The West's cannibalisation of its own institutions

The West’s Final Throes: This Is What Collapse Looks Like

Attacks on journalism is the end of pluralism and the foundation of the West

Joaquim Flores

Fort Russ,
13 March, 2018



Societies in states of collapse begin to cannibalize the very institutions which once made them livable. Fort Russ News has become a major target of slander and censorship. There is a huge upswing in censorship over the last 24 months, and it is enforced by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and now European governments.

by Joaquin Flores, Editor-in-Chief – Fort Russ News – Support our PATREON

Dear Reader,

The West is in its final throes, the course of destabilization is evident. Events are moving at an increasing rate, and alarmingly so. People once believed that the internet’s seemingly unlimited number of independent journalism venues would successfully act as a bulwark against the crimes of the powers that be. 

What’s critical now is that the West’s immune response to ‘foreign bodies’ (i.e., spooky Russians), has become an autoimmune disease, and the West has now taken to cannibalizing, devouring its own civil society and pluralist institutions in order to ‘save itself’. The problem is that ‘itself’ – the West – at least in its best form, was chiefly those civil society and pluralist institutions – neither government nor for profit – that existed as critical checks on corporate and state excesses. These checks clearly didn’t work too well.

Yes, we’ve seen this before in the West, in particular in the years before and during WWI and WWII.

Journalists writing against the heightened insanity that led the US into both European civil wars, were imprisoned and worse. The anti-war anarchist, Joe Hill, for example, was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915. His crime? Words.

Execution of anarchist anti-war activist and labor organizer, Joe Hill

Readers of Fort Russ News are already well aware of the geopolitical events which all point to this general trend of global war once again. Among all world leaders, it’s been Putin and Xi who have been the greatest promoters of stability and progress around the world – not out of altruism, but because stability and progress, like multipolarity, benefits their own geopolitical position and is a whole head and shoulder above the present chaotic system which is the collapsing US-led unipolar world. In many ways, unipolarity is already over. At any rate, the combination of economic, institutional, and legal/super-structural crises is being spelled out clearly in the West.

But what has been happening internally, within the so-called ‘Western democracies’ is just as alarming as the geopolitical crisis, and is often not the focus of geopolitical trainspotters.

Civil libertarian, progressive constitutionalist organizations and pro-bono legal networks that were once committed to fighting off political censorship and attacks on journalists and independent media have in many cases been straight-up high-jacked by the the powers that be. And the general situation now shows all the signs of a final destabilized situation.

Up until now, the ‘internet’ – at least for intelligent enough people who sought it out – was a place where the truth could be found.

Now in the West they seem to be preparing for a final and total war, perhaps against Russia, but China is also a major target – and mid-t0-long term, is perhaps the major target.

This rings true because of serious clampdown on journalism and independent media. This is no longer about journalists achieving pariah status, or being black-listed from jobs outside the fringes. That’s been the case for time immemorial. We signed up for this.

But this last refuge, ‘the internet’, in particular its writers, bloggers, thinkers, and the websites and activist communities that have formed up around them, are under assault. Not metaphorically, not just the standard exchange of ‘bad words’ between pro-establishment and anti-establishment personalities on Twitter and Facebook. No, something has qualitatively changed in the two years or so, and its more pronounced now than ever before. It kicked into high gear when Hillary Clinton swore vengeance on the same internet which exposed her criminality. Trump in office, not the candidate, also can’t be too fond of alternative media and independent journalism. He hasn’t reversed any of Bush or Obama’s impingement on our rights.

Now we are seeing the final throes of the collapse of pluralism in the west. This is not a sign of increasing strength, but of increasing weakness. Developing countries coming out of colonialism and poverty often have restrictions on pluralist institutions because those institutions were chiefly controlled by the West. So those restrictions were part of its developmental model, and were vital to its sovereignty. For the US, we aren’t talking about a developing country increasing its sovereign institutions at the expense of its pluralist ones, we are seeing an empire in denial about its prospects for survival, turning ugly and turning on itself.

This is a sign of a very sick and critical situation. Europe has really ramped things up. 

