Crisis Update: The Currency Of Truth

Alt media must move beyond connecting the dots

Jul 19, 2023

We may not have answers but we have questions
Unlike state corporate media and proponents of ideology-lite
It may take decades, but a line built on lies buckles under the weight
History offers little solace as a form of ‘told you so’
Journalists must lance deceit with an objective in mind
The true ‘Alt’ is the act of regrouping around shared values
Inspiration comes from unlikely sources
If preservation fails, we shall seize their ‘build back’
And bury them under the foundations

Excerpt:

How does a writer break through? Not break through to the banality of fame and clicks but through the imposed uniformity of events that also afflicts the audience? For the viewer or reader also has been schooled to anticipate the journalist’s world view of exaggerated threat and humdrum compliance.

This world is at once terrifyingly random and hypnotically predictable — as narrated by a hundred presenters in unison.

Yet the narrative is breaking down. For events in reality do not conform or align nearly as much as the state corporate media claims.

(2,200 words or about 11 minutes of your company)

Jul 19, 2023

I cannot remember who advised novelists to wait at least 40 years before commenting on events. Or if they were writing a contemporary drama, to set it at least four decades in the past, which is the same thing.

Journalists, on the other hand, tell themselves that they are writing the first draft of history. Or if they are writing about recent history, that there is always a new generation to be informed, to whom the eddies of the recent past that sculpt our present, are ancient pre-history.

In practice, it is “ether, or” — to reach for a perspective from the upper regions of air beyond the clouds, or interpret one’s view through the low-lying clouds or fog.

Neither is right nor wrong, better or worse. The novelist waits because fashion is fickle. Capture the trends of the moment and your work may date. Adopt the long view and you stand a chance of seeing beyond the clouds. The journalist, by contrast, often writes in the fog of culture wars.

The journalist like the screen writer actively seeks to reflect the present, which necessarily includes the feints and struggles that time has not yet resolved. He or she may be paid to put a gloss or a spin on current events, and thus construct history, as we see with Fakt Cheka: the state-subsidised and corporate-owned media do more than take sides; they obfuscate.

The alternative media, as it was called, is caught in the middle, peering through the fog while visualising the pattern of events as might be seen from above the clouds. The closest analogy is the practice of historical perspective, which is concerned less with kings and presidents, dates or events, than with how the past shaped our present.

The Western media is, by its own assertion, locked in a crisis of “post-truth” news, in which it censors politicians for alleged “lies,” and journalism schools ditch the unachievable goal of pure objectivity for equity or managed outcomes.

This gives way to a third path, which the author Emily Chua has dubbed, the currency of truth, the title of her book (The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China’s Digital Era, University of Michigan Press, 2023). [1]

Her study of Beijing and Guangzhou-based magazines, concludes that journalism can move beyond informing or deceiving, to become transactional between stakeholders, as industry players defend or advance positions, form agreements and connections.

I still need to acquire the book — any mention of stakeholders brings the communitarian narrative of the World Economic Forum to mind — but let the reader decide. Perhaps the “alternative” path is indeed to re-establish Western journalism around transactional alliances and shared values.

Seeking solace

Viewers have reached their fill of apocalyptic news. Even if you set the grimmer analysis aside, it is still crazier out there than you think.

A comic genius such as Graham Linehan is constrained by current events to the sardonic, and Jimmy Dore to ridicule. [2]

Jonathan Cook coroborates this: “For two years, people have been dying in larger numbers than normal. Officials don’t know why — and don’t want to know. Many readers appear to feel the same, judged by the backlash to my latest essay.” [3]

He concludes that the cult of compliance still dominates but maybe it’s also the fear of self-detonation in polite company.

I have written at least 10 articles and then opted not to publish them. I feel like the busker that people pay to shut up.

The reader wants a moment of peace and freedom to think — escaping for a while the media’s hail of cluster bombs, the aftermath lying like petal mines awaiting the tread of the unwary, threatening those who in polite company may stray from the official narrative.

The space is open for a sideways glance at events, searching for relief or the sourdrops of Soviet humour, and for news to be restricted to brief rip and reads, like the media used to do when we had one.

One good turn

Narratives today, are not equal. No favour is done by ascribing to all fair intent — as if one good deed deserved another — for the antagonists themselves revealed their mendacious nature in their projection upon others of mis- and dis-information.

The wannabe rulers and their media repeaters have told us for three years that the Earth is beset by CHAOS and only they can bring order. Their answer is centralized control on a scale that civilisation has never seen, encompassing not just people but every leaf and paw of nature, all of which must be recorded on a digital ledger, all DNA owned, patented and monetised.

This narrative is a lie — for the natural state of the world may be unpredictable but it is not chaotic (Chaos in physics stands for “unpredictable” and refers to physical systems that change their state over time). The fact that we imperfect humans do not understand how all natural processes interact does not mean the Earth lacks its own measures and balances.

The sheer presumption that humans, and especially those who call themselves an elite — “stiff-necked fools” as Bob Marley sang, quoting from the Bible in reference to boastful and self-important people — rings alarm bells. [4]

The role of the writer is to interrogate what people say and what they do; the World as it is, and the World as it should be. Anton Chekhov said of writers:

“The best of them are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line they write is permeated, as with a juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be, and it is that that delights you.”

Where the tycoons cut down eucalyptus to amplify their words through newsprint, the writer must cut through euphemism.

When a hundred bureaucrats are choreographed to chant “no-one will be safe until everyone is safe” they are saying “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”

They are asserting that they alone can save everything, by controlling everything.

The role of the writer is to make the connection, and not in obfuscatory language beloved of theorists and the ideological-lite but in plain talk that anyone can argue with.

