Cracking down on dissent – the Western elites are turning to repression in a civil war they mustn’t win.
Eugene Doyle,3 Jan
The old methods of social control – tame media regurgitating official narratives, endless demonisation stories about strategic rivals, mainstream films and tv shows drumming messages into porous brains about who are worthy victims, who are villains – appear to be breaking down. The ruling parties in country after country are experiencing collapses in popular support as many simultaneously grapple with deindustrialisation, debt crises and other seemingly insoluble problems. In response, institutions like the British government and the EU Commission are turning to more repressive measures to maintain control while the US government shucks off its garment of democratic respectability and reveals itself in all the naked aggression of an ageing, incoherent hegemon trying to maintain dominance over a planet. Let’s look at just a handful of examples.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese had to use cash to pay for a medical procedure recently because of sanctions applied to her by the US for her criticism of Israel. Her insurance company refused to pay out for the bill, citing the sanctions. Albanese was unable to present her annual report on the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the United Nations this year because the US withdrew her visa.
“This is the culmination of three years of smear campaigns, defamation, attacks against me and members of the family,” Albanese told Middle East Eye. Justice? Freedom? Democracy? What has the West become when governments allow this intimidation of one of the finest human rights advocates in the world to continue? What are our spineless leaders doing about this? Western lecturing on human rights is increasingly looking like staggering hypocrisy.
ICC judges from UK, Georgia, Fiji, Senegal and Canada have been hit with similar sanctions, had property seized, and found booking hotels, flights or even paying for a meal in a restaurant impossible because they committed the crime of fulfilling their duties under international law to prosecute the crime of genocide.
Canadian Judge Kimberly Prost found purchased ebooks had been removed from her account, and even Alexa went on strike and wouldn’t talk to her because Amazon enforced the sanctions! Chief Judge Karim Khan has been subjected to intimidation, threats from powerful politicians that he would be “destroyed” if the case against Israel proceeded and, according to Middle East Eye, “the UK would defund and withdraw from the ICC if it issued warrants against the Israeli leaders”.
Welcome to the world we are now in; a world where judges are placed on the US Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list alongside terrorists, drug traffickers, organized crime bosses and geostrategic enemies like Vladimir Putin. This is not how the rule of law works. It’s what fascists do to impose compliance.
Colonel Jacques Baud, a distinguished Swiss geopolitical analyst, cannot buy food because of the EU Commission sanctions imposed on him in December; friends who attempted to order a food delivery for him this week were blocked. He doesn’t have access to due process to challenge the vague accusations made against him; he is trapped in a Kafkaesque world.
“Beyond the fact that this is about freedom of speech and freedom of opinion – the freedoms we are supposed to enjoy when we are in democratic societies – I don’t even have the right to defend myself!” Baud said. He is referring to the fact that the sanctions are extra-judicial measures taken by the EU Commission.
Since the proscription of the direct action group Palestine Action in July, about 1500 Britons, most of them elderly, many distinguished citizens, have been arrested under terrorism legislation for holding cardboard signs saying “I support Palestine Action. I oppose genocide”. When I traveled to the UK last year, immediately after my article “Vive la resistance! The heroes who oppose genocide” was published, my wife and I worked out a procedure should I be detained at Heathrow airport. Writing an article deeply critical of the proscription of Palestine Action put me at risk. The fascist turn in Europe is real and rising.
Progressive journalists are increasingly targeted at the very time countries like Britain, Australia, Germany and France are deeply implicated in the genocide against the Palestinian people. Asa Winstanley (author of Weaponising Antisemitism – How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn), Richard Medhurst, Scott Ritter, Ali Abunimah (electronic intifada), Kit Klarenberg, Sarah Wilkinson and so many more (I have a list) have been subjected to raids by van loads of agents, had their devices seized, repeatedly been stopped at borders and sometimes refused entry for having committed what are, in essence, thought crimes.
University leaders have largely been spineless and compliant in the face of this assault from politicians and powerful donors. Key point: freedom of speech isn’t just for people you agree with.
Let's turn to some of the biggest issues all of us should be committed to understanding. First: how the hell are these politicians getting away with this assault on our democracies? The simplest answer is: we are collectively letting them. The more chilling answer is that the elites that run most Western countries have become immensely competent at running systems of manipulation.
Progressives failed to mobilise in sufficient numbers to stop the genocide. Just as we failed in countless wars from Korea to Libya and everywhere in between to stop the violent, genocidal West from exporting death and destruction to every corner of the world over my entire life span. The mind-bending thing is that while all these endless wars were being inflicted by the West, we Westerners were, by a Jedi mind trick, fooled into thinking we were the good guys. This is the power of what Antonio Gramsci called Cultural Hegemony.
Gramsci pointed out in the 1920s, ruling elites maintain dominance not primarily through force but through manufacturing consent. If successful, the elites rule by persuasion rather than coercion. It’s a brilliant system: ordinary people internalize the intellectual and moral framework of their rulers. Those frameworks would include things like the West is pro-human rights, the West promotes a world of laws not brute force, capitalism is superior to all other systems and will deliver greater wealth and security from here to eternity, etc. 2025 has rattled all those accepted truths.
In the next article I will dive deeper into the war that is being waged to control you and me – a war in which tens of billions of dollars are spent each year. I will look at the literally mind-bending techniques that are being deployed – very successfully – to get us to behave. Our world is changing before our eyes and it’s time for our slumbering ‘Lumpen Bourgeoisie’ to wake up.
Eugene Doyle