Someone Interfered In The UK Election, And
It Wasn’t Russia
By
Caitlin Johnstone
December 13, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- Ladies and gentlemen I have here at my
fingertips indisputable proof that egregious
election meddling took place in the United
Kingdom on Thursday.
Before you get all
excited, no, it wasn’t the Russians. It
wasn’t the Chinese, the Iranians, Cobra
Command or the Legion of Doom. I’m not going
to get any Rachel Maddow-sized paychecks for
revealing this evidence to you, nor am I
going to draw in millions of credulous
viewers waiting with bated breath for a
bombshell revelation of an international
conspiracy that will invalidate the results
of the election.
In fact, hardly anyone will even care.
Hardly anyone will care because this
election interference has been happening
right out in the open, and was perfectly
legal. And nobody will suffer any
consequences for it.
Nobody will suffer any consequences for
interfering in the UK election because the
ones doing the interfering were extremely
powerful, and that’s who the system is built
to serve.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
As of this writing British exit polls are
indicating a
landslide victory for the Tories.
Numerous other factors went into this
result, including most notably a Labour
Party ambivalently straddling an
irreconcilable divide on the issue of Brexit,
but it is also undeniable that the election
was affected by a political smear campaign
that was entirely unprecedented in scale and
vitriol in the history of western democracy.
This smear campaign was driven by
billionaire-controlled media outlets, along
with intelligence and military agencies, as
well as state media like the BBC.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
has been described as the most smeared
politician in history, and this is a fair
description. Journalist Matt Kennard
recently
compiled documentation of dozens of
incidents in which former and current
spooks and military officials collaborated
with plutocratic media institutions to
portray Corbyn as a threat to national
security. Journalistic accountability
advocates like
Media Lens and
Jonathan Cook have been
working for
years to compile evidence of the mass
media’s attempts to paint Corbyn as
everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a
Communist to a Russian asset to an IRA
supporter to a closet antisemite. Just the
other day
The Grayzone documented
how establishment narrative manager Ben
Nimmo was enlisted to unilaterally target
Corbyn with a fact-free Russiagate-style
conspiracy theory in the lead-up to the
election, a psyop that was uncritically
circulated by both right-wing outlets like
The Telegraph as well as ostensibly
“left”-wing outlets like The Guardian.
Just as Corbyn’s advocacy for the many
over the plutocratic few saw him targeted by
billionaire media outlets, his view of
Palestinians as human beings saw him
targeted by the imperialist Israel lobby
as exposed in the Al Jazeera
documentary The Lobby. For a
mountain of links refuting the bogus
antisemitism smear directed at Corbyn, a
lifelong opponent of antisemitism, check
out the deluge of responses to
this query I made on Twitter the other day.
This interference continued right up into
the day before the election, with the BBC’s
political editor Laura Kuenssberg
flagrantly violating election rules by
reporting that early postal votes had
been illegally tallied and results were
“looking very grim for Labour”.
The
historically unprecedented smear campaign
that was directed at Corbyn from the right,
the far-right, and from within his own party
had an effect. Of course it did. If
you say this today on social media you’ll
get a ton of comments
telling you you’re wrong, telling you every
vote against Labour was exclusively due to
the British people not wanting to live in a
Marxist dystopia, telling you it was
exclusively because of Brexit, totally
denying any possibility that the years of
deceitful mass media narrative management
that British consciousness was pummelled
with day in and day out prior to the
election had any impact whatsoever upon its
results.
Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to
deliberately manipulate people’s minds using
mass media have no effect on their decisions
at all. I guess that’s why that whole
“advertising” fad never made any money.
I am not
claiming here that the billions of dollars
worth of free mass media reporting that was
devoted to smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the
Labour Party had a greater effect on the
election results than Brexit and other
strategic stumbles in the party. I’m just
saying that it definitely had a much greater
effect than the few
thousand dollars
Russian nationals spent on social media
memes in the US, which the American
political/media class has been relentlessly
shrieking about for three years. To deny
that a media smear campaign the size and
scope of that directed at Corbyn had an
effect is the same as denying that
advertising, a
trillion-dollar industry,
has an effect.
Which means that plutocrats and government
agencies indisputably interfered in the
British election, to an exponentially
greater extent than anything the Russians
are even alleged to have done. Yet
according to British law it was perfectly
legal, and according to British society it
was perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly
legal and acceptable for powerful
individuals to have a vastly greater
influence on a purportedly democratic
election than any of the ordinary
individuals voting in it.
A
free and healthy society would not work this
way. A free and healthy society would view
all forms of manipulation as taboo and
unacceptable. A free and healthy society
would not allow the will of members of one
small elite class to carry more weight than
the will of anyone else. A free and healthy
society would give everyone an equal voice
at the table, and look after everyone’s
concerns. It certainly wouldn’t tolerate a
few individuals who already have far too
much abusing their power and wealth to
obtain even more.
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