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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
The level of power and influence the world's richest man has amassed is a danger to all citizens, whether they like Musk or not. It is also, without a shadow of a doubt, a threat to democracy.
Elon Musk is perhaps one of the purest examples in recent years of the conversion of raw economic power into informational, social, and political power. What makes Musk such a dangerous figure is those various forms of power combined with his willingness to openly lie about his personal and corporate relationships to issues of free speech and democracy.
The level of power and influence he has amassed is a danger to all citizens, whether they like Musk or not. It is also, without a shadow of a doubt, a threat to democracy.
After the riots that broke out in the UK following the murder of three young children in the town of Southport, a number of social media users were arrested and charged in relation to those riots. Musk amplified tweets that claimed the use of the law in this manner was “Orwellian.” In other words, a repressive state was cracking down on citizens for little more than expressing their opinions or thinking in the wrong way. But that argument hid the fact that many of those arrested were charged under UK law with inciting both violence and racial hatred: forms of speech rightly illegal in many countries.
Nevertheless, in “1984” terms Musk pitched himself as standing alongside the Winston Smiths of this world in battle against the Big Brothers. As the defender of the rights of the “ordinary person” in the face of a violent, elite, repressive machine.
You could cut the irony with a knife.
Musk’s rhetoric on free speech and democracy, and the willingness of so many of his followers to accept that rhetoric despite the obvious contradictions, is a perfect example of “doublethink.”
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought a communication platform that enables him to control information and messaging across the globe. With that platform he also gathers huge amounts of data on users. He uses his position to advocate for political candidates and political agendas he supports and cooperates with various authoritarian regimes to shut down messages and accounts critical of their power. His company literally pays individuals whose accounts spread and amplify proven disinformation, and has himself spread and amplified proven disinformation. He throttled access to news outlets he disagreed with. He threatened to sue individuals and organizations that have been nothing more than critical of his own communication platform and other business dealings. When advertisers decide that they no longer wish to spend money on his platform because of increasing levels of disinformation and hate speech, he threatened to sue them as well.
There is something Orwellian going on here, but not in the way Musk claims.
In “1984” Orwell came up with the term “doublethink” to refer to how the exercise of pure authoritarian power includes getting people to believe two things at the same time, even if those two things are in direct contradiction. The most classic examples from the book being the expressions War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
Musk’s rhetoric on free speech and democracy, and the willingness of so many of his followers to accept that rhetoric despite the obvious contradictions, is a perfect example of “doublethink.”
With Musk, we see enormous economic, informational and political power in the hands of the richest man in the world. There is no rational argument for how such a situation cannot and will not damage informed citizenship and democracy in the long run.
Musk is the defender of free speech and democracy who censors opponents of authoritarian regimes. Musk is the advocate of free and open debate who sues people who criticize his platform. Musk is the lover of the free market who threatens to take advertisers who won’t give him money to court. Musk is the defender of workers who actively fights organized labor.
As an academic, I realize that my criticism of Musk will likely be dismissed along ideological grounds. But I can tell you that academics have been warning about the dangers of excessive concentration of private and corporate mainstream media ownership for decades, and that criticism was in relation to all media, including mainstream outlets people call “left-wing.” We warned that power would continue to concentrate and that the damage to democracy could be severe. Yet, when we made those warnings, mainstream journalists, editors and owners largely dismissed them as out of touch and irrelevant. What do academics know of the real world?
Well, here we are now with Musk.
With Musk, we see enormous economic, informational and political power in the hands of the richest man in the world. There is no rational argument for how such a situation cannot and will not damage informed citizenship and democracy in the long run. By his actions Musk has shown no indication that he has no real interest in freedom of speech or ordinary working people. This should be of grave concern to all citizens regardless of their political inclination.
Orwell, a social democrat, was ahead of his time in anticipating the use of technology in surveillance and disinformation in the service of power. Musk is right that Orwell is relevant to today’s society. He’s just wrong about what side of the fight he is on.
That is how Israel, as a military colony, serves its imperial master.
Although it may seem puzzling why the United States supports and provides cover for Israel’s most outrageously authoritarian, lawless, and even brutal actions, the reason is hiding in plain sight. It is not, as many speculate, primarily because of AIPAC. It is because Israel is a military colony of the United States.
From its inception, Zionism viewed a Jewish state as the handmaiden of colonialism. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, described his proposed Jewish state in his 1896 book, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) as “a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” (Astute readers will find echoes of this racism in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent justifications for Israel’s conduct in Gaza; one can decide for oneself if the echo is intentional.)
Some argue that Zionism was not a colonial project because Jews had lived in Palestine for thousands of years. This ignores the fact that the Jews who had been living in Palestine for the nearly 2,000 years prior to the European Zionist intrusion into Palestine often were at least as loyal to their Palestinian identity as to the incoming Zionist colonizers.
In the two current wars being fought with American weapons but without congressional appropriations for those weapons, only one state is running out of ammunition.
In 1947, the United Nations—controlled by European colonial powers such as France and England and their ally, the United States—voted to create a Jewish state. The new state was surrounded by victims of European colonialism: Jordan, which became independent from Britain in 1946; Syria and Lebanon, which became independent from France in 1946 and 1941, respectively; and Egypt, which did not become independent from Britain until 1952. In 1956, when Egypt dared to declare itself the owner of the Suez Canal, which ran entirely through Egyptian territory, Israel joined its colonial sponsors France and England in making war on a country which had been a former colony of both, fulfilling Zionism’s promise to be “a wall of defense.”
