by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 7, 2018 | Repression at Home
by _anonym / Countercurrents
Let’s take that infamous PropOrNot List article apart, along with the growing social media censorship surrounding it, and this whole subject of alternative media being “infiltrated” by “Russian Propaganda”—just to clear the missile strewn air a wee bit insofar as that may be possible what with hardened silos on either side.
The List article begins with the not-so-subtle subtitle “An Initial Set of Sites That Reliably Echo Russian Propaganda.” Let’s stop right there and ask: what is propaganda?
Wikipedia defines the term:
“Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, companies and the media can also produce propaganda.”
Let’s accept that definition, because what we are talking about here is not merely what’s defined, but a full-scale, bona fide propaganda war. The List article itself satisfies this definition of propaganda in every detail, and admits as much, obliquely:
“Americans have the right to echo, repeat, be used by, and refer their audiences to Russian official and semi-official state media, including ‘fake news’ propaganda—just as we have the right to analyze and highlight that, without fear or favor.”
They’re writing US Government propaganda, and they know it—which is not to say it is untrue for that reason alone.
The fact that a piece of writing is propaganda simply has no bearing on its veracity. Let that concept sink in. Propaganda may be shoddy and obvious, but effective propaganda relies on at least a modicum of truth as a platform for its persuasive agenda, and it stands to reason that, given a democracy and freedom of speech, which is to say absent the use of force, suppression and censorship, there should ultimately be a winner in a propaganda war: the side with the preponderance of veracity. False constructs can only survive so long before collapsing of their own dead weight.
One can well argue that all writing, whether by assertion or by omission, whether deliberate or coincidental, is propaganda. A children’s fairy tale is propaganda insofar as it redirects the readers consciousness away from the systemic evils of the real world and encourages acceptance of the status quo. Every Op-Ed or opinion piece in every publication on earth which argues against a systemic evil is likewise propaganda against that system.
Here, the Russophobic propaganda of The List presents facts selectively to encourage a particular perception, using loaded language to influence the reader and to further the American deep state’s anti-Russian propaganda. It does not matter whether or not the authors have a contract with the FBI or the CIA or the DHS to do so, or whether they freely choose to echo, repeat, be used by and refer the reader to official anti-Russia bias of the official American propaganda machine. They surely cannot make any plausible claim to “objectivity.” The List is as cynically calculated a propaganda hit piece as anything in Russia’s bag of tricks. Naturally enough, in the blind box of US propaganda talking points, only content which originates from Russia is propaganda. Are they stupid, or just how stupid do they think we are?
As for the use of loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response, The List effectively seeks to shame you by framing you as a dupe, a stooge, a tool, an agent, and quite possibly a traitor if you share a piece of Russian propaganda with which you happen to thoroughly agree, and which presents an argument you believe others will benefit from reading. To an avid reader, it is of no consequence whether the behavior of a website or one or more of its writers is dogmatically or opportunistically regurgitating Russian propaganda, any more than if it were UK propaganda, or Chinese, or Israeli, or German, or Palestinian, or American.
One may take some intellectual pride in being an equal opportunity reader of propaganda, and in disseminating that which makes a compelling claim with which one, with an open mind, thoroughly agrees. Some struggle to form an opinion, too many others merely join in whatever peerage choir surrounds them. For some of us, however, text fairly withers under our gaze and gives up its propagandist ghost immediately without struggle, so content can be weighed on its merits. Far too many, especially in propaganda-saturated countries like North Korea and America, lack the basic ability to separate bias from truth, weigh opposing sides of an issue, and thus properly form a balanced opinion. That does not stop them from having one, unfortunately. The fact is that challenging ideas provoke a painful cognitive dissonance, the mind tends to close, and if it does, argument turns pointless, tribal belligerence and hatefulness set in, and intellectual rigor mortis follows. Thus it is with dogmatic capitalism in all of its guises and forms, and the guises and forms of all dogmatism, political or religious. A side is taken, an enemy is born. Let loose the dogs of hatred and war.
A great many patriotic Americans genuinely hate capitalism, morally, intellectually and emotionally, and suffer daily having to live effectively imprisoned in what is to them a transparently sick, brutal culture. Poverty is undeniably a gulag whatever one’s politics. Jobs are too often experienced as enslavement for survival. “America, my America, I have no choice but thee…” —while pretty much any country in Europe, despite being utterly capitalist, seems to those condemned to America’s barbaric culture like an oasis of civilization in comparison.
Persuasive writing demands “loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response.” Persuasive writing, indeed, all purposeful writing, is therefore propaganda. As a writer, feel free to call me a propagandist, hopefully an effective and entertaining one, no less so for employing the imagination and Eros in storytelling.
