Free Speech Under Attack VI

This reading carries on from here.

The 16th chapter in Free Speech Under Attack is ‘Free Speech and the Fate of Socrates’ by Tim Wikiriwhi.

This chapter recounts the trial and death of Socrates, who angered the elites of ancient Athens by telling the truth. Those who represented the status quo, and who therefore benefit the most from the commonly-accepted lies, were happy to tell lies about Socrates or to use political force against him.

This is not much different to how Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt got the mainstream media to tell the nation that VJM Publishing was similar in mentality to Brenton Tarrant, just because we sold ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts. There is nothing that a corrupt ruling class hates more than an honest person explaining the lies and falsehoods used by the ruling class to maintain their dominance.

Wikiriwhi puts it best when he says that “Free speech has always been despised by those seeking to perpetuate falsehoods and control the minds of the ‘sheeple’.” This point cannot be laboured enough – those against free speech always take their position because they wish to perpetuate lies.

Unfortunately, Wikiriwhi credits Protestant Christianity with free speech in the West, when Protestants were still burning people at the stake for heresy as little as 400 years ago. Calvinists in Switzerland were even happy to burn to death as great a man as Michael Servetus. The truth is that all the rights we possess have been prised from the claws of an Abrahamic theocracy that has darkened the West for over 1,600 years.

However, Wikiriwhi is dead right when he says that free speech has to be defended to the utmost, for, without it, all the other freedoms are lost in turn. He’s also right when he points out that the modern left hate no-one more than a member of a slave demographic who has escaped the plantation (Wikiriwhi is Maori). He concludes by pointing out that trying to silence people is the real hate.

The 17th chapter is ‘Hey, Give Us Back Our Rights’ by Robert Stanmore.

Stanmore opens this chapter by recounting the ways that free speech rights have been stripped away in favour of supposed other rights. The New Zealand Human Rights Act makes abusive and insulting language illegal – Stanmore contends that this should be changed. Laws must punish actions, not thoughts.

He points out that most of the political elite support restrictions on free speech, as shown by their widespread support for the Harmful Digital Communications Act in 2015. As such, the people are going to have to fight them in order to assert their rights to free speech.

This chapter mentions, at several points, David Seymour’s Freedom to Speak Bill. It also points out that it is often foreign interests that are against our rights to speak freely. Fundamentally, however, our enemies are not foreigners but the enemies of Western Civilisation themselves, whether external or internal. Free speech is an essential human right, and anyone who would take it from us is our enemy.

In summary, Free Speech Under Attack is an excellent and brave book by some intelligent and original thinkers. It’s a very timely volume, given the relentless and broad-fronted assault on free speech currently being carried out by authoritarians, particularly leftist ones. With any luck, many of the suggestions in it will be adopted by a wider movement of free people.

Anyone who believes in cognitive liberty and who doesn’t trust the mainstream media (i.e. the typical VJM Publishing reader) would enjoy reading this book.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Neoliberal Totalitarianism

The 20th Century gave us the right-wing totalitarianism of the Nazis and the left-wing totalitarianism of the Communists. The trauma caused by these ideologies caused people to gravitate towards the centre, in the belief that this was the opposite of totalitarianism. But the 21st Century has given us a new, centrist form of totalitarianism: the neoliberal form.

Neoliberal totalitarianism announced itself last week with the unpersoning of American President Donald Trump. Trump was first banned from Twitter, and then FaceBook, and then the rest of the neoliberal establishment piled in. Within days, he was even banned from Spotify.

The tech tyrants justified this by saying that Trump had violated the terms and conditions of the respective websites. But Twitter continues to host representatives of ISIS – who have been described as “winning the social media war” – as well as supporters of the Chinese Communist Party who argue in favour of concentration camps, and people sharing videos celebrating the Charlie Hebdo murders.

Nazi totalitarianism sought to control everyone’s lives down to the minutest detail, and was willing to destroy anyone who resisted. Communist totalitarianism also sought to control everyone’s lives down to the minutest detail, and was also willing to destroy anyone who resisted. The rhetoric that these forces used may have been different, but fundamentally both were authoritarian movements.

