Listen to a reading of this article:
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Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire?
It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the foreign policy of the US and its allies in front of a sizeable audience gets branded a Russian agent by empire apologists, and this consensus is accompanied by the steadily growing opinion that Russia’s operatives and useful idiots should be banned from western platforms.
Defenders of the western empire won’t admit to wanting all empire critics silenced, but that’s what you get when you combine (A) the fact that they view everyone who criticizes the empire with sufficient aggression as a Russian agent with (B) their opinion that those given to Russian influence ought to be censored. Whenever I criticize the foreign policy of the western empire I get its apologists telling me I’d never be allowed to criticize my rulers like that if I lived in a nation like Russia or China, when they know full well that if it were up to them I wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the western empire here either. They are the same as the tyrants they claim to despise.
The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.
In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.
People tell me “Move to Russia!” or “Move to China!” depending on what aspect of the empire’s global power agendas I happen to be criticizing at the moment, and I always want to tell them, no, you move to Russia. You move to China. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. You don’t belong here.
In school we are taught that our society values truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful, and adversarial journalism, then we grow up and we see everyone rending their garments because institutions like CBS News or Amnesty International let slip one small report which doesn’t fully comply with the official line of our rulers. We see Russian media banned and censorship protocols expanded to the enthusiastic cheerleading of mainstream liberals. We see astroturf trolling operations used to mass report and shout down those who scrutinize the establishment line about Ukraine on social media. We see Julian Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of unauthorized journalism.
It’s obvious with a look around that the “western values” we’re all told about are not actually terribly common in the west. Look at the west’s major media platforms and they virtually never platform anyone who is meaningfully critical of the real centers of power in western civilization. Look at western governments and they continually dance to the beat of oligarchy and empire regardless of how people vote in their supposedly free democratic elections. Look at the internet and it’s actually very difficult to find authentic criticisms of imperial power unless you already know where to look.
Some of us bought into those western values we were taught about in school, but it’s not the people you’ve been trained to expect. It’s we marginalized outsiders who are adamantly opposing censorship, propaganda and the empire’s war on the press while continuously working to shine the light of truth on the mechanisms of power from the fringes, while we are being yelled at and accused of treason by mainstream sycophants who have far more in common with the autocrats they claim to oppose than with the western values they purport to uphold.
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33 responses to “The Trouble With ‘Western Values’ Is That Westerners Don’t Value Them”
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Chancellor Biden’s speech in the original German:
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I’m pretty that most Americans have no clue where their values originate and therefore they act the way they do. Used to be big story here about Hitler and the big lie, that of course turned out to be a big lie, and now of course those poor blubbering sociopaths do nothing but lie, so the moral values of most Americans is whatever the pyscopaths tell them they should be.
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Ukraine is the new IDF policy on Europe. Ukraine’s military will kill Russian civilians with the same impunity just like Israel backed up by the US empire does with Palestinians.
“When it was first reported, the incident drew outrage from Kiev as the media and several officials were quick to report that the assailant was Russian. In response to the reports, many commenters wrote on social media that the incident was an example of how dangerous Russian people were.
The spokesperson for the country’s Foreign Ministry, Oleg Nikolenko, insisted that “the aggressors must be punished” and called for an immediate and thorough investigation into the attack while Ukraine’s Embassy in France denounced the assault as a “heinous incident.”
Turns out the aggressor was a former Ukrainian soldier. MSM, Kiev and Washington went silent.
I remember my party’s candidate for US president spending a presidential “debate” handcuffed to a desk in an undisclosed location after being illegally kidnapped by police for being near the sacred location of the “debate”. Then I remember being stunned hardly anyone even heard about it, and those who did know didn’t care.
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By the way, her Twitter feed is still worth following: https://twitter.com/DrJillStein
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For anyone who doesn’t know, she’s a supporter of Julian Assange, and a member of Doctors 4 Assange.
The US electoral system must promote the worst candidate by any means necessary.
