Climate, technology and chaos Blog

One of the things I dislike about the Right as a movement, is the way it tries to suppress discussion and opposition and has been doing so for a long time and, to a large extent, has succeeded. This is also a time in which the Righteous Australian government is pursuing media organisations and whistleblowers with perhaps the greatest ferocity ever. You must not inform people of things the Righteous do not want people to hear. I’ve written about this previously, so I won’t do more than mention the Australian governments attacks on Get-up (which says things they don’t like), while ignoring the right wing copies of Get-up which say things they do like, the attack on Unions while apparently leaving alone the financial services sector which has been shown to be massively corrupt and the attacks on whistleblowers carried out with secrecy.

Talking about the Government’s apparent lack of interest in stemming corruption, Stephen Charles AO QC said:

Late last year the Attorney-General gave his consent to the prosecution of [whistleblowers] Witness K and Bernard Collaery [who revealed that Australian Intelligence had bugged an ally, East Timor, in 2004 to give information to an Australian corporation to benefit their negotiations over oil rights]. There is no justification whatever for the prosecution to be proceeding in total secrecy. The facts of ASIS bugging, and ASIO raiding and confiscating are already well-known and matters of wide public discussion. The only possible reason for this flagrant departure from the principle of open justice is to hide from the Australian public the full tale of mendacity, duplicity, fraud and criminal misbehaviour with which the Australian Government and its intelligence agencies have treated our near neighbour Timor-Leste. It would also be hard to think of a stronger case for the public interest demanding publication of the events for which Witness K and Bernard Collaery are now being prosecuted.

The point is, don’t criticize the Right and its relation to corporate power, effectively or maybe you will be punished in secret.

Asked about the police raids on [journalists], Ida Buttrose [chair of the ABC] expressed the view the government was fully intent on intimidating whistleblowers, and the strategy was working. She noted the ABC had lost a couple of stories in recent times because potential whistleblowers had balked, concerned about the consequences.

I should emphasise that what I am about to say here, applies largely to right wing organisations and professional culture warriors in Australia, not necessarily to particular individuals – obviously not everyone who has views which can be classed as right wing behaves as described below – real cultural conservatives should refuse to act this way – but it colours what individuals perceive, and that is the point…

Historically, the right used to take overt pride in suppressing dissent and impure thoughts. They were always banning books, films, art, music, political movements and so on. Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s reign in Queensland was even more up-front than usual. States of emergency to put down dissent, making it illegal to gather in groups of more than three on a street, encouraging police harassment and violence against protestors or gay people, banning strikes, suppressing media criticism and criticism by opposition politicians through defamation laws, gerrymandering elections and so on. He was in power for 15 years, so this suppression was not unpopular amongst his followers.

Historically, the Right has, more often than not, tried to suppress the opinions of those lower in their hierarchies, who disagree with them, or can be categorized as: female, ‘inferior ethnicities,’ colonialized peoples, people with non-straight-sexualities, heretics and atheists, workers, unions, socialists, post-modernists, scientists whose findings are inconvenient for profit, economists who are not pro-capitalist, communal anarchists, and so on. Must defend the old hierarchies. The left also used to do this but, in general, it has tried to learn better, rather than lament the good old days when women and others were silent, or the force of silencing was more effective.

Often, this suppression of speech correlated strongly with criminal actions, so that the victims where not allowed to speak against the perpetrators, and the whole hierarchy would engage in protection of its members. The powerful were protected by silence. We can think of various Churches and Private schools in which children, or parishioners, were raped; financial institutions which made sure that people who objected to corruption were silenced and could not get another job in the industry; or governments who arrested those who protested against them, or reported crooked government deals with the corporate sector.

Suppression is more subtle nowadays, but it’s still so widespread that it’s the norm. As stated above, it may have little to do with individuals and much to do with right wing organisations and the ways they use individuals and affect the information individuals receive. I suppose it’s deliberate and coordinated but it may not be. You won’t hear about it much in the media, but that is part of the way it works.

Firstly, there is the argument, usually put in defense of “fake news”, that private news organisations such as Fox should be able to do what they like; and they have no responsibility to be balanced or truthful because they are private. This argument should imply you cannot trust any private media organisations, as they need have no commitment to truth, just to pushing their owner or controller’s politics and ideology. I don’t know the real percentage, but let’s assume, 90% of the media in Australia is corporately owned. By the logic of this defense, we can assume that the majority of this media is pro-corporate in orientation, and purveyors of ideology rather than pro-truth. The only Left wing media I know of, which basically argues things that would have been standard Labor policy before the shift to the right of the last 30-40 years, are produced in back rooms and have no distribution – not for them the luxurious publishing of right wing think tanks.

