Contra Cold War Redux: 9. Saved by the Drums
Russo-phobic mania lets Western politicians get away with telling the people that censorship, inflation, shortages, and more are 'the price to pay for democracy.'
‘It is not of any external threat that I concern myself but rather of insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions—those institutions which formerly we hailed as something beyond question or challenge—those institutions we proudly called the American way of life.’—Gen. Douglas MacArthur, address to the Massachusetts legislature in Boston, 25th July 1951
‘It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.’—Gen. Douglas MacArthur, address to the Michigan legislature in Lansing, 15th May 1952
‘Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstruous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.’—Gen. Douglas MacArthur, address to the annual stockholders meeting of the Sperry Rand Corporation, 30th July 1957
The unity of the West as its people rally around Ukraine in its war with Russia has been a godsend to the public and private powers that be in the West.
The ‘Trucker Convoy’ in 2022 crystallised a contradiction that has been developing between the theory and praxis of liberal democracy in the present digital phase of the Information Age: The unprecedented power which the managerial/professional class is able to exercise through its joint controul of the public and private sectors.
What Justin Trudeau and his ministry (which, incidentally, includes the grand-daughter of a Ukrainian neo-Nazi from WW2 who is herself an unapologetic Ukrainian nationalist) did in Canada is a much more grievous threat to democracy in the Western world than anything that Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine. All of the melodramatic rhetoric about Russia being at ‘the gates of Europe’—I remind you that the war in Ukraine is an escalation of a ‘frozen conflict’ from the fall of the Soviet Union and will be a ‘world war’ only if we have learned nothing from the history of the last two world wars—is a distraction from what the barbarians among us have been doing within our walls.
In the early 2010s, the Internet underwent a fateful consolidation and transformation from a decentralised archipelago of websites for individuals with alternative interests into a blob of a few mega-monopolistic corporations which, in tandem with technological advances such as ‘smart phones,’ integrated the Internet with the real lives of the mass-population. In other words, whilst the Internet used to be place that some people went some times, it turned into a place that all people were at all times.
The Internet originated as a revolutionary platform for freedom of speech, but its consolidation and conformity transformed it into a platform with unprecedented power to controul speech. Beginning in earnest with the problem of ‘fake news’ between 2015 and 2016, ‘Big Gov’ began implicitly and explicitly threatening ‘Big Tech’ with legal consequences (such as the enforcement of anti-trust laws like the Sherman Act or the repeal of the Communications Decency Act’s ‘Section 230’ granting online platforms immunity from liability for content which their users publish online) unless it censored certain content contrary to its interests.
Big-Tech corporations are monopolies, and according to U.S. law, because of the threat which monopolies pose to the efficiency of markets and the integrity of governments, they must either be broken up or regulated as public utilities (like telecommunications or electric companies). What Big Gov has chosen to do instead of enforcing the law, unfortunately, is co-opt the monopolistic powers of Big Tech for itself in order to stifle the symptoms of popular discontent.
At the same time in the 2010s, the political culture of the Internet had begun over-correcting from its civil-libertarian/anarcho-utopian origins into a repressive, regressive, ‘politically correct’ culture of content moderation with the motto ‘hate speech is not free speech.’1 In what may have seemed silly and petty at the time but which now seems like a prologue to our present info-warfare, many online communities self-destructed in digital civil wars over free speech. The technocratic executives running Big Tech no longer identified as ‘the free-speech wing of the free-speech party’ (as the founder of Twitter once put it), but as censors whose job it is to decide for everyone else what they can and cannot hear.2
Wither the free press? Why, they are the biggest beneficiaries of Big Gov’s censorship by proxy through Big Tech, and after the free flow of information on the Internet nearly put them out of business, they were only too happy to repay in kind and use the Internet to put their competition out of business.
Even if the press were the (not-so) unwilling beneficiaries of a public-private partnership sponsoring their content and suppressing their competition, they might have honourably protested with editorial lines in defence of the First Amendment and a free Internet on principle. Unfortunately, their editorial lines could best be summarised as ‘free press for me but not for thee.’ They tell themselves that the First Amendment only applies to credentialed employees of legacy media institutions such as themselves and not entrepreneurial individuals building alternative platforms such as their competitors, let alone private individuals.
