There's A War on Free Speech And Free Thought Around The World

by Saman Mohammadi via  disquietreservations.blogspot.com

"Risk, by definition, is part and parcel of our profession. It is not part of a teacher's profession, or a doctor's, or many others, but it is part of ours. This is why we are ready for it. I think that a journalist is ready for it, he should face it with open eyes and understand that something may happen. Not take fright, cry and so on." - Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Governments in the 21st century have not been kind to journalists and truth-tellers.

Repressive and lawless elites in America, Russia, China, Europe, and Iran are all waging an evil war against free speech and independent journalism.

Government elites are afraid of truth-telling because their power and prestige are based on lies and politically constructed narratives that fall apart in the face of facts. Since they all desire to rule over a society of silent sheep, they expect that all citizens will mindlessly accept their propaganda as truth.

The biggest purveyors of government propaganda in the United States and the West are the pseudo-journalists of the mainstream press. But it is tough to tell if they are corrupt journalists, willfully blind journalists, or government spies. State intelligence agents around the world have infiltrated the media to such an extent that there is no difference today between the state and the media in any country.

Real journalists who expose government corruption and deception are not tolerated in Russia, America, Iran, and other repressive societies.

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed by the Putin regime on October 7, 2006, because she dissected the lies of her country and confronted her poisonous government with heroic courage.

Politkovskaya said in an interview: "We live now in an era where normal values have been displaced. The good is called bad, the bad - good."

Politkovskaya faced what American journalist Gary Webb faced - a tyrannical government hell-bent on protecting its interests and dominating society with the full force of state propaganda.

Webb was killed by his country's state intelligence agency for his critical investigative work which exposed the government origins of the crack epidemic in California. His hard-hitting reporting killed the credibility of the CIA and the War on Drugs.

Webb's dark shadow hangs over the cowardly and corrupted American press.

But free speech is not totally dead in America. The truth-telling done by journalist Alex Jones, former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts, former FBI agent Sibel Edmonds, and many others whose work appears in the alternative media, is a testament to the heroic American spirit.

Alex's radio broadcasts have destroyed the fraudulent two-party political paradigm, undermined the public rationale of the criminal war on terror, and uncloaked the U.S. shadow government that runs the show from behind the scenes.

Back in November, the New York Times implied that Alex's documentaries inspire domestic terrorist attacks, like the assassination attempt on President Obama by the lunatic Oscar Ortega. This was a clear attack on free speech and the independent media by the New York Times. But the Times failed to discredit Alex and the larger 9/11 truth and justice movement because their psychological warfare tactics are weak and childish.

It is stupid and unpatriotic of the New York Times to demonize a man who has dedicated his life to telling the truth and who is providing an example of true heroic leadership in a time of apocalyptic crisis for America and the world.

America cannot be saved from economic destruction and political tyranny unless the truth about the 9/11 attacks is made public and the real criminals are brought to justice.

Alex has tried to awaken America to the truth about 9/11 since before the attacks happened--in July of 2001 when there were rumblings of a terrorist attack in America--while the New York Times and every other media institution in the United States has concealed the truth from the American people and the world.

As a result, Alex Jones has more public credibility in 2012 than the New York Times, the American press, and the world press. Alex has told the truth and preserved the honour of America.

The thought police are brought to their knees every day on the Alex Jones show. But in the Western mainstream press, the thought police rule.

British journalist Alan Hart spoke about 9/11 truth and self-censorship in the Western media in an interview with Passing Clouds Works in September 2011. He said:

"The media’s complicity in the cover-up is absolutely total, but that’s not surprising. There have been so many media cover-ups down the years about so many things.

But there’s one thing I have to say about media control. When you look at the Middle East, for example. There are lot of people who believe and say, “the Jews control the media.” I always argue against people who say that. Yes, it’s true that Jews control some of the media, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is self-censorship. It’s the fear of owners, proprietors, and editors of offending powerful vested interests. And that leads to self-censorship.

The corporate controlled media is never ever going to do anything but to be frightened and compromised by not upsetting what we should call it. . .the system, the establishment, the elite. I mean I’m amazed when I go back to Geoffrey Cox telling me that our job is to keep democracy alive. They’re not. The mainstream media has betrayed it."

Politkovskaya also said that self-censorship existed amongst her colleagues in Russia:

"Our right to receive and distribute information is rationed. Self-censorship is clearly at work. The majority of publications would not even think of writing about the Chechen issue because they know that they would be snapped at and there would be a lot of trouble. If at the start of the war some papers made a bit of a fuss, today - forget it, there is none of that any more.

To call this freedom of speech in accordance with the Constitution - because we do have all these things written into our Constitution - is no longer possible. I am absolutely sure of it.

In my opinion, we live in a sort of neo-Soviet era. It is Soviet in ideology, there is even a Party line, the same as before, which one must adhere to. "An enemy of the people," "an anti-Soviet person," these words are being used once again but "at a new economic level," with private property, with rich people, but the ideology is going back to the old times. I remember them from my own work ... the mid-1980s."

Politkovskaya's murder proved that there is a war on free speech and journalism in Russia, just as Webb's murder proved that there is a war on free speech and journalism in America.

But the heroic spirits of Webb and Politkovskaya live on and continue to inspire journalists to get off the government plantation and take the leap into truth-telling. They are both martyrs of journalism who defended freedom, truth, and justice in the battlefield of the mind.

In a New York Times book review of Politkovskaya's book, Is Journalism Worth Dying For?, Dwight Garner said that, "Ms. Politkovskaya was devoted to facts, to the notion that exacting truth can set human beings or a country free."

If Politkovskaya was an American she would've been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist and nutcase by the corrupt American media and the hijacked American government, both of which are more anti-American than the old Soviet Union.

And like the Soviet Union, the hijacked American government will collapse. The truth about 9/11 will uproot it from its foundations and transform America into a real free country.

Posted by Saman Mohammadi at 11:52 PM