antiwar | The theme of today’s column is suppression – of antiwar voices, of news
that doesn’t fit into preconceived narratives, and of our very ability to raise
our voices in protest.
If you’re paying attention, you’ve
probably already heard about the banning from Twitter of anti-interventionist
author and former US diplomat Peter van Buren, a whistleblower whose book
on the Iraq war exposed the lies at the heart of that devilish enterprise.
When van Buren tweeted that his tenure at the State Department required him
to lie to reporters, and that the paladins of the Fourth Estate were all too
ready to passively record these lies as truth, the Twitter brouhaha took on
seismic proportions. Several journalists were involved, attacking van Buren
for showing them up, and one – Jonathan M. Katz, supposedly a New York Times
writer – reported van Buren to the Twitter Authorities for allegedly threatening
“violence.” Van Buren did no such thing: it was a mere pretext to get him banned.
And ban him they did – for life. His account was scrubbed: years of informative
tweets were erased.
There were two other casualties in this little Twitter war: our very own Scott
Horton, who joined the fray and was suspended for using the “b-word,” and Daniel
MacAdams, the director of the Ron Paul Institute, whose “crime” was retweeting
Scott’s contribution to the discussion.
This occurred in tandem with the purge of Alex Jones from Facebook, YouTube,
and Apple platforms – an obviously coordinated effort undertaken to make an
example of the infamous performance artist masquerading as a conspiracy theorist.
All this wasn’t good enough for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who demanded to
know if the plan was to only take down “one web site.” No doubt he has a
whole list of sites he’d like to take down. Even more ominously, it was revealed
that a direct threat
had been made to these companies by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia), who sent
out a memo listing all the ways the government could crack down on Big Data
if they refuse to go along with cleansing the internet of “divisive” material.
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