{"id":190531,"date":"2019-06-26T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T06:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=190531"},"modified":"2019-06-29T05:58:42","modified_gmt":"2019-06-29T05:58:42","slug":"youtube-inquisitors-demolish-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=190531","title":{"rendered":"YouTube Inquisitors Demolish History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThough justified by liberal Silicon Valley oligarchs as a response to the \u201cracism, sexism, and homophobia\u201d of the alt-right, YouTube\u2019s new censorship plan begins with garden-variety political correctness\u2014and ends in the wholesale falsification of history.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Dr. Kevin Barrett \u2013 American Free Press June 23, 2019<\/strong><\/h1>\n

During the first week of June, YouTube announced a draconian new censorship policy\u2014and immediately erased or demonetized the work of countless video-makers, destroying thousands of livelihoods in the process. Conservatives bore the brunt of the onslaught. The new policy was unveiled in the wake of a highly publicized spat between conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder and \u201cVice News\u201d commentator Carlos Maza, in which Maza accused Crowder of \u201cbullying\u201d and \u201chomophobia.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Though justified by liberal Silicon Valley oligarchs as a response to the \u201cracism, sexism, and homophobia\u201d of the alt-right, YouTube\u2019s new censorship plan begins with garden-variety political correctness\u2014and ends in the wholesale falsification of history.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a June 5 blog post announcing the new policy, YouTube wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, we\u2019re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory. Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first two sentences sound like a well-meaning but maddeningly muddled mishmash of liberal platitudes. Taken at face value, YouTube is telling us we cannot \u201callege\u201d that adults are intellectually superior to children and that children should therefore be segregated or excluded from busy streets. Or that 20-year-olds are more physically vigorous than retirees and should be excluded from over-60 basketball leagues. Age discrimination! Or that men are physically stronger than women and should therefore be excluded from women\u2019s athletics. Gender discrimination! Anti-LGBTQ discrimination! Or that poorer people and groups, being in general less capable in intellectual and practical matters than wealthier people and groups, should be given various advantages like free college tuition as part of a policy of reducing inequality. Race and caste discrimination! Or that veterans, having been willing to risk their lives for their country, deserve special benefits. Pro-veterans discrimination!<\/span><\/p>\n

While the first two sentences of YouTube\u2019s new policy are unintentionally humorous (Veterans? Really?) there is nothing remotely funny about the next: \u201cFinally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.\u201d This statement, framed in such a way as to make it sound acceptable to the misinformed multitudes, is truly Orwellian.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHistory\u201d is a human construction. It is inherently fallible. It is constantly being revised on the basis of new evidence and interpretations. And the statement includes mention of literally millions of \u201cviolent events,\u201d a great many of which are \u201cwell documented,\u201d in the sense that there are plenty of documents available relating to any given event. What YouTube apparently doesn\u2019t understand is that virtually all violent and nonviolent events in history are \u201cdocumented\u201d in complex and contradictory ways and can be interpreted from a wide variety of perspectives.<\/span><\/p>\n

So how does all that evidence, and all those interpretive perspectives, get narrowed down to a relatively simple narrative about what supposedly happened in a given event? We like to imagine that smart, objective historians sift through evidence and argue about the most plausible interpretations. That is the ideal. Reality is closer to the old adage, \u201chistory is written by the victors.\u201d The most powerful people and groups wield various carrots and sticks, forcing the vast majority of historians to consciously or unconsciously toe the official line. The powerless, and their versions of events, are reviled, misconstrued, or consigned to the proverbial memory hole.<\/span><\/p>\n

Left-wing historians once knew this and openly admitted it. In fact, while I was doing graduate work during the postmodernist-dominated 1990s, they actually exaggerated the degree to which truth is unknowable and \u201chistory\u201d is just a myth inflicted by the powerful on the powerless.<\/span><\/p>\n

But then came 9\/11, which was designed by people like Philip Zelikow\u2014a self-proclaimed specialist in \u201cthe creation and maintenance of public myths.\u201d 9\/11 was a scripted and staged human sacrifice event of the kind studied by ethnologist Ren\u00e9 Gu\u00e9non. Part of its purpose was to re-mythologize history, so the common people could once again be force-fed \u201cnoble lies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Medieval Europe, if you \u201cdenied\u201d the official version of certain mythic \u201cviolent events\u201d\u2014 the Crucifixion, the Cathar genocide, or even the Inquisition itself\u2014you could be tortured and burned at the stake. With the Enlightenment came the modern discipline of history, which, fallible as it is, offers a better path to truth\u2014the path of absolutely free and fearless debate. In the wake of the mythic big lie of 9\/11, the Enlightenment has been revoked. YouTube is killing heretics by destroying their livelihoods; Internet censorship is today\u2019s Inquisition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America\u2019s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disguised behind liberal platitudes, YouTube censorship plans look downright Orwellian. Dr Kevin Barrett explains<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-controlling-the-news-andor-the-free-exchange-of-ideas-and-information","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=190531"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190536,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190531\/revisions\/190536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=190531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=190531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=190531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}