The twentieth century cannot be understood as a conflict between socialism versus “freedom,” but between two different groups of socialism fighting for power among themselves. The international socialism of the USSR that penetrated throughout Eastern Europe, South America, Central Asia, and parts of East Asia and Africa, better known as communism, openly espoused the principles of socialism as the proposed Marxist solution to the plight of the working man. As it is known, the claims of helping the “working man” were just a cover to dislodge the current set of rulers and make way for new ones who committed the same evils as before but, having no moral consternation about how they deceived men to rise to power, felt no sense of compassion for them and proceeded to abuse them far worse than their previous rulers. America and her allies responded to this by presenting themselves as the group bearing the “solution” in the form of “democracy and freedom,” which was used as a rallying cry for the many American-backed incursions throughout the same parts of the world.
However, the actual evidence shows that America was approaching her opposition to the Russians not from a way that different in philosophy, but presentation. As it was definitively proven through the existence of Operation Gladio and its inseparable nature from the purpose and history of the CIA, the US responded to the rise of international socialism by promoting the rise of socialism in a nationalized context as the counter. When the USSR would say “workers rights and egalitarianism,” the US would say “blood and soil first.” The USSR said that the “bourgeoisie” were the enemy of the “proletariat” in the pursuit of worker’s rights and egalitarianism, and so the bourgeoisie and those who were accused of supporting the bourgeoisie, whether they did or not, were to be eliminated in a continual purge of “undesirables.” The US promoted groups that would emphasize racial and tribal unity, and the purge of those who opposed or were not members of “the tribe” in a given society.
The US eventually prevailed over the USSR because of the simple reason that for the common man, blood and birth ties are tangible, and the tangible is always more “real” in the minds of the average man than abstract concepts such as wealth or egalitarianism. However, neither system disappeared, and both are continuing to fight with each other through a myriad of conflicts throughout the world but whose goal is eventually world domination and control.
It is said that the first casualty of any war is truth, and this can be said in any conflict. However, the twentieth century was particularly deadly in that while there is more information available than ever before, that said information can be more easily manipulated so to distort the facts and give an impression of what a particular side wants than what facts actually are. This paradigm is being used by both the left and the right without exception.
Take for example in the USA, a recent story about the removal of a plaque placed in 1959 in Texas saying that the war of the Confederacy was not about slavery:
A plaque at the Texas State Capitol in Austin that has stirred ire for more than half a century will finally be removed. Texas lawmakers, fresh in their newest legislative session this week, agreed Friday the Confederacy plaque that claims the U.S. Civil War wasn’t about slavery will be removed.
The plaque removal was a bipartisan committee decision in Texas, which is considered to be one of the more conservative state governments in the country. Not only did new state Speaker of the House Dennis Bonnen and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick back the removal, Gov. Greg Abbott called for it in a letter to Rod Welsh, executive director of the State Preservation.
The plaque in question contains the phrase that the Civil War was “not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.”
The plaque was initially erected in 1959, and state rep. Eric Johnson has led a cause to eradicate the “Children of the Confederacy Creed” that’s been there now for more than six decades.
Johnson, a Dallas Democrat, has said the plaque “is not historically accurate in the slightest, to which any legitimate, peer-reviewed Civil War historian will attest.”
Bonnen, who’s the newly-appointed Texas Speaker of the House, also said the plaque was historically inaccurate.
George P. Bush, the Texas Land Commissioner and son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — and grandson of the late President George H.W. Bush — said the plaque and other such displays “belong in museums, not our state capitol.”
State rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Plano who sits on the State Preservation Board, fervently agreed with the plaque removal.
“If I had a sledgehammer in my office, I’d go up there right now and remove it,” Leach said. “But I’m told that’s not necessary as it will be removed very soon.”
The location to where it will be moved hasn’t been indicated, but the motion started by Leach says it will simply be moved to a location away from the capitol grounds.
The Texas lawmakers agreed to the committee’s decision of removing the plaque, which brought a sigh of relief to Johnson, who has worked to get this done.
