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After Monsey, Will Jews Go Underground? – The Atlantic
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Jews, Monsey, stabbing | 2 Comments »
5 Examples of the Rise of German Free-Speech Nazis | The Daily Bell
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
If the German reference was removed from the title what country would you think was the subject?
By Joe Jarvis
Germany. What are you doing? You’re the poster child for oppressive government!
And maybe it isn’t fair to single Germany out. The Soviet Union under Stalin had a much higher body count, and China’s under Mao was still higher.
But Germany is European, Western.
China and Russia reformed and changed on their own without being defeated by outside military forces. They were never entirely broken down to be built back up, like Germany–or Japan–for example.
So it’s not especially surprising when China marches ever onward toward authoritarianism. For instance, China introduced a social credit system where every behavior including online comments and neighbors’ opinions is factored into a social credit score. Low scores are used to deny citizens jobs, apartments, and the ability to travel.
But there is something especially ironic about German authoritarianism, even for an allegedly good cause.
For instance, in Germany, it is illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened. They were so concerned about that horribly oppressive time in their history… that they oppressively limit free speech.
I understand that Germany is extremely sensitive to the rise of any groups that could be easily compared to Nazis. But to paraphrase Nietzsche, he who fights Nazis should be sure that in the process, he himself does not become a Nazi.
In Germany you can get up to five years in prison for “insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.”
Let’s go through five examples of German officials becoming free-speech Nazis.
1. Surveillance on minority opposition political parties.
A “far right” political party called Alternative for Germany first gained seats in the German parliament last year. They are said to be aligned with racist, xenophobic, and anti-Islamic groups.
Angela Merkel has been quite liberal in her immigration policies. The AfD is the answer to an increase in terrorism in Germany from Islamic extremists.
A poll found 57% of Germans believe the political party should be placed under surveillance.
So just for affiliating with a party which has valid concerns about loose immigration policies for refugees, you could be monitored like a criminal. No specific accusation required.
2. Ban on “Hate Speech” and “Offensive Speech.”
This year Germany banned “hate speech” and tasked social media websites with combatting “offensive speech” on their platforms. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter face €50 million fines if they do not remove “hate speech” within 24 hours of a complaint.
The clear problem becomes defining what exactly is incitement to hatred, or offensive speech.
And the German government defines it with a broad brush.
For instance, failing to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun is considered “hate speech.”
And now people are afraid to even talk about issues like immigration and refugee policies. It is just too easy to be labeled a racist hate monger for expressing skepticism about liberal immigration policies.
3. Raiding the Associates of the Associates of a Suspect.
Sovereignman.com summarized this absurd incident which took place in July.
Unable to obtain the information they wanted from an activist group, police basically played six degrees of separation until they found associates that they could raid.
4. Raiding Homes Over Facebook Posts.
Last summer, German authorities raided 36 homes of people accused of hateful posting on social media.
Most of the raids concerned politically motivated right-wing incitement, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office, whose officers conducted home searches and interrogations. But the raids also targeted two people accused of left-wing extremist content, as well as one person accused of making threats or harassment based on someone’s sexual orientation.
“The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”
Unless of course that climate of fear is created by the German authorities against whoever they decide to target.
5. Ankle Bracelets for “Extremists” Guilty of Nothing.
Last year, Germany passed a law that allows authorities to track suspected extremist Muslims.
Suspected is the key word. The people forced to wear the GPS monitors have not even been charged, let alone convicted, of a crime.
Previously, only convicted individuals could be required to wear the device used to monitor location and movements.
The cabinet proposal, “Gefährder,” or people who pose a security threat, who have not been convicted can be forced to wear the device by order of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
So now they are policing pre-crime.
Has no one considered that being treated like a terrorist might actually make it more likely that someone is driven to extremism?
Germany is using the rise of the Nazis in the past to justify the current government’s quite Nazi-like behavior.
Being unable to express yourself without fear of arrest is not a good place to be.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Facebook, Free-Speech Nazis, GPS monitors, hate speech, Holocaust, offensive speech, preferred pronoun, TorServers, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
30 Years Later: Margaret Thatcher’s Vision for Europe Revisited | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
But today, with another debate on the future of the European Union – and even farther down the road of the “ever closer union,” we should keep in mind what Lady Thatcher said, and “to raise the flag of national sovereignty, free trade and free enterprise – and fight.” Indeed, as the Prime Minister wrote in her memoirs, “if there was ever an idea whose time had come and gone it was surely that of the artificial mega-state.”
https://www.austriancenter.com/thatcher-europe/
This week we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘Bruges Speech,’ where she put forward her vision for the future of the Europe. In our new study 30 years after Bruges: Margaret Thatcher’s Vision for Europe Revisited, we have looked at what we can still learn from the former British Prime Minister. Download the study here, and read a summary below:
Europe is today in the midst of a debate on the future of the European Union. It is not the first one: back before the Maastricht Treaty was passed in 1992, political leaders were discussing as well about where the EU, or as it was called back then, the European Community, was heading. Should it go the way of the “ever closer union,” or revert back to the fundamental principles? There was a split going through Europe on questions like this.
This was the situation in which the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found herself on September 20, 1988, when she stepped in front of a crowd at the College of Europe in Bruges. “I decided that the time had come to strike out against what I saw the erosion of democracy by centralization and bureaucracy, and to set out an alternative view of Europe’s future,” she would later write in her memoirs The Downing Street Years.
