My Brush with French (and World) “Press Freedom”
April 2013 was an exciting month for me. We had
discovered a terrific country music singer who had agreed to perform my parody
of Patsy Cline’s hit, “I Fall to Pieces” and on April 6 Buelahman, my video collaborator, put it up on his web
site. It is entitled “Falling
to Pieces for Israel,”
and, to my mind, it was the best thing that we had yet done together. Later
in the month, I had the opportunity to take my first river cruise in Europe, on
the Saone and Rhone Rivers in the south of France. I took my laptop
with me to avail myself of the WiFi service
that was available on the cruise boat.
I was still a bit excited about our success with the video and
eager, should the opportunity arise, to share it with anyone I thought might be
interested. The WiFi worked
quite well generally, but when I attempted to view “Falling to Pieces for
Israel,” I was greeted with this message: “This video is not available in
your country.” At no time when I was in France was I able to see it.
I thought of that experience as I read the January 14, 2014,
article by George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley, “France
Follows Freedom of Speech Rally with Crackdown on Free Speech,” which begins this way:
This weekend I wrote a column for the Washington Post on the crackdown of free speech in
France. The column suggested
that, if the French really wanted to honor the dead at Charlie Hebdo, they
would rescind the laws used to hound them and threaten them with criminal
prosecution for years. (Indeed, at least one
surviving journalist expressed contempt for those who now support free speech
but remained silent in the face of past efforts to shut down the magazine). Now, however, news
reports indicate that
the French government is doubling down on criminalizing speech in the name of
free speech after the massacre. France has reportedly made dozens of arrests of
people who glorify terrorism and engage in hateful or anti-Semitic speech.
To be sure, my very first thought when I saw that our video that
speaks dramatically to the control of the United States Congress by the state
of Israel was that we had run afoul of French laws limiting what that country
deems to be “hate speech,” no matter how factual the material we were
presenting might be. As powerful as Zionist control of the United
States is, it is not yet so powerful as to prevent the sort of expression that
is represented by “Falling to Pieces for Israel.” In the United States you
can’t be sent to prison, as you can in France, for publicly looking critically
into any facet of the story that the German government during World War II
mainly gassed to death six million Jews in “extermination camps” and disposed
of the evidence through wholesale cremation in an assembly-line-like fashion,
either. I was disappointed, but not completely surprised, then, when
I found that people in France were deprived of the opportunity to experience
our video.
My indignation was dampened somewhat, though, by my first
conversation with a Frenchman about the matter. It happened when we
were on our bus from our hotel in Avignon to the airport in Marseilles, from
which I was to fly back to the States. I was seated next to one of
our guides and took that opportunity to complain to him about it. His
explanation, in defense of his government, was that French copyright laws were
stronger than those in the United States and because we used the tune upon
which others had a copyright, the video was likely suppressed in France for
commercial rather than political reasons.
Before I had my first song parody published on the Internet, “Obama, the Song,” I had assured myself that U.S. law
protected parodies against charges
of copyright infringement quite thoroughly—more than most countries, in fact—and so
I was put off at the time from publicly charging France with knuckling under to
the Israeli lobby. Had I encountered the copyright argument earlier
in the trip I would have immediately gone to check “Obama, the Song” to see if
it was also blocked, but I had no further opportunity to go online before
leaving the country.
If someone reading this article happens to be in France, I would
appreciate it if he or she would let me know if “Obama, the Song” is blocked
and if “Falling to Pieces for Israel” continues to be blocked. That
would go a long way toward settling the question of why I couldn’t expose
anyone else to our great discovery, Liz Dilling,
the singer, and to her rendition of our song when I was in France.
In the meantime, I have come across some evidence against the
“copyright protection” argument. Last year I went on a second
European river cruise, and this one took me through the Netherlands, Germany,
and Switzerland. In each country I was eager to see if the
message, “This video is not available in your country,” would turn up when I
tried to watch “Falling to Pieces for Israel.” It did not. I might
as well have been at home watching it. I am under the impression
that one of the things that the European Union has accomplished is to make laws
generally more comparable among the various member states. If so,
France would definitely be quite an anomaly when it comes to parodies and
copyright infringement. The first two of the countries in my 2014
trip are EU members. My bet is that it is simply a case of French,
U.S.-puppet-state pro-Israel censorship.
