I had a sobering thought as I watched a video I’d rented recently, to wit, we may now be sliding toward rule by totalitarian fascists.
As a person born during the Second World War, I grew up wondering how Nazis could be allowed to take power. Now I know, from living in a society which slaughters millions of people in an endless “war on terrorism,” always looking for new wars, just as in Nazi Germany.
Our leaders have sent military forces to threaten the Russians and Chinese, in recent adventures goading potential adversaries toward war, as though we don’t have enough enemies and wars, much like the Nazis did, with similar trumped up reasons.
Americans are advised through their media that it is acceptable for us to have over 800 foreign military bases threatening anyone on the planet who doesn’t agree with the laissez faire capitalist policies of the world’s transnational corporations.
The movie I’d rented, Anthropoid, is about the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Anthropoid’s protagonists represent the Czech resistance, but their fellow citizens cooperate fully with the Nazis, getting their information from a controlled media very much like that we find today in the Land of the Free.
I watched Anthropoid after a morning of reading stories about the National Security State’s official newspaper, The Washington Post, and their article warning that many of my favorite web sites are feeding the masses fake news stories, all controlled by the Russians.
I have long considered The Washington Post to be a propaganda source pushing corporate greed at any cost to the public interest, along with whatever the National Security State people give it to pass on without questions. For decades, they’ve shown an eagerness to mislead the American people into wars or whatever the establishment wants.
But this is low even for The Washington Post. To completely fabricate such crap shows that the establishment is now desperate because facts are getting out around official sources like the Post and New York Times.
Years ago one of my readers of LUV News emailed me that a web site was reporting that I was paid by George Soros to promote his propaganda. It bothered me that such lies could be spread as major stories by a web site purporting to be reporting news.
Soros is a billionaire who supports a great many things I oppose, and I’m sure he’d swallow rat poison before giving me a dime. I wrote to the editor of the web site asking that the false story be taken down, and he refused. I asked my friend Kevin Zeese, who’d also been smeared by the web site, about it, and he suggested that I let it go, to not give the web site publicity, so I took that course, while fuming.
The Washington Post is doing the same thing, falsely accusing people of working for the Russians. How do editors prove they don’t work for the Russians? Can any of us prove we are not working for Russians, or for that matter, that we are not Martians, should the Post decide to take that route in their next adventure into yellow journalism?
The establishment obviously fears that some of the public are waking up and getting information around the official sources, like those in the Czech resistance to Nazi occupation.
Much of what we say in that which has become the American underground media is anti-war, which goes against network news reports, where retired pro-war generals are paraded out as expert guests without ever a challenge from anyone in opposition.
You can’t have profitable corporate health care, wars, and other things the masses oppose without strict media control. You can’t have polluters, banksters and defense cheats running the country without strict media control (Wolf Blitzer never notices these things). The establishment is frightened when inconvenient facts escape their control.
Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to be observing our future when he said, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
I see the next step by our ruling establishment to be some form of media control on the Internet, it is the hole in the system which frightens hell out of the ruling fascists. I fear they will start by shutting down a web site that most of us don’t want to defend, and once they get away with that, they will move on to another, until it is too late and we are stuck with only the darkness of controlled, corporate media.
It will be like Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came for the Communists.” We’ve got to be watchful and organize to keep the Internet as free as we can, today.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.
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Are we sliding toward absolute rule by fascists?
Smearing and censorship in the name of ‘fake news’
Posted on December 2, 2016 by Jack Balkwill
I had a sobering thought as I watched a video I’d rented recently, to wit, we may now be sliding toward rule by totalitarian fascists.
As a person born during the Second World War, I grew up wondering how Nazis could be allowed to take power. Now I know, from living in a society which slaughters millions of people in an endless “war on terrorism,” always looking for new wars, just as in Nazi Germany.
Our leaders have sent military forces to threaten the Russians and Chinese, in recent adventures goading potential adversaries toward war, as though we don’t have enough enemies and wars, much like the Nazis did, with similar trumped up reasons.
Americans are advised through their media that it is acceptable for us to have over 800 foreign military bases threatening anyone on the planet who doesn’t agree with the laissez faire capitalist policies of the world’s transnational corporations.
The movie I’d rented, Anthropoid, is about the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Anthropoid’s protagonists represent the Czech resistance, but their fellow citizens cooperate fully with the Nazis, getting their information from a controlled media very much like that we find today in the Land of the Free.
I watched Anthropoid after a morning of reading stories about the National Security State’s official newspaper, The Washington Post, and their article warning that many of my favorite web sites are feeding the masses fake news stories, all controlled by the Russians.
I have long considered The Washington Post to be a propaganda source pushing corporate greed at any cost to the public interest, along with whatever the National Security State people give it to pass on without questions. For decades, they’ve shown an eagerness to mislead the American people into wars or whatever the establishment wants.
But this is low even for The Washington Post. To completely fabricate such crap shows that the establishment is now desperate because facts are getting out around official sources like the Post and New York Times.
Years ago one of my readers of LUV News emailed me that a web site was reporting that I was paid by George Soros to promote his propaganda. It bothered me that such lies could be spread as major stories by a web site purporting to be reporting news.
Soros is a billionaire who supports a great many things I oppose, and I’m sure he’d swallow rat poison before giving me a dime. I wrote to the editor of the web site asking that the false story be taken down, and he refused. I asked my friend Kevin Zeese, who’d also been smeared by the web site, about it, and he suggested that I let it go, to not give the web site publicity, so I took that course, while fuming.
The Washington Post is doing the same thing, falsely accusing people of working for the Russians. How do editors prove they don’t work for the Russians? Can any of us prove we are not working for Russians, or for that matter, that we are not Martians, should the Post decide to take that route in their next adventure into yellow journalism?
The establishment obviously fears that some of the public are waking up and getting information around the official sources, like those in the Czech resistance to Nazi occupation.
Much of what we say in that which has become the American underground media is anti-war, which goes against network news reports, where retired pro-war generals are paraded out as expert guests without ever a challenge from anyone in opposition.
You can’t have profitable corporate health care, wars, and other things the masses oppose without strict media control. You can’t have polluters, banksters and defense cheats running the country without strict media control (Wolf Blitzer never notices these things). The establishment is frightened when inconvenient facts escape their control.
Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to be observing our future when he said, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
I see the next step by our ruling establishment to be some form of media control on the Internet, it is the hole in the system which frightens hell out of the ruling fascists. I fear they will start by shutting down a web site that most of us don’t want to defend, and once they get away with that, they will move on to another, until it is too late and we are stuck with only the darkness of controlled, corporate media.
It will be like Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came for the Communists.” We’ve got to be watchful and organize to keep the Internet as free as we can, today.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.