The argument about Fox, also indirectly suggests the power of hierarchy; only the owners of media can have their positions defended, proposed and listened to. Consequently, in general, the already powerful get to determine what ordinary people should think is correct. One implication of the argument is that if you want to talk truth in public, then go and start up your own media company. In other words, people who are not already powerful and wealthy should shut up; and, indeed, have to shut up as they won’t get reported, and their talk won’t reach the public in an undistorted manner. This argument takes hierarchy for granted. The rich have the liberty to do and say what they like and the poor to do what they are told.

It’s a bit like the great libertarian argument which goes: “the owner of private property has the absolute right to stop you protesting on their land, because it’s their land and they get to say what happens on it. Furthermore, there should be no publicly owned land as that is an encroachment on liberty.” The implied conclusion is left unsaid: “Consequently, you can only protest in public when and if the owners allow you to. That is real liberty.” To labour the point, if the wealthy don’t want you to speak, then nobody will hear you, so you might as well be quiet.

In terms of the old joke, the rich person and the homeless poorer person both have the same right to use defamation laws, and not to sleep in a public park.

The ABC, as a public institution is, in the same right wing argument in support of Fox’s freedom to deceive, supposed to have a commitment to “political balance,” because that implies it should go along with deliberate falsehoods and misdirections, which is probably the point of the argument.

But as a public institution, the ABC should be doing the best it can to report reality accurately, and to correct mistakes when it makes them. If we had Stalin in Canberra, we can imagine that he would attack accurate reporting, and claim bias, because the organisation was not supporting him without question. He would want ‘truthful,’ unbiased, pro-Stalin news.

We know that the ABC does its best to report accurately, because when Labor is in power it repeatedly accuses the ABC of bias, but on the whole it seems to think “this is another media organisation that’s against us, we’ll leave it alone”. The Coalition seems to think: “this is one media organisation that does not recognise we are the saviours, so we should punish it, shutdown its money supply, appoint people to the board who are on our side to made sure that it says what we want it to say. It should be like the Murdoch Empire, as that is proper news”. And so they do. And the righteous media cheers them on. At the moment, the Coalition don’t appear to execute people like Stalin might, they just strive to prevent accurate news, and threaten to imprison those who report it. They only have commitment to the free speech of those who agree with them, or who urge them to become more right wing.

If, however, someone, from the ABC, takes a position which the right does not like, like for example, asserting that on Anzac day we could remember refugees from war, or women raped in war, the screaming is endless. It goes on and on. Even if the person apologises. The person is said to traitorous, should be dismissed, should go back to where they came from, should shut up or be shut up, etc. The righteous idea here, is not to have a discussion, not even a mild discussion about the possibility that war is horrible or creates refugees who we might have a responsibility towards (as after all that goes against Coalition policy), but to shut down the possibility of discussion, and to penalise and intimidate those who might want a discussion. The only free speech allowed is Andrew Bolt’s and those who agree with him.

Likewise the public service is threatened and compromised. It has recently come out that growing inequality in Australia was suppressed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to craft a “good media story”, or rather a story which was preferred by the government whose finance minister, Mathias Cormann told the Sydney Institute “Labor in more recent years explicitly committed itself to the flawed socialist pursuit of equality of outcomes – falsely asserting that Australia had a major and growing inequality problem”. Sadly for us, the growing inequality is correct. The ABC further pointed out that:

The survey is statistically unlikely to capture any of those who made AFR’s richest 200 list earlier this year.
This group had a combined net worth of $342 billion.
This group increased their net worth by an estimated 20 per cent last year, and have enjoyed a staggering 17-fold increase in real wealth (after inflation) in the 35 years since that report started.

But most of the media followed the Government’s cozy, pro-class war, line as we might expect – this time ignoring the ABC, perhaps they did not want the news to get out, and have discussions starting. We still don’t know how the report was nobbled.

What this kind of stuff shows is that for the Right news is political and hierarchical. If ‘news’ agrees with their positions, and the positions of those powerful enough to make the news, it’s unbiased and, if it disagrees with them, it should be shut down. The only acceptable news is pro-corporate, pro-hierarchy, news. Again, there is to be no discussion, unless the people on the other side have amazingly thick skins, unlike the person berated for mentioning refugees in war, and no possibility of being dismissed from their jobs by employers nervous of the ‘backlash’.

