In France, the Secretary of State responsible for citizenship, Sonia Backès, tries to discredit nonconforming opinions. File photo.
By Thierry Meyssan – Nov 10, 2022
This is a debate that we thought was closed: Westerners had affirmed that freedom of expression is an essential prerequisite for democracy and that they would never violate it again. However, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, and Germany have already embarked on the path of censorship. Now, there are things that cannot be said.
Freedom of expression had been a feature of the West since the 18th century. This was the basis on which the political regime supported by the middle classes was built: democracy. The principle according to which the general will would emerge from the confrontation of various opinions was no longer contested. Any attack on this freedom was seen as a blow to the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
However, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the World War tore the West apart, the British, then the Americans, did not hesitate to use modern means of propaganda, not only against their enemies, but also against their own population [1]. For the first time, democratic governments were setting up programs to deceive their fellow citizens. At the end of this war, the British prided themselves on their successes, suggesting a possible use of war propaganda in times of peace. Also, when the capitalist economic system was threatened and even before the Second World War had started, democracies and freedom of expression were put on hold, and propaganda resumed, first in Italy and Germany, then throughout the West.
For three quarters of a century, Westerners have sworn to defend their values and no longer practice propaganda for internal use.
Today, as in the thirties, the present capitalist system is threatened by the development of inequalities between voters, but in a way that we have never known. If the industrialist Henry Ford said, during the crisis of 1929, that the salary of a boss should not exceed 40 times that of one of his workers, today that of Elon Musk is 38.5 million times that of some of its employees in the United States. The democratic principle “One man, one vote” no longer has any relation to reality.
It is in this context that freedom of expression has been challenged by Westerners. Social media, including Facebook and Twitter, censored governments and ultimately the sitting president of the United States. They were not violating the Constitution, since it had guaranteed this freedom only in the face of abuses of political power. The fact that Elon Musk has just bought Twitter and announced that he wants to make it a free network does not change what happened. The idea that we cannot say everything has already taken hold.
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The intellectuals perceive that we are going to change the economic and political regime. In recent years, many of them have become supporters of power, whether financial or political, and have abandoned their critical function. Whatever the evolution, they will be on the side of the handle and not the ax. For six years, they have been telling us about the danger of Fake News, that is, biased information, and the need to control what people say and write. Their discourse distinguishes people who are in the right from those who are in error, denying the principle of democratic equality.
Engaged in the trap of Thucydides, the Anglo-Saxons provoked the civil war in Ukraine and the Russian intervention to end it. Gradually, the West enters the war, in the military sense, against Russia and, in the economic sense, against China. All the prejudices according to which it is not possible to make war with powers with which one has intense economic exchanges are contradicted. As in the two World Wars, the world is divided into two camps which are in the process of separating.
So government propaganda is back in the West.
For the first time, the 2020 US presidential election has been contested. Congress declared Joe Biden the winner, but in reality no one can know who won. It is not possible, as in the case of Bush versus Gore (2000), to recount the ballots because the problem is not there: in many places, the counting of the votes was held behind closed doors. Maybe nobody cheated, but there was no transparency of the election; an essential procedure in a democracy. Already in 2000, the Federal Supreme Court had put an end to the recount of the ballots, considering that the Constitution did not refer to an election of the president by direct universal suffrage, but relied on the will of each state.
Before any other debate, the mid-term elections are therefore dominated by the question of the non-respect of democratic procedures by the “democratic” camp.
Excerpt from the minutes of the “Disinformation Governance Council”.
United States
The United States has a Global Engagement Center (GEC), that is to say a structure, within the Department of State, to coordinate the official speeches of its allies. They also have, still in the State Department, an undersecretary in charge of propaganda abroad under the title of “Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.” However, in April 2022, a step was taken: “proclaimed president” Joe Biden surrounded himself with a propaganda specialist, Nina Jankowicz.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, former judge Alejandro Mayorkas, created a “Disinformation Governance Board” and appointed her [Jankowicz] to chair it. It was, no more, no less, than to reconstitute the device of war propaganda created by president Woodrow Wilson, in 1917 [2].
Nina Jankowicz was presented as a young researcher, specialist in “Russian disinformation.” In reality, she was an employee of Madeleine Albright’s National Democratic Institute, responsible for defending the interests of the Bidens in Ukraine.
