Excerpted from Glenn Greenwald’s Substack:
Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.
When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.
When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.
But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.
The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.). More inconveniently still, many of the foreign leaders we are instructed to view as despots are popular or even every bit as democratically elected as our own beloved freedom-safeguarding officials.
As potent as this mythological framework is, reinforced by large media corporations over so many decades, it cannot withstand the increasingly glaring use of precisely these despotic tactics in the West. Watching Justin Trudeau — the sweet, well-mannered, well-raised good-boy prince of one of the West’s nicest countries featuring such a pretty visage (even on the numerous occasions when marred by blackface) — invoke and then harshly impose dubious emergency, civil-liberties-denying powers is just the latest swing of the hammer causing this Western sculpture to crumble. In sum, you are required by Western propaganda to treat the two images below as fundamentally different; indeed, huge numbers of people in the West vehemently denounce the one on the left while enthusiastically applauding the one on the right. Such brittle mythology can be sustained only for so long:
The decade-long repression of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, standing alone, demonstrates how grave neoliberal attacks on dissent have become. Many are aware of key parts of this repression — particularly the decade-long effective detention of Assange — but have forgotten or, due to media malfeasance, never knew several of the most extreme aspects.
While the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder failed to find evidence of criminality after convening a years-long Grand Jury investigation, the then-Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), succeeded in pressuring financial services companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America to terminate WikiLeaks’ accounts and thus banish them from the financial system, choking off their ability to receive funds from supporters or pay their bills. Lieberman and his neocon allies also pressured Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its hosting services, causing the whistleblower group to be temporarily offline. All of that succeeded in crippling WikiLeaks’ ability to operate despite being charged with no crime: indeed, as the DOJ admitted, it could not prove that the group committed any crimes, yet this extra-legal punishment was nonetheless meted out.
Those tactics pioneered against WikiLeaks — excluding dissenters from the financial system and coercing tech companies to deny them internet access without a whiff of due process — have now become standard weapons. Trudeau’s government seizes and freezes bank accounts with no judicial process. The “charity” fundraising site GoFundMe first blocked the millions of dollars raised for the truckers and announced it would redirect those funds to other charities, then refunded the donations when people pointed out, rightly, that their original plan amounted to a form of stealing. When an alternative fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised millions more for the truckers, Canadian courts blocked its distribution. And it was just over a year ago when Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) successfully pressured tech monopolies Google and Apple to remove Parler from its stores and then pressured Amazon to remove the social media site from its servers, at exactly the time the social media alternative became the single most-downloaded app in America. (This morning we published a new video report on Rumble that traces the emergence of this new anti-dissent tactic first pioneered on WikiLeaks and now widely used against dissent generally: “Banishment from the Financial System: the War on Dissent”).
That the U.S. and UK Governments have kept Assange himself — one of the most effective dissidents in the West in decades — in a cage for years with no end in sight by itself highlights how repressive they are. But the precipitating cause of Assange’s apprehension from the Ecuadorian Embassy has been forgotten by many and it, too, illustrates the same disturbing trend.
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3 thoughts on "Glenn Greenwald: Neoliberals Declare War On Dissent"
I think Glenn is trying to say that those in the West who criticize tyranny in adversarial non-Western countries are blind to it domestically. But that assumes those critics actually care about the tyranny in those other countries. That doesn’t make sense to me. The authors of orthodoxy are generally vile (a play on evil, get it?) people whom I wouldn’t trust as far as I can throw them by their hair. They don’t give a crap about tyranny against “the people” no matter where they are, foreign or domestic. All they care about is being in control and at the top of the food chain.
But to pull that off they have to act surreptitiously. The “bad,” non-Western “adversarial” countries are the ones they already control, so – yea – the populaces rebel and they have to get slapped backed down. That’s what Westerners see but never suspect the real controllers behind the pupated despots.
Now the Western countries themselves are being infiltrated and controlled by those same jackals. Draconian policies are subversively invoked which causes the populaces to rebel and so they have to get slapped back down, just like we’ve all seen happening to the “bad” countries for decades.
Importantly, it is the rebellions themselves – not the conditions that are being opposed – that are considered subversive, and thus traitorous. And the authors of orthodoxy really believe that. Those rebellions against their controls ARE a threat to their power. The people in the media, meantime, are just betas hoping to keep their jobs and positions (or better) and “thinking” in their maddeningly insane ways, “bad news is good news.”
What is amazing, however, which is part of Glenn’s point, is that there is always a large minority of the population who are bottom feeders and want to defend their own limitations. For instance, supposedly, the majority of the people in Ottawa are against the truckers and are all for the crackdown, and by any means necessary. They can’t imagine – or think conceptually enough – that maybe tomorrow the “government” might declare something they value to be treasonous too, and treated accordingly.
Also amazing, or ominous rather, is the number of people in all areas of society going along with this and following draconian orders from Trudeau et al. But that’s how Trudeau was able to invoke the mandates, etc. themselves in the first place, and why he hasn’t been censured. It always starts at the top. That’s how it works.
Julian Assange is like a one man rebel so he gets the same treatment. Exposing the controllers and its machine is a real threat. The media doesn’t like him because he makes them look bad, so whatever it takes to bury him is fine. The people who don’t care about him are those who like the status quo. He also undermines their simplistic myths about the West.
For years the liberal left has failed to identify fascism. As with the communists confronted by Stalin’s purges they put near-term objectives ahead of rationality.
Through the Trump years it was considered fair play to use fascism as a portmanteau for demagoguery, but it gradually lost meaning as did populism as a synonym for far-right.
Ultimately, you cannot grasp The Great Reset unless you understand the mentality of the extreme rich. They want to power, like The Godfather writ large, to raise men up and take them down. It is all about control.
https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/crisis-update-canadians-face-to-face