There has always been a hunger for new discoveries and revelations of the truth, but often, in the past, it took great effort to get past the “agenda”—there has always been one.
Think of the Daniel Ellsberg exposure of The Pentagon Papers as well as many pieces coming out of Viet Nam during the ‘60s by a group of idealist journalists covering the war there. None of these were popular publications with the editors (or the powers that be), and had their difficulty getting published, but they were not altogether censored.
Then jump a few decades ahead and think of Julian Assange, still being held against his will for his revealing publications in WikiLeaks on war crimes committed by the United States. And we certainly must not forget the courageous work of Edward Snowden who exposed illegal CIA surveillance in the summer of 2013 having The Guardian, in the UK, and The Washington Post, in the US, publish his story.
Again, although unusual considering today’s climate that his story was published in two particularly prominent instruments of the state, Snowden himself was declared an alleged traitor by the US and has dodged extradition to this day. The screws tightened as the years rolled by—now so tight practically nothing gets through.
There is a lot more than this, of course. And today the censoring of highly qualified professionals and journalists who have pertinent and quite important information to share with the public has become so blatant it brings to mind the Nazi book burnings of the 1930’s and Soviet censorship during Stalin’s reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953.
It is impossible to know how devastating to a culture this sort of censorship is. One can only imagine what it would be like to live in a country where not a speck of information came to you that was not controlled by the state. The state could literally tell you anything and you would have to believe it. Or would you?
I believe one of the distinct differences between now and then is that people did not buy everything that was thrown at them by official word in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia (or the dozens of other such totalitarian regimes spread throughout the world before and since.) Today, although censorship is rampant in the Western world, stuff does get through.
The Internet is not so clamped shut that nothing of contrarian content gets to the eyes and ears of the masses. Actually, very little is stopped cold in its tracks. If you look hard enough, you can find just about anything. Why is this so? —probably because there is no real need to shut it out completely, the people are trained to ignore it.
In Germany or Russia during the height of their censorship efforts, a person could be shot for holding alternative news (truth). And if it did get out, it most definitely was listened to or read and was fervently consumed, but maybe not by everyone. There were always staunch Soviets, Leninists, Stalinists, and in Germany, Nazis who were loyal to the cause. I would venture to say that most of these people under the psychological thumb of their handlers.
The brainwashing effort is so successful here and now, that even if alternative news is available to the public through some alternative news source, it simply is rejected and scorned. This in itself is a form of censorship—the destruction of information’s reliability and the people’s ability to trust.
Anything not officially approved is tainted. The mark of a piece of information’s “unreliability” is its absence (removal, “fact-checked,” banning, etc.) from the usual pop-social news sources such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube as well as the mainstream news sources such as CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
What is occurring is a sort of double whammy. Block (censor) these alternative news items from the approved news conveyors and it is thus marked and if it shows up elsewhere it is immediately considered unreliable, conspiracy material, and untrustworthy—misinformation.
This same process occurs with the news conveyance entities as well as the actual human source (the experts, the witnesses, the scientists, etc.). Since people are not desperately looking for non state-sanctioned news material, the state does not have to worry about such news items leaking out. The minions (sheep) are adequately brainwashed to not be the least bit interested in anything the state does not approve.
The horrendous damage is obvious. Considering the volatility of the world today, information is vitally important. And when a silent enemy is created and released on the public (the manufactured virus), the only way to control its state defined “death ray of destruction” is to acquire information about it—unfortunately only information the state supplies and sanctions.
Any information that is contrary to the state approved information must be rendered impotent through censorship, degradation of the source, ridicule, labeling as conspiracy material or labeled as misinformation. The sheep eat this up, for some odd reason we are still trying to figure out. To the rest of us this state permitted drivel is clearly the actual misinformation. See Mattias Desmet’s fine book on the subject, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
People seem to have a psychological compulsion these days to enable these authority figures and systems (government, law makers, etc.) to “do the wrong thing.” They enable by handing over to these entities the responsibility of filtering through news to determine what they should and shouldn’t be exposed to.
“If we have free speech and a free press then people can say anything they want (duh). They can print and speak hate, they can call people to racism, they can lie about medicine…about anything. You, Mr/Ms Government must protect me from that, I cannot decide for myself, you have to do it for me.”
Even if a person thinks these powers are not corrupt, this enabling and handing over responsibility and power will make them corrupt. This is a natural law no one can ignore.
What of the other things going on in the world? It isn’t only Covid crap that is being censored and radically distorted…what do we know of general world news that we can trust? Look at the Ukraine/Russia situation. How many “non-shrews” have seen in the mainstream news sources anything about the massive trucker’s convoy in the US? How many people have seen in the news the horror in Shanghai? in Sri Lanka, in the Netherlands?
Most shrews are aware of the distorted news we are receiving through what sheep believe are trusted sources. None of this could be even remotely accurate.
Why would it be? If we are receiving false information left and right, then it stands to reason that nothing we are receiving is the least bit reliable. What of worldwide food shortages leading us into famine of a magnitude the world has never seen? What do we really know of all of this? We could be being fed radically false information, and I suspect we are.
Unless you are there on the ground, or have trusted friends in these specific areas of the world, you don’t know shit, none of us do. Most of you reading this do have your sources for news, but the sheep don’t. All the news they will even bother to look at is only propaganda, nothing else.
That is the horrendous consequence of censorship, the breakdown of trust of alternative news sources not under the control of the agenda, and the strangulation of information sources as well as the desecration of our main news sources we have relied on in the past (which probably never were all that reliable). We live in a sealed black box, under the illusion that the Internet in all of its free information glory is actually managing to supply us with all the information we could possibly need.
Only problem here is that many don’t believe 90% of it because it doesn’t meet the state’s criteria for trustworthy news, we are told most of it is misinformation, and should be avoided like the plague. The entire world is about to implode, and most people in the West (or anywhere for that matter) don’t have a clue because they have been brainwashed to avoid any information that does not come from the state-sanctioned news sources.
Check out UNESCO’s effort to degrade alternative information sources, you will have a blast with this one—amazing, and frightening beyond comprehension.
Censorship relieves people of a lot of responsibility. They don’t have to protect themselves from being hurt by things people might say, they don’t have to figure out if what they are reading is true or not, or if it pertains to them.
They let daddy and mommy figure all that out for them, to protect them, to relieve them from deciding for themselves what they should or should not read or see or hear, or to facilitate the state’s nefarious, and self-serving, agenda. This all boils down to trust. I think most oppressive regimes begin with the masses trusting the oppressors (of course, they are not oppressors at first but rather present themselves as liberators).
As time goes by these same masses start to see their prison wardens can’t be trusted, and then the censorship and news that is shoved down their throats as obvious propaganda takes on a different character. Maybe that realization is yet to come in our current situation, but when it does, if it does, it clearly will be too late.
Image by Mike Ljung from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.
