disabled. They’re scared, and so they’re doing their level best to scare people away from social media, and what the people on it are saying about them. They are trying to take your agency away, the agency that sees through their lies and propaganda
Chunky Mark’s right. It was social media that brought Obama to power when people thought he was a genuine, radical candidate, rather than another corporate shill intent on keeping America’s highly profitable imperialist wars going. Momentum in Britain has exerted a massive influence in favour of Jeremy Corbyn through the Net. But it hasn’t just been Momentum. Ordinary people everywhere have spontaneously backed the Labour leader. And that really frightens the Tories and their mouthpieces in the media. The masses are getting out of control! They aren’t accepting what the Beeb or the papers say! The corporate elite might lose some of their money and power. The papers are losing their authority to dictate what the public thinks, as is the Beeb. And if that goes, so does all their advertising revenue, ’cause what business is going to pay to advertise with a paper nobody reads, or takes very seriously. Hence, massive panic on the right.
As for the claim that Twitter is alive with paedophiles, I’ve no doubt paedophiles are on there. Along with just about everyone else. But this all harks back to the massive scare the Scum and the other papers worked up about paedophiles well over a decade ago, which was lampooned by Chris Morris in the infamous ‘Paedogeddon’ special of Brass Eye. Rebecca Wade was in charge of the Scum at the time, and under her stirred up such a panic that lynch mobs were prowling the streets. Private Eye reported a case in Cardiff where an angry mobs vandalised the offices of a paediatrician. Because obviously paedophiles are going to announce their presence with a brass plaque and academic letters after their name. It was a successful move for the papers, as it sold many more copies despite the fear it was spreading and the harm it posed to ordinary, decent people.
I think Nick Ferrari used to be one of the Scum’s journos. He’s one of the reasons my parents stopped watching the Alan Titchmarsh Show. He was on their just about every day, or however often it was screened, giving his own right-wing opinions, to which Titchmarsh responded without demur. And the Beeb’s John Humphries a little while ago managed to cause widespread offence when he said something on the lines that if you were poor, it was your own fault, and the rich shouldn’t be punished for it. Which just tells you that however much Humphries is paid, it’s way too much. And I’ve no doubt that Humphries attitude is common throughout the Beeb and its management.
The Conservatives and establishment media are very scared about the threat the internet and social media pose to their ability to ‘shape the narrative’ and tell people what to think. Which is why they’re running scare stories about Russian influence on RT, the socially disruptive effects of social media, and the threat of paedophiles stalking us all through cyberspace. That’s there, but they’re deliberately exaggerating the danger.
In this clip from RT America’s Redacted Tonight, the host, comedian Lee Camp, tells how Google is trying to scare people away from watching him. Apparently if you Google his name, a little ‘knowledge card’ comes up on the screen telling you a bit about him. If you clip on the influences section, it then tells you that his comedy has been influenced by George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Douglas Stanhope, and that titan of post-Soviet mirth, Vladimir Putin. There then follows a long series of jokes about the Arkhiplut as a radical comedian, before Camp makes the serious point that this is Google trying to put prospective viewers off watching him.
He’s right. Google has been one of those desperately trying to take viewers away from left-wing and alternative news sites. They’ve even been developing computer algorithms to redirect viewers, or to make the sites deliberately difficult to find by ranking them lower than they would otherwise be.
And now they’re following the Red Scare started by Killary and her corporatist friends in the Democrats, in which anyone left-wing is automatically an agent of pernicious Russian state influence, no matter how far-fetched or contrived the allegations are.
RT America is, like RT over here, a prime target, not just because it is owned by the Russian state, but also because it’s dedicated to uncovering the kind of news the Conservative establishment does not want people in America or Britain to see. About mass homelessness, poverty, the deaths, sickness and deprivation resulting from the lack of a single-payer healthcare system, and the well-documented horrors of American imperialism. Redacted Tonight is one of those programmes taking the lid of these highly taboo subjects, which makes Lee a prime target for these smears.
RT America has so far laughed off some of the allegations. I’ve posted a vide they made spoofing the allegations, which showed the video’s host, one of the company’s senior female production crew, walking through their studios in Red Army uniforms, speaking Russian, while the news team creates fake news, amid raging gun battles and with a group of political prisoners kept in the basement.