Even if copyright law is the excuse, it is likely a politically
freighted excuse. Take the situation in Canada, for example. This
is from Wikipedia.
Under Canadian law, although there is protection for Fair Dealing, there is no explicit protection for parody
and satire. In Canwest v.
Horizon,
the publisher of the Vancouver Sun launched a lawsuit against a group
which had published a pro-Palestinian parody of the paper. Alan
Donaldson, the judge in the case, ruled that parody is not a defence to a copyright claim.
What with the known subservience of the Canadian government to
Zionist interests and
the country’s notorious hate
speech laws, one can’t help
suspect that power politics had something to do with how that ruling came
down. A powerful pro-Palestinian medium of protest was thereby
silenced under the force of Canadian law. One can’t help thinking
that the ruling would have been different had the roles of the players been
reversed.
U.S. Censorship More Subtle
In the United States the government doesn’t censor political
expression using the law. The First Amendment of the Constitution
makes it particularly difficult for it to do that, and it doesn’t have
to. The news might not be controlled by the law, but from my own
experience, I can say with confidence that the evidence is overwhelming that it is controlled. One need look no
farther than my most recent article specifically addressing the subject, “The Great Suppression of 2014.” Before that he could go to “The Forrestal Murder and the
News Media,” and before that to
“The Kennedy Assassination and
the Press.”
North Carolina Republican Congressman Bill Hendon learned how
the control works back in 1981. This passage is from my review of the book that he wrote with Elizabeth
Stewart, the daughter of a missing prisoner of war, An Enormous Crime:
The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia:
Hendon, along with fellow freshman Congressman, John LeBoutillier (R-NY),
had the life-changing experience of being present when Air Force Brigadier
General Eugene Tighe, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA), testified to Congress on June 25, 1981, some eight years after all of
the POWs had supposedly returned to the United States. The two new Congressmen
were members of the House POW/MIA Task Force, before which the testimony was
made, and LeBoutillier was also a member of the task force's parent
committee, the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Tighe, as DIA director,
was, as they say, "the horse's mouth," when it comes to whether any
POWs remained in Southeast Asia.
Tighe...stunned those in attendance by testifying in open, public
session that he was "absolutely certain" that American POWs were
still being held captive in Southeast Asia. He also called for a
renewed effort by the Congress and the administration to get the prisoners home
....
"[Hendon] and I were just totally blown away by Tighe's testimony
in public session that the men were still alive," LeBoutillier later
said, "We knew, of course, that they were [alive], but this was the
director of defense intelligence testifying to the fact before the U.S.
Congress in open session. I'll never forget it ─ 'absolutely
certain. ' "LeBoutillier went on to say that he and Hendon were sure Tighe'sstatement "would be big news the next day, not
just on the Hill, but all across town and, via the media, all across
America."
To the congressmen's surprise, however, Tighe's statement
did not appear the following day in the Post or any of America's other major
newspapers. Not, to their knowledge, the next day. Nor
the next, or the next, or the next. Nor was there any buzz about
what the general had said in the halls or on the floor of the House. Perplexed,
the two congressmen contacted senior members of the task force and the Foreign
Affairs Committee to see what they had planned in response to Tighe's testimony. The
two congressmen's message to the senior members was a simple one: "Tighe told
our committee last week he was certain U.S. POWs are alive. Nothing
happened. No press, no follow-up strategy sessions by the task force
or the full committee, nothing in Armed Services, nothing in Veterans Affairs,
nothing on the Senate side and, as far as we can determine, nothing
downtown. What the hell is going on?"
To a man, the senior congressmen replied that other than holding
additional hearings and issuing additional press releases, there was really
nothing more in the short term that Congress could or would do. (p. 220)
It was all up to the executive branch, they said, and indicated
that it was just too politically dangerous a topic for them to explore further. Tighe,
they observed, was set to retire in a matter of weeks and had nothing to
lose. As for themselves, no one wanted to stick his political neck
out far enough to have it chopped off by the folks who were running the show.
Those who were running the show, it is abundantly obvious, were
also controlling the press.