Where The List becomes offensive is in blurring the distinctions between propaganda, disinformation, and fake news. Again, propaganda is most often true, if only a partial, one-sided truth, sincerely or cynically employed as bait to alter your Weltanschauung. It is rarely malicious disinformation, and almost never a factual hoax that will inevitably backfire. However, The List offers not a single example of actual factual disinformation, defined as false information that is intended to mislead, nor a single example of fake news, defined as made-up “facts” written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person. Sure, propaganda, disinformation and fake news can overlap, as do fiction and fact, but please do show us at least some example, beyond your say so, of deliberately spreading false facts or a manufactured news hoax with malevolent intent, that is false beyond disagreeing, perhaps even vehemently, with your capitalist fundamentalism. If such examples can be found, they will be found among the the right-wing junk news sites on the The List, nary a single one from the intellectual left outlets maliciously lumped in with them.
Despite the gravity of this attack on free speech in social media and its dangerously biased anti-Russia fear mongering, one may be hard-pressed to read The List (“Your Friendly Neighborhood Propaganda Identification Service Since 2016” ) without laughing all the way through. The transparency of its distortions, the barefaced and shameless pro-capitalist propaganda piece that it is, is ultimately more risible than frightening. One can hardly help being reminded of the Christmas ditty, “Making a list, checking it twice—gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…Santa Claus is coming to town…”
A great many of the alternative news outlets on The List‘s list, most likely including the one where the words you’re now reading are published, may well be on your regular reading list as they are on mine. I have not once encountered a deliberate factual falsehood, or a fabricated factual hoax. That’s not to say there is not a wide range in the quality of the writing, the editing is often lax or non-existent, the text error-prone, some little more than emotional ranting to the choir, some very few I wish weren’t there, at least in their current incarnation—but it is laughably blatant propaganda to tar every author published in The List‘s outlets as witting or unwitting Russian agents regurgitating malicious factual hoodwinking.
The light in which capitalist behavior is cast by the anti-capitalist perspective may seem shockingly untrue, and cause the capitalist true believer some uncomfortable dissonance, but these are mere matters of opinion about the nature of the facts, not the facts themselves. “The US military aggression…” may well be a loaded phrase about some American military action, but it is an opinion of that action, not an intentional lie or a National Enquirer-style hoax about some event that may not even have taken place. More and more in American society, people of every background are encountering other people “who live in a completely different world…” simply because they actually do!
The Russian government uses propaganda just as the American government does. Indeed, at least 28 governments do, America, UK and Russia foremost among them. Here are some snippets from Armies of Cyber-Troops Manipulating Public Opinion:
“The Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) investigates the interaction of algorithms, automation and politics. This work includes analysis of how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, junk or fake news.
In their most recent report COMPROP have identified how organizations, often with public money, have created a system to help ‘define and manage what is in the best interest of the public.’
COMPROP have compared such organizations across 28 countries…”
The COMPROP report goes on to expose the following:
“- The earliest reports of organized social media manipulation emerged in 2010, and by 2017 there are details on such organizations in 28 countries, including the US and UK.
– Looking across the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while political-party-supported campaigns target domestic voters.
– Authoritarian regimes are not the only or even the best at organized social media manipulation. The earliest reports of government involvement in nudging public opinion involve democracies, and new innovations in political communication technologies often come from political parties and arise during high-profile elections.
– Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns.”
The phrase that stands out in all of the above, which otherwise comes as no surprise whatsoever, is that COMPROP has identified how organizations, often with public money, have created a system to help “define and manage what is in the best interest of the public…” That is rich, isn’t it? Propagandists on all sides, here both the Russians and the jingoist authors of The List, are just doing what’s in the public’s best interest, which is to say they are making your mind up for you in advance because, silly child, you don’t know what’s good for you.
However, behind this big brotherly solicitude on behalf of our “best interest” there is always an implicit threat, and often an explicit one—enter the United States government:
“Led By Thune, Senate Commerce Committee Examines Extremist Propaganda on Social Media Platforms“
“WASHINGTON —
U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today chaired a hearing titled, “Terrorism and Social Media: Is Big Tech Doing Enough?” The hearing examined the steps social media platforms are taking to combat the spread of extremist propaganda over the internet. During the hearing, Thune questioned witnesses from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook on how they are working to better identify and remove extremist content online.”
Here’s an excerpt from Thune’s opening remarks:
“These [social media] services have thrived online because of the freedom made possible by the uniquely American guarantee of free speech, and by a light touch regulatory policy. But, as is so often the case, enemies of our way of life have sought to take advantage of our freedoms to advance hateful causes.”
There is a skillful dog whistle just out of hearing in that statement, a call to lump say, every leftist journalist retweeting a critique of capitalism together with masked head-chopping ISIS propagandists. As for the “hateful cause” dumpster, if you think about it, what might not be tossed in there? It would be a shorter list to find causes which do not hate what is perceived as evil in the world, whether politics or religion or some ungodly combination of the two.
You will find a great many strange bedfellows in the “hateful” dumpster, too. Indeed, many Americans regard the ideology [theology?] of the Republican Party as a “hate crime” in and of itself, in much the same way that Republican anti-Islamists view that theology as hateful; and Republicans surely do themselves hate people and things, like Muslims and Islam, rather a lot, quite openly and without reservation, and that on behalf of a great many other causes solely in their own private vested class interest, the public interest be damned. Ditto die-hard Democrats, one must hasten to add.