Watch what they do

The Covid response was used to justify biosurveilance, such as vaccine passports which the WHO is still pushing. Biosurveillance goes back to the Convention on Biodiversity, drafted in 1992, and which is concerned with recording and editing genes — patents and ownership in other words, including genetically-modified organisms and corporate ownership of Nature.

This necessarily includes humans, making it possible to create a central registry of every person, their race, ethnicity, DNA and medical history — which is tailor-made for a digital currency that can be cut off or rationed at any moment, along with access to food, travel and energy.

The replacement of cash with central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a long-standing objective of the private central banks whose HQ is the Bank for International Settlements, which was closely linked to the Third Reich — don’t let the spectre of the 1930s scare you; the project is centuries old.

CBDC requires vaccine passports, which are also identifiers of your DNA, and a precursor was the Reich’s race documents, such as Ariernachweis. The asset manager BlackRock has just bought Ancestry, one of the biggest ledgers of human DNA.

Talk about equity for the “unbanked” is another pretext for getting people in developing countries onto a DNA ledger, where their burden on society could be tied to their identity. Universal basic income could act as a bribe to get people onboard.

Add SDGs or sustainable development goals to the mix and you have a central record of people and assets of which previous regimes could only have dreampt.

If you pause, and see what has been done these past three years, since the 1970s and over the previous century you will see it amounts to much more than words.

“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”
― E. M. Forster, Howards End

Baltic view

This afternoon I bumped into my neighbour, an economist from Lithuania. He takes the view that the proposals coming out of the World Economic Forum for increased corporate control are simply unworkable.

Regulation requires an independent and accountable bureaucracy. He gives the example of the European Union’s attempt to reverse planned obsolescence by forcing the phone makers to make batteries user-replaceable. This is expected to come into force over the next two years.

I countered that the EU had wasted countless years trying to create a single European electrical plug. Common sense tells you that you are unlikely to get the British (then in the EU) and the French and the Italians to rewire their home sockets, and all the while they ignored the WEF pushing its idea of “agile governance” in which corporations innovate in real time and regulators get out of the way.

My economist friend said monopoly is not compatible with consumer friendly regulation. Nor with innovation, I countered, for a monopoly that can force consumers to use old technology has no incentive to innovate. Monopolist corporations operate by raising barriers to entry, and use regulation not to protect consumers but to stifle their competitors.

As a former state corporate journalist I wondered how advanced is the WEF plan for corporate control.

On the one hand we know how the state corporate media is manipulated. When they say that “Ze Forsse Indhustriaal Hrrevolution” is inevitable... that is no more than propaganda. The crisis of liberal capitalism and the monetary system, is nonetheless real.

The same applies to climate change, which is a narrative to cover a very real struggle for control for energy and resources.

The British House of Commons is starting its summer recess. You may not notice because it seems almost empty. Politicians were paid an extra 10,000 pounds a year to stay home during the Covid response, even though working from home should cut their expenses. The bribe was to empty out parliament so that there were fewer MPs around to object to the biosecurity surveillance state was being erected during their dereliction of duty.

Trapped journalists

Employment is in one sense a trap, and few worker bees are more thoroughly trapped than journalists. Thanks to the centralising role of news agencies, even the smallest news organisation is subject to the straitjacket of accepted narrative — opinion, less so, though that is also conformist — for their very window on the world is a computer screen on which events are retailed to them by the news agencies.

News, like most industries, has wholesalers, middlemen or B2B (business to business), as opposed to retailers who sell to the public. Wholesalers are the news agencies, like Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg and, though it is not strictly an agency, the BBC. They send news to computer screens in the journalists' newsrooms, from which news editors make a selection, and from which reporters copy, often word-for-word. Few journalists do much reporting nowadays. Even those who stand outside buildings during major events are largely repeating the narrative that comes from the news wholesalers, perhaps asking a passer by or a politician for reaction.

They re-produce content — the industry’s term is “repurpose,” the wag’s is “churn.” Journalism is also a job from which it is notoriously hard to escape: the journalists' skills do not map easily onto most management or operational roles.

This world is at once terrifyingly random and hypnotically predictable — as narrated by a hundred presenters in unison.

Yet the narrative is breaking down. For events in reality do not conform or align nearly as much as the state corporate media claims.

Reconnoitre, regroup

We see through the lies! We may not have answers but we have questions — unlike the chorus of journalists or the tribunes of ideology-lite.

Bought and paid journalists need to say what others say. Evidence may lay all around them but they do not want to step out of line. But the line is collapsing.

Dr Peter McCullough was co-author of an analysis in The Lancet of third-party autopsy data. In 73.9 per cent of cases death following the shot was the common feature.

The Elsevier-owned Lancet approved the article twice, but then withdrew it — an act of censorship that won tremendous publicity for the study. Downloads reached 150,000 compared with 5,000 for a regular such article.

Propaganda has failed but “the only court that is open is the court of public opinion,”
says McCullough. Is that a good thing or a bad?

The battle goes on. The academics and deans of some universities continue to insist that students are “current” in the vaccine schedule, including elite medical schools Harvard, Berkeley, Yale. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “up to date” means two shots and five boosters for a total of seven.

Politicians and doctors must be forced to end what McCullough calls their shameful silence: they never knew it was safe. Yet it took 40 years for them to admit smoking was harmful and 20 years to acknowledge opioid addiction.

“Tell your doctor you don’t feel that the shots are safe. Ask if he told patients to take the shots. If they [doctors] heard that morning, noon and night they would change their tune pretty quickly,” McCullough told broadcaster Sarah Westall. [5]

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