Totalitarianism - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

World Without Privacy

Joe Nocera — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 05:56:40 +0000

In his great and prophetic novel 1984, George Orwell laid out his vision of what totalitarianism would look like if taken to its logical extreme. The government – in the form of Big Brother – sees all and knows all. The Party rewrites the past and controls the present. Heretics pop up on television screens so they can be denounced by the populace. And the Ministry of Truth propagates the Party’s three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Dave Eggers’ new novel, The Circle, also has three short, Orwellian slogans, and while I have no special insight into whether he consciously modeled The Circleon 1984, I do know that his book could wind up being every bit as prophetic.

Eggers’ subject is what the loss of privacy would look like if taken to its logical extreme. His focus is not on government but on the technology companies who invade our privacy on a daily basis. The Circle, you see, is a Silicon Valley company, an evil hybrid of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, whose cultures – the freebies, the workaholism, the faux friendliness – Eggers captures with only slight exaggeration.

The Circle has enormous power because it has become the primary gateway to the Internet. Thanks to its near-monopoly, it is able to collect reams of data about everyone who uses its services – and many who don’t – data that allows The Circle to track anyone down in a matter of minutes. It has begun planting small, hidden cameras in various places – to reduce crime, its leaders insist.

The Circle wants to place chips in children to prevent abductions, it says. It has called on governments to be “transparent,” by which it means that legislators should wear a tiny camera that allows the world to watch their every move. Eventually, legislators who refuse find themselves under suspicion – after all, they must be hiding something. This is where The Circle’s logic leads.

Of course, nobody who works for The Circle thinks what he or she is doing is evil. On the contrary, like many a real Silicon Valley executive, they view themselves as visionaries, whose only goal is benign: to make the world a better place.

“We’re at the dawn of the Second Enlightenment,” says one of The Circle’s founders in a speech to the staff. “I’m talking about an era where we don’t allow the majority of human thought and action and achievement and learning to escape as if from a leaky bucket.”

It believes if it can eliminate secrecy people will be forced to be their best selves all the time. It even toys with the idea of getting the government to require voters to use The Circle – to force them to vote on Election Day. And, of course, it has found multiple ways to monetize the data it collects. As for the potential downside of this loss of privacy, it is waved away by Circle executives as if too trifling to even consider.

Is this vision of the future far-fetched? Of course, it is – though no more than 1984 was. The Circle imagines where we could end up if we don’t begin paying attention. Indeed, what is striking is how far down this road we have already gone. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that the National Security Agency has the ability to read our emails and listen to our phone calls. Google shows us ads based on words we use in our Gmail accounts.

Last week, Facebook – which has, in shades of Orwell, a chief privacy officer – removed a privacy setting so that any Facebook user can search for any other Facebook user. The next day, Google unveiled a plan that would make it possible for the company to use its customers’ words and likeness in ads for products they like – information that Google knows because, well, Google knows everything.

So, yes, while we’re not in Eggers territory yet, we are getting closer. I don’t have either a Facebook or a Twitter account, yet every few days I get an email from one of the two companies saying that so-and-so is waiting for me to join them in social media land. The people it picks as my potential “friends” are very often people with whom I’ve never been a true colleague, but I’ve briefly met at some point in my life. It is creepy to me that the companies know that I know these particular people.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,” Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, once said, “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” That line could easily have been uttered by one of Dave Eggers’ characters. That is the thought process that could someday cost us our last shred of privacy. The Circle is a warning.

(And in case you’re wondering, here are The Circle’s three slogans:

SHARING IS CARING.

SECRETS ARE LIES.

PRIVACY IS THEFT.)

Source: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2013/10/16/world-without-privacy/

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Antifa, The Real Fascists

Matthew Vadum — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 02:28:16 +0000

The assault on Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens is just the beginning.

Foul-mouthed Antifa demonstrators went on a rampage August 6 as they assaulted two high-profile conservative activists at a downtown Philadelphia restaurant for being conservatives and supporters of President Trump.

The attack came the day after Antifa smashed the windows at a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office in Berkeley, Calif., during a leftist counter-protest of a “No to Marxism” rally. Twenty people were arrested. “Besides the damage to the Marine Corps post, Berkeley police also said ‘an extremist element among a large group’ damaged 21 city vehicles, setting one on fire, and slashed their tires,” Fox News reported.

The incident in Pennsylvania’s biggest city also came after the leftist mayor of Portland, Ore., Ted Wheeler (D), allowed anarchy to break out in his city, instead of cracking down on Antifa troublemaking. For 38 days Wheeler, who is also police commissioner, allowed hundreds of his Antifa allies to unlawfully occupy public property at an Occupy ICE protest site that eventually became a biohazard. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.”

