The pen is mightier than the sword, so goes a saying that has proved to be true throughout the ages. In a Western style market economy, everything has a price, everything is for sale, including the most precious commodity of all – information, news, history. This is the mechanism of censorship and self-censorship in the West. Money doesn’t talk, it either swears or buys silence. This censorship is more effective and insidious than Soviet style censorship, which was obvious and discounted, because along with the censorship in the West is a nonstop PR campaign by the media that insist there is no censorship.
In the Soviet Union of bygones days, every citizen was guaranteed a job, free health care, pensions, free universal education up to a PhD level, free or subsidized housing, maternity leave, a month of more vacation time. So, the only incentive to toe the line was the law and the discipline of the Communist Party. Censorship of the media which did exist was a formal matter and its stringency ebb and flowed with the times. Reporters and editors knew that and so did the reading/viewing public who understood that what they were reading was from the state’s point of view and so discounted it to a degree. If you bucked the system of media censorship you could be fired from you job as a reporter, but you will get another job, perhaps as a forest ranger in the Siberia, yet still be entitled to all benefits cited above.
In the West however, and especially the United States you are guaranteed nothing, no job – no health insurance or care, no housing, no heat, no clothing, nothing to eat, let alone pensions, vacations, or a free college degree. To get and keep your job, everyone, including hobos learned this lesson very early on – to get along, you go along, if you want to keep you job. The hobos just don’t go along.
Add to that simple dynamic, the prospect of not only making a half decent living like driving a truck or working on the line or in the mine but making millions of dollars a year like major news and media figures do in Western market economies. You don’t need to formally instruct these news “readers/reporters” on what to say or threaten them with one-way ticket to a forest ranger job in Siberia. The “anchors/reporters” will willingly lie their heads off if need be and at the same time swear on a stack of Bibles that there is no media censorship in the US. And if one of the “reporters” grows a conscience” and won’t “go along”, there are 10,000 journalism “majors” waiting in line who are more than willing. That is the Totalitarian Power of Money, an agency of censorship so much more powerful that communist leaders, with their basically egalitarian society, could only envy. That makes Western self-censorship work 24/7 every day without hardly anyone giving it the slightest thought or criticism.
If you misspell Srebrenica, the spell checker in MS Word will offer the correct spelling. If you misspell Jasenovac, the first mass death camp in WWII Europe, your MS Word spell checker offers Casanova. The reason is clear, Srebrenica, the phony genocide of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, 8,000 Muslim men and boys, 8,000 Muslin men and boys ad infinitum, ad nauseum has been so pounded into the public consciousness by Goebbles like propaganda that it has become an unassailable truth while the real genocide of 800,000 – 1,000,000 Serbs, Jews, and Romas at Jasenovac and elsewhere in the WWII Croatia, is unknown.
The Western media is a con game. The New York Times or a TV network from time to time will sacrifice a reporter over trivial plagiarism like news anchor like Brian Williams. In William’s case, he was fired allegedly for misrepresenting his phony Iraq War combat experience, but in reality, it’s part of a sophisticated, but never ending con game. The idea here is the same as when the con man drops a $5 bill at your feet and insist its yours and you will think “Wow, what an honest man”, when in fact he is gaining your confidence to set you up to lend him $500 or buy the Brooklyn Bridge. So, we are to believe NBC cares so much about the truth that they would suspend and demote Williams their top news “reporter/anchor”, then the rest of their reporting must surely be true and accurate. When in fact it is anything but.
Take for example the New York Times propagandistic “reporting” on the nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which provided the public opinion support for the unjustified and illegal aggression against Iraq. The NYT was dead wrong, exposed as a liar, yet no one complained, no one went to jail for their role in the destruction of a country and a million deaths. As Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s Chief of Staff once remark, “The Wall Street Journal lies without consequence” This sociopathic con game is not part of the system, it is the system and like a sociopath, is beyond reform.
They are all in it together because money is like gravity, every mass attracts every other mass so that given enough time every institution is tied to and interlock with every other be, it the City of London’s, Wall Street banks or the Vatican. In the US this money syndrome is called the “Deep State”. The Deep State can buy and influence everyone everywhere, be it the national media, intelligence agencies, Congress, Hollywood, universities (got to get those grants, academic freedom and integrity is as much a myth as the “free press”), NGOs, philanthropics and the list goes on because an army of new Ivy leaguers arrives every year to find every nook and granny that can be used to game the system 24/7 rain or sunshine, nonstop. The power of the market economy for individuals to promote their self-interest knows no bounds. Everyone is trying to make a buck, manic energy, and creativity for good or evil never takes a holiday. Truth doesn’t stand a chance.
This swirling mass of money and power, with a constant flux of players, but with a never ending urgency to accumulate even more money and power is like the gravity of a massive star which can distort space/time and bend light in a “gravity lens” in which an observer on the far side of an event sees an inverted image. The Deep State’s “Gravity Lens of the Market Media” operates just as efficiently where Up is Down, Black Is White, Evil Is Good, Good is Evil, War Is Peace. That’s is why virtually no one ever heard of the Serbian Holocaust and why no so called “human rights organization” protested Slobodan Milosevic jailing on trumped up charges and eventual murder when his heroic defense proved to be too effective.
The vast majority pretend that profound censorship doesn’t exist or doesn’t care it existed, because even to admit censorship existed in the West could get you censored or fired. Recently and thanks to the Internet, which, up until now has not been censored, our clearly censored news started to be called what is really is, “fake news” Srebrenica was fake news, Jasenovac is the truth.
For an academic treatment of Western Market Censorship, avail yourself of Professors Dr. Edward Herman and Dr. Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent, the Political Economy of the Mass Media”.
1 Comment
Spot on take down of the “free press” of the West.