This charming lady worked in the team of the candidate Volodymyr Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine [3]. She was previously, in the midst of the civil war, in the service of Pavlo Klimkin, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of President Petro Poroshenko. She then opposed the Minsk agreements, although they had been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. During this long stay in Ukraine, she developed a theory on Russian disinformation to which she devoted a book: How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict. Unaware of the reality of the civil war and its 20,000 dead, she exposed all the current clichés about the bad Russians who wanted to extend their empire to Donbass by lying to the Europeans.
During this period, Nina Jankowicz used the Ukrainian association StopFake, subsidized by the National Endowment for Democracy (in other words by the CIA), the British government and George Soros, to make believe that the Maidan coup was a popular revolution. [4] .
In the video below, she continues to lie and praises the “integral nationalist” militias Aidar (whose practice of torture Amnesty International had already denounced), Dnipro-1, and of course the Azov battalion.
In 2018, she defended the Nazi C14 militia [5], assuring that it had not practiced pogroms against Gypsies, that it was all… Russian disinformation.
This expert on lies did not fail to lie again in the United States about the charges of treason brought against Donald Trump (the Steele file) and to deny the crimes of Hunter Biden [6]. She even went so far as to present the president’s son’s computer, seized by the FBI, as a “Russian invention”.
In the face of criticism, the Disinformation Governance Council was disbanded on May 17 [7]; however, minutes from a region within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, shows that it persists in another form [8]. In addition, according to the Inspector General of Administration, his function remains necessary [9].
UK
The British, for their part, preferred to rely on an “association,” the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, to carry out, in place of the government, what it intends to do, without bearing responsibility for it. This think tank , created by Lord George Weidenfeld, Baron Weidenfeld, an “Adamantine Zionist” in his own words, is supposed to fight against extremism. In reality, he too is dedicated to spreading lies to stifle glaring truths. The ISD writes reports on its own initiative (or rather that of the British government), but also at the request of European governments which finance it.
What is true among the inventors of modern propaganda is also true in Europe.
Poland
In February, that is to say at the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Polish Defense Council ordered the French company Orange, which is the main provider of Internet access in this country, to censor several internet sites, including that of the Voltaire Network (Voltairenet.org). Contacted by registered letter, the latter did not wish to send us the letter from the Polish authorities. As for the latter, they simply did not answer us. According to European treaties, the Defense Council has the authority to impose military censorship for national security purposes.
Italy
In March, the Corriere della Sera revealed a government program to monitor people labeled as “pro-Russian” [10]. The ANSA press agency has even published an issue of the Hybrid Bulletin that the Italian Department of Information for Security ( Dipartimento delle Informazioni per la Sicurezza ) devotes to it [11].
Germany
In Germany, the Minister of the Interior, the Social Democrat Nancy Fraeser, has also set up a monitoring body. Going much further than the others, she gave it the mission of “harmonizing the news” in the media. For several months, in the greatest secrecy, she has been bringing together major press bosses and explaining to them what should not be published.
Italy and Germany had a cruel experience of censorship during fascism and Nazism, so it is particularly worrying to see them take this path. The same causes always produce the same effects. It is therefore not surprising that, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, Italy and Germany refused, on November 4, 2022 at the United Nations General Assembly, to vote for a resolution condemning Nazism.
[1] “The techniques of modern military propaganda”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 18 May 2016.
[2] « Why Biden is in Danger of Replicating Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine », John Maxwell Hamilton & Kevin R. Kosar, Politico, May 5, 2022.
[3] « How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts », Taylor Lorenz, The Washington Post, May 18, 2022.
[4] « Meet the Head of Biden’s New “Disinformation Governing Board” », Lev Golinkin, The Nation, May 12, 2022.
[5] “Ukrainian racial law”, Voltaire Network, 9 March 2022.
[6] « La décadence de l’Empire états-unien », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 6 septembre 2022.
[7] «The Disinformation Governance Board, Disavowed», The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2022.
[8] «Disinformation Governance Board Minutes», CISA, June 14, 2022.
[9] «DHS Needs a Unified Strategy to Counter Disinformation Campaigns», Office of Inspector General, August 10, 2022.
[10] “NATO monitors influencers who question official version of Ukraine war”, Voltaire Network, 19 June 2022.
[11] Hybrid Bulletin n°4, Dipartimento delle Informazioni per la Sicurezza, 15 maggio 2022.
Thierry Meyssan
French journalist, writer and political activist. Meyssan's book 9/11: The Big Lie (L'Effroyable imposture ) challenges the official account of events of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He is the author of investigations into the extreme right-wing, particularly France's National Front militias, as well as into the Catholic church. Meyssan currently is chairman at Voltaire Network.
