It seems bloggers and socialists really are percieved as a threat by the powers that be. The UK Ministry of Defence has published a report enumerating future situations it sees as likely threats to the military, and quietly dropped in amongst the dire predictions of anthropogenic climate change, worldwide drought, and a billion refugees on the move was this paragraph:
[…]
The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls “declining news quality” with the rise of “internet-enabled, citizen-journalists” and pressure to release stories “at the expense of facts”. It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.
[…]
Marxism
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.
[My emphasis]
They’re scared of us. Good, they should be.
Attacks on the independence and free speech of bloggers come from several directions and seem diffuse but aren’t. Digby and others have written extensively recently on the paid media’s repeated attempts to impose ‘civility’ on bloggers (they’ll decide what civility is, duh). The latest push is couched as criticism of blogs in general, but it’s clear that it’s left political bloggers that are meant.
Of course it’s ridiculous given the US’ First Amendment that anyone could impose a civility code on US bloggers.and they have even less power over us non-USanian bloggers. And speaking as an avowed Marxist I can say with some confidence that most leftish political blogs are far from Marxist – most are woolly liberal – and they’d be horrified to described as such, the prejudice against socialism in the US being what it is.
But that’s not the point.
The point is to push the meme that left political bloggers are wreckers, communistic vandals and traitorous foul-mouthed criminals that must be controlled or eliminated. It’s a meme that, once launched and spreading virally, produces the handily deniable side-effect oframping up and justifying the right’s inchoate ill-feeling to the point where the ‘public’ (ie a bunch of rightwing nutjobs) decides that Something Must Be Done.
In the UK the latest ammunition being used by the papers agaisnt bloggers and online freedom is concern about schoolchildren harassing teachers online. In the US Kathy Sierra’s horrible experience is being conflated by the right with left bloggers’ contempt for Coulter and Malkin and portrayed as undifferentiated sexism, with the intent of painting left political blogs as little more than vehicles for bigotry. (Project, much?)
It’s a created narrative being put together in Washington and Westminster because it’s in the paid media’s own interests to cut down their rivals (all that child support and alimony to pay and all those expensive habits to support). They’re circling the wagons and using the weapons they’ve got: access to the airwaves and an infinite facility for bending the truth.
This, happily for the Republicans and New Labour, both with so much to lose from the truth coming out, neatly co-incides with long-term strategies for the silencing of polical opposition. Their tools are the tools of government:The Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, biometric ID cards, fingerprinting children, control orders, ASBOs, domestic spying, the use of the Justice department, FBI and IRS to target political enemies, the attempt by the Bush administration to take over control of the internet’s DNS root servers – all speak of preparations for a crackdown on dissenters of all kinds, and these days the most pesky, effective and visible dissenters are political bloggers.
Criticise the President, pay the price.
The corporate media’s threatened by a medium it knows will eventually make it obsolete. British and American governments’re threatened by millions of citizens who finally have an unconstrained public voice and plan to use it.
There’s a lot at stake – is it any wonder government and corporate media are fighting back in concert to protect their interests? We may not know our own strength yet, but the establishment has an inkling of where this could lead and they’re making preparations for revolt.