Also we must not debate what is true or false, the overton window is la-la-la-la…
Danny Haiphong just had the brilliant Ben Norton on to discuss MAGA communism, well worth a look. I watched an old doc about Pete Seeger last night. Our government terrorized anti-capitalists in the ’50s. We can only vote for capitalism and imperialism. We now call that period McCarthyism, like it happened but is over. I know many people who spout government propaganda because they are so stressed to maintain their social and economic status and don’t want to be cancelled. They’re not political and are more concerned with getting their toddlers into Harvard. McCarthyism has changed but the terror remains. We are a deeply traumatized country.
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These times are reminding me more and more of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Only this time Hollywood made sure they are on the correct side.
Thank you for another insightful article, Caitlin. In America they stopped teaching kids about our constitutional rights in the late 1970s, so most Americans have only a foggy idea of what our Western rights and values actually are. Recent surveys found a dismally low awareness of what is covered by the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional amendments–only one in a thousand Americans knows what is in the Bill of Rights. The omission of Civics class was intentional, of course–the overlords don’t want us to know a damned thing about our constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms. So by the time 9/11 rolled around most Americans knew next to nothing about their rights and freedoms so the Patriot Act was passed without major protest. It’s freaky how everything moving us toward biosecurity totalitarianism appears to have been carefully timed over many years, almost as if there’s some sort of plan…
If anything, Americans need to bring back Civics class!
Couldn’t agree more Caitlin. But what passes for “liberals” in the US these days is of the Clinton/Biden variety, and they are right wing war mongers. The well-off middle class in the US is very content with the way things are, and many of them are the ones pretending to be liberals, and pretending to care about “western values”. What they really care about is staying comfortable, even if that doesn’t comport with their supposed values. The good news is that workers are getting really fed up with the whole thing, and strikes are looming everywhere. Let’s just hope the Union leadership can’t squash all that pent up rage.
There is certainly a dangerous habit of conflating “interests” and “values”. But the two are incompatible. Interests are the reason nations go to war: values are the excuse.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
Yes exactly
“Such character traits as truthfulness, sincerity, honesty, correspond to the nature of man, and have a connection with creative energies, that is, they contribute to better health.
Cunning, deceit, hypocrisy, deceit, duplicity, features of the so-called lower nature. When they come into effect, the relationship and there is an accumulation of destructive energies leading to physical suffering: pain, illness, injury, accident.
Thus, from the point of view of the energy worldview, it is clearly explained why a lie is an evil that primarily causes harm to its owner.”
You could have the healthiest alkaline diet ever but it all turns acidic if your lifestyle requires you to lie for a living. All that bootlicking bribery money for nothing.
All once noble professions are under assault – the doctors, press, government representatives, even comedians and musicians.
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“Come back to your self. Understand the totalitarians’ coercive tricks; understand the harm they have done to you – the effect of their perverted propaganda on your soul.”
https://off-guardian.org/2022/09/14/physician-heal-thyself/
Western values??? I come to the conclusion that these ‘values’ depend on whatever suits the individual. Whatever ‘values’ were or still are – being corrupted through various means.
“One of the humbling aspects of writing about philosophical issues is that, no matter how much you believe you’ve stumbled upon a fresh insight, it is virtually certain that someone who died 2000 years ago has already thought of your idea.”
“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber” –
Plato
Democracy passes into despotism. —
Plato 427 BC-347 BC
“Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country?
Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.
Socrates: How so, Plato?
Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is a
sculptor.
Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they have no need to be reminded.
Plato: That is correct.
Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.”
“Americans are so enamoured of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. — Alexis de Tocqueville –“Democracy in America”(1835)
I got called a Russian bot, they seem to see enemies everywhere. It’s not a sign of a healthy society.
The myth that you cannot criticize the ruler in Russia is simply not true. (I don’t know about China, but it’s probably also not as bad as western propagandists like the people to believe.)
Free speech is even bigger there than in the west. Just watch some election debate, where people insult Putin right in his face. Western and pro-Western newspapers and TV insulting Putin around the clock. Tons of protests on the street insulting Putin. They do not mince words there.
People just like to project themselves onto others so they don’t have to hate themselves.
