PARIS, France (PNN) - November 25, 2015 - What happened to ordinary French people (and their way of life) after the recent Paris attacks? All mainstream media are concerned with 10 days after the event is making sure that public support for the increased war effort is high. We need more footage of ambulances, their sirens blaring and lights flashing. Put it on loop, 24 hours a day, with sad images of people crying and laying wreaths, then throw in some fear in the form of some ugly-looking jihadists, and the population will be cheering on another foreign mission in no time at all.
While all that’s going on, the fascist government invariably rushes through tougher new laws against terrorism. If history can teach us one thing, it’s that modern terrorism laws are actually anti-civil liberty laws in disguise. Today, with perfect timing, the French version of We Are Change was censored. This is a worrying and unprecedented crackdown on alternative media in Europe, and one which French bloggers fear is the beginning of the end for freedom of speech.
Le Blog De Resistance is a popular French-language alternative news source with over 10 million hits and thousands of regular subscribers. The author, who calls himself Z, has been in panic mode since a state of emergency was called after the Paris attacks. This high-level alert was extended for three months, along with a pro-war propaganda campaign and the media under strict orders to terrify the population like never before. While chaos continued outside, the fascist French government locked itself away to discuss new legislation which would affect alternative media in a very negative way. Today, Z’s greatest fear was realized:
“So it begins. How long will this blog remain open? The worst is that the French do not care, they are totally obsessed with more security at the expense of their freedoms. The world mocks the terrible secrets revealed by Snowden. Amazing - in France, the ‘land of liberty’. Today once again I repeat, I am very afraid for freedom of expression and the alternative media. I don’t know how much longer I can write and report freely. I fear for myself. Risk taking was already intense, made worse with the slew of laws passed since the beginning of the year (anti-terrorism law, intelligence) now, it’s huge. It’s very hard for us to write under the state of emergency. Stress and tension are everywhere.”
The tone is clear. It’s fearful and worried. It’s eerie. It sounds like it was written in Nazi Germany in 1939, not France in 2015.
Here’s a question: when politicians keep telling us not to allow terrorists to change our way of life, why is crushing dissent the first thing they do when something horrific happens? Isn’t dissent part of living in a free world? Aren’t protests and asking tough questions of those in power just a couple of the liberties we are supposedly trying to spread around the world? Isn’t that part of what makes democracy so great?
Well, apparently not. We need tougher terrorism laws because the puppet media just told us that one of the evil guys came in from Greece pretending to be a refugee, and he even left a passport (later proven to be fake) outside the burning building from which he just escaped. We need them because, despite the fact you or I could be arrested at home for an “offensive tweet” within minutes of putting it out there, our intelligence agencies are supposedly too under-resourced to successfully track down a few ISIS Twitter accounts. They’re so crap, Anonymous had to step in and do their jobs for them. It’s strange how terrible the intelligence services are when it suits the agenda: Snowden has revealed how the government can control your mobile phone and listen in on your conversations even when it’s turned off, but somehow the real terrorists get to perfect their complicated and evil schemes without any detection at all. How very convenient.
Yep, the intelligence services are doing a terrible job. They have proven themselves incapable of predicting horrific attacks in advance, despite the fact that as soon as a terror attack occurs, a huge list of details is magically available to media. How was it possible, for example, that alleged Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s personal Amazon wish list was being discussed well before the time it would take the authorities to even look at all the CCTV footage of the marathon? These perceived (i.e. fake) failings may lead many to support increased spying measures for the ever-growing sprawling network of global surveillance tentacles, but it’s worth asking whether these incompetencies are even real, because all terrorism laws tend to do is systematically dismantle what is left of our civil liberties.