In Europe, things are going down a little differently than from the US. The US doesn’t mind the politics of tension, in fact it promotes a whole strategy of tension in Europe. The US would very much like to destabilize Europe, because destabilization leads to war. Europe’s wars would be directed at the Middle-east and Russia, if the Atlanticists get their way.

Facebook and Twitter are intelligence and operational tools of the US intelligence agencies, so they can enforce censorship through this private sector. In Europe, it’s different. They have to pass actual legislation to fine and even imprison journalists, opinion makers, and opposition parties, to silence them.

In France, laws in place for years are now being increasingly, selectively, enforced to silence opinions which are actually shared by either the majority or, on single issues, form a plurality. These tend to revolve around extremism, even though Salafists are apparently exempt.  Strange that Salafists, – the only extremists in the world besides Western extremism that threatens whole sections of the globe today, are exempt from ‘extremism’ charges. Instead the extremists are the ‘populists’ – those whose views reflect a majority or plurality on issues. That’s more or less the opposite of ‘extreme’ or a deviation of the norm. Europe has taken to criminalizing the norm, not the extreme. In a healthy pluralist society, expressing views whether extreme or the norm, should be allowed. President Macron intends to introduce legislation by the end of this year  that clamps down on opposition parties access to media, banning them under the title ‘fake news’.

Over the last 48 hours, in England, two popular alt-light opinion columnists and youtube vloggers were arrested, that is ‘detained at the border. For three days, alt-lite youtubers Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone were held on suspicion of terrorism, to ‘incite riots’ against Muslims.

Pettibone and Southern – alt-lite youtubers arrested in England

The two had intended to interview some individuals with views reflective of the concerns of millions of English and Europeans about migration to England, no-go Zones in parts of Europe, and the ‘refugee’ crisis which was in fact caused by NATO’s imperialist adventure into Syria. It is a secondary matter whether we agree with those views or not. They aren’t fringe views, even if many others would like to view them as such. But extreme, fringe, or mainstream, the ‘social contract’ in the West – that is, ‘free’ enterprise combined with not-so-free elections – was ‘checked’ by citizen journalism and public advocacy around sensitive issues. Not just issues that are inoffensive, in fact, specifically not those. Free press wasn’t about the freedom to talk about training your dog, or your favorite movies.  And “detained at the border” is a nasty little secret of many developed countries. No lawyer, no evidence, you can be held indefinitely. The West’s institutions are in a state of total collapse.

Germany too is collapsing in on itself.  Europe’s biggest country and economic powerhouse has totally clamped down and has outlawed the expression of political opinions which have the potential to ‘offend’ other people, and those which connect ‘X’ to ‘Y’. For example, saying that the Syrian refugee crisis ‘Y’ was caused by an Western backed invasion of said country by Salafist extremists ‘X’, will result in massive fines and a court ruled ban on social media interaction.

As of January 2018, the German Ministry of Justice has put into place the ‘NetzDG’ law, or the the Network Enforcement Act. The law influences Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram. This outrageous law makes social media networks responsible for their users’ content and fines the parent companies companies up to $60 million if they don’t remove “illegal” posts within 24 hours of notification.

Now think clearly about this situation. Normally when you have a society, it is expected that there will be different popular views about the direction that society should take. We can say that the signs of destabilization are clear when one faction outlaws the activities of the other. Right now, in the realm of US geopolitics, the pro-war neocons, Republican and Democrat,  and their new-found allies of the fake-left, including a handful of so-called ‘anarchists’, have worked to criminalize and marginalize the anti-war position. In the field of culture, mega-corporations work to destroy tight-nit communities based on century-old traditions in order to create isolated, atomized, depressed consumers with low-esteem and a confused sense of self-identity. Those working to stop this destructive process are tagged ‘fascists’, ‘Stalinists’, or ‘Russian agents’.

But opposition to war and organizing people around the golden rule and other bits of age-old wisdom are not ‘foreign ideas’, they are as American as Joe Hill.

Will we all go the way of Joe Hill?

– Ed