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Mar 2 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
Defending Freedom And Democracy Sure Requires An Awful Lot Of Censorship

"You'd think the truth would be more robust than that. You'd think freedom would extend farther than that. You'd think democracy would be more tolerant of dissent than that."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/defending-fr…
Defending Freedom And Democracy Sure Requires An Awful Lot Of Censorship (Audio)

"Almost like this has nothing to do with freedom, or truth, or democracy. Almost like it never has."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/de…
Kremlin-backed media outlets have been banned throughout the European Union, both on television and on apps and online platforms.
techcrunch.com/2022/02/28/eu-…
RT has lost its Sky TV slot in the UK, where the outlet is also blocked on YouTube.
theguardian.com/media/2022/mar…
Australian TV providers SBS and Foxtel have dropped RT, and the federal government is putting pressure on social media platforms to block Russian media in Australia.
smh.com.au/technology/gov…
In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia, speaking in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will get you years in prison.
pardrosibu.lv/2022/02/24/aic…
Twitter, historically the last of the major online platforms to jump on any new internet censorship escalation, is now actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content.
This censorship tactic is exactly what I speculated might emerge after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned back in November, due to previous comments supportive of that practice by his successor Parag Agrawal.
Twitter is also placing warnings labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even 'like' a post linking to such outlets on the platform.
It has also placed the label "Russia state-affiliated media" on tweets by the personal accounts of employees of those platforms, baselessly implying that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not their own opinions.
Some are complaining that this new label has led to online harassment amid the post-9/11-like anti-Russia hysteria that's currently turning western brains into clam chowder.
This is all on top of all the other censorship escalations which came roaring in at the beginning of the Ukraine war, and I personally find it a bit scary how fast it's all happening, how fine people are with it, and how much worse it seems likely to get.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/russian-prop…
Others agree.
And I can't help but find it odd that the fight for freedom and democracy should require such copious amounts of censorship.
You'd think a society devoted to truth and freedom, the kind of society western powers purport to be defending in Ukraine, would not require a Ministry of Truth to protect us from trying to seek out alternative perspectives beyond the homogeneous authorized mainstream narratives.
You'd think the truth would be more robust than that. You'd think freedom would extend farther than that. You'd think democracy would be more tolerant of dissent than that.

Almost like this has nothing to do with freedom, or truth, or democracy.

Almost like it never has.
Kind of makes you wonder if perhaps rallying behind the idea that it's fine to censor people to preserve the establishment narrative about things, like Covid-19 and vaccines for example, was every bit the slippery slope that everyone warned it would be.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/why-you-should…
If perhaps we have foolishly consented to a reality where the most powerful people in the world get to control the information people consume in order to shut down dissent against a murderous and oppressive globe-spanning oligarchic empire.
And it kind of makes you wonder, at this frightening moment in history, if we might perhaps be better off with a lot more dissent, rather than a lot less.
Defending Freedom And Democracy Sure Requires An Awful Lot Of Censorship

"Almost like this has nothing to do with freedom, or truth, or democracy. Almost like it never has."

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Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
Mar 3
Russia gets control of Kyiv with this war, while the US gets international consensus for unprecedented economic warfare and support for NATO, plus giving Moscow another Afghanistan.
NATO powers 100% provoked this war. Looks like a classic sacrifice a pawn to get the queen move.
With checkmate being retaining the unipolar world order. China is a rising economic superpower while Russia is the #2 military power, so if you can take out Russia by starvation sanctions, fomenting unrest, overextension and eventual balkanization, you break China's right arm.
Leaving China essentially defenseless on the world stage for whatever long-term cold war strangulation you've got planned for it. People who think the rise of a multipolar world is a sure thing are counting their chickens before they're hatched, IMO.
Read 15 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
Mar 3
Again: it's never been about countering Russian propaganda or fighting Covid misinformation or any of the other excuses they've been churning out. It's because the democratization of information poses a direct threat to ruling power structures, and they need to get control of it.
The "liberal democracies" of the western empire found a loophole in their own freedom of expression laws (the same laws they claim make them superior to overtly authoritarian regimes) in that they can outsource their censorship to government-tied monopolistic megacorporations.
This allows the oligarchic empire to control the dominant narratives about what's going on, thereby controlling how people think, act, and vote. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The powerful understand this. The people, for the most part, do not.
Read 4 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
Mar 3
This is insane. Camp is literally just an anti-war, anti-capitalism comedian who was denied a platform by all western media so went to the outlet that would give him a platform. This new escalation in censorship is getting very scary. Dissent is actively being stomped out.
Camp did a great Redacted Tonight monologue in 2017 mocking the idea that there's something scandalous about an American criticizing American malfeasance on RT because no western MSM will let you. But if you're in the EU or UK you won't be able to see it.
This was the one and only time Camp has ever been allowed on western mainstream media, and it went exactly how you'd hope it would. Hasn't been allowed back since.
Read 7 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
Mar 2
"The costs to Putin if he 'loses' Ukraine to the West are going to be steep... There are real ultra-nationalist forces that would come down on him like a ton of bricks if the historic land of the Cossacks was 'lost' to the anti-Russian EU and their American allies."
😆😆😆
"Indeed, two of the most visible anti-Putin 'dissidents' – Alexei Navalny and Eduard Limonov (of the fascistic National Bolshevik Party) – are rabid nationalists who make Putin look like the kind of liberal who listens to NPR and strongly favors Birkenstocks."
2014. Damn. Raimondo was having constant Twitter shit fits about my anti-Trump stuff at the end of his life, but shit he'd be good to have around now. Him, Stephen Cohen, Bob Parry. A lot of great voices missing on this front.
Read 4 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
Mar 2
A big part of the problem is that one side is saying PUTIN IS HITLER WE NEED A NO FLY ZONE STARVE ALL RUSSIANS, while the other is saying "Putin is evil but maybe we could give diplomacy a small chance?" This imbalance moves the spectrum of debate toward the warmongering extreme.
When one side of the debate is taking the most unmitigated, forceful and extremist positions possible in favor of the US/NATO narrative while the other (already highly marginalized) side is using very mitigated both-sides talking points, it drags the Overton window toward war.
This has created a dynamic where the "moderate" position is supporting nuclear brinkmanship and funding a bloody insurgency on Russia's border while using economic warfare on a level we've never seen before and don't know the future consequences of. That should be the EXTREME.
Read 7 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
Mar 1
This is so disgusting. It can't possibly be that all the many analysts who spent years warning NATO's actions would lead to war in Ukraine were simply correct, it's that they were preemptively creating Kremlin propaganda. Years in advance.
No no, see, the fact that they were right proves that they were wrong. They should probably be executed for treason.
Meanwhile this is the depth of Applebaum's analysis:
Read 6 tweets

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