From Caitlin Johnstone

My eclectic news feed looks odd as the hours count down to the end of the Trump administration. Westerners are largely celebrating the exit of Donald Trump himself, whereas with those I follow from areas targeted by US imperialism, the man they’re happiest to see the back of is Mike Pompeo.

It looks very bizarre, as this part of our weird collective adventure comes to an end, how Pompeo’s tenure first as CIA Director and then Secretary of State were almost entirely unmarred by criticism from the political/media class. This is after all a man whose word and deed have been easily more depraved than Trump’s during this profoundly corrupt administration, yet both rank-and-file Democrats and rank-and-file Republicans have been kept only dimly aware of his existence amidst the nonstop scandalous shrieking about the president and his other goons.

... , like its latest Yemen sanctions which the UN World Food Programme executive director says is “literally is going to be a death sentence to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent people”, its Venezuela regime change ops which have starved untold tens of thousands of civilians to death, its murderous brinkmanship with Iran, and its world-threatening cold war escalations against Russia and China. The man who openly boasted about lying, cheating and stealing in the CIA. The man who privately said the US would intervene to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister in the UK. The man who admitted the US is slamming Iranians with starvation sanctions to force them to rise up against their government. The man who designated WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” as Julian Assange’s imprisonment was being orchestrated.

This person is disgusting. You could hardly find a worse specimen of human life than Mike Pompeo. Yet amid all the mainstream news media’s relentless histrionics about the Trump administration, criticism of Trump’s own Secretary of State has remained a rare sight there, and shrill vitriol like that to which we’ve become accustomed with the rest of Trump’s inner circle has never existed. After all this time and after all his depraved actions, he is walking away with nary a scratch of media criticism on him.

This is because Mike Pompeo’s depravity is the “normal” kind. The kind we’re all meant to be used to. The psychotic, mass murdering American exceptionalist imperialism that the billionaire news media exists to protect and facilitate.

You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and you don’t attack the man who serves the same empire as you. Gotta maintain that access journalism. This could be your next president, after all.

Pompeo’s exit provides a very short respite between the time he leaves for whatever lucrative neocon think tank gigs he winds up with and the time he re-emerges from the sea like Cthulhu to once again try to devour the world. He will be replaced as secretary of state in that interim by Tony Blinken, who is another psychopath because that is a job requirement.

The US Department of Defense used to be called the Department of War, which would be a much more honest label today for a military which virtually never operates in any way that could be described as defensive. An even more suitable name would be the Department of Eternal War.

The State Department was meant to be the counterpart to the War Department, focusing on diplomacy and peace. What ended up happening as the US government morphed into a globe-spanning empire dependent on endless violence and aggression is that the State Department wound up focusing more and more on manufacturing interventionist narratives on the world stage to gin up international support for starvation sanctions, proxy wars and war coalitions.

So in practice the US ended up with two war departments: the DoD and the State Department. Which is why you’ve seen the nation’s Secretaries of State becoming more and more jingoistic and psychopathic, to the point where some sort of antisocial personality disorder is really a job requirement for the position. Hence Psycho Mike.

I wish humanity a pleasant sigh of relief on Pompeo’s exit. Please enjoy it as much as possible until the Biden administration does whatever horrifying things it’s going to do, and until the eldritch monster re-emerges from the sea.

Read more:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/19/psycho-pompeo-exits-with-nary-a-scratch-of-media-criticism-on-him/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbKBjLaBHOg&feature=emb_logo

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“A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.” ― Albert Camus

It is difficult to imagine a time when such words rang more true in their foretelling of Tyranny or more poignantly accurate in their description of the precipice we all in fact find ourselves staring at.

The decision by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on January 7, to suspend Donald Trump’s page, essentially acting a grand silencer over the 45th President of the United States, represents not only the most profound assertion of power by Big Tech over a democratic nation’s political life, but underlines the need for greater oversight by elected state representatives over the ever-growing powers social media executives wield over nations, and maybe more to the point nations’ ability to formulate their own socio-political narrative.

January 6 events, the violence we all witnessed on Capitol Hill cannot be used as an argument in favour of censorship. Censorship cannot and should not be rationalised.

Such an exercise is simply too callous and too egregiously dishonest for any sensible individual to entertain. Especially if one considers that Donald Trump was more than just an individual, he was an elected civil servant; his office was that of the Republic. For better or for worse he was the carrier of a democratic tradition whose duty remained to the Constitution and the people it served, represents and acts on behalf of. How one feels about the former president is irrelevant to the debate.

John Stuart Mills’ words ought to ring loudly over the fray now that a new Inquisition dawns.

“…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”

One does not simply silence a sitting president. And if indeed many may feel that the President crossed a line in his calls for actions against what he perceives as the “Big Steal”, then such individuals are free to seek refuge in the law and draw from America’s robust legal system to redress whatever ill irks them so. But to invoke the weapons of tyrants to allegedly bring another to heel, is far too Kafkaesque … if I may dare say so I would argue that the Democrats’ cries of self-righteous anger on January 6 only prove how morally bankrupt they truly are, not to mention devoid of all intellectual consistency.

Free Speech cannot be left open to interpretation. Free Speech is THE benchmark by which all democratic states can measure the strength of their institutions.

In an attempt to justify his unilateral decision to ban Trump from his social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg published what can only be described as a rhetological fallacy. He writes:

“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.”

Twitter soon joined the dance by announcing that it’d too suspended Trump’s access to its social media platform – our modern day public square. Twitter was thorough in its purge too since it targeted not one but three of the former president’s accounts: @realDonaldTrump, @POTUS and @WhiteHouse. In good fashion the move was conveniently labelled as necessary “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

If only Twitter and its counterparts proved consistent in their reproach of violence … we might have lent an ear to their arguments.

What we witnessed was a deliberate and unilateral attack on a democratically elected president by corporations which have proven to wield powers and influence that are such that they now threaten the very foundations of the Republic. At the push of a button, unaccountable tech billionaires decided to cancel out the voice they wished no longer to be heard.

And though today left-wingers cheer Zuckerberg’s move, for it falls within the confines of their ideology, I recall a time not so long ago when Facebook’s positions against antifa irked Democrats to no end. Big Techs serve their own interests and so far they answer to noone but themselves.

Lin Yutang once wrote:“When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.” Ironically, Trump foresaw such shadows … he actually worked to oppose them by building structures to rein in their otherwise unfettered powers.

I give you May 28, 2020 Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship. It reads,

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows … Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.”

And

“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.”

Enough said … I would hope!

Catherine Shakdam is a research fellow at the Al Bayan Centre for Planning & Studies and a political analyst specializing in radical movements. She is the author of A Tale of Grand Resistance: Yemen, the Wahhabi and the House of Saud. She writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/01/21/an-egregious-attack-on-free-speech-sends-democrats-cheering/

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