There is not likely an American alive today who does not honestly and deeply hate at least something about capitalism, at least some of the time, and a great many Americans feel utterly betrayed and victimized but do not recognize the culprit to call it out as capitalism per se. There are others still who understand the capitalist system all too well, and loathe it utterly and consistently, most if not all of the time, whether propelled intellectually by study, emotionally by experience, or morally bearing witness to its endless, cynical, and systemic rot.
Most anti-capitalists can begrudgingly admit to a few things that capitalism gets right, like freedom of speech, including the rapidly shrinking freedom to utterly despise capitalism in all of its guises and forms. Communism, where it still purports to exist, as in China, has much to learn from capitalism in that single regard. Free speech is just vacant hot air venting until it becomes organized into a movement and an electoral force, a difficult thing to do, but only then does it achieve moral force in a society, and become in fact a survival mechanism for that society. To suppress it is tantamount to national suicide.
We propagandists are busy trying to bring about exactly that transformation from hot air to moral force. The “hate” of the anti-capitalist generally proceeds in fact from love of humankind, particularly those most abused by capitalism, though nearly everyone, including the idle rich (though they may not know it) are to some degree its victim. On the other hand, the hate of the capitalist generally proceeds from contempt of humankind, especially the great unwashed masses, as well as from the very real arrogance of an imagined superiority.
The American propaganda machine seems to assume, correctly if tragically, that we are thoroughly indoctrinated into its domestic propaganda, and even if we are not, we have no choice but to work “for the man” in order to survive, and that in effect achieves all the self-censorship and mind control the powers that be could ever hope for via mainstream propaganda. Foreign policy, however, seems to be another matter, and that is where the US propaganda machine knocks itself out trying to convince Americans, and the rest of the world, that its interventions and wars are just, humanitarian, and necessary given the “evil axis” of China and Russia and nations like Iran and Syria and Cuba and Venezuela in their orbit.
In terms of foreign policy, American mainstream media is the most powerful arm of the US propaganda machine, with scarcely a breach in its wall of support for “Pax Americana” and the whole can of ideological worms which that entails. Even Bernie Sanders, an eloquent spokesman for America’s domestic woes—indeed, he echoes and seemingly regurgitates much of what one may find in Russian propaganda outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik with regard to US domestic policy—even he seems to buy into mainstream American foreign policy myths. (Perhaps that is why he is not singled out for criticism along with independent leftist publications online?)
The American political and media establishment would seem to consider domestic policy—outside of our pathetic dollar-denominated duopoly elections mind you—as fair game for foreign opposition, but US foreign policy, including our own propaganda interventions in Russia and around the world under the “jurisdiction” of the CIA—not so much. And it is apparently not so much what Russian propaganda is saying about our foreign policy, but the bare fact that it is the Russians who are saying it. What is that if not Russophobia? Or some bizarre kind of nationalist or ethnic prejudice? It’s not like Russia is any longer a communist country locked in existential battle with the United States, on the contrary:
“We are currently in some sort of crisis of capitalism, as the concentration of wealth continues apace and the general population of western countries increasingly feel insecure, exploited and alienated. It is still very hard for voices that reject the neoliberal establishment view to get a media platform, but Russia does provide comparatively small platforms in the West – like Russia Today and Radio Sputnik – which allow greater democratic freedom than western media in the range of views they invite to be expressed. So the ultra-wealthy, their politician servants and media lackeys view Russia as some kind of threat to the dominance of neo-liberalism .
There are a number of ironies to this, not least the very real deficiencies in Russia’s domestic democracy and media plurality, and the fact Russia has an even worse oligarchic capitalism than the West and has a 1% completely integrated with their Western counterparts. But despite these ironies, the Western 1% perceive Russia as some sort of threat to their dominance. This leads in to the intellectually risible attempts to prove that Russia somehow “fixed” Trump’s election, for which no solid evidence can ever be adduced as it did not happen; but nevertheless vast resources continue to be spent in trying.”
[ from The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! ]
Thus we have a propaganda war with both sides pointing at the other and proclaiming, “Fake News!”
Yes certainly the perspective cuts both ways—a far lengthier list of American mass media outlets spewing forth pro-capitalist propaganda and US jingoism, often government-supplied, could surely be compiled. Most mainstream media regularly dispenses, not only propaganda, but disinformation—especially via the omission of facts—as well as using loaded language to make a predominantly emotional appeal, and in a few extreme cases outright factual hoax news can be found, as in funky pro-capitalist stalwarts like the National Enquirer and some Tea Party publications. An Oxford University study notes:
“The [Donald] Trump Support group consumes the highest volume of junk news sources on Twitter, and spreads more junk news sources, than all the other groups put together. This pattern is repeated on Facebook, where the Hard Conservatives group consumed the highest proportion of junk news.”
