No true freedom of expression in US

If narrow minds continue to support the totalitarian government of the US and its allies as champions of “democracy,” we must try to understand how anyone could be so mistaken.

Could a person really support the apparatus being used to deprive him of liberty, or is he only afraid of speaking out against his chains? When one hears pundits defending the US government’s destructive and failed foreign policy in Syria or Ukraine, those opinions should be met with disbelief.

In actual fact, they don’t really believe what they are saying, and are just afraid for their careers if they should contradict their government’s tyrannical and idiotic policies once they are in motion. This craven desire to protect careers over truth is the motor of sycophants, who parade their support of a failing government in the press.

One of my namesakes among British philosophers, Jeremy Bentham, famously coined the term “panopticon” to describe a circular prison wherein prisoners are controlled by the specter of the watchman rather than relying on physical shackles and guards. The success of the panopticon relies on the subjects of surveillance having some awareness of the watcher’s capabilities sufficient to make them fearful, but keeps them guessing at whether or not the subject is really being watched.

One way or another, citizens of the US and many other countries have long believed the US government to have tremendous capabilities to watch them. The information disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden merely served to confirm many people’s fears, which were often not expressed due to their apparent similarity to the conspiracy theories.

The revelation that our every private communication is being intercepted by an American government agency, and Britain’s General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) serves to augment that abuse, has created a significant amount of distrust between the rulers and the ruled. It would have been disturbing enough if the government was merely monitoring the trails made publicly by individuals in their use of the Internet. People might not have objected to that practice, but they should. For the government to take up the role of watching everyone is for the government to take up the role of controlling everyone.

Americans no longer control their government, but are controlled by their government. The US government has proven that it will do anything against its own people, or any foreign people, to survive and make itself as powerful as possible.

Edward Snowden claimed that the American surveillance apparatus is filled with dissent comparable with his own. It is held in check by “false” patriotism, which is in reality fear and craven obedience to authority figures. The same obedience is apparent in the press, and became even more so in the UK after the British government forced The Guardian to smash its own hard drives lest they publish more of the truth.

On that day when a newspaper was forced to censor itself to save a red-faced government from shame, British democracy was severely set back and the government’s legitimacy plummeted to zero. At the same time, The Guardian began its new role as a parrot of government policy rather than questioning it, prompting its critics to establish the Offguardian website to host the conversations The Guardian seems scared of.

In an atmosphere of the state’s pervasive, coercive interference against public debate, anyone who supports the government policy or shares its aims is a coward. Their arguments spring not from their own convictions, but from their fear at the costs to their jobs or their standing in the eyes of the law if they don’t parrot the absurdities of the rulers.

It is through motivation by this cowardice that so-called liberal pundits have been consumed in absurd anti-Russian and anti-Iranian narratives of foreign policy. While they claim to believe in some forms of democracy or liberty that compel them to oppose the so-called “authoritarian” Iran or Russia, these attack dogs are slaves of their own authoritarian masters.

Media commentators who share the government phobias of foreign powers like Iran and Russia are at the intellectual level of dogs. Xenophobic and noisy at the thought of anything unfamiliar to their primitive and violent impulses, the only thing they understand is the stick being used by their government to beat them, so their barking should be treated with contempt.

In the age of the Internet, it is hard to believe that anyone could be dumb enough to accept government propaganda as fact. Such people are still there, but are much more abundant today in the press than in the general public. We have a press that lies endlessly, parroting the statements of the government as gospel while pretending to have some understanding of “democracy.”

These criticisms of the mainstream media may seem excessive or vitriolic, but they are well-earned. When the earliest proponents of the modern accepted forms of freedom of speech led the American and French Revolutions, they never sought freedom of speech for the state or parrots to amplify its voice and create its false image of legitimacy.

Freedom of speech was created for the common citizen, so the pundits who use it to support the criminal oligarchic regime issuing threats against them or smashing their hard drives are not exercising freedom of speech but undermining it in the worst possible way. The attack dogs of the police state do not add to a healthy democracy but subvert it, so it would be best if they said nothing at all.

HJB/MKA

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk