Author: Larry Romanoff
Affiliation: Freelance Author and International Consultant (Management, Import, Export)
Organization/Publisher: The UNZ Review
Date/Place: March 4, 2021/ USA
Type of Literature: Opinion
Word Count: 5600
Link: https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/information-blockades-how-and-why/
Keywords: Media Censorship, Information Blockade, Assassinations, and Anglo-Zionism.
Brief:
Western powers and their regimes have built an elaborate system to filter information and construct narratives, depending on co-opted media to overwhelm the general population with the accepted version of events. Censorship is the most basic form of narrative control, as organized efforts of information filtering are ensured by the total control of almost all media outlets by a handful of individuals who own magazines, news services and the book publishing industry. Western media is structured in a way that it has all outlets echoing the same voice, and any information that is deemed distasteful is brushed under the rug. However, when it comes to media based outside the west, the US goes to radical lengths to silence dissenting voices well beyond its jurisdiction. Examples of this censorship include the bombing of Aljazeera’s stations in Iraq and Afghanistan and pressuring the Qataris to the point of forcing the channel to become “mainstream”. Other methods have included assassinations of individual reporters in Iraq, or grouping a bunch to kill them at once as was the case in the Palestine Hotel affair; those who weren’t killed were imprisoned as “Cyber Dissidents”. The attempts to silence any voice that exposes US war crimes in its War on Terror have been staggering, from bombing hospitals that were archiving cases of deformed child births due to American usage of depleted Uranium, to the killing of its own soldiers like Pat Tillman for his making too much noise about the ongoing “illegal war”. Counter narratives are branded as conspiracy theories or fake news, a similar trend that is being observed in the current war in the Ukraine. This effort to have the only voice to be heard is an attempt to maintain Western hegemony and blockade information from their own public. While countries like Iraq and Libya are losing their independence and control over their own wealth, global citizens of the West only hear the narrative that America has made the world safe for freedom and democracy.
Critical Commentary: The author gives vivid examples—and provides disturbing pictures—to describe how information is heavily filtered to maintain narrative supremacy, silencing dissident channels, reporters and institutions so a counter-narrative would die before having any chance to challenge it. This alarms the reader towards an elaborate effort which is part of a larger hegemonic project, one that disregards basic morality and acts as if it has the moral high ground. Though the article engages with censorship in both its soft and hard forms, it doesn’t go much into the role of disinformation and the role of propaganda in weaponizing narratives that push for a violent war; the primary example is the disinformation campaign against Iraq right up to its invasion. Adding the disinformation dimension wouldn’t simply give more details on how information blockades happen but also how the “accepted” narrative itself is formed.
By: Omar Fili, CIGA Research Assistant