Celebrity, escapist, and “junk” news coverage in general, whether or not it is actually fabricated news, fills up a consciousness that might otherwise encounter something meaningful, instead of a fantasy confirmation of the great American delusion: “I am not an exploited proletariat, I am temporarily embarrassed millionaire” (to paraphrase John Steinbeck). Celebrity culture in particular is a broad hoax perpetrated on Americans in that it hogs the cultural news, occupying virtually the whole cultural space. All escapist media, whether print or film, serve the deflective and tranquilizing purposes of propaganda.
So, where do we stand? If everything is propaganda, then nothing is? Is it then just a matter of distinguishing quality propaganda from the shameless and shallow kind? Don’t you have to pick a side eventually?
The government of the United States, as a creature of its corporate lords, is ratcheting up the pressure on the public to pick a side so they can acquire absolute hegemony over your thinking, and harass or terrorize you if you resist. Can they really be so afraid of truth on the fringes of media? It certainly does look so. House and Senate intelligence committee leaders have pressured social media executives to compile lists of accounts within their services which disseminate “Russian Propaganda,” and to their shame the technology companies have enthusiastically complied.
Twitter, Google and Facebook representatives have been summoned before the Senate Commerce Committee, like wayward school children to the principle’s office, to be chided on their laxity in keeping the hegemony of American propaganda intact for “the public good.” And they have acceded to this pressure without question.
Here’s the letter Twitter has sent out to offending accounts like our own EpiphanyOnWallStreet @NineInchBride account, which opposed both “Shillary Clinton” and “Donald tRump” in equal measure in 2016:
Dear EpiphanyOnWallStreet,
As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency.
Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account.
We are sharing this information so that you can learn more about these accounts and the nature of the Russian propaganda effort. You can see examples of content from these suspended accounts on our blog if you’re interested.
http://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.htmlhttp://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html
People look to Twitter for useful, timely, and appropriate information. We are taking active steps to stop malicious accounts and Tweets from spreading, and we are determined to keep ahead of the tactics of bad actors. For example, in recent months we have developed new techniques to identify accounts manipulating our platform, have improved our process for challenging suspicious accounts, and have introduced new measures designed to identify and take action on coordinated malicious activity. In 2018, we are building on these improvements. Our blog also contains more information about these efforts.
People come to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world. We are committed to making it the best place to do that and to being transparent with the people who use and trust our platform.
Twitter
The double-speak is one up on Orwell’s 1984: “Information Quality Initiative” is used for intimidation and the implied threat of censorship for speaking truth to power, while “the public good” is here again invoked “to detect and prevent bad actors from abusing our platform.” If you follow their blog link you’ll find several offensive but ultimately iinnocuous tweets by such “bad actors” specifically regarding the election of 2016, which, as commonplace as these or similar tweets are among real Americans, compel one to believe the days of free speech in America are woefully numbered. According to twitter, our account has been so foolish as to retweet one or more of the accurate comics unfavorable to Clinton.
“If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all,” as Chomsky has so ably pointed out. That’s democracy, the worst of systems—but for all the others. All voices have the right to be heard, no matter how sick or depraved. These will surely fall by the wayside in the course of time, and the idea that some aggregate of these shallow, tasteless efforts at exciting right-wing nut jobs to vote for Trump has actually led to putting the scoundrel in office is risible at best, at worst a naked excuse for forcible intimidation and suppression of free speech in America.
It is worth noting that the Russians only preferred Trump, as did so many Americans, because Clinton was perceived to be the worse war-monger. For the Russians she was plainly a greater existential threat to them, but also, I suspect, the Russians foresaw the degrading spectacle of a Trump presidency, and the laughing stock militarist America would become in the eyes of the world. It is also worth highlighting that their propaganda, being not only hysterically anti-Clinton, but preposterously pro-Trump, has exposed itself to the American left as utterly authoritarian by aligning with the capitalist obscenity that is Donald Trump.
This friendly “big brother” alert “for your information only” from Twitter management, under pressure from the Senate Commerce Committee, is itself “anti-propaganda” propaganda just as The List article is, and uses much of the same language in its defense. The recent Mueller indictments of Russian Twitter-bot propagandists show that “witting or unwitting stooges of Russian propaganda” surely do exist, especially within America’s political right oddly enough, but there is not likely a single anti-capitalist (i.e. “left”) American writer within these grey-listed publications or among these censured social media accounts, and ultimately, even the content promulgated by ideological “stooges” may contain valid arguments insofar as they go. It seems the problem for American propaganda is not that there exists Russian propaganda, but that their modest effort is effectively stealing its own native right wing audience and base out from under them. That is unacceptable.
On the other hand, it would surprise me not at all to learn there are Russians who can extract some truthful perspective from the CIA’s hypocritical critique of the Russian capitalist oligarchy via the Voice of America and similar propaganda incursions into their domestic culture, just as Americans can learn and grow in their understanding of the root of America’s evils from Russia’s exportation of anti-capitalist (or even anti-Clinton) propaganda, hypocritical as it may be given their capitalist (and militarist) autocracy at home. Let information flow freely without advantage or disadvantage, that’s the only way democracy can work.
Many if not most of the publications on The List feature sterling and thoroughly American leftist writers, often with an internationalist perspective, and none of these writers are “unwittingly” regurgitating Russian “propaganda” that is not painfully and incisively true from their own perspective. This simple fact is clear and bears repeating: If the truth about capitalism is sown by a hireling of the Russian government, it is no less true. If a lie about capitalism is sown by American mainstream media it is no less a lie.
American culture places an extreme emphasis on the right to hold an opinion with next to none on the actual ability to form one. We are, as a people, uneducated for democracy, which is to a large extent why we do not have one, and why the powers that be feel obliged to rely on censorship: people can’t be trusted to think for themselves. If Americans have neither the moral nor intellectual capacity to distinguish truth from lies, good argument from cheesy propaganda, enter the “anti-propaganda” propagandist and “censor-as-a-public-service” to tell them what to believe.
Thankfully there is a large and ever growing number of Americans with no such moral or intellectual deficit, who have educated themselves for democracy since the system does not. It is the abject betrayal of mainstream media, including National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System and other purportedly civic non-profit media venues, which fails to provide a viable platform for the legitimate American anti-capitalist voice, that in turn gives rise to the profusion of non-commercial alternative news outlets noted in The List.
Please do feel the heat of this problem as one of the more aggrieved and eloquent victims of this mainstream exclusion, Chris Hedges, rails forth. This is a prized American journalist whose only uncensored platform options are those in The List‘s list, including Russia Today, better known as RT where his video program On Contact is aired. Surely something is deeply rotten in America when even a highly credentialed journalist must resort to a foreign adversarial media outlet in order to take an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist political stance.
Twitter’s email is, in no uncertain terms, a chilling tap on the shoulder from FISA-abusing deep state security agencies evangelizing the Russophobic rhetoric from The List: Is It Propaganda Or Not?—which, despite the question mark, has plainly decided that it is, not only “propaganda,” but disinformation and cynically constructed “fake news” master-minded by evil Russians using silly, gullible you as their stooge and mouthpiece. You’re on the naughty list.
Recently Twitter has been busy catching up with Google and Facebook’s algorithmic censorship based on this infamous List. Not only have they stooped to the scare tactic of the above warning letter, but now they are overtly deleting or suspending more and more accounts under the guise of their being Russian bots—or supportive of them. They have also taken to playing this clever game of “zeroing out” an account’s Following list as a punishment to certain accounts. This causes your followers to unfollow you in return as they become aware you have “unfollowed” them, which is what Twitter has done to you. (Don’t fall for it. If you follow an account and suddenly you find their Following list drops to zero, don’t unfollow, unless you want to be Twitter’s “stooge.” Their Following list will be reinstated at some point later on with you still in it.)
Now that some 677,775 US Twitter accounts have been singled out to receive this “we’re watching you” email—coal in the stocking from our malevolent corporate Santa Claus (incidentally, make of it what you will, that number is a hair under 1% of the current 69 million active users in the US). If these users persist in opposing mainstream media’s jingoism with critical truth from the only sources extant—Russian or otherwise—what then is next? A Pinochet-like “virtual disappearance” of all 677,775 voices on the Twitter platform?
We’ve got your number, they’re plainly telling us, we can kill your account in a blink if we choose, and feel patriotic about doing so. Perhaps they’ll be supplying government security agencies with your account data, if they are not already, which may or may not produce a knock on your door by FBI or DHS agents some quiet evening—curious about something you tweeted yesterday, or a year ago… (A native-born American citizen, I was myself visited one quiet evening, not by two or three, but a gang of four FBI agents on a fishing expedition over a separate but similar First Amendment issue…this sort of scare tactic, an abysmal waste of taxpayer money, is already going on!)
America tragically seeks to become a closed-mind, a pro-capitalist and anti-Russian hegemony, the “marketplace of ideas” be damned no less here within our cynical duopoly than in North Korea, China, or the former Soviet Union.
The answer to abusive authority is to refuse to buy into their threats, veiled or explicit. They threaten because they are themselves fearful. Laugh out loud at their “best interest of the public” propaganda (this drives them crazy). Tell them flat out you refuse to live in fear of them or to join them in complicity. Howl against their algorithms, demand the government cease leaning on these corporations for ever greater thought-policing.
Whether writer or reader, declare yourself a truth seeker, wherever that takes you, whatever its source. Make The List your reading list! Read and tweet and share its articles widely. Should micro-blogging and alternative news sharing on social media prove no longer viable, we shall find or found other means to be heard.