The attack in Philadelphia and other recent violent actions by Antifa are yet another reminder that the totalitarianism-loving domestic terrorists of Antifa, who call themselves anti-fascist activists, are the real fascists in today’s America because, among other things, they use violent tactics pioneered by the real-live fascist storm-troopers of Weimar Germany, the Sturmabteilung (SA). These Antifa goons opposed the Nazis but eagerly copied their tactics, using their fists to shut down political opponents and break up meetings and rallies. Some Antifa today even dress like Nazis, wearing black and red, the anarchist colors which traditionally have also been used by Nazis.

Antifa, which as a group has been warmly embraced by many Democrats, have regained prominence in the post-Obama era by assaulting conservatives and Trump supporters. The hyper-violent anarchists and communists of the Antifa movement are notorious for promiscuously labeling those they target as fascists, Nazis, and racists, in the absence of evidence.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and communications director Candace Owens were trying to enjoy breakfast at the Green Eggs Cafe when Antifa thugs surrounded them and became loud and belligerent. Antifa poured a bottle of water on Kirk as police officers, who were not white, tried to protect them.

The restaurant assault resembled a Black Lives Matter action carried out on the weekend of Jan. 3 and 4 in 2015. In it leftists terrorized people as they got together for brunch. “Black Brunch” organizers and their followers stormed upscale eateries in New York City and Oakland, Calif., reading out the names of black criminals killed by the police and shrieking that whites had no right to be there. They accused whites of committing “genocide.”

Kirk and Owens were no doubt targeted because Turning Point USA is becoming a formidable threat to the increasingly violent anti-Trump resistance movement. Turning Point is a six-year-old nonprofit organization whose mission, according to its website, “is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”

The group “has embarked on a mission to build the most organized, active, and powerful conservative grassroots activist network on college campuses across the country. With a presence on over 1,300 college campuses and high schools across the country, Turning Point USA is the largest and fastest growing youth organization in America.”

In a bizarre scene right out of Communist China’s Cultural Revolution, young white Antifa agitators blew whistles in the faces of Kirk and Owens, a black woman, while chanting “Fuck white supremacy,” during the restaurant showdown earlier this week. Owens can be seen in a video yelling back at the Antifa activists, “We love the police, we love America, we love the U.S.A.,” as police officers in the City of Brotherly Love tried to separate Owens and Kirk from the protesters.

Soon after the assault, Kirk took to Twitter to denounce the Antifa activists involved.

“If [an] angry conservative mob formed while two young liberals, one white guy and a black woman, were eating breakfast, and the mob hurled horrific insults, threw objects and assaulted them, the left would call it a ‘hate crime’ and every major outlet would be demanding condemnation,” Kirk tweeted.

Interestingly, Antifa activists, like those in Philadelphia who claim America is an irredeemably racist hellhole, are generally young and almost exclusively white.

This fact was not lost on Owens, who referred to Antifa as “an all-white fascist organization” on Twitter, and thanked the police for coming to her aid. “Would like to personally and publicly thank the @PhillyPolice force for keeping us safe today. As you can see in the video, they were all Hispanic and black. The white liberal thugs were shouting ‘no good cops in a racist system[,]’”she tweeted.

Interestingly, at least two left-wingers came to Owens’ defense.

Movie director Samm Hodges stood up for Owens in a Twitter post.

Man, I hate @RealCandaceO’s politics, but watching an (apparently) all-white crowd scream “fuck white supremacy” in her face was sickening. I’m pretty sure that no part of being an ally includes actively oppressing women of color.

Singer Ariana Savalas tweeted:

This is beyond comprehension. What the hell is happening to my party? No matter what you think of @RealCandaceO, even if you hate her, this childish behavior is abhorrent. Fellow liberals, come on. We need to start speaking out more strongly against this bullshit. #NotInMyName

These disturbing incidents caused by radical leftists are becoming increasingly common.

The attackers in Philadelphia seemed to be expanding on the admonition of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) who earlier this summer urged her supporters to publicly confront and harass members of the Trump administration over the separation of illegal aliens’ children from their parents in immigration detention.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that [the] cabinet of [President Trump] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Kirk blamed Waters for the Monday incident in Philadelphia.

“Why won’t Democrat leaders denounce these ANTIFA thugs?” Kirk tweeted. “This is the new base of the Democrat party. They hate America and will go to violent measures to attack conservatives. This is {Maxine Water’s] America – she called for these sort of attacks.”

