This is all Putin's fault
This is all Putin's fault
Chris Hedges proved ultimately correct as Ukraine war makes me write another article
Almost a year ago I had the idea of starting a blog critiquing capitalism and imperialism, but with a positive, Can-Do Post-Capitalism spin. It was going to talk about the crises and inequality created by our anti-democratic and unsustainable system, but in a way that would not leave the reader depressed and escaping to binge watch Star Trek. Quite a task.
I talked about this with my father and he was interested in doing it as a joint venture. He held very similar views to my own and we felt it would be a good pairing to play his jaded curmudgeon against my young, wide-eyed naivety. He was going to write his own intro shortly after mine, presumably as a slapdown. I’m not sure, I never saw it.
I mentioned at the time that we did not expect to reach anyone, knowing this kind of discussion would fall well outside the boundaries of sanctioned discourse determined by the free speech regulators Google and Facebook. We knew that we would be screaming into the void.
What I’m getting at is that we were to be our own primary audience. If anything, this was to act as our own psychological buttress against the propaganda and lunacy of the outside world. Putting this on paper would be a kind of self-affirmation, a flag in the ground, marking our Dissatisfaction.
As it turned out, we failed our audience. There were various reasons - the commitments of a young family, a busy full time job, moving to Colombia, the death of my father. Especially after the latter I faltered and stepped back a little from current events, refocusing on things I could hold, like my kids.
And then the war happened
Yes exactly, and then the war happened.
Last year I talked about the left and media falling in love with censorship and authoritarianism, of a collapse of engagement in general, a move to tribal bubbles. Skip forward to today, the left and media are in love with censorship. Authoritarianism is in fashion and engagement is now treason.
If the media signal to noise ratio had already been unbearable, if I felt I’d almost been drowning under propaganda before the war in Ukraine, this took it to a whole new level.
In a way this is not surprising. In his 2002 book ‘War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning’, Chris Hedges talks at length about the effect war has on us:
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.
I can not think of a title that more aptly describes this time. This war resonates particularly because unlike those of the last few decades, which were either started, funded or supported by our allies (mostly the USA), this war is the responsibility of our officially sanctioned enemy, Russia.
I mean, 👻😱 Russia (oooo) 😱👻
This war has given us something we have not been allowed to experience in decades: A just cause. The Israeli occupation is off limits because they are allies, the Ukrainian civil war since 2014 was off limits because the USA was funding it. Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan were all stained with our own and our allies involvement and complicity.
Russia gifted the West with a reason for living and Americans had already been primed to accept it. Six years of Russiagate had turned Putin into a comic-book level villain and the entire population blacklisted as “The Russians”. If you know any Russian people, at all, you are “Known to have ties to The Russians”, a treasonous offence.
This kind of dehumanisation is a central aspect of war, especially the process of preparing a population for one. It takes a lot to convince people to kill other humans, but it is a hell of a lot easier if you first take away the enemy’s humanity. It is much more difficult to hate a mother, a father, a young violinist or shop clerk than it is to hate the cartoonish gangster mob ‘The Russians’.
Fortunately neither Australia, nor the USA, nor any of its allies are at war with Russia. And further, Australia is not even close to the level of hysteria as the USA, evidenced by our foreign ministers recent unwillingness to be drawn on the language escalation question of genocide.
Despite this, we are still on the same path, trudging loyally behind and feeding on the same diet of war propaganda coming out of the USA and Ukrainian governments.
Opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not mean you have to ignore the history and context of the situation. It does not mean we have to ignore the legitimate concerns Russians may have around the expansion of NATO and the massacres of Russian speaking populations in The Donbas since 2014. It does not mean we have to ignore the extremists and neo-nazis within the Ukrainian military and government, or the role of the U.S. in stoking the conflict over the years.
We only need to ignore that complexity if our ultimate goal is not peace, but to prime ourselves for escalation of the conflict. The ability to see the people we oppose as human beings with valid concerns and interests is a skill that must be preserved and promoted precisely because it is the only path to engagement, negotiation and peace.
We need to ban the import of American censorship
The reason why this discourse and social environment in the USA matters to us in Australia is that the USA exports its censorship all around the world.
During the 2020 election, when discussion of Hunter Bidens laptop was banned across social media, it was not just banned in the USA but also in Australia. When Chris Hedges entire library of On Contact episodes were removed from YouTube for being associated with the news network RT America, it was not just taken down in the USA. It was taken down for Australians and everyone else.
It is not just leftists in the USA that are shadow banned and suppressed. Any voices in countries falling under the tech monopoly suffer the same fate. These U.S companies, acting on behalf of the U.S. government, are able to determine not just what Americans are able to see and talk about, but what Australians are able to see and talk about.
The best place to start addressing this would be to simply force these companies to expose the tags and modifiers used in their ranking algorithms. We force cigarettte manufacturers to put warning labels on their products, why can’t we make YouTube and Facebook do it too?
I’d love to see a prominent message on YouTube warning users that their search results are censored on the request of the USA security state and liberal establishment. That would go down real well with users.
Secondly provide a mechanism to dispute the removal of content. Phone providers can’t just refuse their product to whoever they don’t like because they are classed as an essential service. Are Google and Facebook not equally critical services now?
If this kind of power was in the hands of “The Russians” it would be scandalous. The idea that one country can interfere with the freedom of speech of the citizens in another country is anathema to the core liberal values we supposedly espouse.
It should be surprising that countries like Australia are not incensed at this attack on their self-determination. I suspect however that a lot of these decisions are right in line with the perspectives of the Australian government and media and so cause few waves.
This leaking out of US domestic censorship and discourse by way of America’s media tech monopoly is exactly why we cannot ignore the U.S. as some kind of batshit crazies ‘over there’.
They’re not across the ocean, they are here and they’re conducting the online equivalent of a book burning with our own media.
Now what
I don’t really know. Keep trying to point it out? Maybe enough voices will normalise dissent? Rely on the system to destroy its own credibility?
Keen to hear your thoughts in the comments.
In the meantime I’ll try to keep writing to the algorithms and trying to find a way to get a Google crawler to navigate a subscription page.