“The plaque should never have been put up by the Legislature in the first place, and it certainly shouldn’t have taken 60 years to remove it. And that’s on Republicans and Democrats alike, to be perfectly honest,” Johnson wrote. (source, source)
Without going into the issues of the conflict over states rights versus slavery, the point of this is not about the historicity or not of the plaque, but rather about its removal as a political symbol. Indeed, one could argue that the placement of the plaque, given the time it was placed, was a political act then, but this is not the issue. It is the removal of something that, whether one likes it or not, has a history in an area and is being abolished for political expediency.
At the same time, there was another development in the world of media, where a site called NewsGuard has come up and is now being used to propagate a pro-government line while accusing other nations, notably Russia, of being a propagator of “fake news” when she is doing just that:
The frenzied, hysterical Russia narrative being promoted day in and day out by western mass media has had two of its major stories ripped to shreds in the last three days.
A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials back in September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were misinterpreted. The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers heard some crickets in Cuba.
Another report which dominated news headlines all of yesterday claimed that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (the same Paul Manafort who the Guardian falsely claimed met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy) had shared polling data with a Russian associate and asked him to pass it along to Oleg Deripaska, who is often labeled a “Russian oligarch” by western media. The polling data was mostly public already, and the rest was just more polling information shared in the spring of 2016, but Deripaska’s involvement had Russiagaters burning the midnight oil with breathless excitement. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall went so far as to publish an article titled “The ‘Collusion’ Debate Ended Last Night”, substantiating his click-generating headline with the claim that “What’s crystal clear is that the transfer to Kilimnik came with explicit instructions to give the information to Deripaska. And that’s enough.”
Except Manafort didn’t give any explicit instructions to share the polling data with Deripaska, but with two Ukrainian oligarchs (who are denying it).
The New York Times was forced to print this embarrassing correction to the story it broke, adding in the process that Manafort’s motivation was likely not collusion, but money.
These are just the latest in a long, ongoing pattern of terrible mass media debacles as reporters eager to demonstrate their unquestioning fealty to the US-centralized empire fall all over themselves to report any story that makes Russia look bad without practicing due diligence. The only voices who have been questioning the establishment Russia narrative that is being fed to mass media outlets by secretive government agencies have been those which the mass media refuses to platform. Alternative media outlets are the only major platforms for dissent from the authorized narratives of the plutocrat-owned political/media class.
Imagine, then, how disastrous it would be if these last strongholds of skepticism and holding power to account were removed from the media landscape. Well, that’s exactly what a shady organization called NewsGuard is trying to do, with some success already.
A new report by journalist Whitney Webb for MintPress News details how NewsGuard is working to hide and demonetize alternative media outlets like MintPress, marketing itself directly to tech companies, social media platforms, libraries and schools. NewsGuard is led by some of the most virulently pro-imperialist individuals in America, and its agenda to shore up narrative control for the ruling power establishment is clear.
The product which NewsGuard markets to the general public is a browser plugin which advises online media consumers whether a news media outlet is trustworthy or untrustworthy based on a formula with a very pro-establishment bias which sees outlets like Fox News and the US propaganda outlet Voice of America getting trustworthy ratings while outlets like RT get very low ratings for trustworthiness. This plugin dominates the bulk of what comes up when you start researching NewsGuard, but circulating a plugin which individual internet users can voluntarily download to help their rulers control their minds is not one of the more nefarious agendas being pursued by this company. The full MintPress article gives a thorough breakdown of the yucky things NewsGuard has its fingers in, but here’s a summary of five of its more disturbing revelations:
1. The company has created a service called BrandGuard, billed as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.” Popularizing the use of this service will attack the advertising revenue of unapproved alternative media outlets which run ads. NewsGuard is aggressively marketing this service to “ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers”.
2. NewsGuard’s advisory board reads like the fellowships list of a neocon think tank, and indeed one of its CEOs, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is a Council on Foreign Relations member who has worked with the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Members of the advisory board include George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, deep intelligence community insider Michael Hayden, and the Obama administration’s Richard Stengel, who once publicly supported the need for domestic propaganda in the US. All of these men have appeared in influential think tanks geared toward putting a public smiley face on sociopathic warmongering agendas.
3. Despite one of its criteria for trustworthy sources being whether or not they are transparent about their funding, the specifics of NewsGuard’s financing is kept secret.
4. NewsGuard is also planning to get its news-ranking system integrated into social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, pursuing a partnership which will make pro-establishment media consumption a part of your experience at those sites regardless of whether or not you download a NewsGuard app or plugin.
