Patrick Lawrence: The Sound of Enforced Silence

Is there some connection, — not quite official but it may as well be— between censorship and presidential politics? I pose the question as a survivor of the Russiagate years, when illiberal liberals started talking about “free-speech absolutists,” and when corporate journalists cheered the censoring of unincorporated journalists so long as it was called “content moderation.” 

I cannot answer my own question, honestly. But as this November’s elections draw near, a new and aggressive campaign to suppress dissent — in social media, at airports, on campuses, and elsewhere — is hard upon us. This is a trans–Atlantic, trans-national operation. Let us not fail to take note. 

Straight off the top, you probably noticed that the Democratic Party’s openly undemocratic elite refused to allow any speaker of Palestinian background to address the convention in Chicago last week. We can read this, disgraceful in itself, as an indication of how the Democrats intend to deal with the Gaza crisis and other such foreign policy matters if they succeed in extending their power another four years. 

Yes, they will continue supporting terrorist Israel and the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine just as they have to date, but they will avoid talking to you and me about the imperium’s gruesome business as they conduct it. Silence on such matters will be as gold to these people, especially between now and Nov. 5. Kamala Harris, or the cynical operatives busily inventing Kamala Harris, are selling “joy” this political season, not any kind of sober, responsible view of our circumstances. Harris is supposed to ride into the White House on a carpet of good vibes. Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Washington’s provocations at the other end of the Pacific: Nah: All such questions are bad vibes.

One of the things the Russiagate years exposed was the close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the national-security state. People who know their history have long understood that “the intelligence community” — so odious, this term — has been, from its beginnings in the late–1940s, more liberal than conservative in its culture and sensibilities. Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing defeat in 2016 consolidated this relationship. It is now hard to tell where the Democratic Party ends and the national-security state begins.  

I have been, since the Russiagate years, perfectly comfortable with the term “Deep State.” And here it comes again, reliant as always upon its appendages in the Big Tech social media platforms and the more repellant quadrants of corporate media as they attempt to extinguish all other-than-approved opinions and perspectives.        

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Of the many recent incidents of censorship, suppression and intimidation, the one that got me to the keyboard concerns Sharmine Narwani, who founded, three years ago this month, an online journal of news and comment called The Cradle, as in “the cradle of civilization.” Narwani, based in Beirut, now writes columns regularly and edits features for the English-language version of the site. She calls The Cradle a collective effort, “an online magazine covering the geopolitics of West Asia from within the region.” Those last four words are the ones that matter most to me.

Last week — on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, indeed — Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram, the holding company’s most trafficked social media properties. Narwani now stands accused of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.” This ruling came without warning. All Narwani got was this:

Your account, or activity on it, does not follow our community guidelines. No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request a review of this decision.

How’s this for the sound of liberal authoritarianism? Big Brother could not have got down the poetry of fascistic finality any better. 

Narwani, who earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in international affairs before joining the Great Craft, writes forthrightly and without regard for however much her reporting may shock the comfortably misinformed. Hers is not the stuff of beach reading, which is where its strength lies. Narwani’s investigations at the height of the CIA’s covert operation in Syria were  especially distinguished but proved simply too honest for American media — The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon, and so on — to continue taking. When Huffington Post stopped accepting her work, it scrubbed her entire archive. 

I published a long, two-part interview with Narwani in 2019, shortly before she seems to have concluded, very wisely, that there is no getting truthful reporting of her kind into a mainstream media scene wholly given over to the imperium’s propaganda machine. It was Narwani who first taught me that “the Middle East” is better understood as “West Asia.” I saw in The Cradle’s pages, in other words, the true power of perspective when it is decentered — or, better put, properly recentered. 
Losing alternative perspectives is precisely what is at stake in this new round of censorship. Narwani wrote last week (the italics are hers):

Meta’s accusations of [The Cradle] “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence” largely stem from posts and videos that relay information or quotes from West Asian resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah — blacklisted by many western governments  — who are an essential part of the news stories unfolding in a region on the precipice of a major war. 

It is also essential to recognize that these are major West Asian political organizations that have deep institutional and civic roots within Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen and are part of the very fabric of these societies. They are represented in governance, run schools, hospitals, and utilities, and disperse salaries to millions of civilian workers.

I am very pleased Narwani made this important point. We lose all such density of understanding when power—political power, media power, Big Tech power—affixes the label “terrorist” to an organization, a person or a group of people. All are thenceforth rendered two-dimensional, while we are rendered ignorant—precisely the intended state. And in this new wave of censorship, the drift is that journalists, too, can be accused as terrorists or of acting as their accomplices. 

Just as I was thinking through Meta’s permanent ban of The Cradle, I came (a little late) to the case of Andrew Napolitano, who, in a previous life, was a Superior Court judge sitting on the New Jersey bench. Judge N.’s daily webcast, Judging Freedom, has become must viewing in my household (and many others, by the numbers). Napolitano has a gift for clipped, succinct questions that call forth the insightful replies of an extraordinary list of returning guests. Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, Jeffrey Sachs, Alistair Crooke, John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson — these are top-drawer names, all of them unwelcome in corporate media.

The censors arrived in June, when YouTube, a Google property, took a segment of Napolitano’s program off the air and assigned it a “first strike.” Get three of these and YouTube, long distinguished as one of the most aggressive censors of dissenting opinion, will remove your webcast permanently, with Meta-style courtesy.

When I asked Napolitano about this the other day he replied in a note:

We were told by YT — with no notice — that the strike was due to an on-air conversation I had with a guest back in June of this year. The 20–second conversation addressed the well-known and well-documented Nazi origins of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion and the propensity of many of its members to bear swastika tattoos. The same subject has been addressed in the NY Times and on CNN and elsewhere.

YT called it hate speech. We ran it through standard and respected AI platforms, and all concluded that this was not hate speech. Of course, Google agreed with its offspring.

There are a couple of things to note about this—three, now I think of it. 

One, it is by now tiresome in the extreme to have people in the propaganda apparatus pretending there are no neo–Nazis active in Ukraine when the Kiev regime is shot through with them and when Azov and other such groups, driven by a visceral hatred of Russia and its people, lead the most effective battalions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As I and numerous others have pointed out, and as Napolitano suggests, the country’s neo–Nazi elements have appeared and disappeared in mainstream Western media according to passing geopolitical exigencies. Judge N. got paddled for making reference to common knowledge. 

Two, when we consider the caliber of Napolitano’s regular guests we have to conclude that the operators of the censorship machine are shifting gears. What has been until now a somewhat spotty, swatting-flies operation shapes up to be a pervasive threat to free speech and the right to dissenting opinion from which not even our most distinguished minds are immune.   

Finally, I will take this opportunity to assert that the notion of “hate speech” and all efforts to outlaw it are wholly objectionable in any society purporting to be democratic and come to, at the horizon, nothing short of thought control. Contempt may be a nobler sentiment, but hatred is an altogether human emotion and we all have a right to it. The Germans, who are way ahead of Americans in this line, are a good indicator of where the suppression of “hate speech” leads: It leads to a polity that no longer knows itself because its people, fearful of prison or fines, no longer live their lives, so to say, publicly. All becomes furtive. 

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When Scott Ritter was pulled off a plane in June, just as he began a journey to St. Petersburg, Russia, to attend an annual conference, it was obvious there was a degree of performance or demonstration in the conduct of the New York police and the State Department, which authorized the operation. Ritter, once a U.N. weapons  inspector and now a commentator on military and foreign affairs, had his passport confiscated and cannot, for the moment, travel. State could have got this done without all the theater at Kennedy. 

Who knew at the time where this would lead? Who knew it was the front edge of an effort to intimidate journalists of various kinds with the direct threat of prison on charges of terrorism or working as an agent of a foreign power or who knows what? 

Earlier this month, while Ritter was marooned in his suburb of Albany, the FBI raided his home and removed all his electronic communication devices, along with many crates of documents. As The Times subsequently reported, this is part of an investigation into whether Ritter acts as a foreign agent when he writes for RT International, Russia’s equivalent of the BBC, or participates in some of RT’s  broadcasts. 

The operative statute is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the question at issue is whether Ritter transgressed when he failed to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. “More searches are expected soon,” The Times reported, citing officials. “Criminal charges are also possible.” 

