Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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It’s funny how former Israeli PM Ehud Barak just deleted a tweet admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons at the same time The Washington Post reports that US allies have a “don’t talk about Nord Stream” policy because of the answers it would turn up. There are so many open secrets that everyone knows but isn’t allowed to acknowledge publicly.
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The world’s most famous journalist was just deprived of a visit from Reporters Without Borders because the British prison he’s being kept in “received intelligence that they are journalists,” and yet all we ever hear about is how Russia and China mistreat journalists. Julian Assange is the world’s greatest and most famous journalist and he’s in prison solely for the crime of doing good journalism, but sure, let’s all spend our time shaking our fists at far away “authoritarian regimes” for imprisoning journalists.
This morning @Rsf_inter was barred from an already approved prison visit. Prison officers told them “The prison has received intelligence that they are journalists” and took them off the visit without prior warning.https://t.co/hZceORaD46
— Stella Assange (@Stella_Assange) April 4, 2023
Assange is not only the world’s greatest living journalist, he is the greatest journalist who has ever lived. There’s really no valid argument against this. Seriously, name me a superior journalist. You can’t. Assange began his journalism career by revolutionizing source protection for the digital age, then proceeded to break some of the biggest stories of the century. There’s no one who can hold a candle to him, living or dead.
And now he’s in a maximum security prison, solely and exclusively because he was better at doing the best kind of journalism than anyone else in the world. That is the kind of civilization you live in. The kind that imprisons the best journalist of all time for doing journalism.
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You’ll never convince me it’s an organic phenomenon that the population always splits itself into two equal oppositional political factions which always leaves them in a deadlock unable to get anything done, and it always deadlocks in a way that benefits the rich and powerful.
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The CCP has arrested a woman for "insulting" President Xi Jinping on the Chinese social media site Weibo. She'll have to stand trial for calling Xi "filth" and will receive a massive fine if convicted.
Just kidding it's not China, Xi and Weibo, it's France, Macron and Facebook.
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 3, 2023
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People who spend their time freaking out about China are the single dumbest group I interact with online. Not necessarily the nastiest or the most aggressive, but definitely the dumbest. They’ll believe pretty much anything said by anyone, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it’s critical of China.
The instant they see literally any negative claim about China from literally anyone, all their critical faculties go right out the window and they turn into a bunch of foam-brained imbeciles. Probably the most well-known out of innumerable possible examples was when Jordan Peterson shared a BDSM “milking” video because some disinformation account had implied that it documented abuses by the Chinese government.
This dynamic seems to have its roots in the generations-long portrayal of the Chinese as a mysterious, inscrutable race whose culture is nothing like ours. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why westerners ascribe motives and agendas to their government that make no sense at all.
Once you stop thinking of a nationality as normal human beings with hopes and dreams who love their families and want to get by just like you, you can believe anything is true about their motives and goals, because you’ve turned them into space aliens or evil orcs in your mind. If you believe Chinese people are human beings more or less like yourself with similar motivations, then you’re able to quickly recognize bullshit claims about their motives and behavior because they make no sense from a normal human perspective. Without that view, you’re lost.
The other day someone I was arguing with online just casually referred to the Chinese as “insect-like”, comparing them to an ant’s nest. Once you’ve dehumanized an entire nation like that, you’ve sedated all your critical thinking abilities into a coma. You’ve crippled your mind.
Another reason why people with anti-China hysteria are the single dumbest group I interact with online is that they’re constantly being fed moronic bullshit like this:
“China is preparing to kill Americans and we have to prepare to defend ourselves. The Defense Department is making slow preparations to oppose China” – CPAC board member @GordonGChang on @FoxBusiness pic.twitter.com/bumgwRTRZU
— CPAC (@CPAC) April 3, 2023
They’re constantly having brain poison like this mainlined right into their skulls by empire propagandists like Gordon Chang.
“China is preparing to kill Americans and we have to prepare to defend ourselves.” You mean China is preparing to defend itself from completely undisguised military encirclement and potential US intervention in an inter-Chinese conflict? A conflict on the other side of the planet from the United States? A conflict which you, Gordon Chang, would not be fighting in?
Fucking idiot.
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Western media figures should think VERY hard about whether they want to promote the idea that propagandists are legitimate targets. https://t.co/7riRwoEnEU
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 3, 2023
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The 2016 US presidential election changed everything. Not because Trump himself changed things significantly (he didn’t), but because the western media formed a consensus at that point that it’s their solemn duty to help the US government win an information war against Russia.
A consensus quickly formed that it was wrong for the media to report on the 2016 WikiLeaks releases, which were alleged to have come from Russian hackers (though still not proven to this day). In that decision the last rays of real journalism in the mainstream media were quashed. Once all mainstream journalists accepted that it’s their job not to report true facts about the powerful but to advance the information interests of their government and/or prefered political party, it was over. The last glimmer of life in a truth-based society was snuffed out.
We’ve seen this on full display since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with “journalists” uncritically reporting unevidenced government claims, ignoring important questions like the Ukrainian death toll, even accepting the US government’s admission that it’s using them to circulate lies in an information war.
It could have gone the opposite way. The media could have seized on the corruption exposed in the WikiLeaks documents to spark an invigorated charge to investigate US government malfeasance. Instead it was used to hide, forgive, and facilitate US government malfeasance.
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