The Mainstream Media, just like Big Gov and Big Tech, is controulled by the same elite political class and shares all of its same privileges and prejudices, and thus often meets (if not exceeds) the state in pressuring corporate monopolies to censor their competitors. This is a brave new world of propaganda, one which is more pervasive than ever before because of the power of the Internet, as well as one which is more persuasive than ever before because it is nominally ‘the press’ instead of a ‘Ministry of Truth.’3
During the chaotic years after 2016, as the elite political class in controul of public and private institutions became aware of its collective power to do extra-legally (and illegally, at least according to the Supreme Court) what the Bill of Rights prevented the former from doing legally, it was still controversial and had not yet been consolidated. Unfortunately, this assault upon our civil rights/liberties was concentrated against the person of Donald Trump, whose personal unpopularity blinded most Blue- and even many Red-State Americans to the precious principles that were at risk.
After the decisive victory of Blue-State America over Red-State America in 2020, thanks in no small part to the power of Big Tech, the power of private corporations to exercise the equivalent of police-state power without due process—that is, to surveil, to propagandise, to disenfranchise—has been depressingly normalised.
Yet resistance to neoliberal governance—our present system of policy-making by so-called experts and self-interested lobbyists which produces socioeconomic inequality and cultural degeneracy—could not but rear its head once again, as it had been throughout the West with increasing intensity and frequency since the end of the Cold War. The visible mental and physical decline of leaders like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi certainly did not help, but the problems were more systemic than that: The elite political class that controuls both public and private institutions holds different interests and ideals from the mass of the voter class, for one, and for another, holds the interests and ideals of the voters in contempt, not to mention those voters themselves. These elites have been explaining away the discord of the masses by blaming it all on censor-approved conspiracy theories like ‘Russian influence’ and banning the speech of Americans who the censors have deemed ‘under the influence’ of ‘the Russians.’
In a bit of dark comedy, they unironically compared the ‘storming of the Capitol’ on 6th Jan. 2021 to the ‘Reichstag Fire,’ evidently unaware that the burning of the German parliament is infamous not because it was a terrorist attack on the state but because of how the Nazis exploited that act of terrorism—which may have been a false-flag attack by the Nazis themselves—to seize emergency powers and initiate their own terror. Continuing to unwittingly emulate Adolf Hitler, they proclaimed a new ‘War on Terror’ on their domestic enemies.
Journalists, with astonishing rapidity and conformity, also parroted Pres. Biden’s line that the Capitol Hill riot was ‘the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,’ with some so carried away that they claimed it was even ‘worse than Pearl Harbor’ and ‘worse than 9/11.’
On the anniversary of their Reichstag Fire, the mastermind of the last War on Terror, Dick Cheney (and his daughter, Liz, a Red-Party Congresswoman from the Cowboy State) auspiciously appeared on Capitol Hill where, according to The Washington Post, he ‘received a warm welcome from Democrats.’ To quote de Talleyrand’s bon mot about another ossified ruling class, ‘They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’
The vicious crackdown on the Trucker Convoy in the Canadian capital city of Ottawa—what was, in essence, a general strike in the labour tradition but which an increasingly shrill and brittle political class deemed another ‘insurrection’—threw this political conflict into stark relief.
Many of the independent journalists whom I follow, such as Matt Taibbi (formerly of Rolling Stone), covered and commented on the Trucker Convoy, which not only crystallised a phenomenon that had been previously unclear to many but also was poised to shatter that phenomenon like a crystal:
‘Justin Trudeau’s Ceauşescu Moment,’ by Matt Taibbi, 10 February.
‘The Great International Convoy Fiasco,’ by Matt Taibbi, 12 February.
‘When Boring People Turn Dangerous: Canada’s Insane Power Grab,’ by Matt Taibbi, 21 February.
Notice, now, how the cause célèbre of the Trucker Convoy has utterly vanished as Western peoples of all political persuasions have united around ‘our’ side in a turf war from the fallout of the Soviet Union. The Western economy was already suffering from labour-shortage, supply-chain, and inflation problems, all of which are now worse because of the West’s economic warfare against Russia.
We have been informed, however, that these are sacrifices which we must make as a patriotic duty: ‘Putin’s price hikes!’ This is not patriotism; it is base servility. When the British Parliament taxed the unrepresented American colonies for revenue to offset the debt from the French and Indian War, the response of the Americans was not, like some slavish loyalist, to echo ‘Louis XV price hikes!’ but, like a freeman, to demand justice from their own king, even if it meant taking up arms.
Pardon me, but Americans must be some of the most docile and gullible people in the world when it comes to how easily they allow their leaders to distract them from their domestic business with foreign conflicts which are none of their business.
It reminds me of a passage of one of my favorite writers, H.L. Mencken, from 1926:
Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase, and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting "Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!" It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single important episode.