This tactic seems to have been normalised in the US during the 1980s early 1990s with the rise of right wing radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh. Again he should be able to speak, but was his tactic to have discussion? No, it was simply to close discussion and assert righteousness. Anyone who disagreed with him was screamed at, name called, mocked, threatened and shut down. If he was caught out lying, which he often was, he was just an entertainer, or satirist with no obligation to truth, just to entertaining his audience. That became the new normal for the Right, and their exemplary patter for their own suppressive speech. It still goes on today.

In this time the technique of shutting down discussion by screaming “politically correct” at almost anything which might be troubling, or express worry about equality was developed. Even today, ‘politically correct’ continues to be used as a discussion stopper and an assertion of righteousness, and dismissal – especially when the person being accused can be cut off. Silencing the problem and the discussion is the aim. The right has developed a whole series of other catch phases they use repeatedly to prevent communication and thinking. Thus if someone expresses a moral position a righteous person does not agree with, then that person is “virtue signaling” – a term which implies the moralist don’t actually believe the position either, but is trying to look good to others. Ironically, the people using the term are signaling to other right wingers that they don’t have to engage with the despised moral position at all, just shut it down, because they are all so virtuous. Likewise if someone is remotely concerned about inequality, or repression, they can be dismissed as a “social justice warrior”; they are just a fanatic interferer; no need to consider what they say just shut them down. If a woman objects to women being treated as objects for violence or rape, she is a “feminazi”, no need to deal with the problem, abuse her, mock her, and shut her up. People who discuss issues can be dismissed as the “chattering classes,” presumably the idea is that we should never discuss, only act or suppress others talk. Likewise terms like “socialism” have been turned into terms of abuse, so we cannot discuss how we might make a better capitalism, unless it involves making the wealthy even more powerful.

Again, this is something that clearly marks the shift to the right. Standard words from the 60s and 70s cannot be used, to the joy of the righteous triumphalists, who protest violently about being suppressed if some people object to them berating “boongs”, “apes”, “poofters” or whatever.

Alan Jones is a milder form of Limbaugh, but he still thinks that threat and shutting people down is the way to go, and when people suggest he should calm down he claims he is the one being bullied. If, finally, there are enough women able to speak, and who object to his threats of violence against women, why then they are just trying to prevent his innocent free speech and his right to assert the necessity of violence against powerful women. He is just being misunderstood. It’s not, “wow a previously silenced constituency now feels able to express their opinion, let’s listen we might learn something”. No one on the official face of the right has anything to learn – one reason why everyone else should shut up.

It is worth noting that, with his most recent spray, no one objected to the information he gave about New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s remarks on climate change, even if it did contain misrepresentations, they just objected to his demands that Australian prime minister “Scott Morrison gets tough here with a few backhanders”, “shove[s] a sock down her throat” and “goes for her throat”. With the usual right wing commitment to free discussion he added “she is a joke, this woman. An absolute and utter lightweight” “If I see her once more on the TV, I’ll puke.” “I wish she would shut up.”

This proved a bit much for Scott Morrison, for once, and he objected. Jones responded:

There are many people who would relish the opportunity to misinterpret anything that I say, and we saw some of that online yesterday. I would never wish any harm to any politician male or female

Pity he so often expresses the wish to harm women and others for disagreeing with him.

In general, the right has no time for any minority who might want to participate in a discussion which they previously did not feel able to participate in, unless that minority supports them. It does not welcome challenges to the normal hierarchies. If a group points out it has been discriminated against, even if it points out the discrimination is largely not deliberate but unconscious, then the screaming starts, about how men are the real victims, white people are the real victims, rich people are the real victims, Arch-Bishops and Cardinals are the real victims etc.

Somehow, the dominant factions when challenged managed to see themselves as the oppressed with the perfect right to shut up those who disagree with them – a bit of a paradox that expressing the dominant voice makes you a victim. And shutting people down, is what they try and do. Over and over. And yes you might expect that sometimes people who have really been oppressed and dismissed appear unreasonable when they speak (partly because hearing them speak is so unusual) but there is no effort to understand this, just to denounce it to support the existing hierarchy. The right only seem happy when the minority is hounded back into its box and shuts up.

This is just the norm on things like Fox, which are in right wing terms “fair and balanced,” but I once asked a right wing friend on the internet in the 90s, at the start of all this, why he thought people deployed this kind of arguing, and he replied that the point of discussion was obliteration of the opponent. Discussion was for whimps. Left wingers needed to be destroyed because they undermined true freedom. Ok, so you can only be free if you agree with right wingers. Over the years I stopped wondering why all the ‘trolls’ I encountered where right wing; even if they claimed to be giving voice to the silent people, it was always a particular intolerant, shouty type of ‘silent’ people who already seemed to be well represented on right wing media.

