Free world: how free are we really?
by akrainer
Thursday, Dec 21, 2023 - 5:39
[Originally published on Alex Krainer's Substack] Hooray, we are free people living in the free world! We know this because we are reminded of it daily with many soundbites and slogans: the freest nation on earth; liberté, egalité, fraternité, etc. And as we all appreciate, repetition makes truth - especially the kinds of truth we like to believe. Of course, some grunge might come by and say that, "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
But we should pay no attention to such hate speech - that's not about us. If he were alive today, Goethe would probably aim such quips at the Russians, the Chinese, or some other oppressed peoples. Indeed, it is our own, 21st Century's "white man's burden" to bring democracy and freedom to such peoples, whether they like it or not.
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Math is racist. So are facts.In a 2022 interview, Russian dissident podcaster Konstantin Kissin pointed out to media host John Anderson that, "In Russia last year, 400 people were arrested for things they said on social media." Duh, we know... Russia bad (repeat often). Kissin is privileged to live in Britain, in the free world where, in 2021 only 3,300 people were arrested for things they said on social media. That sounds great, unless you're good at math, which, thankfully, is less and less of a problem in the free world. After all, math is racist. (here's a video of Kennesaw State University students working out that 15 x 4 = 48).
However, if we did embrace math and explored facts, Goethe's quote might strike much closer to home. For example, we might work out that in Great Britain, the cradle of western democracy, almost 17 times as many people per capita were arrested in 2021 over social media posts as in Russia! John Anderson was incredulous at what Kissin was telling him and he probed about what kind of posts could get you arrested in Britain. Kissin did offer one example. Another example recently made the news: one Michael Chadwell, a 62 year-old former Policeman earned himself a 6-month prison sentence over a meme he posted, not on social media but in a private WhatsApp group shared with former colleagues.
The meme showed a picture of multi-colored parrots and a picture of children from different ethnic groups with a question asking why diversity is celebrated in animal species and not humanity? A comment below the meme said, "Because I've never had a bike stolen out of my front yard by a parrot." Chadwell's offence was not in what he actually posted but what could be implied by it. Whatever.. good enough to give the man a six-month prison term! Thank you for your service, officer!
Living in the gangsta’s paradise 
EU’s Minister of Truth announces Europe’s unwavering commitment to free speech.
Do we live in a free society if the state persecutes ordinary people over things they say at such an industrial scale? The EU now wants to ban Twitter entirely over its refusal to toe its content censorship directives. And speaking of bikes or other stuff stolen from Britons (not by parrots), British law enforcement has pretty much abandoned them to criminals. In 2018, the Daily Mail revealed that in more than 3,000 areas in England and Wales, zero burglaries were solved in the previous year.
Last year, The Times reported that "The percentage of solved burglaries has nearly halved in seven years across England and Wales, and in some areas fewer than one in 30 crimes are reaching court..." Overall, only 5% of crimes are typically solved. It is a free country alright, only not so much for the ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
We just know it: it must be so much worse in Russia!Surely, things must be so much worse in dark places like China under the Communist Party rule or in Russia under her evil dictator, Vladimir Putin. Duh, everybody knows that, it's repeated daily on the telly and in the papers! But again, apart from the relentless demonization, how much do we really know about it? In researching for my book "Grand Deception,"
I came across a curious, but perhaps indicative case from Putin's Russia. The protagonist of the story was William Browder, a British subject who used to run the largest foreign-owned investment fund in Russia during the 1990s and who in 2012 managed to lobby the Magnitsky Act through US Congress (the law is regarded as the opening salvo in the new Cold War between the US and Russia).
Broadcasting “Putin’s No. 1 enemy” on Moscow radio Browder styled himself as "Vladimir Putin's No. 1 enemy," and he was indeed declared the enemy of the state in Russia in 2007. But in spite of that, Browder was able to publish content in Russian media like the No. 1 business newspaper Vedomosti, from where it was regularly picked up by other Russian newspapers (this is according to Browder himself).
In the summer of 2008, Browder was invited for a telephone interview with Russia’s leading independent radio station, Echo Moscow. Over the 45-minute interview, he was able to “methodically” lay out the story of his run-in with Russian law enforcement: the raids at his offices, alleged theft of his companies, false court judgments, involvement of ex-convicts, police complicity and the theft of $230 million from the Russian treasury for which Browder directly accused Vladimir Putin and the thuggish state bureaucrats under his control.
In other words: in Putin’s Russia, after more than eight years of the evil tyrant’s rule, the man who had already been declared a national security threat could speak on public radio unhindered for 45 minutes and accuse President Putin of stealing $230 million. Matvei Ganapolsky, the journalist who interviewed Browder and expressed shock and consternation about the government corruption, was evidently unafraid to have the enemy of the state on his show and to broadcast the interview. It would seem that he was not wrong to feel unafraid. At the time I researched this case, more than 8 years after that interview had aired, Ganapolsky was still very much alive, a free man, and still a regular contributor to Echo Moscow.
What if they’re freer than we are?Could it be that Russia does have a respectable degree of media freedoms and that dissenting voices do get heard? Is that degree greater or lesser than what we have in the west? I don't know, but the book in which I published some of this research was banned in our free world, only 5 weeks after it was published in 2017: all it took was a letter from a US State Department lawyer to Amazon.com, and the book was disappeared (it is now only available from the RedPill Press).
Of course, I did fare much better than Julian Assange who has been rotting for years in a London dungeon, not far from where Bill Browder lives and works with various think tanks and NGOs that contrive much of the mud that is slung daily in the direction of Russia and her president by our media. Incidentally, Julian Assange has not been convicted of any crime. But whatever... we are free, Russia bad, China bad, Iran bad... We know that all this is true because our 'reputable media' told us so.
Truth shall make us freeSarcasm aside, If we are to be free, if we can hope that our children will know freedom and prosperity, we must reject lies, embrace truth and speak it. We must learn to discern who the real enemy is. They are not abroad! For centuries, the ruling oligarchies used foreign enemies to misdirect their subjects' grievances. Foreign enemies have always been the bullfighter's red cloth for the masses. We must learn to be smarter than frightened bulls in the killing arena - and that should include some math skills too. |
