CV19: Filtering Fake News or Censorship?

By Claudio Resta for VT

History repeats itself even if in different forms

For the uninitiated, the original photostatic caption that I reported under the title and subtitle graphically reports in the characters of the time an authentic affirmation of Benito Mussolini. As it was customary to do during Fascism.

When the most memorable statements of Mussolini in large characters were commonly reported in the texts of books, magazines, and newspapers.

Indeed, Mussolini’s mottoes were often written in gigantic characters on the walls of private houses and public buildings. Then after the fall of fascism, they were canceled almost everywhere. But some resist, perhaps also for the good quality of the autarchic materials (!) Or you can still glimpse through thick layers of white paint above it. Especially on the walls of houses in the Venetian countryside. Whereas the Italian Social Republic (1943–1945) left a more incisive mark.

A curiosity, although not strictly related to the discourse that I am developing here,, very, very tasty, is that, paradoxically, these affirmations known to all as to belong to Mussolini’s thinking had been really pronounced by him, the Duce of fascism, (and former school teacher), but,
they were often not flour from his sack but from others.

Roman Classics and French, German and Russian philosophers, sociologists or agitprop, mainly of the end of the XIX century.

And guess who he stole them from? To the Classics, to Nietzsche, to Le Bon, to Sorel, but above all to Lenin! Unbelievable!

Yes, you understood correctly, after all, Mussolini was indirectly, and not a little, Leninist, and therefore also a sort of Bolshevik Socialist out of Russia.
Especially at the beginning, and then also at the end of his regime. Not in the 1930s but in the 1920s and after 1943.

Although many historians and intellectuals are unwilling to acknowledge this. Unjustly and mendaciously. Out of ignorance or bad faith.

But forget it, it was not what I wanted to talk to you about, although that is a very stimulating subject and starting point to revise the political view of the previous history in the post-war period, in particular, the view of the Italian culture and Left with fascism after 1945 until today.

But, I wanted to talk to you, instead, about a current thing, indeed very current.

I am going to talk to you about the censorship that is made on social networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, and Google, or better yet the removal of any content labeled as fake news deemed to be the unquestionable (and secret) judgment of the administrators of those social networks.

And also the filing and the use of such files of any user’s research made by Facebook and Google.

In addition to offensive, racist content, etc., which (for now) we are not interested in, but represent all the same another form of censorship.

That is why I quoted at the beginning the original inventor of it, Mussolini’s Fascism.

And his first National Security Agency: CECA exactly like Russian Lenin’s CEKA.

They were pursuing the same tasks of FBI before of it, and now are pursued mainly by Facebook and Google but with instruments infinitely more powerful than CECA, CEKA, and GESTAPO in the years of the wars.

With a slight difference besides the political purposes of those fascist agencies, Facebook and Google pursue also important commercial goals.

And besides the extreme difficulty in principle and theory of the objective (and impartial!) recognition of the alleged “falsity” of a news item (is information false only when it is false in itself or is it false even when, although true, it comes from a third unofficial and authorized source?

I understand well that I am pedantic in such reasoning but it is of extreme importance and also necessary to face these Sophistic  Byzantinisms that belong to contemporary North American political and juridical philosophy to understand its intrinsic tendentiousness.), and, without any prejudice to the ever-present presence of a possibility of falsification even by its official certifiers when the stakes are strategically high enough, as well as, finally, apart from the questionability of the judgment and the limited discernment capacity of the employees of this office regarding these issues which are said by the most shrewd philosophers, epistemologists and even philosophers of the law to be difficult to resolve, apart from all this, it is a fact that often these so-called fake news that is removed by Facebook & C. are not even news.

In fact, very often these so-called fake news are only free opinions of experts or amateurs, simply not aligned with the mainstream narrative.

I would not like to quote the Bible, but deep down, we are still at the scandal of the Son of God who dies crucified to save us from our sins.

Forgive me for the not enough secular parenthesis, but it expressed an appropriate and penetrating concept by its metaphor.

Now, these opinions of experts or amateurs, but, however, sometimes such as to make up for the lack of expertise, and specialization with a possible and unexpectedly greater intelligence, sagacity, intuition, or even bravery can provide us with an alternative version to the mainstream narration that is functional, useful if not also necessary in the search for truth.

It must also be said that sometimes, not to say often, the experts, the specialists, because of their awareness of how things are going in this world, together with their greater competence, are very prudent and cautious, indeed they are too much of it to express an opinion which, if expressed, in science and conscience, should go against the mainstream narrative, against that official truth which is dominant and hegemonic for fear of losing their scientific credibility and authoritativeness.  Cowardly silencing or otherwise refraining from expressing doubts or criticisms that would instead be very important or necessary instead for the search for truth.

And so dissidents who dare to express an uncomfortable truth are reduced to silence and non-existence in the field of recognized theories while they may be right and be the only ones to tell the truth against a false and tendentious mainstream majority.

Or maybe just ignorant, sometimes even paid. From publishers, the editors of the newspapers, and social networks that instead necessarily row in the sense of the dominant narrative, for money, even more so because this is the only way for them to do their job. Being their publishers almost always impure in the economic (as well as moral) sense.

Press freedom does not necessarily exist. Even in America or England. And this was told to me by an important American journalist against the tide in his personal and friendly comment about one of my articles.