The result was today’s infamous yet magnificent ‘Bruges speech,’ which was far from being anti-EU, but a stark warning against Brussels, an attempt to save the EU in the wake of federalists demanding more and more integration. This week, we are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of this speech. And, as it turns out, it has stood the test of time shockingly well. Indeed, many of the warnings that Thatcher put forth are even truer today (which you can read in our new study).
The European Heritage
In Thatcher’s vision, the European heritage is of crucial importance. She tries to teach us that Europe can be proud of its history. While wars did play too big of a role in the past, Europe is still the continent in which the ideal of individual liberty prevailed before anywhere else. It is the continent which brought forth many of the greatest innovations, artistic pieces, literary works, and intellectuals the world has ever seen.
Great Britain has played an instrumental part in the European story, Thatcher makes clear: “Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.” Britain has contributed mightily to European history and its values with the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and many other major steps on the path to freedom. But so has Britain benefitted from its link to mainland Europe, for instance having “borrowed that concept of the rule of law which marks out a civilized society from barbarism.”
This special relationship, says Thatcher, must be retained. Today this is even truer: on the eve of Brexit, it is of the utmost importance to keep this mutual understanding between the two sides intact, regardless of whether Britain is in- or outside of the EU.
Despite the millennia-long European history of (much) success, we need to remember that it is the long history of Europe, not the EU (the latter being only sixty years old): “Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.” Not everyone who criticizes the EU is automatically anti-European – an important point in today’s world in which Europe and the EU are most of the time used synonymously.
Rather, the European Union is a tool which can be used to promote the values Europeans defended so often in the twentieth century: the EU “is not an end in itself,” but rather “a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people.”
A Europe of Free Enterprise and Free Trade
What is the way to future prosperity? For Thatcher, it is “to deregulate and remove the constraints on trade.” It means “action to free markets, action to widen choice, action to reduce government intervention.” Instead of increasing centralization and regulatory efforts, Europe should remain a champion of free enterprise. History – and the Soviet Union, should be enough proof that centralized decision-making doesn’t work.
The EU should not only be pro-trade to the inside, however. Instead, it should be globally oriented: “Europe never would have prospered and never will prosper as a narrow-minded, inward-looking club,” she warned. Free trade with the outside world – something that the EU is lacking behind to this day (while forcing all member states to comply with its trade policy), is one of the most important competences of Brussels: “we must ensure that our approach to world trade is consistent with the liberalisation we preach at home.”
For this, a strong relationship with America is needed. For Margaret Thatcher, the U.S. was indeed to a certain extent part of Europe, “in the sense that she shares a common heritage of civilised values and a love of liberty.” It is a natural fit between the two sides of the Atlantic, since the core values are shared with one another. In the face of today’s trade wars and aggressions on both sides, it would be all the worse if this relationship would be squandered in just a few months’ time.
Against Eurotopia
If there is any argument which the Prime Minister hit home continuously, it was her stark opposition to a centralized federal state, ruled by the Brussels bureaucracy. The idea of a United States of Europe is a utopia that “never comes, because we know we should not like it if it did.” Instead of politicians trying to create a single European identity, the mantra should be unity in diversity: “Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.”
In Margaret Thatcher’s opinion, the EU should stay a supranational organization which is based on voluntary cooperation between sovereign states, rather than one federal state. She perhaps felt alone with this opinion when she presented it thirty years ago. But today, with another debate on the future of the European Union – and even farther down the road of the “ever closer union,” we should keep in mind what Lady Thatcher said, and “to raise the flag of national sovereignty, free trade and free enterprise – and fight.” Indeed, as the Prime Minister wrote in her memoirs, “if there was ever an idea whose time had come and gone it was surely that of the artificial mega-state.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: 30 Years Later, Bruges speech, Eurotopia, Magna Carta, Margaret Thatcher | Leave a Comment »
Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR | Mises Institute
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. He found “reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices”; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture’s program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).
https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr
Critics of Roosevelt’s New Deal often liken it to fascism. Roosevelt’s numerous defenders dismiss this charge as reactionary propaganda; but as Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes clear, it is perfectly true. Moreover, it was recognized to be true during the 1930s, by the New Deal’s supporters as well as its opponents.
When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he received from Congress an extraordinary delegation of powers to cope with the Depression.
The broad-ranging powers granted to Roosevelt by Congress, before that body went into recess, were unprecedented in times of peace. Through this “delegation of powers,” Congress had, in effect, temporarily done away with itself as the legislative branch of government. The only remaining check on the executive was the Supreme Court. In Germany, a similar process allowed Hitler to assume legislative power after the Reichstag burned down in a suspected case of arson on February 28, 1933. (p. 18).
The Nazi press enthusiastically hailed the early New Deal measures: America, like the Reich, had decisively broken with the “uninhibited frenzy of market speculation.” The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, “stressed ‘Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,’ praising the president’s style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler’s own dictatorial Führerprinzip” (p. 190).
Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He “told American ambassador William Dodd that he was ‘in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan “The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual”‘” (pp. 19-20). A New Order in both countries had replaced an antiquated emphasis on rights.
Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. He found “reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices”; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture’s program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).
Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'” (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s program to modernize Italy: “It’s the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious” (p. 32, quoting Tugwell).
Why did these contemporaries sees an affinity between Roosevelt and the two leading European dictators, while most people today view them as polar opposites? People read history backwards: they project the fierce antagonisms of World War II, when America battled the Axis, to an earlier period. At the time, what impressed many observers, including as we have seen the principal actors themselves, was a new style of leadership common to America, Germany, and Italy.
