How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The United States Win A Propaganda War Against President Putin? by Ms Caitlin Johnstone
(2022-04-17 at 01:58:53 )

How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The United States Win A Propaganda War Against President Putin? by Ms Caitlin Johnstone

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There is a very important question that we all need to be asking ourselves at this point in history, and that question is as follows: how much are we as a society willing to sacrifice so that the United States government can win a propaganda war against Vladimir Putin???

Let me explain.

One severely under-discussed aspect of the latest round of escalations in Silicon Valley censorship which began at the start of the Ukraine war is the fact that it is an entirely unprecedented order of censorship protocol. While it might look similar to all the other waves of social media purges and new categories of banned content that we have been experiencing since it became mainstream doctrine after the 2016 United States election that tech platforms need to strictly regulate online speech, the justifications for it have taken a drastic deviation from established patterns.

What sets this new censorship escalation apart from its predecessors is that this time nobody is pretending that it is being done in the interests of the people.

With the censorship of racists the argument was that they were inciting hate crimes and racial harassment.

With the censorship of Alex Jones and QAnon the argument was that they were inciting violence.

With the censorship of Covid skeptics the argument was that they were promoting misinformation that could be deadly.

Even with the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story it was argued that there was a need to protect election integrity from disinformation of potentially foreign origin.

With censorship relating to the Ukraine war there is no argument that it is being done to help the people. There is no case to be made that letting people say wrong things about this war kills Ukrainians, Americans, or anyone else. There is no case to be made that disputing claims about Russian war crimes will damage the United States of Americas democratic processes. It is just, "Well we can not have people saying wrong things about a war, can we?"

More Escalations In Online Censorship

"YouTube has been deleting videos disputing the United States government narrative about Russian war crimes in Bucha"-Caitlin Johnstone (caitoz) April 15, 2022

Ask a properly brainwashed liberal why they support the censorship of someone who disputes United States narratives about Russian war crimes in Bucha or Mariupol and they will probably tell you something like "Well, it is disinformation!" or "Because it is propaganda!" or "How much is Putin paying you??" But what they will not be able to do is articulate exactly what specific harm is being done by such speech in the same way that they could when defending the censorship of Covid skeptics or the factions responsible for last years riot in the Capitol building.

The one argument you will get, if you really press the issue, is that the United States is in a propaganda war with Russia, and it is in our societys interests for our media institutions to help the United States win that propaganda war.

Cold wars are fought between nuclear powers because hot warfare would risk annihilating both nations, leaving only other forms of war like psychological warfare available. There is no argument that this new escalation in censorship saves lives or protects elections, but there is an argument that it can help facilitate the long-term cold war agendas of the United States.

But what does that mean exactly??

It means if we accept this argument we are knowingly consenting to a situation where all the major news outlets, websites and apps that people look to for information about the world are geared not toward telling us true things about reality, but toward beating Vladimir Putin in some weird psywar. It means abandoning any ambitions of being a truth-based civilization that is guided by facts, and instead accepting an existence as a propaganda-based civilization geared toward making sure we all think thoughts that hurt Moscows long-term strategic interests.

And it is just absolutely freakish that this is a decision that has already been made for us, without any public discussion as to whether or not that is the kind of society we want to live in. They jumped right from "We are censoring speech to protect you from violence and viruses" to "We are censoring speech to help our government conduct information warfare against a foreign adversary." Without skipping a beat.

BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To "Information War" With Russia

"You know you are in trouble when the military man tries to do the journalists job by asking questions and holding power to account.. and the journalist tries to stop him."-Caitlin Johnstone (caitoz) April 18, 2018

The consent-manufacturing class has helped pave the way for this smooth transition with their relentless and ongoing calls for more and more censorship, and for years we have been seeing signs that they view it as their duty to help facilitate an information war against Russia.

Back in 2018 we saw a BBC reporter admonish a former high-ranking British navy official for speculating that the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria was a false flag, a claim we now have mountains of evidence is likely true thanks to whistleblowers from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The reason the reporter gave for her objection to those comments was that "we are in an information war with Russia."

"Given that we are in an information war with Russia on so many fronts, do you think perhaps it is inadvisable to be stating this so publicly given your position and your profile? Is there not a danger that you are muddying the waters?" the BBCs Annita McVeigh asked Admiral Alan West after his comments.

We saw a similar indication in the mass media a few weeks later in an interview with former Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who was admonished by CNNs Chris Cuomo for highlighting the completely uncontroversial fact that the United States is an extremely egregious offender when it comes to interferences in foreign elections.

"You know, that would be the case for Russia to make, not from the American perspective," Mr. Cuomo said in response to Ms Steins entirely accurate remarks. "Of course, there is hypocrisy involved, lots of different big state actors do lots of things that they may not want people to know about. But let Russia say that the United States did it to us, and here is how they did it, so this is fair play."

Which is the same as saying, "Forget what is factually true. Do not say true things that might help Russian interests. That is Russias job. Our job here on CNN is to say things that hurt Russian interests.

lol no. Again no journalist wants to be the "but her emails" journalist and branded a leper by their entire industry. It is that simple.-Stephen L. Miller (redsteeze) October 16, 2020

We can trace the mainstreaming of the idea that it is the western medias job to manipulate information in the public interest, rather than simply tell the truth, back to Donald Trumps 2016 presidential win. In what was arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9-11-01 and its aftermath, the consent-manufacturing class came to the decision that Donald Trumps election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control.

In October 2020 during the Hunter Biden laptop scandal The Spectators Stephen L Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Hillary Clintons 2016 loss that it was their moral duty to hide facts from the public which might lead to Donald Trumps re-election.

"For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the "but her emails" dilemma," Mr. Miller writes. "Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clintons private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Donald Trump in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Hillary Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Donald Trumps foibles. It is an error no journalist wants to repeat."

Once "journalists" accepted that their most important job is not to tell the truth but to keep people from thinking bad thoughts about the status quo political system, it was inevitable that they would start enthusiastically cheerleading for more internet censorship. They see it as their duty, which is why now the leading proponents of online censorship are corporate media reporters.

Ratting out Radio Sputnik. Interesting task for a reporter.-Tim Shorrock (TimothyS) April 16, 2022

But it should not be this way.

There is no legitimate reason for the Silicon Valley proxies of the most powerful government on earth to be censoring people for disagreeing with that government about a war, yet this is exactly what is happening and it is happening more and more.

It should alarm us all that it is becoming increasingly acceptable to silence people not because they are circulating dangerous disinfo, nor even because they are saying things that are in any way false, but solely because they are saying things which undermine the United States infowar.

People should absolutely be allowed to say things which disagree with the most powerful empire in history about a war. They should even be allowed to say brazenly false things about that war, because otherwise only the powerful will be allowed to say brazenly false things about it.

Free speech is important not because it is nice to be able to say what you want, but because the free flow of ideas and information creates a check on the powerful. It gives people the ability to hold the powerful to account. Which is exactly why the powerful work to eliminate it.

We should see it as a huge, huge problem that so much of the world has been herded onto these giant monopolistic speech platforms that conduct censorship in complete alignment with the mightiest power structure in the world.

This is the exact opposite of putting a check on power.

How much are we as a society willing to give up for the United States government and its allies to win a propaganda war against President Putin???

Are we willing to commit to being a civilization for which the primary consideration with any piece of data is not whether or not it is true, but whether it helps undermine Russia??

This is a conversation which should already have been going on in mainstream circles for some time now, but it never even started.

Let Us Start It!!!

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