John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DR BINOY KAMPMARK IN SOUTH FRONT
“FAKE ARGUMENTS ON FAKE NEWS”
"The battle over what is the fake and authentic in news easily dovetails into regulations of control and limitations on expression"
Yes, indeed. Some of the battle is more like a deliberate covert operation intended to do just that, to lead to control of speech.
We have so many fraudulent claims about what is true and what is not true. As though any authority, government or non-government, even understood the truth in many cases.
Some of these claims are laughably ridiculous, as from a company like Facebook piously talking about “truth” after years of abusing users, being dishonest with them, and just plain cheating in various practices such as the ranking of news stories and the purchase of “likes” from overseas computer operations to affect advertising rates.
The claims about truth come out of the fact that America and its close allies have an immense amount of dark work going on in various places, dark work to shore up empire.
And governments always lie about dark work. Always.
Truth about events comes out of the free flow of ideas, just as in science. It is a dynamic and fluid thing, not fixed and immutable. Not able to be set like the hands of a clock.
But governments, like that of the United States and the corporations that loyally serve it, have little tolerance for the concept. They see truth as what they say it is, because they want reality to be what they say it should be.
Although their efforts are never quite so crude and blunt as what we came to expect from openly totalitarian societies, and they always pay lip service to principles around human and democratic rights, the innate conflict in trying to tell people what is true itself screams a kind of truth, a not very pleasant one.
It’s a new form of tyranny, and it derives completely from the desire to control others without appearing to do so.
FOOTNOTE: A RELATED RESPONSE TO A DIFFERENT ARTICLE, ONE ON THE RUSSIA, TURKEY AND IRAN SUMMIT IN ANKARA CONCERNING SYRIA
But what a huge job it is trying to allow truth to prevail where great forces simply do not want it.
