by Paul Craig Roberts
Not even one value of Western civilization remains. All values that composed an era of freedom have been repudiated.
The example of the hour is Telegram owner Durov’s indictment in France. The basis of the French indictment is that Telegram’s privacy, the basis for its existence, provides a mechanism that criminals can use to commit crimes, such as posts of children in sexual acts. Privacy also provides secret means of communication that criminals and drug dealers use for their illegal businesses. The French government’s claim is that Telegram, by providing privacy, enables these crimes and therefore Durov is complicit in the crimes. Notice that it is Durov, not the child pornographers and drug dealers, who is being prosecuted.
In other words, the argument of the French indictment is that as an owner of a communication mechanism that criminals use to facilitate their commitment of crimes, Durov himself has committed a crime.
We have been hearing illogical arguments of this kind for some time. Those who want to take away the ability of people to protect themselves from criminals and rapists by using their Second Amendment right to own firearms try to hold firearm manufacturers responsible for injuries and deaths caused by people using firearms. In other words, it is the manufacturer’s fault, because his product enabled the criminal to commit the crime.
Sooner or later this argument will be applied to a large number of goods and services. For example, vehicles are used in bank robberies, in murders, and in human trafficking, and it is the car and vehicle manufacturers who enabled the criminals by producing the vehicle.
One can see it applied to search engines and to GPS, because they enable criminals to locate their target.
All of this might sound silly to a reader, but it is no more silly than the French government’s indictment of Durov. Indeed, it is not silly at all. It is weaponized law in operation.
In a way Durov’s indictment is his own fault. Like many Russians who have been brainwashed by Western propaganda, Durov thought France had more freedom than Russia and took French citizenship. He made a mistake.
The French case against Durov also reflects the Gestapo police state argument, which over the years has been finding a welcome home in the Western world, that it is the responsibility of private individuals to be accomplices of police and that the failure to perform this role indicates criminal behavior.
For the past several decades people in the Western world have been so poorly educated–indoctrinated against themselves instead of educated–that they find it plausible that people who refuse to be agents of a police state are criminals.
The Washington Post sees it this way. The only valid reason for social media’s existence is to spy for the government. One of the Post’s mal-educated reporters wrote that “for years internet moguls have flown above the law.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/31/musk-durov-social-media-crackdown/
How is protecting free speech “flying above the law?” What law is above the First Amendment?
The indoctrinated reporter thinks that laws contrary to the First Amendment of the US Constitution are valid, and that Elon Musk and Pavel Durov are violating the law by their commitment to free speech.
The Washington’s Post’s presstitute says “The world’s internet regulators are no longer playing around.” He writes that the crackdowns against Telegram and X “come months after the United States passed a law that could lead to the banning of TikTok” and herald the end of the era of free speech on the Internet, a good thing in the Post’s view.
The Washington Post is delighted that free speech is to be regulated. In my opinion the entire rationale for the existence of the Washington Post is to control narratives for the CIA.
As even insouciant Americans should know after enduring eight years of the system violating all ethics and all laws in its effort to deep-six Donald Trump, throughout the Western world law is nothing but a weapon to protect the lies fed to insouciant people as official narratives, the doubting of which is rapidly becoming a criminal action.
In the name of official narratives, truth is being removed from the Western world.
In my lifetime I have watched the transformation of the free Western world, a product of centuries of struggle, into a Gestapo Police State.
