Youtube’s Mission Statement:
Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
Bullshit.
Six years of work by Chris Hedges. Youtube doesn’t like it, so now it is gone.
Excerpt from the website of Chris Hedges:
The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of the money-drenched electoral system, neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, predatory capitalism, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.
What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a ten-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
The deplatforming of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the establishment media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorothy Parker once said about Katharine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast. This is the reason Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and I are on Substack.
It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media, but it no longer exists on YouTube.
Chris Hedges, being interviewed by Matt Taibbi (following Youtube’s decision to pull down all of Hedge’s “On Contact” shows – – – “hundreds of interviews about topics ranging from Julian Assange’s imprisonment to censorship to police brutality to American war crimes in the Middle East.”
Excerpt — this is Hedges speaking:
“In ‘89, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the revolution, everybody was talking about a peace dividend. That we wouldn’t have to throw so many resources, and such massive amounts of money, at the arms industry anymore. And again, that’s just another example of how we didn’t get how pernicious and powerful this industry was.
In the end, of course, Russia pulled the trigger, and they’re guilty, but they were baited to a degree. But you can’t even say that within this media landscape, even though that’s a historical fact. That’s not an opinion. But it doesn’t fit with the kind of euphoria.
After 20 years of committing egregious war crimes all over the Middle East, we’ve suddenly anointed ourselves once again as the saviors of the world, and we love it. And a lot of it has nothing to do with Ukraine, but about our own self-adulation. This is the difference, as Chomsky and Herman write about, between worthy and unworthy victims. So Yemenis are not worthy victims, Palestinians are not worthy victims, Iraqis are not worthy victims. But Ukrainians — and it helps that they’re white — are worthy victims. They’re worthy of our compassion and our support. It’s just another way to mask our own war crimes. What we did in the Middle East — I believe Shock and Awe alone far outstrips anything Putin’s done, though that may change.
What does the U.S. want? Well, the U.S. is quite clear. It wants another Chechnya. It wants another old Afghanistan, where Brzeziński baited the Russians into Afghanistan, by significantly arming those forces that would become the Taliban. And then he was quite proud of it, and argued that the defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan led to the collapse of Eastern Europe. And that’s what they want. They want, in their cynical parlance, to make Russia bleed. But of course, the irony of this is the people who will really bleed are the Ukrainians. That’s what’s happening.”
The authoritarian left needed a miracle to prevent Trump from coasting to an easy re-election, and God created COVID. Now it needs a miracle to prevent the Democrats from drowning beneath a red wave, so God invented Ukraine.