Tag: history

Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard’s claim that Consortium News published “false content” about the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its “green check” designation system. It becomes clear as you read the article that NewsGuard’s real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, “guarding the country from the news.”

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‘1619 Project’ Founder Doesn’t Know When The Civil War Happened

The creator of the revisionist ‘1619 Project,’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has long argued that pretty much all complex modern issues – from obesity and traffic jams to capitalism itself – is the result of racism being at America’s core, apparently has yet to grasp the simple dates for the Civil War. With the recent release of the much anticipated book formed out of her popular essay series, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, academics and educators have hailed it as laying the groundwork for upending and transforming the way the United States’ foundational story of its beginnings as a nation is told, even down to impacting how elementary school teachers present America’s founders to school children.

The book assures us that “the inheritance of 1619” – that is slavery, racism and social injustice – “reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.” Given her outsized influence as a New York Times writer, and now that she’s being held up in mainstream media and even establishment academia as an ‘expert’ on American history, it’s not too comforting to know that she doesn’t know the basic dates for the Civil War.

“…until 1865, when the North was reluctantly drawn into a war that ultimately ended slavery.” The woefully misinformed and ignorant of basic facts response which claimed the Civil War began in 1865 came during a Monday Twitter spat with William Hogeland, who himself is a widely published author of United States history.

A number of commenters were quick to point out in the wake of Hannah-Jones getting a basic fact which is taught to school children across the country wrong that the error is inexcusable. “Why would we expect you to know the correct year,” one quipped sarcastically.

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Boston Tea Party happened 248 years ago today

Thursday, December 16 marks the 248th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party – a protest during which Massachusetts colonists, angered by Britain’s “taxation without representation,” dressed up as Mohawk Indians and dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston harbor.

Throughout the 1760s, the British government imposed a number of taxes on American colonists in an effort to pay off the crown’s debts. According to History.com, in 1765, the Stamp Act taxed colonists on nearly every piece of printed paper, including playing cards, business licenses, newspapers and legal documents. Two years later, the British government passed the Townshend Acts of 1767, taxing other basic items like paint, paper, glass, lead and tea.

On March 5, 1770, a street brawl turned deadly riot on King Street in Boston inflamed already rising tensions between the colonists and British. The event that left five colonists dead and six others wounded would come to be known as the Boston Massacre.

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The Real Story of Rosa Parks 66 Years Later: What You Learned in School Is Wrong

Unjust laws will remain unjust until they are disobeyed by good people. Had brave individuals throughout history not risked imprisonment or worse to challenge tyrannical, racist, and immoral laws, society today, would be much less free — this rule is especially true for black people in America.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks made history by disobeying an unjust law that required people of color to yield their seats on the bus to white people. When the bus driver told the entire row of black people to move to the back of the bus because a white man boarded, everyone complied, except for Parks.

Parks was arrested and convicted for failing to obey the driver’s seat assignments. The events following her arrest, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the federal ruling of Browder v. Gayle which ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional, would be a turning point in segregated America.

While Rosa Parks is certainly a large part of American history, her idea to disobey the unjust bus law was not entirely original.

Can you name the first woman who wouldn’t give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama? The answer is not Rosa Parks.

Rosa Parks’ decision to disobey that fateful day was inspired and, in fact, modeled after a 15-year-old hero named Claudette Colvin.

Nine months before Parks was arrested for her choice not to give up her seat, on March 2, 1955, this brave child, without the support of the NAACP, or Civil Rights groups, took a stand on principle alone and refused to give up her seat.

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