There was, again, no commitment to facts, but a large commitment to shutting down disagreement or reasonable discussion. Threats of death, violence and hacking were common, although physical hurt was unlikely to be carried out online. When I occasionally met right wing Americans offline (and we are not talking neo-nazis, but standard Republicans) the threats of violence were more disconcerting, and it was part of their right of free speech to make such threats. And of course they were just following the example of the powerful and mainstream right wing media, for whom this type of discourse was standard.

And then there were all the right whingers online who seemed to think they had had a successful discussion if they got ‘liberals’ upset. It almost became a cliché; that many on the right seem to guide their behaviour by what they think will upset liberals or shut them up. Not with positive policies, and not by whether their own arguments are any good. This is the righteous social injustice warriors in action.

Sadly after about 10 to 15 years or so of this righteous behaviour becoming the norm, people on the left or centre also became more rude, shouty and dismissive. I guess they had become fed-up of talking with no results except for constantly being insulted and threatened. Whatever the cause, it was not a good thing. Nowadays it can be hard to tell the parties apart in the way they act, and that feeds into the sense the right have that they are the “real victims”. However, we rarely heard, or hear, people who condemn the impoliteness of the left, worry about the continuing upfront public rudeness of the right, or about suppression of people by the right. I guess they don’t see it, and the right wing media rarely dwell on it or make a fuss about it, and after all, being biased is perfectly ok for corporate media.

Producing this binarism was, I think, the underlying idea of the tactic; to get political discourse to a state in which people could not talk to each other, because in-groups and out-groups were so tight and marked, there was no possibility of discussion. This is almost a sociological truism. Once you get people like this then they dismiss other opinions unheard, they will go along with more or less anything if it comes from “their side”; they certainly are less likely to criticise it, or wonder about their side. If they find that something their side agitates for is untrue, then they don’t have to think about their sides general position, and they cannot risk talking to someone on the other side. And in a situation in which most of the media is corporately owned and pro-right, the default side will nearly always be right wing. So, the right win from disrupting discussion and suppressing disagreement

Thus, to give one example, the Sydney Morning Herald, which is usually denounced as ‘leftist’, used to have days of coverage for protests in Canberra against the Labor Government, even if only 40 people turned up. They would talk about this as if it was a big issue – they still report some tiny right wing protests like this. Then when Tony Abbott got in and there were protests by hundreds of thousands of people all over Australia against Abbott’s policies, they neglected to cover it at all. Can’t have people thinking that lots of people might disagree with Abbott and stand in the pouring rain in Sydney to make the point (which they did). It might suggest he was unpopular. The Herald was taking the standard line that leftist thinking should largely be ignored. However, on that occasion, the Herald was confronted with lots of angry readers who had been to the protests and decided enough was enough. I can’t remember exactly how the Herald editorial staff tried to get out of it, but (from memory, and so I could be wrong) they basically asserted it was not newsworthy as everyone already knew about it! They still don’t discuss the few anti-Coalition demonstrations they report, for weeks before and afterwards, if they do bother mentioning them at all. Of course, we would have to look at the relative numbers of demos to be sure, but the first big Anti-Abbott demo was extremely noticeable, and was treated by a suppression they clearly thought was reasonable.

The Right increases fines and prison sentences for protests against corporate power, and you hardly hear about it. Who would report it, or dwell on it? Not the righteous media. They routinely suppress climate science and prevent anyone they can from speaking out, while giving as much publicity as possible to people who disagree with the science, or they close their articles suggesting that nothing can be done. They insist on any small problem with renewables and gloss over the multitudes of serious and known problems with coal or gas. The right happily stop people from investigating the conditions refugees live in, and appear to use violence and threat to shut down communication with refugees. This tactic often blends with the internet attacks, Trump’s friends reputedly compile lists of journalists they don’t like to spur on internet attacks on those who disagree with them, or who report their scams.

The current government in Australia is developing ways of shutting down extremism on Facebook. It’s not yet clear what they mean by “extremism”, but we can notice that the exclusion of extreme right wing sites and commentary gets media publicity, while the exclusion of non-violent left wing sites and commentary does not. In the US, some Republicans apparently consider Nazis to have protected speech, and anti-nazis to be extremists, so we can guess who will be silenced, and we won’t know much about it.

