Can someone wake me up from this nightmare?
I remember years ago, during my obsession with the former Soviet Union and Iron Curtain, reading Czeslaw Milosz’s “Captive Mind” and thinking how horrible it was, how easy it was to set up and how it would never happen in the west, in my part of the world. How wrong I was.
You know the story, how the narrative was controlled by the Politburo and everyone thought the West was evil and mother Russia was growing, improving, creating a new, heaven on earth. It was believed by many citizens despite the everyday facts in front of their faces - this was not the case. Communism was a stagnant pond of poverty.
I wake up today finding out that Gates has paid over 300 million USD in the past couple of years to most of the major news outlets - you know the ones, Gannet, Fox, CNN, BBC, Le Monde, Al Jazeera. You get the point. If you dig deep, it just gets dirtier and dirtier.
Bezos is up there too with about 250 million spent this past year. Not to mention how he’s transformed the Washington Post into a digital, all-for-profit, blow-hard.
The spending of both these men pales in comparison with Big Pharma and how much they spend and thus, keep the blood flowing at major news corporations. It’s expected to top $7 billion this year. Yeah, you got that right $7 billion. Just on ads and influence. Remember once upon a time when we actually had laws saying these companies couldn’t advertise their drugs - they should not be in the “pushing” business?
Buy hey! - $7 billion USD is just a small drop in the ocean when you are making over $1,000 a second from a vaccine that you pledged to give free to the world, to save the world. Eh?
But it isn’t just medicine (drugs) or greedy corporate tycoons that are the problem. The problem is everywhere - influencing our minds, our press, our culture and world view. Lobbyists with briefcases full of cash and future promises, control our governments and politicians. In education, endowments and foundations push money into forming opinions - like the “science of reading”, so they can sell their wares down the road.
In almost all aspects of the lives of our minds - we are being manipulated by paid ads. Soft sell. So much of what we read, watch, listen to - is paid for and just selling influence. We are the final product and we are bought off with buckets of dollars. Who will be our Luther and tack the theses on the door of Capital Hill?
I say all this amid almost complete censorship on the topic of covid 19 and the vaccines. Censorship that reeks. Smells like rotten cabbage. And that’s the real problem - when the money doesn’t just buy air time, voice, print pages but also buys control. CONTROL.
There is a reason that speech and a free press is the first amendment. It is the most sacred thing we, any society have. We shouldn’t have to have the courage to speak like so many did in Milosz’s Poland. No courage needed. We have the right to speak and the right to be heard. We have the right to information and the right to a fourth estate free of the influence of money, power.
Instead, all we have is a press that is basically a corporate public service announcer. Shaping and capturing our minds.
It’s sad, we need a whole rethink and we need people ready to take up the call and say “Enough”.
To end - my hats off to all those journalists who’ve given their lives for the truth, in digging to find out the truth. To all those journalists still brave enough to reject the dollar bills and cozy comfort on offer if they just conform and write about puppies in China or better teeth implants.
To a journalist like Georgy Gongadze - one of the first internet muck rakers who paid for his life, beheaded in a forest outside of Kyiv, leaving his baby twin daughters behind.
Our death won’t be so painful but be sure … we are next. Every last one of us. The barbarians are at the gates.
A Fireside Chat
— in memory of Georgy Gongadze
They killed him
again and again.
One stab, one kick, one grin
after another, after another, after another
while the darkness altogether smothered
any heavy breathed fright
and nervous dogs whelped out of sight.
And I in shock
by the fire
in my more than human way
stood up to say;
“Stop! Isn’t once enough?”,
To which the brightest replied
(a grinning toddler at his side),
“For the dead yes, but for the living never!”
Outstanding!