_anonym is a native-born American citizen living in New York, NY, and the anonymous author of An Epiphany On Wall Street and Suited For War, books one and two in the Nine Inch Bride series of political novels.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image: A single mom with seven calves who she is caring for. More than likely, only one of these calves are hers, and the rest of these babies are buffalo she adopted after their mothers were killed by hunters. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
by Stephanie Seay / Buffalo Field Campaign
It’s just below zero as we trek through freshly fallen snow on an unusually windless early morning, in the high hills above the Gardiner Basin. Taking advantage of the calm air that won’t rock our scopes and cameras, our patrol is on the way to a lookout spot high above Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek buffalo trap. The trap is miles away. The spot we’re at is one of the few places that we can see even a far-away glimpse into the industrial size monstrosity that has entrapped more than 450 of the gentle giants in the past couple of weeks. Yellowstone initiates a massive seven-mile public closure around their trap, obviously wanting to hide the horrible things they are doing to this sacred species, our national mammal. On our way to the lookout, our footsteps squeaking through the freezing cold snow, one of our crew shouts out, “wolves!” We all stop dead in our tracks. To the south of us, we can hear them, the beautiful, haunting serenade of a wolf pack, singing blessing songs to the morning, or, more like mourning songs to the travesty unfolding before us. The wolves know. We get to the lookout spot and it’s as bad as we thought: hundreds of buffalo in the trap, huddled together, eating hay rations, trapped on death row. Four park wranglers on horseback, and a white SUV are coming into the northernmost paddock of the trap which holds approximately 60 of the country’s last wild buffalo. This paddock is the veritable end of the line before the buffalo go in even deeper, to places they will never return from.
“Genocide,” our Blackfeet brother says. We nod in agreement. The U.S. Government continues the systematic destruction of the sacred buffalo, and for the same reasons, too. Only, these days, instead of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Cody, they call it “management” and the killers are the so-called guys in green: Yellowstone National Park. Donning buffalo on their uniform badges, they are the very ones who are obligated to protect the buffalo — the buffalo who are the main reason this park even exists, that people even come here. These “caretakers” are facilitating all of the trapping and most of the killing. As we watch through our scopes and binoculars, eyes teary from the blistering cold, or the pain in our hearts, the wranglers go in for the attack. It’s just another day in the park. Frantic, the sixty buffalo run away from the wranglers, but the only path open to them is the dark corridor that leads into the labyrinth of the trap, towards the bull pen and the squeeze chute, towards the end of freedom and family, into the tiny holding pens where they will spend their last hours in feces and fear, before being loaded onto livestock trailers headed for the slaughter house. The mournful howling continues. The wolves know. We join in.
A bird’s-eye view of Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek buffalo trap. The massive closure is an attempt to keep the public from seeing what Yellowstone is doing. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
Anticipating shipments to slaughter, the next morning we rise even earlier to get our sites on the trap before the trailers arrive. We are well ahead of schedule. Our presence, our vigilance is the only way for anyone to know what is taking place here, for anyone to know what is really happening to the buffalo. Once posted up, we send one patrol high into the hills for an even better birds-eye view. Even so, both lookouts rely on the powerful magnification of spotting scopes to see anything, and tiny-dot-anythings at that. With the naked eye, the trap and it’s happenings are hardly visible at all. The trap is so strategically located that Yellowstone’s shame and desire for secrecy are apparent. Just before dawn, multiple vehicles start arriving to the trap. The unmarked rigs of the wranglers, a few park service law enforcement officers, Yellowstone’s bison biologist, Rick Wallen, and others, get ready for another day of wild buffalo abuse. Then the stock trailers show up, flanked by law enforcement escorts. It takes less than an hour for them turn wild buffalo from sacred, free-born beings into “pounds on the hoof” headed for the slaughter house.
2018 03 01 03 003 Update3 Buffalo Field Campaign Stephany Seay 2018 800 Two stock trailers drive through Yellowstone, and groups of buffalo, taking buffalo who were captured at Yellowstone’s facility to slaughter on Wednesday morning. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
The dominant culture — not even those who might care — can’t bear to look into the face of the reality of its actions. It views the human supreme; born out of a cold arrogance lusting for control, enabling the conversion of the living into the dead for profit. Forgetfulness, mindlessness – “with guns and laws and truth that lies” – help grease the gears of the machine; numbness is the key to conducting wildlife “management.” It is said that once you see, you cannot unsee. A self-inflicted blindness enables it —to see would break their hearts and force their souls wide open. So, with brutal efficiency, the government workers keep their blinders on, do their jobs, and hold fast to the agreed upon Interagency Bison Management Plan.
Approximately 450 wild buffalo have been captured in Yellowstone’s trap, and nearly 250 have been killed by hunters just across Yellowstone’s boundary. By Yellowstone and Montana’s own standards, the middle-end of their 600-900 kill quota — in place to appease Montana’s cattle interests — has already been met. After the last few weeks of extremely unsavory ‘hunting’ along Yellowstone’s north boundary, very few hunters have come to kill buffalo this week. Many have left here utterly disgusted, vowing never to participate in such a slaughter again.
With their enormous, shaggy heads, buffalo face into a storm. We have much to learn from our relatives, the buffalo. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
Before and after bearing witness to this insanity, we are reminded of the real reason we are here. Other buffalo, who were not in the trap, gave us the gift of remembering and connection, the honor of being in their presence and living in the moment. They help us remember who we are fighting for — and with — and why. The buffalo help us connect with their humbling ancient wisdom; a truth so incredibly sacred because of its gentle simplicity and rightness.
