Who Will Speak for the Oppressed in an Age of Corporate ‘Fact-Blocking’?

Robert BRIDGE

American writer and journalist.

 Western audiences, completely in the dark as to the true nature of the Ukrainian standoff, have no idea to the back story that led to the events of February 24, 2022.

Despite having at our disposal the most powerful communication technologies ever assembled, people around the world are arguably less knowledgeable about the true nature of current events than at any time in the past. How to explain such a paradox?

Here’s a rhetorical question for the proponents of lightning fast 5G technologies: What does it really matter how speedy an internet system works if the most critical information it is meant to process is hidden or outright censored? In reality, the people don’t need excessive speed, they need truth.

It would be just as well, all things considered (exposure to hazardous electromagnetic radiation, for starters) if the hyperactive human race simply went back to reading the morning paper over breakfast and watching the news in the evening. Or is warp-speed internet service primarily designed to keep everyone’s brains comfortably numb on Netflix productions?

Whatever the case may be, something rotten is afoot in the electronic neighborhood. For example, the most powerful search engines, namely the monolithic giant Google, are determining user results based on surreptitiously tuned and very powerful algorithms – so powerful, in fact, that they are reportedly able to determine the outcome of elections.

In 2019, Robert Epstein, Ph.D., Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, testified before a U.S. Senate investigatory committee that, according to his research, “Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor on one political party [i.e. the Democrats] – a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant.”

The good doctor went on to reveal the shocking bit of trivia that Google has been “determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful.”

Aside from achieving near dominance in the field of politics, the mainstream media, in cahoots with social media, possesses the power to forbid any sort of conversation that challenges the narrative on treating Covid-19. ‘Facts’ are now the sole purview of the all-powerful ‘fact-checkers,’ like, for example the altruistic Atlantic Council, one of the most influential i.e. pro-war establishment think tanks of the last quarter of a century. In essence, these institutions now have the power to ‘fact-block’ in order to keep a particular narrative going strong.

Thus, one group’s opinion (even Facebook has admitted that ‘fact checks’ are based on nothing more than personal perspectives), can deny people the right to a second medical opinion. Joe Roan discovered this the hard way when the entire left of the political spectrum had a conniption fit just because he hosted two doctors who did not subscribe to the official Covid-19 narrative that one can hear parroted from every mainstream media outlet with disturbing uniformity. Such a dystopian nightmare flies in the face of scientific inquiry, which has been built over millennia on intelligent people questioning each other on a range of diverse issues, few of which are ever fully understood.

But now, the notoriously unethical and corrupt pharmaceutical industry stands to earn tens of billions of dollars on the sale of vaccines as the government forces these unproven drugs on millions of people. At the same time, medical practitioners who attempt to prescribe preventive therapies are ostracized from polite society. These atrocities, which are allowed due to overt media complicity and censorship, don’t end there; media tyranny has a direct influence on questions relating to war and peace.

For eight long years, the Western media has turned a blind eye on the plight of Donbass, a separatist region of Eastern Ukraine that distanced itself in 2014 from Kiev following the ouster of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. What the people of Ukraine wound up with was a U.S.-supported puppet government with affiliations to neo-Nazi organizations.

That tragic ‘oversight’ has, undoubtedly, fueled the war now raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Very few people had heard anything about the Donetsk Peoples’ Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), where the homes of innocent people in Eastern Ukraine, many of them Russian speakers, were being routinely shelled in the middle of the night as they slept. This indiscriminate slaughter, Moscow warned on numerous occasions, had all the potential to turn into genocide. But nobody listened because so few heard.

Nor did the Western media attempt to inform their audiences on the Minsk Protocol, a multinational agreement that sought to ensure an immediate ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and those of the Donbass. Not only were the conditions of the agreement regularly ignored, but various member states of NATO, covetous of Ukraine one day joining its ranks, began pouring armaments into the country. At the same time, Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, began openly talking about NATO membership, a clear red line for Russia, as would be witnessed soon enough.

Such a disturbing turn of events prompted Moscow to send the United States a draft security treaty that would require Washington to halt further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as deny accession to the military bloc to former Soviet republics. Additionally, with Ukraine specifically in mind, the Russian draft stipulates that NATO would not build military bases in former Soviet states that are not NATO members, nor develop military cooperation with them.

For all intent and purposes, Western audiences, completely in the dark as to the true nature of the Ukrainian standoff, have no idea to the back story that led to the events of February 24, 2022. Moreover, the media failed to provide them information on the attacks against Russians in Eastern Ukraine.

Had the American and European people been in possession of a media complex that was not wedded to political and corporate power, where journalists are encouraged to ask the uncomfortable questions regardless as to what political agenda is at stake, Moscow and NATO would likely have found other ways to resolve the standoff. But because the Western media found it more expedient to keep the world in the dark about the true nature of the crisis, Russia was left with just one option, and certainly not the most attractive one.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/02/28/who-will-speak-for-the-oppressed-in-an-age-of-corporate-fact-blocking/