Neoliberal totalitarianism is just as bad. Like Nazism and Communism, it seeks total control over the lives of the citizens. Much like other totalitarian systems, it involves Big Business and Big Government working together against the common person. The degree of authoritarianism is the same. As Trump learned, when the neoliberal totalitarians decide that you’re gone, you’re gone.

Neoliberal totalitarianism is much more sophisticated than either Nazism or Communism.

The crude tyrannies of the 20th Century were not at all shy about making enemies, whether external or internal. Theirs was very much a rule of iron. Dissenters were crushed, sometimes literally as in the case of Tienanmen Square. Consent was achieved through submission to fear. Secret police were an everyday menace.

The tyrannies of the 21st Century are more the rule of silver. The logic is to abnormalise violence as much as possible, with the intent of making it unthinkable for any of their victims to use it against them. Neoliberal totalitarianism achieves its power through absolute control of the media matrix.

The reason for the current purge of wrongthinkers from social media is to maintain the effectiveness of that media control.

Josef Goebbels, in his Principles of Propaganda, wrote that “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority. It must issue all the propaganda directives. It must explain propaganda directives to important officials and maintain their morale. It must oversee other agencies’ activities which have propaganda consequences.”

This totalitarian approach was the basis of the Nazi propaganda strategy. Far from recognising the value of free speech, the Nazis banned every propaganda organ that wasn’t under their control. The Nazi Party would be the sole source of truth for the German citizenry. A similar situation arose in Communist countries.

Goebbels understood that, if all other voices were silenced, people would unquestioningly follow the narratives they were given. It was only when other voices started to question the veracity of the Nazi propaganda that it started to become less effective. So all those questioning it were silenced. Anyone pointing out how the Nazis were lying were liquidated, many in concentration camps.

Totalitarian governments attack free speech with more fervour than they attack any other freedom. This is because free speech is the basis of every other freedom. Without free speech, the other freedoms cannot be peacefully defended. The loss of free speech is therefore the breach in the dam that leads inevitably to tyranny.

The neoliberal totalitarianism of today is pushing for the same degree of central control over media content that existed in Nazi or Communist countries. They do this out of similar motivations to the Nazi and Communist totalitarians. Desiring power, and being indifferent to the suffering of the people whose freedoms would be lost, the totalitarian is happy to trade those freedoms away for more control.

The only major difference between the neoliberal totalitarians of 2020 and the Nazi/Communist totalitarians of 1940 is that today’s tyrants are more subtle. They use their total control of the apparatus of propaganda to train the citizens to police each other. They don’t need to put wrongthinkers in gulags if they can train the citizens to shun those wrongthinkers into submission.

Because the citizens themselves act as the overseers of the slave plantation, it feels like they are doing so consensually. As long as no-one questions why it is that people think they way they do, or who decided that they should think that way, the hate machine can roll onwards unimpeded. In this manner, wrongthinkers can be neutralised without provoking resistance.

Any future solution to neoliberal totalitarianism must base itself on anti-totalitarian grounds. This will require common agreement across all of left, right and centre that totalitarian measures are unacceptable. The first step might be to declare common agreement with George Washington that “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

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Clown World Chronicles: Elections In Clown World

That Clown World is at the point where democracy tips over into tyranny is evident from the state of elections today. If there’s anything in today’s world that could be compared to a grotesque circus, it’s our general elections. The political world has always been like a circus, but in Clown World the circus is 24/7.

Problems with starting a democracy in places like Africa, it is said, don’t generally arise during the first election. It’s in one of the subsequent elections, when the winner of the initial election loses, that the problems start happening. It’s all well and good for one party to assume control after winning the first democratic election. What matters more, though, is what happens when they lose control and are asked to hand over power.