The blizzard came in quick and heavy, and the buffalo moved right along with it as they always do. With their heads into the storm, grazing and walking, sparing and goofing around, they look up at us for moments with the eyes of god, the faces of ghosts, awakening memories of ages past and future potentials. Still here. Still present. Still doing what they have always done since buffalo time began. Where they walk, ravens feast on the gut piles of their recently killed relatives, strewn across the landscape at Beattie Gulch, a beautiful place that has become synonymous with death. And, yet, the buffalo still come, still offer life, staying among the living. Obstacles be damned. These ancient beings have survived Ice Ages; now the question is: can they survive the U.S. government? In the joy of sharing time and place with the buffalo, in our pain and anger fueled by management plans, being in the company of friends both human and buffalo recognizing each other, committing to each other again; in our solidarity among our comrades we understand that all of these things come from love. Profound love. The buffalo and their wildness, their teachings of sorrow and joy, their obligation to the earth, and ours to them. These realities keep awake our spirits, reaffirm and strengthen our vow: yes, you will survive, and we will give ourselves to make sure of it; fighting for you, along side you.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 27, 2018 | ANALYSIS, Toxification
by Alex Jensen / Local Futures
That pollution is bad for our health will come as a surprise to no one. That pollution kills at least 9 million people every year might. This is 16 percent of all deaths worldwide – 3 times more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than all wars and other forms of violence. Air pollution alone is responsible for 6.5 million of these 9 million deaths. Nearly 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. All this is according to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, a recent report by dozens of public health and medical experts from around the world. This important report is sounding the alarm about a too-often neglected and ignored “silent emergency”—or as author Rob Nixon calls it, “slow violence.”
In one media article about the report, the Lancet’s editor-in-chief and executive editor points to the structural economic forces of “industrialisation, urbanisation, and globalisation” as “drivers of pollution.” Unfortunately, however, the report itself doesn’t elaborate upon this crucial observation about root causes – in fact, when it moves from documentation of the pollution-health crisis to social-economic analysis, some of the report’s conclusions go seriously awry, espousing debunked “ecological modernization theory” and reinforcing a tired Eurocentric framing that paints the industrialized West in familiar “enlightened” colors, while the “developing” countries are portrayed as “backward.”
For example, one of the Commission’s co-chairs and lead authors Dr. Philip Landrigan (for whom I have the greatest respect for his pioneering work in environmental health), points out that since the US Clean Air Act was introduced in 1970, levels of six major pollutants in the US have fallen by 70 percent even as GDP has risen by 250 percent. According to fellow author Richard Fuller, this sort of trend proves that countries can have “consistent economic growth with low pollution.”
Coupled with the fact that about 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, this would indeed appear to validate one of the core doctrines of ecological modernization theory—”decoupling”—which posits that while pollution necessarily increases during the early “stages” of economic development, it ultimately plateaus once a certain level of wealth is achieved, whereupon it falls even as growth continues ever upward.
It is understandable why the Commission might want to package its message in this way: it makes an “economic” case for addressing pollution that is palatable to policymakers increasingly ensconced within an economistic worldview, one that is increasingly blind to non-economic values (including, apparently, the value of life itself – one would have hoped that 9 million deaths would be reason enough to take action against pollution). The economic costs of pollution, along with the apparent happy coexistence of economic growth and pollution reduction, are marshaled to challenge “the argument that pollution control kills jobs and stifles the economy.” This favorite bugbear of industry and big business is certainly spurious—forget about pollution control “killing jobs;” the absence of such control is killing millions of people every year!
But, as I showed in my previous blog post (Globalization Blowback), much of the rich countries’ pollution has been outsourced and offshored during the corporate globalization era. It is disingenuous at best to cite instances of local pollution reduction alongside increased economic growth in the rich world as evidence of decoupling, when those reductions were made possible only because of much larger pollution increases elsewhere. A global perspective—where true costs cannot be fobbed off on the poor and colonized—is necessary for gaining a meaningful and accurate picture of the relationship between wealth, growth, development and environmental integrity and sustainability. Panning out to this broader global perspective shows that, in fact, GDP growth and pollution continue to be closely coupled. And because a large percentage of the pollution in poorer countries is a consequence of corporate globalization, so is a large percentage of pollution-caused deaths.
Choking—and dying—on globalization
China’s export-oriented industrial spasm, powered largely by burning coal, has bequeathed it notoriously lethal air pollution, so much so that, according to one study, it contributes to the deaths of 1.6 million people per year (4,400 per day), or 17% of all deaths in the country. Another study puts the total at two-thirds of all deaths, and concluded that the severe air pollution has shortened life expectancy in China by more than 2 years on average, and by as much as 5.5 years in the north of the country.
Interestingly, some studies have actually calculated the number of globally dispersed premature deaths from transported air pollution and international trade. One such study found that deadly PM2.5 pollution (particulate matter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller) produced in China in 2007 was linked to more than 64,800 premature deaths in regions other than China, including more than 3,100 premature deaths in western Europe and the USA. At the same time—despite manufacturing- and pollution-offshoring—about 19,000 premature deaths occur in the US from domestically emitted pollution for the production of exports, 3,000 of which are linked to items exported to China.