In the US during the election it came out that Trump was facing court for having sex (rape) with a thirteen year old girl at one of Epstein’s parties. You know, the guy who Trump said was a great guy who liked women “on the younger side”. He was accused by the woman who had been the girl and the woman who pandered her – who was clearly convicting herself. Another woman, who said she was one of Epstein’s sex slaves, claimed to have worked at Trump’s Mar-a-lago. If this had been Bill Clinton or any other Democrat it almost certainly would have been front page news for weeks, endlessly brought up on Fox and co…. but it was about a Republican and it still seems that most Americans, and Australians are unaware of the charges, it was handled so delicately and quietly. It should not have mattered who the candidate was; even when she dropped the charges because of the death threats she claimed to have received. Naturally the Righteous start the rumour that Clinton had Epstein killed. Trump himself promoted it. Trump must be separated from the scandal, and the evidence not discussed. Trump is probably not connected with the death, but that is not the point here, its about what gets taken up and what gets shut down without comment.

It is probably fruitless to point out that almost all the US media had been calling for President Clinton’s resignation over the Lewinski affair, but hardly any are calling for Trump’s resignation despite a series of overt lies, attempts to obstruct justice, subvert the courts and the constitution, profit off the presidency, and work with the Russians to support his election campaign – not to mention the accusations of under age rape, (because they never get mentioned). Sure there is some fuss about Trump and it appears that many do not like him, but it’s nothing like the one voice there was in Clinton’s time, because the Right, on the whole, support Trump no matter what he does (even, apparently, when he disrupts the sacred ‘free market’). If there is an excuse for praising or normalising Trump it is taken, as with the eagerness with which his State of the Union addresses have been praised as statesman-like because they were not just an obvious attack on his opponents. And then, almost all the Media in the US, including supposedly ‘leftist’ papers like the New York Times, initially accepted the Trump team’s account of what was in the Muller report without question that it might be false, indicating their general orientation, and then even said that Mueller’s live testimony, when it happened, was boring, not interesting etc. The extreme right wing media were more vituperative as usual. Dereliction of duty, or just default right wing media in action?

I could go on about the NSW government’s fight to shut down criticism, and its discovery that free speech means nothing if you just ignore the critical speech, and refuse to engage in discussion, because no one else [in the righteous media] will report it more than once, so it does not count or build up a movement. The whole series of events with the Westconnex, like signing contracts before making a business case or having an Environmental Impact Statement, the community consultations in which nothing was revealed, the community consultations not announced until the day before they were held, the vague and overtly inaccurate maps, and the reports on consultations being issued and printed days after the closure of submissions – which give the impression that the consultations were ignored. Then there was the take over of people’s homes with no notification; the suppression of a report which said the Government was grossly underpaying people for these thefts; the handing of the right of judging housing damage to the people who made the damage; and the refusal to filter exhaust stacks (even though it is possible) when medical science says the particulate pollution from the stacks will kill people before their time and make children sick. The reasons for the stacks being unfiltered are because it might cost a bit to maintain and interfere with corporate profit.

That’s right, the right will knowingly kill people to guarantee maximum corporate profit – not just any profit, but maximum profit. No wonder they will suppress discussion to maintain profit.

That is the other reason I dislike the right. Because, whenever there is conflict between public good and corporate power and profit, their organisations will always come down on the side of corporate power and profit. Hierarchy is everything.

I suspect that this is why they developed the news trolling and abuse strategy and devolved into encouraging the kicking and suppression of “liberals”. When the right wing organisations began to move away from being cultural conservatives to becoming neoliberals, and setting up a bold new unstable world. They could not say openly “we are now going to sacrifice your children to corporate power and profit, because that is the only thing that matters” as they would have lost their supporters. Much better to tell their supporters they were being victimised by the left, and should kick back. Even if the problems faced by people were largely produced by the expansion of corporate dominance, the suppression of opposition and the denial of conservatism. Of course, as we might have expected, the support of corporate power and “free markets” meant that the media field shrank, and independent media died or was taken over by corporate media, and hence there is no little opposition to their real policies. The best knowledge we have about ecology, water, economics, medicine and so on, is routinely ignored or slandered when it comes into conflict with corporate greed. The political field, and what is acceptable, have slid rightwards. As, old leader of the Coalition and now “far left” commentator and professor of Public Policy, John Hewson said, they are “are essentially running a marketing, rather than a well-defined policy, strategy” “[T]hey must deceive because reality is not on their side.”

The Right has simply poisoned discourse, to hide the fact that their policies are completely different to what they declare them to be. They aim to support and entrench the hierarchy, nanny the plutocracy (especially miners and developers) and kick the poor and anyone who disagrees with them. You may not hear much about the right wing suppression of thought and discussion, because the default right wing media supports these suppressions. Free speech is pointless without open discussion, and that has stopped. It’s a perfect circle.

Later continuation

Is capitalism inherently authoritarian?