Once more we must avoid a common misconception. Because of the ruthless crimes of Hitler and his Italian ally, it is mistakenly assumed that the dictators were for the most part hated and feared by the people they ruled. Quite the contrary, they were in those pre-war years the objects of considerable adulation. A leader who embodied the spirit of the people had superseded the old bureaucratic apparatus of government.
While Hitler’s and Roosevelt’s nearly simultaneous ascension to power highlighted fundamental differences … contemporary observers noted that they shared an extraordinary ability to touch the soul of the people. Their speeches were personal, almost intimate. Both in their own way gave their audiences the impression that they were addressing not the crowd, but each listener as an individual. (p. 54)
But does not Schivelbusch’s thesis fall before an obvious objection? No doubt Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini were charismatic leaders; and all of them rejected laissez-faire in favor of the new gospel of a state-managed economy. But Roosevelt preserved civil liberties, while the dictators did not.
Schivelbusch does not deny the manifest differences between Roosevelt and the other leaders; but even if the New Deal was a “soft fascism”, the elements of compulsion were not lacking. The “Blue Eagle” campaign of the National Recovery Administration serves as his principal example. Businessmen who complied with the standards of the NRA received a poster that they could display prominently in their businesses. Though compliance was supposed to be voluntary, the head of the program, General Hugh Johnson, did not shrink from appealing to illegal mass boycotts to ensure the desired results.
“The public,” he [Johnson] added, “simply cannot tolerate non-compliance with their plan.” In a fine example of doublespeak, the argument maintained that cooperation with the president was completely voluntary but that exceptions would not be tolerated because the will of the people was behind FDR. As one historian [Andrew Wolvin] put it, the Blue Eagle campaign was “based on voluntary cooperation, but those who did not comply were to be forced into participation.” (p. 92)
Schivelbusch compares this use of mass psychology to the heavy psychological pressure used in Germany to force contributions to the Winter Relief Fund.
Both the New Deal and European fascism were marked by what Wilhelm Röpke aptly termed the “cult of the colossal.” The Tennessee Valley Authority was far more than a measure to bring electrical power to rural areas. It symbolized the power of government planning and the war on private business:
The TVA was the concrete-and-steel realization of the regulatory authority at the heart of the New Deal. In this sense, the massive dams in the Tennessee Valley were monuments to the New Deal, just as the New Cities in the Pontine Marshes were monuments to Fascism … But beyond that, TVA propaganda was also directed against an internal enemy: the capitalist excesses that had led to the Depression… (pp. 160, 162)
This outstanding study is all the more remarkable in that Schivelbusch displays little acquaintance with economics. Mises and Hayek are absent from his pages, and he grasps the significance of architecture much more than the errors of Keynes. Nevertheless, he has an instinct for the essential. He concludes the book by recalling John T. Flynn’s great book of 1944, As We Go Marching.
Flynn, comparing the New Deal with fascism, foresaw a problem that still faces us today.
But willingly or unwillingly, Flynn argued, the New Deal had put itself into the position of needing a state of permanent crisis or, indeed, permanent war to justify its social interventions. “It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis…. Hitler’s story is the same.” … Flynn’s prognosis for the regime of his enemy Roosevelt sounds more apt today than when he made it in 1944 … “We must have enemies,” he wrote in As We Go Marching. “They will become an economic necessity for us.” (pp. 186, 191)
Originally published September 2006.
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FDR with his “Uncle Joe”
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: fascists, FDR, Hitler, Mussolini, Nazis, Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, TVA | Leave a Comment »
“The Guy is Freaking Evil” | The American Conservative
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
The military is a false god.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/the-guy-is-freaking-evil/
“The Guy is Freaking Evil”
…Newly released testimony from Eddie Gallagher’s fellow SEALs paints a dark picture of Trump’s ‘hero.’
The NYT story published this morning for the first time lends credence to the prosecution’s story—that members of Gallagher’s team were frightened and hesitant but came forward to Navy investigators as their pleas to the chain of command went unanswered. According to the paper, the men described seeing Gallagher stab the wounded captive with a hunting knife and “painted a picture of a platoon driven to despair by a chief who seemed to care primarily about racking up kills. They described how their chief targeted women and children and boasted that ‘burqas were flying.’”
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.”
Obviously they knew what they were doing—not so different from the sailors in the 1954 Hollywood film, The Caine Mutiny—would put their own careers in peril. But hundreds of texts that were used in the trove of evidence indicate the men did not coordinate their stories, but commiserated in a sort of support system during the trial and after they were re-assigned and scattered.
“This stuff is frustrating to read and makes it seem like Eddie will possibly get away with murder (literally),” Special Operator First Class Dylan Dille texted the group. “Let’s not forget there are 7-12 of us in here who had the balls to tell the truth about what Eddie has done.”
He said he thought the case against Chief Gallagher was strong despite the procedural setbacks. “I am also convinced that we are gonna answer to a higher power someday, and everything happens for a reason,” wrote Special Operator Dille, who has since left the Navy. “Not compromising our integrity and keeping right on our side is all we can do.”
Because of the code that no one informs on a fellow SEAL, the men who testified against Gallagher have been publicly excoriated, particularly by Gallagher and his wife Andrea, who have been given a golden platform on Fox News for the last year to make their case of innocence. This has obviously affected Trump, who sided with Gallagher and has made him a hero. And everyone else? Traitors.