Characteristic of democratic elections in African scumholes is that they are contested. Almost inevitably, the loser accuses the winner of cheating, either by stuffing ballot boxes or by intimidating opposition voters into staying home. This is especially likely to be true if the loser won the previous election. It’s common for these disputes to end up in massacres or even civil wars.

Characteristic of democratic elections in the West is that the loser accepts the result. This is why it was so shocking for the 2000 American Presidential Election to drag on for as long as it did. But in Clown World, elections in the West have started to go down the African route.

The first real sign of it was the Russian interference conspiracy theory that was pushed by Democrat Party operatives in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. This conspiracy theory suggested that the election result might not have been legitimate because it was influenced by the actions of the Russian Government, who supposedly purchased enough FaceBook ads to switch the result from Clinton to Donald Trump.

At time of writing this chapter, the result of the 2020 American Presidential Election still isn’t clear. Seven weeks after the election, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has conceded (although the mainstream media has anointed Biden the winner). Trump has mounted a number of legal challenges relating to the vote, and rumours persist that he might try to enlist the military in a coup.

The tendency of Clown World politicians to dispute election results is made worse by the fact that the elections themselves have become detached from reality. The election process presents an image of a politician that 99.9% of voters will never meet. So it’s almost impossible to know if the results of a general election reflect the will of the country. This makes disputes much more plausible.

In Clown World, elections come down to a battle between competing narratives. Whichever narrative can assert itself the strongest wins, regardless of what any vote tally might say. Elections aren’t so much won as consent for one side’s victory is manufactured. This has made elections into permanent public relations exercises more than temporary leadership contests.

Buying media space is how positive public relations are maintained, and thereby how most elections are won. 90% of the time, the better-resourced candidate wins. This is because most voters in a democracy simply vote for the candidate with the most name recognition. If they saw Candidate A on the television and not Candidate B, that must mean that Candidate A is superior.

It’s even possible to calculate how much money you need to buy enough positive attention to win. A seat in the United States House of Representatives, for example, will cost around $1.6 million. However, it’s not always as simple as money – Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million to win the Democratic nomination for the 2020 Presidential election, and failed. Generally speaking, the lower the office the easier it can be bought.

No matter how hard it is to buy an office, though, people will always try. Because of all the mainstream media propaganda and disinformation this leads to, we still don’t know who has won the 2020 Presidential election. Faith in institutions is so low that there’s no-one we trust to tell us the definitive truth about who the President will be. FaceBook will censor anyone questioning Biden’s supposed victory, but as of right now it’s not clear that Trump intends to concede.

The great risk when elections become disputed is that it can lead to tyranny. The logic is that if the other side isn’t going to play fair, then why should we? Mistrust can escalate to the point where both sides reason that they had better get their retaliation in first. At that point, the country is essentially in a state of civil war.

Unfortunately, if the last two decades of American presidential elections are anything to go by, civil war is almost inevitable. It seems like the election results are becoming more and more heavily disputed by the loser. Trump is digging in his heels right now, and ill will is so widespread that if he called for a million Republican supporters to hit the streets with firearms he might get it.

For democratic elections to work, there has to be widespread confidence that the electoral process is legitimate. This means widespread confidence that there is no voter suppression, no foreign interference, no collusion with outside third parties and no influential disinformation campaigns. If one or more of these factors are present, the results are liable to get disputed.

It might well be that democratic elections themselves are inherently signs of Clown World. But the decay doesn’t stop at democratic elections. The predictable future is increased Weimarisation, up to the point where the system collapses or is overthrown. One possible pre-emptive solution is withdrawing the franchise from certain anti-social groups.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Class Relations In Clown World

The West is proud of its egalitarian heritage. We derive a sense of moral superiority from being a culture in which even the lowest classes can, through hard work, determination and applied will, reach the highest positions. The example of Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a frontier log cabin, is archetypal. But class relations in Clown World are very different to those in the 19th century.

In Clown World, we’ve effectively gone back to feudal times.

