Freedom of Speech in Wartime

Humpty can't keep it together

This post is part two of “Free Speech is a Danger to Democracy”.

It deals with:

• An Empire in Decline - summary of the state of the Regime

• War and Peace Dividends - Neoconservative capture of post-Soviet US policy

• The Dangers of Freedom to Democracy - Censorship, propaganda and power

---

An Empire in Decline

To step back from the looking glass, the Regime is in serious decline. The United States has failed to force regime change in Kazakhstan, Belarus and in Russia. The ruble is now perhaps the strongest currency in the world, Russia awash with cash. The sanctions pressed by the US threaten to destroy Europe and condemn it to permanent stagflation, a fact announced by the Financial Times this week.

The US has squandered what seemed to be an unchallengeable global dominance in this last reckless gambit, a war which it forced by its own deliberate brinkmanship, and one which it is losing on the ground and on the airwaves. Chaos at home and abroad is the new normal.

Edward Bernays, who rebranded propaganda as ‘public relations’.

Of all the wars it has lost in the last seventy years (all of them) this is by far the most damaging. It is a war that ended in 1989 with the fall of Communism, and it has taken them thirty years to lose it despite the odds. It has staked everything on this one only to be staring failure in the face. For the Regime this is an existential matter. If it is seen to lose yet again it will be utterly discredited, having staked everything on a gambit which appears to have failed.

The Regime has lied to you about everything concerning Ukraine, just as it has presented a bizarre distortion of reality in practically every other issue of note for the past several years. I do not think it can recover from such a tremendous loss of face as presented by the sudden revelation that it has fabricated a completely false narrative on the scale of that seen over Ukraine.

The narrative about the war which has been packaged for our consumption is one which cannot account for the return to nation state politics. With the sudden collapse of communism, which no intelligence agency predicted, the US found itself the world’s only superpower.

War and Peace Dividends

Aside from the tragedy of this squandered opportunity to build on the peace dividend – a phrase we never seem to hear any more – the United States enjoyed a period of perhaps thirty two years of unchallenged global supremacy. No one refused to pick up the phone to the US, as they do now.

It is a cruel accident of fate that the neoconservatives – a fringe group of former Trotskyites – happened to be adjacent to US power at a time it required some new, invigorating idea to guide its policy through an extraordinary moment of unipolarity.

The peace dividend was supposed to be the benefit of the new era of cooperation and friendship which was to replace the Cold War. It was to be derived precisely from the elimination of enormous military budgets, inflated by the arms race between NATO and the Soviet Union. The money was supposed instead to spent on improving your life at home. The current US Secretary of Defence serves on the board of Raytheon, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers.

Lockheed Martin - treading softly, carrying a shock ‘n’ awe stick.

What followed instead of global security was a succession of wars. The next one, whose trailer we are all watching now, will be a similar exercise in handing dividends to the military industrial complex whilst stimulating economic collapse throughout Europe and the wider world.

There is no plan as to what is to come next, once war is achieved, nor is there any interest in addressing the combination of inflation and recession known as ‘stagflation’. The neoconservative faction which directs US foreign policy – and therefore that of most NATO countries – has never been interested in the economic consequences of its actions.

The actions of the US are simply the actions of a nation state attempting to preserve its interests. With the current faction controlling US/NATO foreign policy, the interpretation of interests means ‘asserting US dominance by military force’. It is of course a disastrous, if for some lucrative, policy, which has led to the destruction of many nations and the reinvigoration of the enemies of the US in every war it has fought since NATO was founded.

Russia too is no innocent. Nations are not innocent. Their interests are pursued by their governments according to those governments’ understanding of what their national interest is at the time. It is noteworthy that the co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, Robert Kagan, admits that the policies of the US inspired by his faction did in fact provoke Russia to invade Ukraine.

He wrote

“Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post – Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe.

Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact.”

The Dangers of Freedom to Democracy

We have now returned to the state of global affairs which sees nation states acting independently of a single power bloc to serve their own interests. The war in Ukraine is Russia doing so, the proxy war waged by the US and its client states is likewise an expression of that nation’s interests. Neither of these actions is morally good, and neither side is on yours.

This is politics on the state level. It has nothing to do with your interests, and the power struggle between nations will be presented to you in simple, emotional terms matched to symbols. You may adopt these symbols in order to feel good about yourself, to feel part of something, to feel you are doing something.

These symbols and the simplified moral narrative they represent are created to be easily attached to your emotions, so that anyone who does not display them nor support them makes you feel bad, as if you have been attacked personally.

The cruel irony is that the use of these symbols and their widespread adoption by ordinary people makes it far more likely that you will indeed be attacked personally. This is not an outcome which any sane person in possession of these facts would welcome.

This is the reason free speech is to be feared. Free speech is not just a problem for Twitter employees. Twitter is, like all the big tech companies, an arm of the US government intelligence community. The information monopolies are places where the acceptable version of reality is manufactured. Without censorship and punishment they can no longer function as intended – to control the population without force. This has always been the purpose of Bernays’ ‘engineered consent’.

The United States Government has created a Disinformation Governance Board, which is to combat Russian ‘misinformation’ in the buildup to war. This comes as Twitter is taken over by a self declared free speech champion, and mirrors the establishment of the Committee on Public Information which Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, among others, used to propagandise the US population into both world wars.

The United States routinely suspends free speech in a time of war. It is also quite normal to create some ‘Ministry of Truth’ in wartime to secure a uniformity of messaging - or propaganda. Here is the new head of Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board, singing a happy propaganda song.

This makes the move towards free speech on Twitter an astonishing break with State power and policy, which may conclude with the sanctioning and prosecution of Twitter’s new owner.

Elon Musk is not a superhero, though he is heroically reckless if he does not recognise he is staking his life against a system which cannot survive without censorship and propaganda. The Regime is real, and it favours these means of dominating its populations whilst maintaining an appearance of moral legitimacy. Refusing open repression in favour of limits on speech, it governs by coercion through relentless and intrusive propaganda. Its policing favours the insane and the unstable. Its memes appeal to those whose minds it has already broken.

The Regime is absolutely corrupt and has no legitimacy – moral, political or otherwise. It is literally bankrupt. Our birthright has not been sold for a mess of pottage – it has been squandered in a mess which may soon get much, much worse.

“Our Lady of good counsel, pray for us”