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The Shaping of Things to Come

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More recently still, I did a review of The Dissident, the 2020 documentary that provides an insider's look at the targeting and death of Jamal Khoshoggi. The review is titled "MBS: Lord of the Flies," because, according to director Brian Fogle, that is what MBS sets up -- a dark room full of spooky dishdashed men who spend all their hours attacking a target online, unleashing insults and promising death. Khashoggi, who had crossed the line from being a columnist at WaPo, to a dissident (illegal in the Kingdom, according to Saudi sources in the film), was targeted by these so-called Flies, who swarmed him before he was "taken" at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. Check it out.

The Internet means information, and the need for its control. It used to be an excellent place to track down alternate versions of MSM-published news, including primary documentation that would allow the educated reader to make up his or her own mind about events. But there are too sites out there that cater to "conspiracy theory" minds, the Establishment thing goes, and not long after 9/11 the Pentagon saw the next pearlharbor event coming from Internet activity, and so quietly reported that the Net had been declared a battlefield -- and, as we all know, the military controls a battlefield. So, it's come full circle alright. The Pentagon invented the modern Internet and its widely used TCP/IP protocols. Essentially they've re-poed the Net.

By making everybody on the planet (eventually) dependent on accessing the Internet for maintaining services, online voting (increasing numbers of States are going this route), and identity algorithms through social media -- including, of course, all our connections to others. What a marvelous centralized way to control future dissidents. Threaten to take you, but also everybody you know -- maybe send a snap-shot graphic like Corbyn's (above) of all your connections.

So this all brings us back to Greenwald and the importance of his observations about the MSM and their ramped-up attempts to tamp down the online opposition to their dominant messaging. Paper news is passe'. The NYT, WaPo, WSJ and Guardian, losing ad revenue by the barrows each year, are now competing for money online and need to knock out the competition to their messaging, including, as Greenwald is pointing out, trying to get other journalists who criticize their work censored and, essentially, shut down.

I am reminded again of the Harold Pinter Nobel speech above, and its emphasis on American empire and the means and methods it will employ to succeed at any cost. I keep in mind: "As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" As a reader of news, always keep your skepticism until information can be genuinely corroborated -- an MSM hidden agenda is just another form of fake news. But the other thing Pinter was marvelous at, with all that dark humor, is that we need to be careful when they come for us. In the scene below from The Birthday Party, Stan, a kind of dissident, is about to be taken away from his home by English mafia figures who want to "adjust" him, a euphemistic way of saying they are going to take birthday boy away to blow out his f*cking candles. Darkness does not like light, It swallows it whole, like a black hole. Be careful out there. If you hear monotone voices behind you, run.

Each year we are getting closer and closer to the final lockdown of our lives by electronic means. It has never been more critical to fight back, take precautions, and look for an alternative means of communicating with each other. Swarming is the future, subtle shaping of our behavior from online on the ground. There are currently plans to re-do the Internet, so that commercial interests can be ixnayed and privacy returned. More on that in a later piece.

Right now, anyone wanna go for shawarma?

(Article changed on Mar 26, 2021 at 2:21 AM EDT)

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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