Leftists recently hounded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen into abandoning her dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) participated in the name-and-shame action and broadcast video footage of it over social media. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was chased out of a restaurant in Lexington, Va., for daring to work for President Trump. Immigration hardliner Stephen Miller was screamed at in the capital city for doing his job and a set of “wanted” posters appeared near his downtown apartment. He famously discarded an $80 box of sushi after a chef heckled him as he left a restaurant (Miller said he feared his food had been spat on).

Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway was accosted in a supermarket. Former chief strategist Stephen Bannon was harassed while he was quietly minding his own business in a bookstore. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R), a strong Trump supporter, was harassed by activists outside a movie screening.

But now Americans far outside President Trump’s inner circle are feeling the wrath of Antifa.

And a backlash is on the way.

ABOUT MATTHEW VADUM

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.”

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270986/antifa-real-fascists-matthew-vadum

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The Great Russian Disinformation Campaign

David Frum — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 04:05:30 +0000

In a new book, Timothy Snyder explains how Russia revolutionized information warfare—and presages its consequences for democracies in Europe and the United States.

Journalists listen to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his annual end-of-year news conference in Moscow, Russia, on December 23, 2016.SERGEI KARPUKHIN / REUTERS

When Westerners first began to hear of Vladimir Putin’s troll army—now some five years ago—the project sounded absurd. President Obama in March 2014 had dismissed Russia as merely a weak “regional power.” And Putin’s plan to strike back was to hire himself a bunch of internet commenters? Seriously?

In a recent talk in Washington, the historian Timothy Snyder observed that Russia’s annual budget for cyber-warfare is less than the price of a single American F-35 jet. Snyder challenged his audience to consider: Which weapon has done more to shape world events?

Snyder is an unusual historian-activist, both a great scholar of the terrible costof 20th-century totalitarianism and also a passionate champion of endangered democracy in Ukraine and Eastern Europe—and now, the United States. Increasingly, he sees his concerns fusing into one great narrative, as methods of manipulation and deception pioneered inside Russia are deployed against Russia’s chosen targets.

Clausewitz defined war as the use of violence by one state to impose its will upon another. But suppose new technology enabled a state to “engage the enemy’s will directly, without the medium of violence,” Snyder writes—this would be a revolution in the history of conflict. This revolution, Snyder argues, is what Russia has imposed upon the United States and the European Union. How, why, and with what consequences is the theme of Snyder’s newest book, The Road to Unfreedom.

“Democracy never took hold in Russia, in the sense that power never changed hands after freely contested elections,” he writes. “Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation because of an election that took place when Russia was still a Soviet republic, in June 1991. Those taking part in that that election were not choosing a president of an independent Russia, since no such thing yet existed. Yeltsin simply remained president after independence. … In other post-communist states, free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections quickly followed. The Russian Federation managed no election that might have legitimated Yeltsin or prepared the way for a successor.”

Amid the collapse of the Soviet state, canny survivors of the old regime seized valuable assets. Yeltsin secured their new wealth; they secured Yeltsin’s power. As Yeltsin succumbed to age and alcohol, his entourage looked about for a replacement. They found their candidate in an obscure former spy who had got rich quick as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg: Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin elevated Putin as his deputy, then resigned in his favor. Putin faced the electorate in 2000 supported by all the power and money commanded by a Russian incumbent. Public opinion was consolidated by a conveniently timed series of murderous terrorist bombings. Number Snyder among those Western experts who strongly suspect that the bombings were organized by the Russian authorities themselves to legitimate Putin’s accession.

At first, Putin turned a sunny face to the West. He cooperated with the United States after the 9/11 attacks. In 2004, he endorsed EU membership for Ukraine and did not object to NATO enlargement. He attended a NATO summit in 2008 and spoke warmly of European economic integration. But as he centralized the state and consolidated his own power—rewriting the constitution to enable him to rule for life—he turned ever more harshly repressive at home and violently aggressive abroad.

He promoted ideologies that Snyder inventively describes as schizo-fascism: “actual fascists calling their opponents ‘fascists,’ blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence.” Putin’s favored ideologist, Alexander Dugin, “could celebrate the victory of fascist in fascist language while condemning as ‘fascist’ his opponents.”

In this new schizo-fascism, homosexuals played the part assigned to Jews by the fascists of earlier eras. Democratic societies were branded by Russian TV as “homodictatorships.” When Ukrainians protested against faked elections and the murder of protesters, Russian TV told viewers, “The fact that the first and most zealous integrators [with the European Union] in Ukraine are sexual perverts has long been known.” Putin himself struck more macho poses and wore outfits more butch than all the stars of the Village People combined. In Snyder’s pithy phrase, “Putin was offering masculinity as an argument against democracy.”