Behind this “impure” press or information, which in fact is also willing to work economically at a loss, to invest in information by purchasing loss-making publications at a price higher than that of another form of capital thus making an economically “wrong” investment, almost wanting not to make a profit, in short, does all this make sense if not to achieve other meta-economic or political goals?

That these goals that I have just called meta-economic, i.e. political, are also economic is a fact but they are so at another higher level.

That is not at the immediate level of maximizing the profit of your publishing company but at the highest level of another broader, often global, and entrepreneurial project that requires information control. Read censorship, propaganda, and psychological warfare in the interest of the feasibility of the largest business project, of its facilitation.

To prepare the right soil for it.

And who could face the size of the investments needed ad hoc?

Only large transnational capitals! And we will see why below.

Which is the ultimate instigator of this new concealed and invisible fascism.

After all, mine is a speech in some way very similar to that of Eisenhower about the fascism involved in the “military-industrial complex” suitably updated in the sense of its financial and transnational evolution contemporary state of the art.

Regarding the large transnational capital, have you ever wondered why British and US sovereign wealth funds since the nineties of the twentieth century have spread throughout the world with their investments very far from the national borders of their reference powers?

In other words, because these British and US sovereign wealth funds, together with their large financial groups rather than consolidating their control through the concentration of their resources in their sector and in their domestic market, have allocated these new additional resources in increasingly diluted holdings in sectors and markets so far from their borders and their more reliable markets and legal systems?

I dare to suggest three possible answers possibly also in summation.

The first, the banalest, due to a relative saturation of their domestic financial markets.

The second is to minimize risk through diversification not only between different sectors but also between different markets and countries.

The third, the one for which I am inclined, is the fact that a sovereign fund or a financial group, by acquiring participations in different sectors, but also in different markets and countries, with the agreement of competitors, ends up buying a sort of leverage that on the one hand, the global power of its reference economic entity increases even far from the countries of origin.

In fact, with appropriate secret cartel agreements between competitors that I hypothesize as data, it is possible to realize in a given sector and in a given market, participation in a multinational and transnational joint-stock company, or rather participation in at least as many companies as there are sectors and the markets, and possibly many more, capitalist systems, this, which indirectly ends up creating a substantially monopolistic oligopoly starting from an original competitive starting situation of many different subjects and companies, and segmented by sector and nation.

And if this pool existed, and I believe it exists as a cluster, whether it is called Trilateral, Bilderberg, Davos, or Freemasonry, nothing changes, it would have an interest in monopolistically and fascistically controlling global mainstream information, as well as the economic capacity to achieve this goal.
It is nothing less than the “invention of reality” in the Orwellian sense and the setting of the global agenda!

Not to mention the fact that search engines and platforms like Google and Facebook would certainly be the cornerstones of this system.

In short, behind the hunt for fake news, there is the imposition of unique thinking and the repression of any alternative to it, or the repression of the freedom of the press, which is now information. Which is the repression of free thought.

And also the only chance we have of accessing the truth, at least potentially.

We came to a short circuit with the past. Not only in economics to the liberal one of a century ago, before the twentieth century according to Hobsbawm (which goes from 1914 to 1989) but, ideologically, even to a new pre-1848 Age of Absolutism.

In which it is not known or thought what the King does not want to know or think.

Obviously, today’s absolutist King is the European Union and /or the American Empire.

And behind them is the pool or cluster of above mentioned transnational funds and groups.

These are all characteristics of fascism or other totalitarian regimes, which have already attempted these social and political experiments before us in modernity.

In fact, China is taken as an example and model. Incredible to say the pro-Chinese government in Italy! La Cina è vicina (China is close) is a sixties radical motion picture of Italian director Bellocchio!

That’s why I started this piece by reporting the original fascist caption, because, beyond all appearances and in an absolutely different social and political context, the removal of fake news and other information filing and handling is in any case an intrinsically fascist act, aimed only at reinforcing the dominant narrative, stifling opposition in the bud by depriving the people of free information.

Above all, the secret modality that prevents most people from knowing the content of these dissident opinions and also the number of them, is very fascist.

That could also be many or even the most authoritative.

Because, you see, if the trial of the so-called fake news would be done publicly in the light of the sun, allowing everyone, first of all, to know its content, and then to participate in it, through a public debate, I could also agree, which could seem to me to be a great test of democracy.

But certainly not in these secret ways from the Holy Office, although the shape would seem apparently very different and incompatible. But not the substance.

It is painful to note that what, in theory, could have been (and should have been) powerful instruments of direct democracy, have proved to be the most intelligent means of the Police State or of contemporary Surveillance State or better Capitalism, of social control and psycho police that arises from the combination of this problem and the obligation to conform to a politically correct language.

By the way, the characters I used not by chance but by analogy precisely because they were popular under fascism.

Although, my operation tends precisely to the opposite end, as it wants to be an attempt to deconstruct it, the building of contemporary fascism in essence and working in progress, through the unmasking of its true nature.

At the bottom of that same “Surveillance Capitalism” that Shoshana Zuboff also talks about.

Claudio Resta

Claudio Resta was born in Genoa, Italy in 1958, he is a citizen of the world (Spinoza), a maverick philosopher, an interdisciplinary expert, oh, and an artist, too.

Grew up in a family of scientists where many sciences were represented by philosophy to psychoanalysis, from economics to history, from mathematics to physics, and where these sciences were subject to public display by their subject experts family members, and all those who they were part of could participate in a public family dialogue/debate on these subjects if they so wished.  Read Full Bio

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