Now just a damn minute. More searches? Criminal charges? When the BBC’s U.S. correspondents are similarly investigated — unthinkable, of course —  I will take this invocation of FARA seriously. But our censors, as the record shows again and again, have no special concern about acting in a serious manner. Power has no such obligation.  

I must now fear for people such as Chris Hedges, who had a program on RT America before the U.S. government effectively shut the network down — and at which point YouTube deleted the six-year archive of Hedges’s RT America program, “On Contact.” I have my own views of the wisdom or otherwise of working for RT International, if not RT America, which in practice served as a haven for dissident Americans of various stripes, but will set these thoughts aside for now. The idea that Hedges, top-to-bottom a professional the whole of his career, could get marked down as a foreign agent is simply preposterous. 

Did I say “preposterous”? Ah, I come to the case of Richard Medhurst.

Medhurst, born in Syria and a British subject, has an enviable knowledge of West Asian affairs and is a vigorously outspoken critic of Zionist Israel’s terrorizing campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Traveling through London last week—he resides in Vienna—Medhurst was not detained at Heathrow: He was arrested and held in solitary for nearly 24 hours under Article 12 of Britain’s Terrorism Act. He has not been charged with any crime—and I reckon he won’t be, so farcical is this exercise—but he will remain under investigation for three months. 

Here is Hedges on the Medhurst case, and I hope he will forgive my ellipses:

The arrest of the reporter Richard Medhurst, who has been one of the most ardent critics of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli apartheid state … is part of the steady march towards the criminalization of journalism…. 

It is designed to have a chilling effect on reporting that elucidates Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, as well as the active collaboration in this extermination of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and U.K. governments…. 

If we do not vigorously oppose Medhurst’s arrest, if we do not denounce the use of terrorism laws to attempt to silence journalists… Medhurst’s arrest will become the “norm.”

There is more where all this comes from. John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who was convicted of exposing the CIA’s torture program, was recently escorted to his connecting flight in Toronto and detained in Washington as he flew home from Athens via Canada. “There’s no good news in these stories,” Kiriakou writes in a review of his and other cases in a Consortium News piece published Tuesday under the headline, “The Slide into Authoritarianism.” “This is the future, unless we stand up to fight it.” 

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My mind drifts back to the Democratic National Convention as I consider these events. I think of all those dreamy, worshipful faces, eyes uplifted, to which the cameras turned in the course of the speeches delivered by various  party elites, and, of course, Kamala Harris when she formally accepted her nomination last Thursday evening. How innocently eager they seemed to have something, someone, they can believe in. How lost they were to the world as it is all around them. And how cynical the illiberal liberals who run the party as they manipulate the emotions of these people while condemning them to ignorance of the imperium the party is committed to sustaining.   

Edward Luce, formerly the Financial Times’s Washington bureau chief and now one of the FT’s more readable commentators, ran a column on the convention under the headline, “‘Gaza’ is the word Democrats dare not whisper in Chicago.” A day into the proceedings, The Intercept put out an item headed, “Democratic Party Unites Under Banner of Silence on Gaza Genocide.” 

That is how it was, more or less, at the DNC in Chicago. There was plenty of talk of AIPAC, the antidemocratic American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a foreign agent if ever there was one — but only in the streets outside the convention hall. Harris finally raised the Gaza crisis, during her acceptance speech, but boyo, did she blow through that topic with haste. This was “strategic vagueness”—that adorable phrase The New York Times has coined to make a virtue of Harris’s weather-vane vacuousness—at its very finest.   

It was the usual thing when Harris devoted a few sentences to Gaza: Her White House will shed more crocodile tears for the suffering of Palestinians, but the unwavering, unconditional support the “Biden–Harris administration” extends to apartheid Israel will remain unwavering and unconditional. When you hear Harris say, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” as she stated last Thursday, it is the recipient of AIPAC funds speaking in the code the Israel lobby understands: Worry not. You will get what you have paid for.

My take: It will be silence on the imperium’s doings between now and Nov 5. And if Harris is elected in November, getting her through the following four years will require an escalated version of the censorship regime the national-security state and Big Tech imposed on dissenting voices during the Trump years, but with one difference: The objective then was to take down our forty-fifth president; this time it will be to sustain our stunningly unqualified forty-seventh.