The Kindle Blackout
How far this “private” control of information can go was brought
home forcefully, and shockingly, to me from another of my experiences involving
international travel. Upon the recommendation of an online contact,
I had purchased the Kindle edition of the bombshell book, Gold
Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold, by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave. Why
I call it a bombshell is well summed up by this excerpt of the review by Publishers
Weekly:
The Seagraves, bestselling authors (Lords of the Rim, etc.),
contend that Japan systematically looted the entire continent of Asia during
WWII, seizing billions in precious metals, gems and artworks. Further,
according to the authors, from war’s end to the present, the looted treasure,
used by President Truman to create a secret slush fund to fight communism, has
had a malignant effect on American and Asian politics. The Seagraves
assert that the Japanese imperial family, along with Ferdinand Marcos, every
American president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and numerous sinister
figures on the American hard right have been tainted and in
many cases utterly corrupted by the loot. Postwar
efforts to recover and exploit the treasure, according to the Seagraves,
involved murders, dishonest deals and cover-ups…
The “entire continent” part is a bit of an exaggeration by the
reviewer, of course. The looting, which apparently far surpassed
anything the Nazis did, naturally extended only to those Asian countries that
the Japanese occupied, but that was quite a large area, and it involved quite a
bit of gold.
In 2013 I had the opportunity to visit some of my old stomping grounds in South Korea on a two-week tour. I
had put Gold Warriors in my book queue to read during the
trip. I began reading while waiting for my flight at Dulles
Airport. Once in the air I was distracted for several hours by two
or three inflight movies and didn’t pull out my Kindle to resume reading until
about the time we approached Japanese air space. Gold Warriors was
GONE. It had been there for several months after I purchased it from
Amazon, and it was there when I started the flight, but now it was nowhere to
be found.
Once in my hotel in Seoul, I checked the Kindle again, and Gold
Warriors was still missing. I used my laptop to check my
Amazon account to see if I still owned the book and confirmed that I did. I
then used the Kindle to request that it be re-sent to me, and I did it on
several occasion during the two weeks, but it never showed up. I was
never able to share any of the explosive information in the book with anyone in
Korea during my stay there.
When I got back to the States, virtually the first thing I did
was to look for the book on my Kindle, and there it was as if it had never gone
away. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to continue reading, and it quickly
became evident to me why the “controllers” would not want this sort of
information spread around among American vassal states in Asia. I
also proceeded to buy several paperbound copies of the book to give as
Christmas presents to friends.
I also couldn’t help but wonder if there might be some connection
between the apparent blacking out of the Kindle version of the book in Asia and
the $600
million contract that
Amazon has with the CIA to provide “cloud computing services” and the decision
of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to bail out the Graham family by at least lending his
name to the purchase of the now massive
money-losing Washington
Post.
YouTube Hijinks?
With all this evidence that Bezos and Amazon are in bed with the
CIA, I am certainly made more receptive to the claims by many that Google
and Facebook are no more than
fronts for U.S. intelligence, as well. I have never had anything to
do with Facebook, but Google is another matter. In 2006 Google purchased
YouTube for $1.65 billion, so anyone who puts a video up on YouTube is dealing with Google
now.
What that means is that, if they should choose to use it, Google
now has the power to determine, with its posting of the number of hits that a
video receives, which videos “go viral” and which ones, insofar as anyone
outside Google knows, hardly even get off the ground. Considering
the importance of the bandwagon effect, is it really plausible that our controllers
would resist the temptation to use that power?
This brings us back, in conclusion, to the subject of my
videos. On July 11, 2012, I posted the video of Mark Lentz’s very
powerful antiwar, anti-neocon anthem, “At What a Cost.” Lentz is a first
rate musician and his message could hardly be stronger. The
message should resonate in particular with veterans of our endless wars in the
Middle East and with the members of the U.S. military and their families. That’s
the problem. For the longest time YouTube’s viewer count for “At
What a Cost” has been stuck right around where it is as I write these words, at
a piddling 2,866. I find that number really hard to believe. It
might show some small bounce from people reading this article, but something
tells me that our controllers will never let us see it crest even the 5,000
mark.
David Martin
January 20, 2015
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