Lowkey on “corporate capture” at the BBC

Rapper Lowkey at a rally for the woke-abandoned Julian Assange, October 2021

This follow up to Gaza – hats off to Gary Lineker features George Galloway’s Mother of All Talk Shows, and the guest he introduces as:

a professor of the streets, a wordsmith, a musician and hip-hop artist at the top of his trade, host of the Watchdog podcast, veteran political campaigner and all round hero

He means Lowkey, whom I heard and snapped three and a half years ago at a London rally for Julian. What struck me then, and even more so in this interview yesterday, is how astonishingly well informed the man is. Informed about what? In this case a web of media conflicts of interest not confined to the BBC but – given both its much vaunted ‘impartiality’, and Lineker’s forced resignation on Sunday – most pertinent there. In his sights are patterns of ownership, influence and control through which a genocidal state may deep penetrate those media institutions …

Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.

The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings.

Caitlin Johnstone: You don’t have to choose between being happy and being informed

… which shape our thinking while leaving us believing we arrived at our views all on our clever lonesome.

Before going any further let me offer a Brian Berletic quote from a podcast last October. I’ve used it several times:

People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three.

For US we may substitute the West at large, UK especially. I use Brian’s words to push back against the notion that Israel captures Western states to get them to act against their own interests. Some who say this are nakedly antisemitic but others, like John Mearsheimer and (Jewish) Jeffrey Sachs, are serious and well informed voices with much to recommend them. Their error is to conflate a nation’s interests with those of its elites. Yes, the Israel Lobby can influence policy in Western states but this is because Israel’s interests as seen by the criminals and fanatics at its helm align for reasons set out here and here with those of a waning and by that fact triply dangerous Western empire.

Because that alignment is real, so is Israeli power and reach. I’ve seen my share of exposures of this – not least the 2017 Al Jazeera documentary series, The Lobby – but not one so informed and articulate as the spider’s web of “corporate capture” sketched out by Lowkey for George and his viewers in the context of the Gary Lineker affair.

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