So-called leftists allowed themselves to be bamboozled by the Russiagate narrative. Great damage has been done to journalism, particularly that of the Black left, who are at great risk of being censored and deplatformed.
On Tuesday, October 10, 2023, By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik ceased its broadcast. This was not a voluntary decision by the show’s hosts, Sean Blackmon and myself, Jacqueline Luqman. For legal reasons, there is not a lot I can say about the ending of our show and our termination. What I will say is that the ending of our show was a consequence of our commitment to anti-Zionist principles, which we adhered to in our personal organizing and expressed in our work on the show throughout its existence.
While we consistently presented our guests with whatever corporate media narrative was spun about a given controversial topic we had invited them to discuss, we understood the power of imperialist propaganda and never legitimized the lies of the US empire and its lackeys and vassal states. Instead, we allowed our guests to address the validity or lack thereof of narratives propagated by the Scribes of the Empire, as Sean often called the corporate press.
We wrestled with difficult topics and contradictions and sometimes disagreed with the position of a guest. In all cases, we did our best to present movement news from around the world for movement people and communities impacted by movement work in a professional, fact-based, and principled way.
The full and official joint statement from Sean and myself is found on The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter here.
I cannot say much more about my sudden unemployment, but I have a lot to say about the dangerous times we are in and the state of independent left journalism.
Because many on the Latte Left facilitated this new era of fascist censorship. Remember when people didn't care that folks who were accurately assessing the situation between Ukraine and Russia were targeted and silenced?
Not that long ago, we were talking almost daily on our radio show about the history and politics that led up to the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Beginning in February 2022, we addressed NATO’s repeated broken promises that the Western military alliance would not expand to come closer to Russia’s borders; the ever-increasing military exercises carried out with NATO in countries bordering Russia; the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine; the arming and legitimizing of neo-Nazis; and the eight-year Kiev-led bombing campaign against ethnic Russians in the Donbas region.
We accurately pointed to the complicity of the US government and its NATO gang of thugs and international imperialist lackeys in propelling that proxy war with the aim of using Ukraine to facilitate the downfall of Russia without directly mobilizing US or NATO troops. In response, alleged Leftists smeared us as puppets of Putin, agents of Moscow, willing dupes of the Russian government, and, of course, Putin apologists.
But, as I wrote in a previous article about this strange phenomenon on the alleged Left,
“...everyone who was once critical of the US regarding issues like the invasion of Iraq on the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie, the US lies about Syria, the blackout in US media of the horrific war in Yemen, the continued support by the US government of the apartheid regime in Israel, the 20 year senseless and destructive and expensive quagmire of the US war in Afghanistan somehow are not critical of the US role in the conflict in Ukraine.
So many of those people on the so-called left who were critical of the US and its propaganda outlets for the lies told about those things and more, like the silence on Biden’s continued hateful immigration policies, his COVID policies that are no better than Trump’s; his reneging on the COVID relief checks that were promised…now so many of those people suddenly believe every word from the US government, the Biden Administration, and corporate media - the very same government and media they were criticizing just a few weeks ago. And why? Or shall I say how? That six years of the Putinization of the American psyche, that’s how.
But masses of anti-war activists and so-called leftists in the US have now decided that war isn’t so bad, that the US is without any complicity in Ukraine, that US media is truthful in their accounts, and there are no neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian Army because the country’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is of Jewish heritage. Even though independent and implicitly anti-imperialist media outlets have been raising the alarm about the coup in Ukraine directed by Barack Obama and Joseph Biden in 2014 that was facilitated by John McCain and Victoria Nuland, posing for pictures on stage with, passing out cookies to, and negotiating with the very fascists who coopted and turned the Maidan Square protests into a massacre to be the tip of the spear to overthrow democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych.”
I ended that article by saying, “I don’t know how much all of this skullduggery cost, but I’d say those who have been protected by it got their money’s worth, the way so many in this country are now all in for imperialism. And all they had to do was tell Americans that Putin is their problem, and do it nearly every day on every media outlet for six years. This could be Russiagate’s checkmate.”
And it appears that I was right.
Principled anti-imperialist journalists recognized that the allegations of mass rapes and 40 beheaded babies in the early days of the Oct 7 Palestinian uprising were similar to the lies spread in the corporate press that babies were thrown out of incubators by Iraqi troops in Kuwait, Libyan troops were given Viagra to mass rape, and more recently, Russia kidnapped 700,000 Ukrainian children. Journalists who refused to legitimize those lies by reporting them as valid be fired. Social media platforms like X and Facebook are continuing to suspend or otherwise suppress pro-Palestinian accounts and even suspended the personal accounts of individual Palestinian correspondents working for media outlets like Mondoweiss.
We realized that the claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 Israeli babies was a lie when we heard it. Indeed, every major news outlet that ran with that story, including CNN and the BBC, had to walk back unverified claims that were a complete fabrication. Even Israeli journalists admitted they saw no evidence of such claims and the White House was forced to “clarify” President Joe Biden’s lie that he had seen “...confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” To state the obvious at this point, he saw no such thing because there were no pictures and no beheadings of children.
The damage was already done by the breathless propagation of these lies by corporate media outlets. They fueled as they were designed to do the racist bloodlust against Palestinians, encouraging a genocidal Israeli response against the people of Gaza. This damage occurred on a ground already prepared by so-called leftists who positioned themselves as anti-imperialists, except for Russia.
Few were willing to defend principled anti-imperialist Leftists and journalists who provided the facts regarding the Russia/Ukraine war when they were targeted, censored, deplatformed, and fired from their jobs. The powers that be saw how easily the Latte Leftists abandoned their so-called principles and ate their own after February 22, 2022, and easily washed it down with a healthy side order of imperialist warmongering and lies served up by the same corporate media that lied about Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. So they did not hesitate to go even further in silencing and intimidating the anti-imperialist Left to keep them from standing up for Palestine.
It’s been…cute to see all the shock and outrage over this round of imperialist and zionist censorship when, just a few months ago, many people had said “good riddance” to the “Putin-apologists” on the Left, either actively working to discredit or silence us, or simply cheering or being silent when we were.
Whatever happens in Gaza at the hands of the genocidal white supremacist settler colonial state of Israel, now that Palestinians have less ability to get their stories out because Israel has cut off internet access and electricity (as well as water and food), and journalists’ ability to report on the situation is restricted by the number of pro-Palestinian accounts that have been shuttered, the Latte Left can take credit for some part of the outcome as well, since they were fine with censorship and distortion because they hated Putin more than they cared about the truth being told.
Yes, this is Russiagate’s checkmate. But many more people will have to pay a much higher price than me and my comrades losing a job because so many were willing to play that game.
You can continue to support Jacqueline Luqman’s writing and other work on www.Patreon.com/luqmannation.
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