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["He who controls today`s Internet servers, controls the intellectual record of mankind."] In the UK right now, there are 300 secret gag orders. Those are gag orders that not only prevent the press from reporting corruption and abuse; they prevent the press from reporting that the press has been gagged. This is not the liberal democracy that we had all dreamed of. This is an encroaching, privatized censorship regime. And just like everything else in the West that becomes privatized and fiscalized, censorship also is not only a mechanism that is implied by the state. It is something that can be hijacked by wealthy plutocrats, by big companies, to use the coercive mechanisms of the State through the judicial system, through unequal access to the judicial system, through patronage networks, to have material removed permanently from the historical record. So, in the West --- and we are, after all, in Norway --- we should not be too proud about our sense that there is no state censorship, because we have privatized state censorship. We have made it more complex and not as obvious. It is not a brute hammer anymore. It is a sophisticated device, like money laundering through Caribbean tax shelters is a sophisticated device, where the brutality is hidden in its complexity. Similarly, when we see the path that countries like the United States -- which once had a proud tradition of freedom of the press ---is going down, we have to question whether it is really holding those values anymore, and what we should do about it. Because, if we don't have Western countries as a beacon on the hill for Enlightenment values, what countries are left to hold that value? You may -- those of you who are familiar here with World War II --- remember the statement that was put by the Nazis on front of concentration camps that "work brings freedom," an idea that Himmler had when he himself was in prison. But in my investigations of exposing documents which include many abuses by the United States military, which includes the main manuals for prison camps, like Abu Graibh, Bagram and Guantanamo, I have seen pictures on the front of those camps of their slogans, So guess which camp has "Honor bound to defend freedom" on the front of it. The defense of freedom as a value is on the front of Guantanamo Bay. And I say that as a perversion of the truth that slogan is worse than "Work brings freedom." And we in the West should be aware of that perversion. And understand that the alliance which once existed between liberals and libertarians and the military-industrial complex in opposing Soviet abuses in the Cold War - is gone. Where once upon a time people who stood up for enlightenment values domestically, in Western countries, who stood up for human rights and freedom of the press domestically in Western countries, liberals, libertarians and the press itself were in a tacit alliance with warhogs. They were in a tacit alliance with those people who opposed the Soviet Union merely for geopolitical reasons. And that alliance was to pick up a moral stick and to beat the Soviet Union for its abuses, its terrible abuses, censorship The government. and military joined this alliance in recognition of the geopolitical value of the alliance as a moral stick with which to beat the Soviet Union for its terrible abuses in its censorship. As of 1990-91 that artificial alliance, that temporary alliance. had dissipated, with reversion to a different standard, where the natural interests of authority, the natural interests of the intelligence agencies and the natural interests of the military is in stifling press reportage of abuse, and it has been reasserted in Western countries. In this broader framework of what we do, it's to try and build a historical, intellectual record of how our civilization actually works in practice, now, from the inside, everywhere, in every country around the world, from the inside. Because all of our decisions, individual decisions, our political decisions are based on what we know. Humanity is nothing but what we know and what we have. And what we have can be replaced and degrades quickly. And what we know is everything and it is our limit of what we can be. So before we can embark on any particular political stratagem we first have to know where we are. If we don't know where we are, it's impossible to know where we're going. Likewise, it's impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they're going on. So I ask you to think about the words of Macchiavelli, think about them in their negative, when he said, "Thus it happened in matters of state when knowing afar off which is only given a prudent man to do the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured; but when for want of such knowledge they're allowed to grow until everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found." For secret planning is secret usually for a reason, because if it's abusive it is opposed. So it's our task to find secret abuses planned and expose them where they can be exposed before they are implemented; for if they are exposed by their implementation, by people suffering from that abuse, then the abuse has already occurred and it is too late. He who controls today`s Internet servers, controls the intellectual record of mankind. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