5. NewsGuard markets itself to state governments in order to get its plugin installed in all of that state’s public schools and libraries to keep internet users from consuming unauthorized narratives. It has already succeeded in accomplishing this in the state of Hawaii, with all of its library branches now running the NewsGuard plugin.
We may be absolutely certain that NewsGuard will continue giving a positive, trustworthy ranking to the New York Times no matter how many spectacular flubs it makes in its coverage of the establishment Russia narrative, because the agenda to popularize anti-Russia narratives lines up perfectly with the neoconservative, government agency-serving agendas of the powers behind NewsGuard. Any attempt to advance the hegemony of the US-centralized power establishment will be rewarded by its lackeys, and any skepticism of it will be punished.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Ruling power’s desire to regulate people’s access to information is so desperate that it has become as clumsy and ham-fisted as a teenager pawing at his date in the back seat of a car, and it feels about as enjoyable. They’re barely even concealing their desire to control our minds anymore, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to wake everyone up to their manipulations. We need to use every inch of our ability to communicate with each other before it gets shut down for good. (source, source)
Nobody really knows who is behind this organization. But before one says that “it’s the left,” one should also consider that Trump has aggressively promoted the idea of America starting, in addition to VOA, her own “worldwide news network,” and doing this in the middle of his entire career as president in which he has viciously called the news media “fake news.”
The “right” is not different here from the “left,” because just as with the international socialists and the national socialists, they are working towards the same goals of power and domination. In the context of the media, they are attempting to reshape the events of history as they happen to fit their ideology, and the events of the past by either denying their existence or using them for another nefarious cause.
It is critical that, regardless of the nation, major statues or plaques, or things that have been in an area for a long time, cannot just be flippantly removed, and to do so is a serious matter. It does not matter if the thing is looked at by the current generation of people as “good” or “evil,” because monuments and plaques are set up for a reason- to provide a record of past events that, correct or not, is left to future generations. Removing such things sets a dangerous precedent for the manufacture and deletion of history for political purposes at a future date, and both left and right are guilty of it. This is not to say that certain things should not be removed for public view, but that just as with the passing of laws, one must be very careful as to why one does it because of the potential precedent it could set regardless for what is acceptable behavior in the political and social sphere.
The situation is not limited to just the USA either, as this applies overseas. For example, the German AfD leader Björn Hocke wants a memorial to the Holocaust removed because he said that he believes the monument distorts the way that Germans perceive their history
No one in the village saw it coming, least of all Björn Höcke, a quiet and well-liked local father of four who also happens to be Germany’s most notorious far-right politician.
Last January, at a rally in Dresden, Mr. Höcke questioned the guiding precept of modern Germany — the country’s culpability in World War II and the Holocaust — calling on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history.
Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” he said, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
And then, one recent Wednesday morning, Mr. Höcke woke up in his rural home to find the Holocaust memorial outside his bedroom window: 24 rectangular concrete slabs, one section of the original monument, rebuilt to scale on the property immediately neighboring his. (source, source)
As the story itself notes, this is a classic example of a case involving the politicization of history. It does not matter whether or not what anybody believes about the Holocaust, because at the current time in history and given the events taking place in Germany, any discussion about it in the context of this memorial is not going to benefit society, but will be used to foment violence and imbalance in the pursuit of power. This is a particularly obvious example because Hocke is himself a supporter of National Socialist philosophy, and he wants to remove this monument because he wants to do what Germany did in World War II again, and monuments such as this are tangible reminders of Germany’s National Socialist past.
Currently, the situation is already bad enough in the US to such a point that the perception of the past and increasingly, the present is being warped by both the left and the right. There is no need for “news guards” or “fact checkers” with either a conservative or liberal bias, but simply people of good will who, even if they are right or wrong, to seek to present what exists and then to leave well enough alone with both current events and past events. This is one part of the true way out of the progressive embrace of socialism that both left and right have embraced for decades, as both parties are not making the country better, but driving her to the ultimate end of another major world war for profit in which the people who are being told to support either side, left and right, will be forced to bear the cost in blood of their actions while those in office on left and right, who go to the same clubs and are in the same circles of influence, will laugh with each other over expensive steaks and cocktails paid for by your tax dollars.