But this is far less than what the Chinese are suffering because of consumption in the West. According to the study, “consumption in western Europe and the USA is linked to more than 108,600 premature deaths in China.” (Worldwide, pollution emitted for the production of goods and services consumed in the US alone caused 102,000 premature deaths; European consumption caused even more: 173,000 premature deaths). Note that the above fails to take into account the costs of various other air pollution-related chronic illnesses. And of course, air pollution isn’t the only harmful human cost of China’s coal-driven industrial growth and export-orientation. According to Chinese government statistics, some 6,027 Chinese coal miners died in the course of work in 2004, though analysts point out that official estimates are usually highly conservative, and “the real number is probably higher.” Since 2004, coal extraction has grown significantly in China.
Shipping
What about the transport of incomprehensible quantities of materials back and forth across the planet? Coal to China, commodities from China, waste back to China (the undisputed locus of global waste trade)—nearly all of it is done via oceanic shipping, which carries heavy ecological costs. The statistics on the scale and impact of the global shipping industry are arresting: a 2014 study found that ship traffic on the world’s oceans has increased 300 percent over the past 20 years, with most of this increase occurring in the last 10 years. According to one analysis, emissions from international shipping for 2012 were estimated to be 796 million tons of CO2 per year (or 90,868 tons per hour), more than the yearly emissions of the UK, Canada or Brazil. (An earlier study put the amount of annual emissions from the world’s merchant fleet at 1.12 billion tons of CO2.) Whatever the actual figure, shipping accounts for at least 3 to nearly 4.5 percent of global CO2 emissions.
Much worse, shipping contributes 18-30 percent of the world’s total NOx and 9 percent of its sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution. A single giant container ship can emit the same amount as 50 million cars: “just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars.” By 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from shipping were 70 percent higher than in 1990, and, left unchecked, were projected to grow by up to 250 percent by 2050; this would make shipping responsible for 17 percent of global emissions. According to the University College London’s Energy Institute – whose astonishing ShipMap may be one of the best visualizations of globalization available—“China is the center of the shipping world; Shanghai alone moved 33 million units in 2012.”
And this is only maritime shipping. Air freight is even more pollution-intensive: though much less merchandise and material is moved by air, some estimates are that the relatively minor 1% of the world’s food traded by air may contribute upwards of 11 percent of CO2 emissions.
In sum, the toll of the global shipping industry makes the “death footprint” of globalization’s air pollution even larger. A 2007 study conservatively estimated that just the PM (particulate matter) emissions of global shipping—estimated at 1.6 million metric tons—kill 60,000 people per year, which the authors expected to increase 40 percent by 2012.
Conclusions
To point out the harms of global pollution outsourcing is emphatically not to argue that US corporations, for example, should simply return their outsourced production and pollution to the territorial US. This was the erstwhile “Trumpian” right-populist recipe. Under this ideology, the way to facilitate “insourcing” is not to insist on higher labor and environmental standards abroad, but to systematically dismantle the framework of laws in the US (however weak many of them already are thanks to corporate-captured government agencies)—that is, to bring the race to the bottom home. Whether generous tax cuts and other hand-outs will entice the outsourcers back remains to be seen: it’s becoming evident that the Trump/Koch brothers enterprise is about both eviscerating domestic environmental and labor laws, and accelerating global transnational corporate pillage—the worst of all worlds.
An anti-corporate, degrowth, eco-localization stance is the unequivocal opposite. Firstly, it rejects the broader ends and means of the entire consumerist, throw-away project. Rather than merely bringing the disposable extractive economy back home, localization is about reconnecting cause and effect and overthrowing irresponsible and unethical environmental load displacement on the global poor. Localization is about re-orienting the entire economy towards sufficiency and simplicity of consumption, towards needs-based, ecologically-sustainable and regenerative production, and towards fair, dignified and democratic work and production. By definition, localization connotes less dependence on external resources and globalized production chains that are controlled by global corporations and are congenitally undemocratic. Putting power into workers’ hands is to not have globally—outsourcing, hierarchically—owned and managed corporations, tout court.
Of course Dr. Landrigan is right that reducing pollution doesn’t “stifle the economy”—quite the contrary, if “the economy” is understood in a much more holistic sense than mere GDP. But, as has been pointed out previously on this blog (here and here), we also shouldn’t equate a healthy economy with a growing economy. The converse is more often the case. To reduce global pollution deaths, we not only need robust pollution control regulations, we must reduce corporate power, globalization, and the scale of the economy as well.
Alex Jensen is a Researcher and Project Coordinator at Local Futures. He has worked in the US and India, where he co-ordinated Local Futures’ Ladakh Project from 2004-2015. He has also been an associate of the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics in Himachal Pradesh, India. He has worked with cultural affirmation and agro biodiversity projects in campesino communities in a number of countries, and is active in environmental health/anti-toxics work.
Photo by shawnanggg on Unsplash