It’s so hard to buy a house today that, if you aren’t born into money, you will need to be in the top segment of income earners to do it. In both America and Britain, the house price to income ratio is at highs not seen since the aftermath of World War II. In the case of Britain, things are so extreme that you’d have to go back to the Victorian Era to find a time when it was harder for the average person to own their home.

This has led to large proportions of entire generations becoming resigned to paying rent in perpetuity. Some have even labelled the lower classes Generation Rent. Class relations in Clown World are marked by the great distance between the landowning class and the renting class. Many landowners in Clown World make more profit from capital gains on property than they could working for a wage.

This state of class separation is maintained by a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment to destroy class consciousness, the only thing that could really threaten it. The mainstream media pushes any and all alternatives to class consciousness: race consciousness, gender consciousness, age cohort consciousness, any possible corporate brand consciousness. Anything but class consciousness.

These efforts keep class relations much less antagonistic than would otherwise be the case. There are no workers’ marches in Clown World, because the working class is divided along multiple lines of fracture. These lines of fracture prevent the solidarity that would be necessary for collective action.

These divisions are maintained by the control that the ruling class has over the apparatus of propaganda. This control allows them to set the agenda in every Western country, and this agenda is inevitably fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting ageism – and never fighting classism.

Class relations in Clown World, then, are characterised by the relentless efforts of the ruling class to keep the lower classes divided and conquered. The masses are bedazzled by the 24/7 circus of flickering images coming through the television. They are demoralised by the relentless bombardment of bigotry accusations. They are disorientated by the contradictions coming from the government.

The net result of these efforts to keep poor people down is greater inequality, and less social mobility, than ever.

Inequality is now at historic levels. The American Gini Index sits at 41.4, meaning that America is even less equal than kleptocracies like Haiti, Iran and Turkmenistan. Even China and Russia – bywords in some circles for autocratic shitholes – have lower Gini Indexes than America.

It’s similar with homeownership. The homeownership rates in supposed poverty-stricken dumps like India and Mexico is higher than in supposed lands of opportunity like America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the Western mainstream media bleats incessantly about how wonderful everything is and how we’ve never had it so good.

In Clown World, wealth equals the ability to suck productivity out of other people by controlling their labour. The commodification of some people means fat profits for others. The poorer a population is, the more readily they can be extorted out of rents. The class system in Clown World, then, is much like a food chain: energy is passed upwards.

Inequality has reached such levels that a person can be significantly wealthier than average and still be a long way from the upper economic strata. The result of this is a widespread absence of sympathy for those in the lower strata. They are so far below that they might as well be animals. In Clown World, your opinion only matters if you’re wealthy enough to buy media time.

The 2020 American Presidential Election was fought between the billionaire Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a man who had already spent 47 years in the upper levels of American governance. The previous election was fought between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had also spent decades in the upper levels of American governance. The one before that involved Mitt Romney, whose net worth was $250 million, and Barack Obama, the descendant of slave owners.

An Abraham Lincoln is unthinkable today. Someone born into poverty in today’s America is born so far behind that even becoming a homeowner would be a herculean effort. That they might become President is just laughable. Today, the ownership class has a complete lock on positions of power.

Naturally, a situation like this is ripe for revolution.

Democracy is about the easy satisfaction of desires. When those desires can no longer easily be satisfied, dissatisfaction quickly turns into a will to cause chaos. The widespread rioting of 2020 is a foretaste of the inevitable suffering of the next decade. As it becomes harder and harder to meet desires for decent housing and decent pay, people’s willingness to riot will increase.

The real risk of Clown World is that class relations become so bad that a majority of people want to overthrow the system. That could lead to them putting all their energies in behind a tyrannical demagogue. A leader who promised to get revenge on those hoarding property could summon a hurricane of rage behind them.

For class relations to improve, the masses have to have hope again. This doesn’t mean hope of becoming multibillionaires, just hope of meaningfully improving the station into which they were born. It means that they suffer less drudgery and poverty as they get older, and not more. If economic forces or policies push the masses away from hope, they push them into the clutches of fear and hate.

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