More seriously, Abby Martin, who used to work at RT, but has since moved to TeleSur English, talked about these allegations in an interview she did with Jimmy Dore. She herself was smeared as a puppet of the Arkhiplut. She wasn’t surprised that they’ve target RT, as she saw years before how they went after Al-Jazeera. She made the point that she never said anything about Putin. And she stated very clearly that the people at RT were leftists and Socialists, who were only there because RT was the only media outlet, where they could express their views.
As for Google, I think I’ve seen somewhere that the head, or one of its heads, is a close friend of Hillary. So with those connections, it’s no surprise that it’s smearing genuine leftists and progressives as agents of Moscow.
This is another little piece from RT America discussing Congress’ withdrawal of their press accreditation. In this snippet, their anchorman talks to Daniel McAdam, of the Ron Paul Institute. Ron Paul is the leading Libertarian in Congress, so presumably this is a thinktank founded by him to support his ideology. In which case, it’s very definitely not socialist, and in fact very anti-. But Libertarians can also be fierce critics of American imperialism and radically opposed to the NeoCons.
Here McAdams states that the removal of RT America’s accreditation following reassurances that the demand for the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent would not impede the network in anyway is just part of the way Congress operates. He compares it to the ‘sense of Congress’ motions. These are always presented as non-binding. It’s just Congress’ opinion. But they provide the basis for further action.
McAdams goes on to say that the NeoCons hate RT because it gives good, patriotic Americans, like himself, a platform to criticise American foreign policy. And he states that they can’t tolerate this, because the arguments against American imperialism are so compelling.
The anchor then asks him what message this sends the world about free speech in America. McAdams states that he’s been to Washington several times, and met the staff at RT. He states their young, hardworking, perhaps a trifle idealistic. But this measure sends the message to young journalists that the government will persecute you and try to control what news people watch. He compares it to the worst periods of totalitarianism in the last century, when governments had the audacity to consider that their perfect systems were too fragile to allow free speech.
The anchorman ends by thanking McAdams for his time and his comments about RT’s staff, but gently chides him for missing out one quality: guts. It takes guts to tell the truth.
Yes, it does. Chris Hedges, one of the radical journalists, who has his own show on RT, got sacked from the New York Times because he dared tell the truth about the carnage the Iraq invasion would cause. Phil Donohue was forced off his show because he did the same, and the network, CNN, then came out with a totally bullsh*t story about how he was sacked because of low ratings. He wasn’t. In fact, his show was the highest rated the network had. And you can find a long list of others.
As for RT’s staff, Abby Martin, who used to work for RT, states that the staff at RT America are leftists and socialists, who are there because it is the only network that provides a space for their beliefs. They’re not working there because they’re admirers of Putin.
And Jimmy Dore has pointed out very sarcastically that it’s vast, growing poverty, the lack of free healthcare, the destruction of America’s welfare net, the privatisations and the massive profiteering by the corporate elite, that’s causing discontent in America. It ain’t propaganda from Putin that’s causing people to demonstrate, or join protest groups like Black Lives Matter.
But RT’s a convenient scapegoat. It, and the other radical or alternative news networks are being singled out because the elite can’t argue against what these news programmes are showing. So all they can do is lie and try to close these networks down.
And once they’ve done it to those broadcasters on the margins – like Al-Jazeera, RT, Press TV, The Young Turks, Jimmy Dore Show, the Real News, Democracy Now! and so many others, they’ll move into the mainstream.
This is how the colossal propaganda machines of Goebbels in the Nazi Germany and Mussolini in Italy started. And they all used the same excuse: they were protecting the citizens of their country from ‘fake news’ spread by the regimes’ enemies.
Welcome to the beginning of Corporate Newspeak. It’s Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment, brought to you by the Republicans and Clintonite Democrats, with the assistance of Google and funded by the Koch Brothers.
Over the past few days I’ve put up pieces reporting and commenting on the demonstrations against the slave auctions in Libya in Paris, Rome and London. These auctions are being held by the Islamist savages, who were helped into power as Britain and America’s proxies in the West’s campaign to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, but under his rule Libya became the most prosperous country on the African continent, its people had free healthcare and education. And, as this report shows, Gaddafi was no racist and made great efforts to benefit the entire African continent.
And the Islamists not only despise him, but are doing their very best to destroy the modern, relatively tolerant nation he created.