“The teams are now divided over this, like I’ve never seen happen before,” Rick Haas, a retired command master chief who served in the SEALs for 30 years, said in the NYT piece…
Moreover, Trump is in no position to tell the rest of America who is a “hero”and who is a “traitor” based on his own venal political agenda. These men are being used as props, and it’s dangerous. Yes, there is a divide—but it’s over right and wrong, not Red and Blue.
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Killing anything that moves
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Eddie Gallagher, evil, killing anybody, SEAL | Leave a Comment »
To Hell With the Perpetually Offended – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
https://www.takimag.com/article/to-hell-with-the-perpetually-offended/
…Fifty-two years later I am once again writing under censorship, this time virulently unsuited to it, the inspectors now being the politically correct gestapo who hand down punishments for life. One wrong word and one’s career is kaput, no ifs or buts about it.
A society in which free speech or an ill-judged joke means losing one’s livelihood is not a laughing matter. And this is taking place right here, in the good old U.S. of A. Free speech and due process have become things of the past. Let me explain: The Orwellian vision of total conformity derives from an intrusive government that polices thought, the written and spoken word. Today’s demand for total conformity as far as free speech is concerned does not come from any government, but from the media, the film industry, and university campuses. When you think of it, it’s really quite unique. Governments have been suppressing free speech since time immemorial, but for the first time in man’s history the abolition of free speech has taken place through osmosis, by the very people who teach and make movies and write about freedom: the universities, Hollywood, and the media. The key words that are used for restricting speech are racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist, white supremacist, and other taboo words I cannot think of right this minute.
An 85-year-old sports announcer in Canada recently was fired for regretting on the air that new immigrants had abandoned the tradition of wearing a poppy in their lapels to commemorate the veterans who had lost their lives in World War I. Don Cherry’s crime was seen as such for mentioning immigrants, the diversity mob demanding his head even before he had finished the sentence.
Megyn Kelly’s television-superstar career has been on hold for years because she rhetorically asked on the air what was wrong with wearing black face paint à la Al Jolson at a costume party. She compounded her mistake by also saying that Santa Claus was white, not black. Both Cherry and Kelly were fired because aggrieved listeners were shocked to hear such talk. And it gets worse: Due process no longer exists when a female accuses a male of harassment.
The latest brouhaha with the perpetually offended—the sisterhood—comes to us from dear old England, where a woman threatened to divorce her husband because he gave her an exercise bike for Christmas. Fellow females were outraged because the present signified the recipient was fat. Enter that super-woke jerk Justin Trudeau, who wants to have the word mankind changed. Nothing, of course, can match The New York Times for waging unrelenting war against white people. The rag praises a junk movie as if it were Citizen Kane: “Queen and Slim are slow dancing in a Louisiana juke joint. The black couple has been on the run since shooting a white cop dead. The two sway tenderly, staring deeply into each other’s eyes….” Needless to say I haven’t seen this trash, but I bring it up because of the sympathetic manner in which the rag presents the black killers. Imagine what would happen if someone wrote in this manner about a white couple having murdered a black police officer…
Finally, good old Syracuse U. It recently gave in to student demands after rioting by black, Latino, Asian-American, Jewish, Muslim, and indigenous students after racist and anti-Semitic graffiti appeared in a freshman dorm. Nineteen demands by students were met, and everyone went home happy after rioting that lasted two weeks. Worst of all, the graffiti read “Little China Town.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: censorship, Don Cherry, mankind, Megyn Kelly, Perpetually Offended | Leave a Comment »
‘Epidemic’ in England as Nearly 19,000 Children Identified as Victims
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
Swept under the rug for a decade for PC reasons.
(TMU) — There’s a new official epidemic in England and it can’t be tackled with increased hand washing or a new vaccine. In the past year, nearly 19,000 children have been sexually groomed, according to official numbers. But some say the real figure is much higher.
Five years ago, 3,300 suspected victims of child sexual exploitation were identified by authorities. That number rose to a shocking 18,700 in 2018-2019.
Grooming was not officially recorded as an assessment factor during referral to social care until 2013.
Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, told the Independent that the grooming of children “remains one of the largest forms of child abuse in the country.”
“Too many times, government has said it will ‘learn lessons’, yet 19,000 children are still at risk of sexual exploitation.
The government has singularly failed to tackle this issue head on. Its approach has been piecemeal and underfunded.”
According to the Independent, the Home Office has begun an analysis of data regarding the cases and will use the results to inform new policy and prevention strategies, but the Queen’s Speech did not mention anything about a public review.
The Independent also reports that investigations into grooming gangs are ongoing throughout the country. In fact, abusers in Huddersfield have already been jailed.
Sammy Woodhouse, a victim from Rotherham, told the Independent:
“You hear this bullshit line, ‘lessons have been learned’, but they haven’t learned anything.”
Woodhouse, who isn’t surprised by the newly released numbers, helped expose a sandal in 2012 that involved the abuse of an estimated 1,500 victims.
“I still hear a lot about the authorities aren’t doing things as they should. It’s not very often I hear something good and for all different reasons—if the police won’t act on reports, people feel they’re not being listened to or supported properly, or information not being shared,” Woodhouse explained.
“I’ve said for years that this country’s in epidemic when it comes to abuse and exploitation. Authorities claim it’s under control but it’s not.”
Woodhouse also noted the likelihood that many victims won’t report what is or has happened to them.
Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection, says officers are “doing all we can to pursue and prosecute criminals who exploit and abuse young people” but that “more must be done to stop abuse happening in the first place.” Bailey suggests “honest conversations, education, and appropriate safeguarding.”
