The following is an excerpt of a news analysis by journalist Matt Taibbi.
This weekend I re-read 1984, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of doublethink:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.
In the last weeks, Russia took an already exacting speech environment to new extremes… On the flip side, a slew of actions have been taken to crack down on “fake news” and “misinformation” in the West. The big one was the European Union banning RT and Sputnik…
In the U.S., Google and YouTube disallowed Russian state media ads (following a request by Senator Mark Warner) and demonetized “a number of Russian channels,” including RT but also many non-Russian individuals, before proceeding to demonetize all individual Russian content creators, even the individuals opposing the invasion. Even DuckDuckGo, the speechier, more pro-privacy alternative to Google, announced it was de-ranking “sites associated with Russian disinformation.” A growing list of Westerners have seen accounts frozen for supposed parroting of Russian talking points or “abusive” commentary.
YouTube banned Oliver Stone’s documentary Ukraine on Fire, while Netflix is going so far as to shelve a production of Anna Karenina. In what might have been the craziest move of all, Meta reportedly followed up a decision to un-ban the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion with a mind-blowing decision to alter its hate speech policies to “allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion,” according to internal emails seen by Reuters.
Read the rest of the article here:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/orwell-was-right?s=r
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I’ve always enjoyed Taibbi’s journalistic skew. His research on the Wall St Bail-Out was one of the most detailed I’ve read. That said–I don’t quite see eye to eye with him on Russia’s recent actions. In fact–using the analogy he suggests re Orwell’s “doublethink” , and targeting Russia seems negligent insofar that many of us have been following the New Global Leaders program of Dr Evil incarnate, Mr Klaus Schwab and the WEF; and we know that Zelensky is a WEF graduate. In case Taibbi is unaware, the Technocratic agenda is based on a transhumanist/eugenicist program with a goal of digitizing every human on Earth and creating a new format human 2.0. Klaus Schwab openly speaks of the agenda and the intended outcome. If Taibbi fails to include this particular profound detail in his analysis of Russian actions, he’s missing a very large piece of the jigsaw puzzle!
So many lies are coming from all sides over this war that it is diffiucult to know any truth. I do know that no one in the government of Ukraine has gone over the border into Russia to do anyone harm. The reverse is indisputably true.Moreover, too many reports 0f civilians purposefully being targeted have been made, for there to be no truth in it. We already knew Putin was evil and had vast ambitions.