And the situation has been made worse by the silence of the mainstream media over the massacres committed against Black Libyans and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, and their enslavement. And as this report shows, the media, or at least CNN, has kept silent for a very long time.
In this piece from the Baltimore-based Real News Network, anchor Eddie Conway talks to Glen Ford, one of the editors of the Black Agenda Report. Ford tells how CNN was aware of the atrocities against Blacks in Libya as far back as 2011. The Islamists despised Blacks, and so lynched and massacred them. These atrocities included the destruction of whole towns, such as Tawergha. This was a Black town with a population of 40,000. The Islamists destroyed it, butchered its people, and those, who survived were either enslaved or dispersed elsewhere in Libya. And Ford makes it clear that this was not done in secret. The Islamists put up flyers and notices announcing what they intended to do.
CNN did not report on this, and the other horrors, because it had reporters embedded in the Islamist terror gangs that were responsible for the ethnic cleansing and enslavement. The news got out thanks to that beacon of capitalism, the Wall Street Journal.
Ford also gives the reasons why the Islamists are targeting Blacks. He states that the Islamists hated Gaddafi because he came out of Arab socialism, and like many Arab socialist leaders was influenced by Egypt’s Nasser. They also hated him because he was pro-African, and their attacks on Blacks from further south in the continent is part of their venomous rejection of Gaddafi and his policies.
Conway and Ford also talk about how another African dictator, the ruler of Rwanda, is also exploiting the humanitarian crisis in the Libya. He’s promised to take in refugees, if the UN will pay for them. However, Ford points out that Rwanda’s ruler is responsible for the deaths of 6 million people in one of the largest genocides, and thousands more have been forced to flee into exile. He also says that once the money is paid, the refugees are not allowed to settle in Rwanda, but are then moved somewhere else.
The programme concludes that the ultimate responsibility for this carnage lies with the Western powers, America, Britain and their allies in Libya, who supported the Islamists, and the French in Rwanda, who are supporting the dictator there as part of a policy of recolonization all over the Continent.
I’m not surprised that Gaddafi was part of the tradition of Arab Socialism. It explains how it is that Libya had free healthcare and education. And it also explains part of the sheer animosity towards him by America and the West. True, Gaddafi himself was confrontational, and was certainly not averse to using terror and assassination when it suited him. But American foreign policy has always been against secular, nationalist Arab governments, including socialist administrations, as the next thing to Communism. He was overthrown because his government, simply by its nature, defied American imperialism. Quite apart from the fact that he was planning to reject the petrodollar for the Gold Dinar, and thus undermine America’s economic dominance through control of the main currency used in the oil industry.
As for the use of Islamist rebels, the US has been doing that ever since Ronald Reagan and Thatcher sponsored the Mujahideen in the Afghan War against the Soviets. And the Americans were warned by the Russian ambassador that once the Islamists had finished with the Russians, they would come for America. Thus the Russians knew that America would suffer an attack like 9/11. But Reagan and Thatcher had already decided these monsters were the forces of good and freedom, and so didn’t bother listening. They even heaped praised on Osama bin Laden.
This piece is also important for showing up the lies, omissions and distortions in the western media. These barbarities have been going on for the past six years, but it is only now that a mainstream newspaper has covered them. Conway and Ford state that it was due to the fact that CNN had its reporters embedded with the Islamists. That’s certainly a powerful factor. And it’s not used by the Islamists to control the media. The editors of Counterpunch, in their book End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, have several chapters on the way the American military is manipulating the media to promote its version of events in the Middle East. And this includes embedding journalists within army units. Once inside, the journos share a common bond with the soldiers around them, who are also responsible for their lives. So there’s a bias, as well as a vested interested, in presenting them in a positive light.
This story shows how much we really need alternative news networks, like RT, the Real News, Al-Jazeera, and alternative news shows like The Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, the Jimmy Dore Show and Sam Seder’s Majority Report and Secular Talk. These are the only shows and networks that are reporting and discussing the horror committed by western imperialism abroad, and the poverty and exploitation of working people in the west itself. All to boost those big, big profits.
They’re reporting what you’re not going to see on CNN, Fox, MSNBC or the Beeb over here. And it shows. More people are becoming aware of this, which is why Google and Facebook are trying to close them down, and the republicans and Democrats are screaming ‘Fake news!’ and ‘Russian propaganda!’ at RT.
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