A spokesperson for the Home Office said:
“The Home Office is committed to tackling child sexual abuse and will leave no stone unturned in tackling this abhorrent behavior.
This is why we launched the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse to get to the truth, expose what has gone wrong and learn lessons for the future. The inquiry operates independently of government and, within its terms of reference, decides for itself what it investigates.
The inquiry is investigating institutional responses to child sexual exploitation by organized criminal networks with public hearings set for the spring of 2020.”
“We cannot allow grooming to fall out of the spotlight, because sexual exploitation always flourishes in the shadows,” Champion contends.
By Emma Fiala | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: child abuse, child sexual exploitation, England, grooming, PC | 1 Comment »
The US Has Been Fighting “Forever Wars” Against Muslims for 120 Years
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
Fast forward over 100 years later and it is difficult to see how U.S. military doctrine has changed for the better. A video came to light in 2010 of then-General James Mattis saying that it was “a hell of a lot of fun to shoot” people in Afghanistan. Mattis was later rewarded for his heroism and bravery by being crowned Donald Trump’s secretary of defense for a short while.
https://themindunleashed.com/2019/12/us-forever-wars-muslims.html
(TMU Op-Ed) — U.S.-led wars in the Middle East have killed some four million Muslims since 1990. The recently published Afghanistan papers, provided an insight into the longest war in U.S. history and revealed how U.S. officials continuously lied about the progress being made in Afghanistan, lacked a basic understanding of the country, were hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, and had wasted as much as $1 trillion in the process.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon is nothing new. While most people accept that the United States has been interfering with Muslim populations quite heavily since World War II, the truth is that the U.S. has been fighting “forever wars” against Muslim populations for well over 100 years. (If you want to really go back into history, Thomas Jefferson was also fighting Muslims in the oft-forgotten Barbary Wars in the early 1800s).
The average American school curriculum likely doesn’t feature the fact that the U.S. waged a war from 1899 to 1913 in the southernmost island of the Philippines. Known as the Moro War, it was the longest sustained military campaign in American history until the war in Afghanistan surpassed it a few years ago. As a result, the U.S. and the Philippine governments are still embroiled in a battle with Islamist insurgents in the southern Philippines, which takes the meaning of “forever war” to a whole new level.
Despite over a century passing since the U.S. led a counterinsurgency war against the Islamic Moros, its similarities with the Afghanistan war are incredibly noteworthy, to say the least.
Even reading accounts of the terrain in which both conflicts were fought suggest they were equally as treacherous. As detailed in the memoir of Captain John Pershing, fighting the Moro Wars “entailed guerrilla warfare in a country unknown to us, with its swamps and rivers and its hills and mountains, every foot of which was familiar to the inhabitants and their insurrecto troops.”
While the U.S. often boasts about fighting for freedom, many Americans may be wondering how it is that their freedom came to be located in the Philippines in the first place. Was it worth sending 75,000 American troops in just 1900 alone to the Philippines to fight and die? And was the operation even remotely successful?
More importantly seems to be the indication that the U.S. military was not welcome in the Philippines, much as it is not welcomed by Afghanistan or any other Muslim-majority nation which has to duel with the U.S. Empire. After the U.S. defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and annexed the Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moro population were not even consulted. The U.S. then sought to “pacify” them using brute force.
“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
Fast forward over 100 years later and it is difficult to see how U.S. military doctrine has changed for the better. A video came to light in 2010 of then-General James Mattis saying that it was “a hell of a lot of fun to shoot” people in Afghanistan. Mattis was later rewarded for his heroism and bravery by being crowned Donald Trump’s secretary of defense for a short while.
As you can imagine, General Smith received his wish just as Mattis after him, with perhaps half a million locals dying as a result of the U.S. invasion. At Bud Dajo, some 1,000 Moro separatists, including their families had fled to the crest of a volcano to escape the American invasion. Allegedly, American troops reached the top of the volcano and fired down into the crater until they killed 99 percent of the inhabitants. The colonizers then took the time and effort to pose for a photograph with the hundreds of dead bodies (no, seriously).
It is also worth noting that some 4,000 U.S. soldiers lost their lives during this particular war. This closely mirrors the number of coalition deaths since 2001 in Afghanistan—and for good reason. To minimize U.S. personnel deaths in the Philippines’ war, the U.S. military deployed Filipinos led by U.S. officers into battle. (Sound familiar?)
At one stage, Filipinos ended up doing almost all of the dying as U.S. soldiers slowly left the battle theatre. In fact, the final year of conflict was the bloodiest year of the Moro war. This seems to be the trend in a number of U.S. wars. This is certainly true with respect to Afghanistan, with the U.S. military and its Afghan lackeys on the ground killing more civilians than the Taliban in recent times.
But what is all this senseless violence for? To put it simply, whether in the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, this rampage is all borne out of the belief that America’s subordinates are not capable of ruling themselves and will ultimately profit from American occupation. This was actually the firm thinking of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who saw it as the duty of the United States to maintain the Philippines as a protectorate. This idea was famously (or infamously) termed the “White Man’s Burden” in a poem written by Rudyard Kipling, who sent the poem to Teddy prior to his decision to engage in the Philippine-American war. A 1902 Life Magazine cover even depicted an apparent waterboarding of a Filipino POW by U.S. personnel (the supporters in the background seem to be watching with glee).
When not much has changed, it seems it never will. We can also expect this type of activity to continue for the foreseeable future, given the geopolitical stakes at hand. In the case of the Philippines, it was recently reported that Chinese and Philippine foreign ministers have sealed an agreement for the two nations to pursue joint oil and gas exploration in the hotly contested South China Sea.
