Democracy in Crisis

Caitlin A. Johnstone June 12, 2023 When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves. Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media. Originally published at Mronline, on May 28, 2023 A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of...

The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, and 4 others Originally published by Racket News on Substack on May 10, 2023 Introduction by Matt Taibbi On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.  Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new...

We believe that public education about China is of great importance, not the least given the fact that so much of what the Western mainstream media focus on China is negative, condescending or otherwise unbalanced – some even pure propaganda, as we have shown in the TFF Smokescreen Report. We also believe that it is wrong to try to understand China – which is so very different in most ways from the West – by applying only Western concepts and values. It’s any concerned academic’s duty also to try to understand China on its own premises, its culture, history and ways of thinking. Here is a video – and there are many like it – that explains to you in just 7 minutes how China’s political system works. It also explains why China is neither a ‘dictatorship’ nor a Western-style democracy – how it is a completely different type of...

Christopher Quigley April 28, 2023 Very few people today know that between 1934 and 1961 the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote A Study of History describing the rise and fall of the 23 civilizations he had identified in human history. In contrast to Oswald Spengler, who thought that the rise and fall of civilizations was inevitable, Toynbee maintained that the fate of civilizations is determined by their response to the challenges facing them. In fact the unifying theme throughout the book is challenge and response. One of the ground-breaking discoveries by Toynbee is the fact that there have been so many highly developed civilizations. Understandably in the West, our history lessons focus on our own civilization with its roots in Greek and Roman cultures, but in addition, there have been Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Islamic, Sumerian and Orthodox civilizations, to name but a few. According to Toynbee, civilizations start to decay...

Liu Xin, CGTN April 1, 2023 A short, spot-on documentary about problems the West is not too keen to discuss openly. It ends with an effective statement based on this analysis of media developments over 50 years. Enjoy!

Well over a year after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is backsliding away from democratic freedoms and liberal pluralism. And US and European taxpayers are unwittingly being made complicit in Ukraine’s backsliding away from democratic freedoms and liberal pluralism. Below, see also the US State Department’s quite critical report on human rights in Ukraine. Branko Marcetic March 22, 2023 Few Ukrainians have spent as many years of their life fighting authoritarianism as Volodymyr Chemerys. The sixty-year-old Ukrainian human rights campaigner’s record of activism reads like a history of Ukrainian protest: the 1990 “Revolution on Granite” against Soviet domination of the country, today dubbed the “first Maidan”; the 2000–2001 “Ukraine without Kuchma” protests targeting an independent Ukraine’s later, similarly repressive president; founding human rights bodies that monitored and gave legal aid to the Euromaidan protesters in 2014; and fiercely criticizing Ukraine’s post-Maidan establishment and the growing menace of the far right that came...

Chandran Nair March 14, 2023 The mass hysteria reflects the biases inherent in the world’s most powerful media outlets.  A key feature of mainstream Western media today is the relentless China-bashing. It is off the charts and tiring, often involving regurgitated trivia or fabricated stories with no evidence to support callous statements about the country, demonstrating a deep lack of understanding. But such stories continue to be churned out with no end in sight. Countering this in international media by offering more balanced views for a global audience is near impossible as censorship is rife. There almost seems to be a global compact to control the narrative, a propaganda war powered by today’s digital technology. Just try looking for a positive story on China any day of the week in any of the leading global media outlets. Apart from reports in January about the Lunar New Year, there will hardly be...

Lev Voronkov January 25, 2023 In the modern lexicon of supporters of the liberal ideology, the word “democracy” means a certain positive phenomenon, to the triumph of which humanity must certainly strive in all spheres of public life. They declared despotism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, totalitarianism and other similar negative things as the antipodes of this phenomenon. Many politicians in Western countries are now inclined to assert that the central place in world politics and international relations is occupied not by a system of relations between sovereign states, based on universally recognized norms of international law, but by the struggle of democratic political regimes against authoritarian ones, which should be conducted in accordance with “the rules” established by them. The list and content of such rules are not available; for some reason they are kept secret. But one thing is clear, namely that they have little in common with generally recognized norms...

Illustration: Craig Stephens Li Xing 19 January 2023 – The West likes to argue that market capitalism and political liberalism go hand in hand; in reality, the former has proved far more powerful than the latter – Having made countries around the world economically interdependent, the West should not expect them to jeopardise their global links by taking political sides US President Joe Biden has framed the Ukraine war as a battle between “democracy and autocracy”, while also claiming that “the West is now stronger, more united than it has ever been”. During a recent visit to Taiwan, former Danish leader and Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that, when combined, the world’s democracies represent 60 per cent of the global economy, providing an overwhelming deterrence to Beijing’s ambitions regarding Taiwan. The irony is that, if we applied this logic to the Ukraine war, the US and Europe would have already...

Paul Krugman June 19, 2018 – published here on December 15, 2022 Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs and breaking up trade agreements are all about turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations. The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely. What do these stories have in common? Obviously, they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst person ever to hold his position. But there’s...

Jan Oberg November 18, 2022 This article was written in October for the distinguished China Investment – a magazine sponsored by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. It was published in November here in both Chinese and English. Due to the reactions to my articles there, it looks like I shall become a regular contributor to China Investment like I am to the China Daily. The European Commission has just decided on new sanctions against Russia – in fact, the eighth round of such sanctions. This time the reason is that Russia has held referenda in the Donbas region of Ukraine. I sense we’re witnessing a new disease – Sanctionitis. It seems related to a larger, fatal disease with few treatment options, namely the SHMSI Syndrome:Sanctionitis + Hubris + Masochism + Self-Destructive Impulses. The patient has foggy ideas about reality and his own strength and exaggerates ad absurdum the positive...

Caitlin Johnstone November 15, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article here So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online. Originally published in Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter on November 1, 2022 While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”: According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review,...