The latest scandal swamping Facebook’s top corporate echelons, and capitalist wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg himself (who is clearly out of his depth and, stuck in the mobs that usually surround his appearances of late, often looks like a deer in the headlights), is not about what his company did or didn’t do regarding the safeguarding of privacy of hundreds of millions of Facebook users, that’s a joke. Personal privacy is punctured and violated every day in millions of ways by the US government (as shown by Wikileaks, among others) and the corporate world, the latter due to its irrepressible drive to harvest prospects to expand sales. It’s been like that ever since marketing emerged from the capitalist slime eons ago, and later when it was discovered the Internet provided a lightning fast way of reaching and prospecting customers cheaply and effectively and, given the topography of the new invasive (and often seductive to some) new technologies, in an virtually unstoppable way. In America, intrusiveness has always been a vested right of the corporate nobility, as anyone sitting in front of a tv set can quickly appreciate.No, friends, as you already probably intuit, that is certainly not what this storm is all about. All this noise, all this frenzy as if the sky was falling, and the calling of Zuckerberg to the Congressional shed, so to speak, is just a smokescreen, a bum steer, plain and simple political BS, deployed by a united establishment led by the Democrats to force the hitherto largely apolitical social media industry to toe the imperial line and enforce ever more draconian measures to patrol and suppress all forms of actual free speech and political dissent. It should be noted here that some entities, like the Google octopus, are already there, way ahead of the pack, virtually embedded with the Pentagon and the intel crowd, merrily collaborating in all sorts of criminal skullduggery, something that even employes have now begun to protest.
The Democrats, a party well known for its repugnant hypocrisy and irrepressible cowardice and opportunism, has led the charge since Trump came to power, creating, in tacit alliance with the CIA and other sinister players, a veritable witch-hunt against dissenting bloggers, and laying, through their equally hypocritical and baseless Russiagate, the groundwork for a criminalisation of political dissidence behind the pretext of neutralising bloggers who supposedly “create national divisions,” serve Russia’s ends, or disseminate “fake news,” a term much in vogue today with truly Orwellian reverberations, all of which would be laughable if it were not so dangerous to the future of this republic. Indeed, such priggish posturing ignores, as we might expect, the irrefutable fact that the main engines of fake news creation and distribution are and have long been the very “respectable” mass media, owned lock, stock and barrel by a handful of plutocrats whose social, economic, and political interests are at variance with 99.99% of humanity.
Incidentally, a number of clueless consumer groups have joined the crusade against Facebook’s “ghastly” crimes of being a capitalist entity and doing what capitalists do all day long, and organised protests of their own, over the giant firm’s failure to protect their data, thereby giving credibility to the deep state’s claim that this is chiefly about compromised personal privacy. In their innocence about what the system is up to for lack of a better word they remind me of the kids in the March for Our Lives campaign, demanding gun control and an end to violence in America, an old liberaloid demand, while ignoring the far larger issues underlying such violence, not to mention the fact that cops and the US military gun down many more people here and abroad with nary a protest by the white middle class crowd.
One more thing needs to be said before presenting a couple of examples of how the media act as enforcers for this insalubrious anti-democratic development. If you think that the Democrats with their new-fangled McCarthyite tactics are threatening free speech now (well, they’ll never admit it, of course) only because of their malignant and hopefully temporary obsession with Trump (however superficially plausible considering how odious and unprincipled Trump usually is) you’d be dead wrong. The suppression of free speech in the US and the rest of the “capitalist democracies” (a glorious oxymoron) is a systemic bipartisan plot that long precedes Trump, the result of the establishment’s realisation —brought to a boil with the upset election of Trump—that they are losing control of the main narrative—the truth is getting through, so to speak— and the holes must be plugged. The gargantuan echo chamber dedicated to lies 24/7 that is the mainstream media and supporting institutions must be kept safe from further erosion and eventual dismantlement by that pesky little thing some people still quaintly call, “just the facts.”
EXHIBITS
Note that in the below CBS (like the rest of its ilk) is happy to push for regulation of the social media tech companies, all for the good of the people, you understand, a veritable Pandora’s box with many possible political traps for US and Western dissidents.
An antiwar and media activist, Addison dePitt despises the Big Lie, abhors neocon-instigated imperial wars, thinks capitalism is a terrible disease, and that Orwell chose the wrong target to skewer in 1984.