As it turns out, the South China Sea could contain anywhere between 125 billion barrels of crude oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The idea that a foreign adversary, especially one rising to prowess on the world stage such as China, could control the majority of these resources unchecked is a major blow to the U.S. Empire.
Whether it is lithium, opium, and geostrategic chess moves in Afghanistan; or natural gas and oil in the South China Sea, Muslim populations will continue to suffer in a colonial terror campaign which has been unfolding for over 100 years.
Think of it this way: if another century passes and your great grandchildren had never heard of the “forever war” that took place in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, all the while watching a new war unfold in the Indo-Pacific region for similar reasons, you would rightfully be fuming in your grave.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Afghanistan Papers, Forever Wars, James Mattis, Moros, Muslims, Philippines | Leave a Comment »
A Newsweek Reporter Resigns, a Counter-Narrative Won’t Die | The American Conservative
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
Haddad declared, “I resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letterwere refused for no valid reason,” adding, “I have collected evidence of how they [the OPCW] suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US govt was removed, though it was factually correct.” Haddad further noted that he had been threatened by Newsweek with legal action if he sought to publish his findings elsewhere.
Is the media suppressing evidence that the 2018 chemical ‘attack’ in Syria didn’t happen the way officials said it did?
A picture taken on February 1, 2018, shows members of the Civil defence removing the remnants of a rocket reportedly fired by regime forces on the outskirts of the rebel-held besieged Syrian town of Douma, Syria, a month before the alleged major chemical attack in April.(Photo credit:HAMZA AL-AJWEH/AFP via Getty Images)
It is perhaps the least reported media scandal about the least reported international controversy in recent times—the resignation of Tareq Haddad, a well-regarded journalist from Newsweek, a mainstay of the mainstream media.
At issue was what he said regarding the magazine’s refusal to cover the scandal unfolding within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Evidence has been building for some time that the OPCW cooked the books in its investigation of alleged chemical weapons use in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, 2018. These allegations served as the justification for a subsequent joint U.S.-U.K.-France attack against suspected chemical weapons targets inside Syria, despite the fact that the OPCW had yet to inspect the Douma location, let alone issue a report on its findings.
In an announcement on Twitter, Haddad declared, “I resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letterwere refused for no valid reason,” adding, “I have collected evidence of how they [the OPCW] suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US govt was removed, though it was factually correct.” Haddad further noted that he had been threatened by Newsweek with legal action if he sought to publish his findings elsewhere.
The OPCW’s Douma investigation has been under a cloud of controversy since shortly after its interim report was released to the public in early March 2019. The document was prepared by Ian Henderson, an engineer working for the OPCW. It challenged the conclusions of the inspection team regarding the provenance of two chlorine canisters located at the incident scene, and was leaked to the press.
The document, which the OPCW subsequently declared to be genuine, raised the probability that the canisters had been manually placed at the scene, as opposed to having been dropped by the Syrian Air Force, raising the question as to whether the entire Douma incident had been staged.
Haddad’s story, however, was not about Ian Henderson’s report, but rather a series of new documents, backed up by an inspector-turned-whistleblower known only as “Alex,” that accused the OPCW leadership of ignoring the findings of its own inspectors in favor of a revisionist report prepared by another team of inspectors based out of Turkey. This second group allegedly relied heavily on data and witnesses provided by the Syrian Civil Defense (the “White Helmets”) and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), two ostensibly humanitarian organizations opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Haddad’s new sources emerged after the publication of the OPCW’s final report on the Douma incident in July 2019. That document concluded that chlorine had been used as a weapon at Douma, likely via chlorine canisters dropped from aircraft—making the Syrian government solely responsible and legitimizing the U.S.-led aerial attacks.
The leaked material was verified by interviews to select reporters (possibly including Haddad, who is seeking whistleblower-like protection from Newsweek) by “Alex,” who claims to have been part of the Douma investigation. The narrative that emerges from a cursory examination of this new data is damning—the OPCW suppressed the findings of the investigation team, which concluded that chlorine had not been used as a weapon at Douma. The OPCW management then conspired with the U.S. government to manufacture another report, based on an alternate set of facts, which sustained the notion that the Syrian government had, in fact, used chlorine as a weapon.
The OPCW management has largely ignored the leaks. The current director general, Fernando Arias, defended the work of his organization, declaring, “While some of these diverse views continue to circulate in some public discussion forums, I would like to reiterate that I stand by the independent, professional conclusion [of the investigation].” For its part, Newsweek, through a spokesperson, told a reporter, “The writer [Haddad] pitched a conspiracy theory rather than an idea for objective reporting. Newsweek editors rejected the pitch.”
Under normal circumstances, the leaked documents and first-hand testimony of a whistleblower like “Alex” would have garnered the attention of the mainstream media, especially given their link to the Trump administration. There was a time when the media wasn’t afraid to take a controversial story and run with it, even one that involved multilateral arms control. In August 1998, I resigned from my position as a chief weapons inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which had been charged with the removal, destruction, or dismantling of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in accordance with relevant UN Security Council resolutions. My resignation was front-page news at both The New York Times and The Washington Post (among others), and I was called to testify before the both the Senate and the House about my allegations, which centered on American interference with the work of UNSCOM.
