The New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and Economist cater to snob appeal. The elite media spend the entirety on their budgets appealing directly, indirectly and covertly to well-educated people with money and influence, and to people who in their minds are well-educated, have money and influence.
These institutions are capable of committing unimaginable crimes because they constantly reinforce with their readership how smart, important and well, elite, they are. The subscribers don’t actually have to think, they just have to absorb the propaganda with the comfort of knowing that their friends and coworkers will approve of their opinions within the range of options offered by that section of the press.
All news outlets cater to a specific population in some way. The BBC, CNN, MSNBC are not too different from the above, but they cater to what is perceived by the status quo as trendy thought. Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough are the king and queen of this prom — yes, those descriptors are in the correct order. To a general segment of the MSNBC viewership, those two buffoons are considered fashionable.
This morning I was thinking about Wallis Simpson. Now, she truly was authentically fashionable with a capital “F” and not the creation of high-paid Hollywood stylists, political consultants and script writers. And, importantly, she did not have a voice which is how fashion should be.
Fashionable thought never ever leads to anywhere good, ever. If Marxism and Nazism do not convince you of this, I cannot help you.
All those decades ago a divorced Jewish-American nearly became the queen of England. She wasn’t beautiful by any public standards, but she understood fashion better than anybody and was and is a fashion icon. The irony is that she was not only prevented from becoming British royalty, smeared as a Nazi and bullied into into exile, but fashionably censored by the international WASP elite —the real fascists—with her equally fashionable/unfashionable husband Edward.
The Windsors had no allies among the real fascists because they were “different.” The status quo of society simply cannot handle different.
Anything that challenges what they “believe” to be correct is refused by their tiny brains. Some call this “paradigm blindness” and there are lots of other pseudo-psychology explanations. I merely think of it as peer pressure and Alexander Solzhenitsyn referred to it as a sort of “fashionable censorship.”
“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges,” said Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
If you’ve read Solzhenitsyn and have really put your arms around him, you’ll understand the concept of fashionable censorship in at least three ways, but there are probably more. He wrote about its application in Soviet Russia, and then in the late 1970s when he warned America about its own problem with the disease, because yes, this is a symptom of the disease of fascism, he was fashionably censored himself. One of the greatest illustrations of the centuries-old Russophobia is the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
For decades, “the West” published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence but only when he criticized communist Russia. In fact, his views on Russia were reasonable, and his religious principles moderate. He argued a cosmopolitan democracy would have no cultural roots and would therefore fail. He never advocated fanatical spiritual devotion —only not to cast off religion in favor of materialism.
At Harvard in 1978, he warned the West about its dependence on legalisms rather than common-sense moral codes, belief that material comfort can lead to happiness, the inclination to adopt trendy fashions of thought, the media, and an overall loss of spiritual grounding. After Harvard, he was virtually exiled by the West and the media’s popular image of Alexander Solzhenitsyn became that of a dour prophet railing against the modern world.
The exiled Russian author spoke out against the media and its suppression of independent thought. His words matter now more than ever. Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke of a “moral revolution” that would move beyond the excesses of modernity, yet without returning to the spiritual despotisms of the past.
Because he instinctively knew that so-called “counterterrorism” efforts of western intelligence agencies aim to split peaceful religions and society, in general. The Bolsheviks and Nazis both relied on those covert actions, big time. And ascetic religions were and are the enemy of the “intelligence community,” back then and now, because these religious practices allow a man to take control of himself in a powerful way, to think for himself.
Thus, the only real threat to national security in the world is the military and the intelligence agencies. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it all those years ago at Harvard. But he used words we did not understand at the time. Solzhenitsyn even warned of perpetual war: “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.” Remember, he was speaking about the West which means the Anglosphere.
Enter England. I’ll be honest, I’d written off the Fabian Society as unimportant, mostly because it seemed conspiracy theorish. I’ll admit I was wrong to do so. In fact I might even say that it represents in a sense the gesso of the British Empire’s perfidious Albion—secret society. What changed my mind is the notion of the “managed truth” (also known as lying) and its deep history within the British elite. This political lying is less about the untruth then it is about the willingness to misrepresent someone or something, regardless of how it is justified. Every war has depended on widespread dissimulation of information to the masses in the form of carefully crafted managed truths —“perception management.”
One of the central aspects of mass propaganda is “the lie,” which is always shrouded with a modicum of truth, however small. Authors who described this immersion in falsehood —Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev— insisted that falsehood isn’t simply an additive but an organic component of totalitarianism, a protective carapace without which it could not survive. We see this blatantly demonstrated today.
Few take time to seek out truth. Most are too busy and many have neither the ability nor the desire to understand the complex issues. Folks who cultivate competence, accuracy, and intellectual honesty are the smallest segment of media, their audience the smallest of the public.
The role of the intellectual is of paramount importance in the deception. It’s no exaggeration to say that once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible. The intellectuals’ convictions and opinions operate as the sieve through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses.
We see this in operation not only as it regards the media but also in policy making and in the process of reaching judicial decisions. It is the self-appointed “expert,” or the “expert” chosen by the ruling elite to whom we defer in such cases, despite often overwhelming evidence of the errors in their thinking. But the impact of their pronouncements and opinions can mean the difference between life and death.
It sure sounds like the Fabian Society was in the minds of Neoconservatives in America. No? With the Russia Hoax revelations and subsequent aftermath, we’re seeing how the Neocons were able to “normalize” corruption in America à la the Fabian Society. The Neoconservatives not only made themselves unaccountable to Congress but were emboldened by both House and Senate.
Once again, recall, in reference to “the war in Iraq” Seymour Hersh asked, "how could eight or nine Neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" Neoconservatives overran the bureaucracy, they overran U.S. Congress, they overran the media, and they overran the military. The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies.
The Neocons literally hit us in our blind spot. And did so over and over and over again during the first two decades of the 21st century.
Legally we are free, but we are conditioned by the fashion of the day. That is what Solzhenitsyn had described as “fashionable censorship.” In a society in which even a sizeable minority of the public are capable of critical thinking, few will immediately believe everything they are told, even if they can’t quite put their figure on a specific point of contention. Because of that our corporate media should serve the purpose of alerting people as to what they will be prevented, censored, from disagreeing with in public.
In other words, the elite policies as delivered through corporate newspapers, radio and television is propaganda but also declared as a red line. Our media constantly send messages that it is impermissible to have an opinion contrary to their “standard“ line.
Once you accept that we in no way have a free press, life is a lot easier. You can avoid the bloodbath by boycotting corporate media. Then, begin your own fight against the elite’s fashionable censorship by encouraging critical thinking, compassion and understanding.
Epilogue
I wrote the above over a year ago and am republishing it in French. While my thoughts remain intact, I now have the benefit of hindsight, at least what 16 months buys. Before I could gain that hindsight or dare I say wisdom, I had to dig down pretty deep.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was warning us about old school Mussolini fascism (corporatism) for the 21st century. Fabio-Fascism. Elitism. Today, corporations carry this out in the name of America (“the West”) but the fascism is not American.