All of the popular momentum that was mounting against the ‘domestic war on terror’ which poses a dire threat to our way of life as a free society, has—in a Judo-esque maneuver—been redirected into a nationalistic moral panic over the non-existent threat of Russia and concentrated against the person of Vladimir Putin.
Tragically, but not terribly surprisingly, the elite political class has exploited this nationalistic moral panic to justify that very domestic war on terror. Russian news media and even official Russian government sources have been effectively censored in Western liberal democracies. In the EU, they have been censored directly by the government, but in these U.S. of A. (where the Bill of Rights nominally protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press), they have been censored by the government-sized monopolies which the government permit to controul the Internet in violation of its own anti-trust laws. Is this not a distinction without a difference? Whether these monopolies are acting under duress or have internalised a culture of censorship, the end result is the same. That may be fine for most Americans, whose notion of foreign travel is a trip to EPCOT, but how many more non-Russian media sources will be labeled ‘Russian propaganda’ for reporting information which dissents from the consensus?
Remember, for years they lied (at first to us and by the end to themselves) that Donald Trump was a literal Russian asset.4 The most shameless peddlers of this vile lie, like Julia Ioffe and Masha Gessen (two self-loathing Russian expats-turned-experts who are nonetheless little Stalinists at heart), are now denouncing their domestic enemies (like Tucker Carlson, who is the sole sceptical voice about American intervention in this war in the mass-media) as ‘Putinists.’ According to Mmes. Ioffe and Gessen, if you are skeptical or critical of anything that people like them tell you, then you are a ‘Putinist.’
Remember, they lied that the New York Post story about the evidence of corruption found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was ‘Russian disinformation’ and used that lie to censor the story. The so-called ‘private companies’ that de facto controul the ‘public square’ seized the social-media account of the NY Post and banned users from circulating the story on social media. Meanwhile, other members of ‘the free press’ formed a cordon sanitaire around the NY Post’s story and refused to cover it. As NPR’s public editor put it, ‘We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distraction.’
Although the emails from the laptop have since been authenticated, no retractions of ‘Russian disinformation’ have been issued and none of the ‘intelligence experts’ who pronounced them ‘Russian disinformation’ have been pronounced discredited themselves. There is little to no accountability for the members of the elite political class in controul of the public and private sectors, and whilst they are free to misinform and disinform the people, it takes something like masturbating on a video call for them to lose their jobs.
Civil rights/liberties must be indivisible or else the authorities (be they in public or private power-centers) will incrementally divide them, first coming for one other minority, then another minority after another, until there is no one left to speak when they finally come for you.
All of the awareness that was spreading about the Covid-19 ‘bio-medical security state’—the basic human rights which were suspended not even by duly enacted laws but by kneejerk executive orders—has been delayed indefinitely. If there is a bright side to this, however, it is that perhaps this war will make people forget about Covid-19, so to speak, start treating this virus like other endemic seasonal/regional viruses and stop all of the pseudo-scientific/quasi-superstitious policies which have wrecked our society without even effectively ‘stopping the spread.’
In sum, this whipped-up Russo-phobic mania has let Western politicians get away with telling the people that censorship, inflation, shortages, and more are ‘the price to pay for democracy.’
Previous: ‘Conclusion’
To which the proper retort is that if freedom of speech protects anything then it must mean protecting speech that you hate.
Angela Nagle’s book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, published by Zero Books, is the best analysis of this history of the Internet. Ironically, Ms. Nagle was ‘canceled’ (a slang term that trivialises the personal bullying and professional blacklisting that occurs anonymously online) for writing too understandingly about the subjects of her book without the ideological disclaimers and denunciations that readers now demand.
Human batteries (passive people with no pursuits and no passions whose faces and minds are plugged into programs) have supplanted the early ‘cyber-punk’ generation of the Internet. Whilst the Internet once offered you the freedom to be yourself, its consolidation and conformity now erases your individuality and personality. It would not be quite right to say that more people are choosing the ‘blue pill’ over the ‘red pill,’ because fewer people are consciously making that choice. A more accurate analogy would be that the Machines have designed a better, more believable Matrix with fewer ‘systemic anomalies.’
The enormity of the RussiaGate lie—the ‘who, what, when, where, why’ of it—has yet to be told, although a few independent journalists on the left like Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté (all here on Substack) are valiantly making the effort. Mr. Taibbi’s latest book, Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, includes a new chapter on RussiaGate, ‘The Bombhole Era.’ Mr. Maté has a book, Cold War, Hot War: How RussiaGate Created Chaos from Washington to Ukraine, forthcoming this fall.