In retrospect, I’d be delusional to believe that the sole reason the media had taken an interest in my story was that they found the intricacies of disarming Iraq fascinating. The reality was that, at least from the perspective of the mass media, my resignation had served as a means to play the story off against competing domestic political power bases, which in my case consisted of an incumbent Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and a Congress where both houses were controlled by Republicans.
My story had relevance not because I was empowered with fact-based truth (I was), but because my cause was taken up by one side (congressional Republicans) and used as a political cudgel against the other (President Clinton). The moment both the president and Congress came together of one mind, choosing military-backed regime change over legitimate disarmament, my utility was eliminated, and the media dropped me like a bad habit. The demonization of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq precluded any meaningful discussion of issues of disarmament, with the end result the unquestioning embrace of the notion that Iraq had retained WMD, despite there being no evidence to sustain this, and an acceptance of war as the only viable solution, despite the fact that weapons inspections had proven they could be useful.
While conventional wisdom eventually evolved to accept the fact that the UN disarmament process had worked, and that I was correct when I’d reported that Iraq had been qualitatively disarmed and no longer posed a threat worthy of war, the fact remains that the issue of Iraqi WMD was always secondary to the issue of Saddam Hussein. Even once there was agreement that the WMD had been nonexistent, there was never any rethinking of how we had collectively pigeonholed Saddam into the “evil dictator” category, with the merits of his removal rarely questioned.
There are many similarities between my case and that of the OPCW inspectors, especially when it comes to their defending the integrity of the institution they represent and resisting the corruption of outside influences. The OPCW matter, however, remains a matter of internal dispute, denied the grand stage of American politics and the media attention that would garner.
There are several reasons for this. First, it is hard to rally people around a case where the central debate is over the relevance of particles per billion, or engineering equations concerning the tensile strength of concrete and steel. While the underlying science and math appears to be on the side of Ian Henderson and “Alex,” the refusal of the OPCW to engage in any substantive discussion means that what passes for a “debate” has been hijacked by social media personalities. They’re led by Eliot Higgins and his cohort of Bellingcat “specialists” who back up their questionable science with well-worn tropes designating all who oppose them as “pro-Assad” conspiracy theorists and/or Russian-controlled trolls who are simply regurgitating “Kremlin talking points.”
Newsweek’s suppression of the reporting of Tareq Haddad is disturbing; the failure of the mainstream media to pick up the metaphorical ball and run with it is a damning indictment of the current state of journalism today. There was a time when an intrepid investigative reporter like Seymour Hersh would have sunk his teeth into a story such as this. But Hersh’s one-time outlet of choice—the New Yorker—and its editor, David Remnick, have foregone the pursuit of truth in favor of publishing stories that demonize Assad and Putin. The same can be said of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets.
The OPCW whistleblower scandal has all the elements of a blockbuster—heroes, villains, scandal, lies, and cover-up. But fact-based truth is no longer the fuel of the media business that modern journalism is supposed to sustain, especially when the truth can so easily be fobbed off as “pro-Assad” or “pro-Russia.” As long as this model remains in place, and the work of genuine journalists such as Tareq Haddad is suppressed by editors, the American people will remain prisoners of their own ignorance.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books, most recently, Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War (2018).
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Media’s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal – Caitlin Johnstone
Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019
This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”) throwing a fit over the Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever” from the organisation’s secure registry.
Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story.
Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”.https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019
The drop also includes the minutes from an OPCW toxicology meeting with “three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist”, all four of whom are specialists in chemical weapons analysis.
This is getting really, really, really weird.
WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we’ve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.
This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”) throwing a fit over the Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever” from the organisation’s secure registry.
Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”.https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019
The drop also includes the minutes from an OPCW toxicology meeting with “three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist”, all four of whom are specialists in chemical weapons analysis.
“With respect to the consistency of the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” the document reads.
According to the leaked minutes from the toxicology meeting, the chief expert offered “the possibility of the event being a propaganda exercise” as one potential explanation for the Douma incident. The other OPCW experts agreed that the key “take-away message” from the meeting was “that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified”.
Like all the other many, many, many, many different leaks which have been hemorrhaging from the OPCW about the Douma incident, none of the important information contained in these publications was included in any of the OPCW’s public reports on the matter. According to the OPCW’s Final Report published in March 2019, the investigative team found “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”
We now know that these “reasonable grounds” contain more holes than a spaghetti strainer executed by firing squad. This is extremely important information about an unsolved war crime which resulted in dozens of civilian deaths and led to an act of war which cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and had many far-reaching geopolitical consequences.
Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story.
As of this writing, a Google News search for this story brings up an article by RT, another by Al-Masdar News, and some entries by alternative outlets you’ve almost certainly never heard of like UrduPoint News and People’s Pundit Daily.
Make no mistake about it: this is insane. The fact that an extremely important news story of immense geopolitical consequence is not getting any mainstream news media coverage, at all, is absolutely stark raving insane.
Up until the OPCW leaks, WikiLeaks drops always made mainstream news headlines. Everyone remembers how the 2016 news cycle was largely dominated by leaked Democratic Party emails emerging from the outlet. Even the relatively minor ICE agents publication by WikiLeaks last year, containing information that was already public, garnered headlines from top US outlets like The Washington Post , Newsweek, and USA Today. Now, on this exponentially more important story, zero coverage.
The mass media’s stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence?
We can at least gain some insight into that last question with the internal Newsweek emails which were published by journalist Tareq Haddad two weeks ago. The emails feature multiple Newsweek editors telling Haddad that they would not publish a word about the OPCW leaks for two reasons: (1) because no other outlets were reporting on them, and (2) because the US government-funded narrative management firm Bellingcat had published a laughably bogus article explaining why the leaks weren’t newsworthy. Haddad has since resigned from Newsweek.