Excerpt: The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled (Silencing the Lambs-How Propaganda Works-9/13/22-By John Pilger-Mintpressnews).
Excerpt: In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries (Silencing the Lambs-How Propaganda Works-9/13/22-By John Pilger-Mintpressnews).
Excerpt: Western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council (Medvedev issues apocalyptic warning to West over Ukraine-9/13/22-rt.com).
Do you think the United States is a democracy?
Democracy: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system (www.dictionary.com).
Do you still think the United States is a democracy? Is the U.S. governed by the people? In the United States, is the supreme power vested in the people and exercised directly by the people? How about our “elected agents,” do they represent the citizens of the U.S.? Does the United States have a “free electoral system?”
Truer words have never been spoken. Ultimately though, ideology is what will kill the species. Any ideology. People believe essentially what they want to believe because it suits them and then they distort facts until they fit their fantasies.
When reasonable people encounter facts running contrary to their theory, they change their theory. When ideology-driven people encounter facts running against their theory, they change the facts, i.e. they alter the perception of those facts through delusion, propaganda, censorship, and in the most extreme cases, like Snowden and Assange, ban from society through exile and prison. And we end up with the alternative narrative that makes the world an illusion.
The most hopeless part of course is the acquiescence of the majority which is very well explained by the Asch conformity experiments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
I suppose most people have enough psychological problems of their own and then couple, family, work problems and they just jump on the bandwagon of the majority narrative about stuff they don’t really know about and are not really interested in to be on the safe side while dealing with their personal issues.
And then they defend that viewpoint tooth and nail because their ego has identified with it. Being confronted becomes an existential struggle where everything goes: lies, baseless assumptions, character assassination and more generally cheap sophistry.
That’s why things never change except through the extreme violence of revolutions and wars. And the more verbal violence is repressed as hate speech, the more physical violence is likely to take over, like the water boiling in the tank of a locomotive will produce steam powerful enough to move its tons of steel. Hate speech being of course always what goes contrary to the propaganda of the rulers. Nowadays, you can be as insulting as you want toward Putin, especially in the British media, it’s not hate speech but patriotism. What’s hate speech is suggesting, like the majority of people in the world, that perhaps Nato shouldn’t have provoked him into war.
These dialectics are in the logic of things too. Heraclitus pointed out long ago that all phenomena are in motion toward their opposite. Thus peace will lead to war and war will lead to peace. It’s the movement of the Tao where the only permanent thing is change and one has to adapt like water or break and disappear.
Some years ago we had that shameful staged terrorist attack in Boston, MA. As soon as surgeons and physicians start giving statement about the victims and debunking ridiculous scenes where a man bleeding without one leg was talking with a first responder. The physicians said “it is not possible for someone who lost a leg to be taking like that”. The videos and images were all removed from the internet and no one talks about it anymore. If you decide to say something around the place where the terrorist attack happened in Boston probably they will arrest you for “breach of peace”.
This Boston bombing affair was definitely the best piece of surrealism since the death of Salvador Dali.
Basic hardcore of human society – corruption, lies, deception, religion.
Truth is alien to our “values and way of living”. It is a mystery why there are so many people today outraged about the lack of transparency and honesty when both are topics to be debated in classes of ethics and abstract arts.
The culture of lying cannot have values.
https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth
Much truth in that. Troubles begin when politicians and journalists believe their own lies reverberated by each other’s echo chamber.
What you’re saying is true of course. Since you’re getting all this mail saying how awful you are, I guess people like me shouldn’t always just agree with you silently. Good luck to you.
My entire life-81-Ihave been routinely told I was a traitor for criticizing the very system of capitalism every person is exploited by. They did want to give me a PhD, but I couldn’t teach below the college level. There are endless un-named mental disorders hobbling each citizen, that living a precarious life as a citizen under a capitalist ruling class, creates endlessly. Those lobotomized by their indoctrination do not recover. That is why we are in an endless war whose benefits only come to the rich. Mainstreamers are codependent on the system that is killing them. So stay independent and alive but watch your back. The last thing the fascists want is for people to awaken from their trance. Though the rulers do know that they have a system that defies change.
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