Left, a Bing in Internet Explorer return on my search for RT (formerly Russia Today). Right, a DuckDuckGo in Tor return on the same. Why not make up your own mind whose voices you hear? Download the Tor Browser today!
On the Greanville Post site today:
YouTube Deletes Scott Ritter’s Channel
The Ukraine war is one of the most heavily censored events in modern history. The West, jealous of its huge advantage in propaganda, is enforcing extreme narrative control. Not just Russian media — long censored by the EU and US — but any dissident voices in the West, contrary to vaunted “freedom of speech” traditions, are being silenced by covert edicts of government or media itself … Under such extreme hypocrisy, and risk of nuclear war, it is our duty to publish any voices that in our opinion bring truth to the forefront.
The veteran former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, UN weapons inspector, geopolitical observer and Sputnik contributor has spent over a year providing incisive commentaries about the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, challenging the Western mainstream narrative and offering his own perspective on the origins of the crisis.
A banner reading “This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech” greets anyone trying to navigate to Ritter’s channel.
The company did not provide any information about the nature of these alleged “multiple or severe violations,” or how Ritter’s mostly Ukrainian crisis-related commentaries and interviews constituted “hate speech.”
YouTube allows for user-based reporting of any alleged “hate speech,” prompting concerns from content creators over the years that the video hosting giant lets organized online activists silence voices and views they might not like or agree with, or which challenge important state and corporate narratives. [emphasis added]
The penultimate paragraph above has long been par for the course. Years ago I was placed on “pre moderation” at The Guardian – my comments so threatening to liberal sensibilities they could only appear after being checked by moderators; a process which could take days, thus ensuring I could take no meaningful part in fast moving discussions.
No reason, far less any specific transgression, was cited. As with Scott Ritter, I was referred to a generic list of verbotens, none of which I had committed. I may dislike the virtue signalling and worse of identity politics …
… In just 200 years we’ve progressed from expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned people while saying racist things, to expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned people while condemning racism .. (Caitlin Johnstone)
… but I don’t do sexism, racism or other exclusionisms, nor stack my comments with URLs to promote commercial sites, nor wander off topic nor mount ad hominem attacks. I simply, in the days when I still thought Guardian BTL comment worth the candle, offered reason and evidence to back up views disliked at Guardian Media Group. This for instance:
Liberals who a few years ago cheered Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump, danced in the street at the electoral victory of war criminal Joe Biden, and now champion the criminalising of ‘hate speech’, are not as a rule stupid in any generalised sense of the word. In my experience they are typically sincere and thoughtful – just blind to a vital part of the equation. One that changes everything.
Our rulers (of whose very existence liberals are in part or complete denial) couldn’t give a flying fuck about ‘hate speech’ or social exclusion. They may have the ear of useful idiots who do, but those who from behind a thinning veil of democracy truly run the West value these – and any other ideals – only insofar as they can be harnessed to the advancement of division and control, wealth, privilege and power.
So my take-home, for today and all other days, is that it’s time to grow up, politically, and drop the infantilising delusion that we live in a democracy in which values like social inclusion may be taken at face value even when promoted by power. Democracy implies consent, consent is meaningless if uninformed, and on matters vital to power corporate media cannot be trusted – for reasons and in ways set out in posts like this – to inform us fairly and thoroughly. Since we are in actuality ruled by the criminally insane – witness the dearth of meaningful action on ecocide; the flat out lies, provable as such, by which so much blood is spilt and Armageddon risked in Ukraine – you should know that power will cynically use your fine ideals and mine to further ends far removed from those we had in mind.
* * *
It’ll get far worse, until the West implodes from within, like the USSR in its time… not many will notice who are not tuned to the real news (aka alternative news, aka not narrative ridden news), but the gap between the “garden” and the countries outside this freedom starved cult arena will keep growing… until people from NATOstan, a term appropriately coined by Pepe Escobar, start escaping to the East.
NATOstan – I like it! I’ve long followed Pepe, though he does tend to get carried away with his own rhetoric. As always, it’s important to triangulate.
That cartoon should be plastered across every wall in Edinburgh:
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-end-of-the-enlightenment/#more-138747
War is peace, truth is lies, and exclusion is inclusion …
On the subject of censorship:
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/08/25/cyberattack-on-this-journal-proving-truth-is-the-first-casualty-of-war/
“The Strategic Culture Foundation’s online journal was this week hit by a massive cyberattack. The assault resulted in the forum being shut down on its regular internet site. Readers who normally access the journal were informed that the site was no longer available.
The online journal has safely migrated to strategic-culture.su and, in addition, we continue to post articles via SCF’s Telegram channel in order to exercise our inalienable right to freedom of speech.”