We may be certain that this story is being killed in news rooms all around the world in similar fashion, and possibly using those very same excuses. As long as no other “respectable” (i.e. establishment) outlets are covering this story, it can be treated as a non-story, using a deceitful US government-funded narrative management operation as justification as needed. If one journalist threw his life into chaos and uncertainty by resigning and blowing the whistle on this conspiracy of silence, we may be certain that the same is happening to countless others who don’t have to courage and/or ability to do the same.
Our fearless media watchdogs still maintaining complete blackout on @OPCW whistleblower leaks debunking WMD attack in Douma. The leaks show that Trump—like Dubya— used fake WMDs to bomb Arab country—then strong-armed @OPCW to cover up the lies.https://t.co/bdbzf6py8p
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 27, 2019
Many alternative media commentators are highlighting this news media blackout on social media today.
“Our fearless media watchdogs still maintaining complete blackout on OPCW whistleblower leaks debunking WMD attack in Douma. The leaks show that Trump—like Dubya— used fake WMDs to bomb Arab country—then strong-armed OPCW to cover up the lies,” tweeted journalist Mark Ames.
“The US attacked Syria for a chemical attack by Assad last year. But official OPCW scientists who investigated the event didn’t find evidence the Syrian military used chemical weapons. The media has chosen to ignore this story and fire its own journalists who try to report on it,” tweeted author and analyst Max Abrahms.
“This is the FOURTH leak showing how the OPCW fabricated a report on a supposed Syrian ‘chemical’ attack,” tweeted journalist Ben Norton. “And mainstream Western corporate media outlets are still silent, showing how authoritarian these ‘democracies’ are and how tightly they control info.”
“Media silence on this story is its own scandal,” tweeted journalist Aaron Maté.
But this spin machine is twirling off its axis trying to normalize this silence.
Surprise, surprise, Wikileaks didn’t leak the next email in this chain from the OPCW questioning why Ian Henderson was creating rogue reports.
This email also quite clearly contradicts “Alex’s” claim that Henderson was in the FFM. pic.twitter.com/qcJkAyXe9W
— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) December 27, 2019
Bellingcat narrative jockeys such as “senior investigator” Nick Waters are already scrambling to perception manage everyone into believing their own eyes are lying to them. Waters has a thread on Twitter that’s being shared around by all the usual Syria spinmeisters claiming, based on no evidence whatsoever, that WikiLeaks is selectively publishing the documents it has to create a false impression of events in the OPCW. Waters falsely claims that an email by Sebastien “Voldemort” Braha — the guy at the center of the scandal — proves that Ian Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma, in contradiction to the claims made by the anonymous second OPCW whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym of “Alex”.
As Waters is one hundred percent aware, Henderson absolutely was part of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission, and one of the FFM members who actually went to Douma no less. I’ve put together a Twitter thread refuting Waters’ ridiculous claims which you can read by clicking here, but in short an arbitrary distinction seems to have been made between the FFM and the “FFM core team”, or what is labeled the “FFM Alpha team” in a newly leaked email trying to marginalize Henderson’s assessment. Henderson actually went to Douma as part of the FFM, unlike almost all members of the so-called “core team” who except for one paramedic operated solely in another nation (probably Turkey).
Of course, the distinction of whether Henderson was or was not “in the FFM” is also itself irrelevant and arbitrary, since we know for a fact that he is a longtime OPCW inspector who went to Douma and contributed an assessment which was hidden from the public by the OPCW.
So this narrative being spun by the US government-funded propagandists at Bellingcat is bogus from top to bottom, but what’s infuriating is that we already know who editors in news rooms are going to listen to.
“We have this alternative media ecosystem that is driving a lot of disinformation. It is not understood by journalists or anyone really beyond a very small group of people who are really engaged with it,” @EliotHiggins says https://t.co/RWi2Mqy8jV
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 27, 2019
It’s absolutely amazing how tightly interlaced Bellingcat is with the upper echelons of mainstream news media and the public framing of what’s going on in Syria. Mere hours after the latest WikiLeaks drop, CNN pundit Brian Stelter shared an article about Bellingcat founder and former Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Eliot Higgins, who warns of the dangers posed by alternative media reporters who cover underreported stories like the OPCW scandal.
“We have this alternative media ecosystem that is driving a lot of disinformation. It is not understood by journalists or anyone really beyond a very small group of people who are really engaged with it,” reads the ironic Higgins quote in the excerpt shared by Stelter.
We’ve been seeing a mad rush from mass media pundits to give this US government-funded narrative management operation unearned and undeserved legitimacy, churning out tweets like Stelter’s and fawning puff pieces by The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Yorker. This unearned and undeserved legitimacy is then used by editors to justify looking to Bellingcat for instructions on how to think about important information on Syria rather than doing their own basic investigation and analysis. It’s a self-validating feedback loop which just so happens to work out very conveniently for the government which funds Bellingcat.
It remains unknown exactly what’s transpiring in news rooms around the world to maintain the conspiracy of silence on the OPCW scandal, but what is known is that by itself this scandalous silence is enough to fully discredit the mass media forever. WikiLeaks has exposed these outlets for the monolithic propaganda engine that they really are, and they did it just by publishing extremely newsworthy leak after extremely newsworthy leak.
In order to perception manage us any harder, these freaks are going to have to go around literally confiscating our ears and eyeballs.
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