U.S. military aid to Israel was almost never more than about $13 million annually until after the Six-Day War and,in the early 1970s exploded into the hundreds of millions and then multiple billions of dollars. Almost all of the aid had to be spent on weaponry from U.S. defense manufacturers. In an era when the U.S. dared not engage directly with the Soviet Union, Israel made war on Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, pitting U.S. advanced military hardware against Soviet hardware. This made Israel the only actor who could use American weapons against Russian weapons without risk of provoking world war, essential for testing American weapons under battlefield conditions.
Israel also developed its own defense industry, specializing in selling arms to dictators that U.S. presidents wanted to support but could not. The Guatemalan Army used Israeli weapons and training from Israeli advisers to carry out its genocide against its Indigenous Mayan population in the 1980s. Guatemalan rightists called it “Palestinianization.”
By the mid-1980s, just about everyone in the world except then-President Ronald Reagan and Israel had cut military relationships with apartheid South Africa. U.S. aid stopped when Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. But Israeli aid only stopped when the U.S. threatened to end military aid to Israel.
Today, with interstate warfare increasingly rare, the real need of power elites is to control civilian populations. Israel is a major exporter of civilian control weaponry. According to Eran Efrati, speaking on behalf of the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence at a private home in Albuquerque on February 6, 2014, highly trained, Arabic-speaking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers (“musta’ribeen”) infiltrate peaceful Palestinian demonstrations to provoke violence. IDF troops then deploy multiple types of tear gas or weapons to see which works best. After the IDF reports the results, these products are marketed internationally as “battle-tested”—including to American police.
The chickens are roosting here. Israeli technology is turning the U.S. into a surveilled state. Israeli defense manufacturer Elbit Systems sells so much advanced surveillance technology for use at our southern border that Elbit has opened a subsidiary in El Paso. But this goes beyond desperate immigrants: A network of surveillance cameras modeled on Israeli technology blankets Atlanta, making it virtually impossible to go anywhere or do anything in the city without being seen and watched by an unblinking eye.
NSO Group, a private Israeli company, developed Pegasus, a software that, once introduced into a cellphone, makes every bit of data inside the phone available to the software operator. Unlike most of the malware we all receive, no click is necessary. License to use the software can only be sold with Israeli government approval. Who gets to buy a license? Dictators around the world have it. The Saudi government installed it on the phone of the fiancée of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents. FBI Director Christopher Wray has admitted to Congress that, yes, the FBI has purchased Pegasus but would never use it. How’s your cellphone?
Finally, in the two current wars being fought with American weapons but without congressional appropriations for those weapons, only one state is running out of ammunition. Unlike Ukraine, Israel has no shortage of bombs or ammo. Given the scale of the devastation visited upon Gaza, how is this possible?
The United States used its military colony to cache billions of dollars’ worth of munitions, ready for deployment against any real or perceived enemy of the U.S. As an unforeseen “benefit,” President Joe Biden has been able to release those bombs and bullets to Israel without a congressional appropriation. Now, in addition to vetoes at the U.N., Israel is being serviced with tangibly destructive assets. The restocking costs will no doubt be buried in next year’s trillion dollar defense appropriation.
It is no accident that on July 3, 2017, standing aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, Benjamin Netanyahu likened Israel to a mighty American aircraft carrier. That is how Israel, as a military colony, serves its imperial master. America repays its military colony, Israel, in kind.
Human Rights Watch examines how repressive governments use harassment, surveillance, and assassination to target dissidents.
A report published Thursday by Human Rights Watch details how governments around the world relentlessly target dissidents, journalists, and others beyond their borders, resorting to threats, harassment, and even abduction and assassination to silence those perceived as threats.
"Transnational repression looks different depending on the context," notes the new report. "Recent cases include a Rwandan refugee who was killed in Uganda following threats from the Rwandan government; a Cambodian refugee in Thailand only to be extradited to Cambodia and summarily detained; and a Belarusian activist who was abducted while aboard a commercial airline flight. Transnational repression may mean that a person's family members who remain at home become targets of collective punishment, such as the Tajik activist whose family in Tajikistan, including his 10-year-old daughter, was detained, interrogated, and threatened."
The report—titled "We Will Find You": Global Look at How Governments Repress Nationals Abroad—also highlights the well-known case of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist and dissident who was violently murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, "approved" the operation. Khashoggi's remains were never found.
The Saudi regime, an ally of the U.S., uses a number of tactics to silence dissidents, the new report notes, pointing to the targeting of family members of government critics, arbitrary arrests and disappearances, and surveillance.
In total, the report examines more than 75 cases of transnational repression committed by over two dozen governments.
"Governments responsible for transnational repression should be on notice that their efforts to silence critics, threaten human rights defenders, and target people based on their identity are no less problematic abroad than they are at home," the report states.
1/ Powerful new @HRW report today on how governments harass & abuse their citizens living abroad inc killings, kidnapping, misuse of Interpol, arrest of relatives at home. Urgent action needed by govts, EU, UN to stop this #TransnationalRepression https://t.co/zrT298Rjpo
— Hugh Williamson (@HughAWilliamson) February 22, 2024
The new report comes after the United Kingdom's High Court held two days of hearings on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—an Australian national who has spent the past five years in a high-security London prison—can appeal his extradition to the United States.
Advocacy groups, including Human Rights Watch, have described the case as a "grave" threat to press freedom and an attempt to "intimidate and silence" journalists worldwide.
Bruno Stagno, chief advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch, said Thursday that "governments, the United Nations, and other international organizations should recognize transnational repression as a specific threat to human rights."
"They should prioritize bold policy responses that are in line with a human rights framework and uphold the rights of affected individuals and communities," said Stagno.