Restrictive new laws silenced democratic debate, including remembrance of the victims of Soviet-era crimes. Memorial associations were condemned as alien invaders. “Russia’s own past became a foreign threat”—but it all started with the August 2012 law outlawing advocacy of gay rights.

Yet the most crucial turn to a new kind of politics—one now agonizingly familiar to Americans—arrived with the Russian invasion of Crimea in February 2014. Even as Russian troops in Russian uniforms seized the peninsula, Putin denied anything was happening at all. Anyone could buy a uniform in a military surplus store. Russia was the victim, not the aggressor. “The war was not taking place; but were it taking place, America was to be blamed.”

Snyder identifies a new style of rhetoric: implausible deniability. “According to Russian propaganda, Ukrainian society was full of nationalists but not a nation; the Ukrainian state was repressive but did not exist; Russians were forced to speak Ukrainian though there was no such language.”

Russian TV told wild lies. It invented a fake atrocity story of a child crucified by Ukrainian neo-Nazis—while blaming upon Ukrainians the actual atrocity of the shooting down of a Malaysian civilian airliner by a Russian ground-to-air missile.

But Russia’s most important weapon in its war on factuality was less old-fashioned official mendacity than the creation of an alternative reality (or more exactly, many contradictory alternatives, all of them Putin-serving). “Russia generated tropes targeted at what cyberwar professionals called ‘susceptibilities’: what people seem likely to believe given their utterances and behavior. It was possible to claim that Ukraine was a Jewish construction (for one audience) and also that Ukraine was a facist construction (for another audience),” Snyder writes.

In 2014, Facebook was not yet a decade old; Twitter younger even than that. As a state weak in conventional means of power, Russia early identified the potential to weaponize these new tools against stronger foes. “The Russian economy did not have to produce anything of material value, and did not. Russian politicians had to use technologies created by others to alter mental states, and did.”

Perhaps this campaign might have been defeated by strong responses by Western governments and truthful reporting by Western media. Indeed, Snyder dedicates his book to reporters, “the heroes of our time.” But alongside those heroes were others working for other ends. Snyder quotes his own warning from the Ukraine war: “Here is going to be there.” Americans and Europeans were left unready to face the new Russian techniques “because writers they trusted were not analysts of, but rather participants in, the Russian campaign to undermine factuality.” Snyder cites repeated examples of journalists in prominent platforms, trusted by left-of-center readerships, whose reporting seemed to support Russian claims that Ukraine had become a romper room for neo-Nazis—or alternatively to “the green flag of jihad.” Many of these reports cited second- and third-hand sources, some of whom disappeared untraceably after depositing their testimonies on Facebook. Hard-left and alt-right social-media trolls then tidied up after the reporters, belittling claims that the original sources were disinformation. Of one such troll, Snyder quips—in an apothegm that applies sadly widely—“he did not see the Russian intervention because he was the Russian intervention.”

Even greater success still awaited the Russian disinformation project: the Trump campaign of 2016. In Snyder’s telling, Trump is himself the ultimate expression of Putin’s anti-factuality. Trump in Snyder’s telling was not the successful businessman he performed in his TV non-reality series, The Apprentice, but an American loser who became a Russian tool. “Russian money had saved him from the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure.”

As late as July 2016, Trump insisted that Russia had not entered Ukraine. His first big foreign-policy speech of the election campaign—viewed from a reserved front-row seat by the Russian ambassador to the United States—was reportedly ghostwritten in considerable part by Richard Burt, a former American diplomat then under contract to a Russian gas company. (Burt has denied this attribution).

Snyder sees Trump as very much a junior partner in a larger Russian project, less a cause, more an effect. He worries, too, that slowly before Trump—and rapidly after Trump—America is becoming like Russia: a country on a path to economic oligarchy and distorted information. Trump’s attitude to truth again and again reminds Snyder of the Russian ruling elite: The Russian television network RT “wished to convey that all media lied, but that only RT was honest by not pretending to be truthful.”

The Road to Unfreedom is a rich and complex book, punctuated by epigrams that cast heroic clarity upon the disturbing distance the United States has already traveled to the sinister destination in Snyder’s title. If some of Snyder’s assessment seems overstated or premature, he can powerfully reply: He has perceived more accurately than his critics what has already happened. He has earned the right to be heard on what may lie ahead.

DAVID FRUM is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/the-great-russian-disinformation-campaign/564032/

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