Rev Martin Niemoller was a prominent anti-fascist Lutheran pastor during the first decade of Hitler’s Thousand -Year Fascist Reich (now into its 86th year). He was a co-founder of the Pastor’s Emergency League that resisted the Nazi Party’s assault on the Protestant churches. For his resistance to German fascism, he was imprisoned in a concentration camp. The poem acknowledges the fact that Niemoller and his group had failed to speak out when they could have been assisting other oppressed groups that he didn’t belong to and therefore wound up in the camps or gas chambers.

 

“There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.

“The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics books. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War.

“This second, invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe.

“The Invisible Government is not a formal body. It is a large, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government. It is not limited to the Central Intelligence Agency, although the CIA is at its heart. Nor is it confined to the other agencies which comprise what is known as the intelligence community.

“The Invisible Government includes, also, many other units and agencies, as well as individuals, that appear outwardly to be a normal part of the conventional government. – From the 1963 book titled “The Invisible Government” authored by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross

 

Read on.

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The vicious world-wide censorship campaign to silence and sabotage anti-over-vaccination activists has really revved up in the past few weeks, with attacks on any and all altruistic, not-for-profit, science-based, scholarly efforts that have been working to educate and warn people about the many well-documented dangers of over-vaccinating American infants and children.

 

The perpetrators of this anti-democratic and oppressive censorship campaign are based in various highly-lucrative government and industry-related entities, and the major, wealthiest motivating group is the for-profit pharmaceutical industry. The common denominator that links all the censoring entities is, of course, the highly profitable drug and vaccine industry, even though each group couches its arguments in humanitarian verbiage.

 

Seven oppressor entities are listed below. Each one is participating in the censoring of documentable, scientifically-grounded, provably-true information that none of the groups want read or heard or viewed. (See last week’s Duty to Warn column at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2019/03/07/16201_adam_schiff_the_persecution_of_anti_over).

 

One of the points of that column was to connect the dots between the Nazi Party’s burning of books in 1933 and the extreme censoring of the literature of legitimate activist groups by entities that are associated with the group of seven.

 

One of the many reasons that every patriotic American should object to the censorship of fellow citizens, no matter what their religion, race, sexuality, occupation or employer, is the guarantee of freedom of speech as written in the Constitution.

 

I have personally been one of the targets and casualties of some of the groups listed below, and I know that many of my colleagues in the anti-over-vaccination movement have also been seriously affected by the censorship/book-burning as well.

 

Here is the list of what could be called “the gang of seven” saboteurs: that have been targeting the “Anti-Over-Vaccinating-Our-Kids” activist movement (derogatorily, slanderously and inaccurately called “Anti-Vaxxers” by those who stoop so low as to resort to distortion, name-calling and dis-information tactics).

 

Whenever there are for-profit groups that use disinformation, misinformation, lies, pseudoscience, internet trolls and name-calling to denigrate their opponents is where the wisdom of Socrates needs to be understood: "When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser."

 

Some of the more powerful entities on this list will be recognized as being involved in the oppression of any number of resistance movements besides the current vaccine danger issues. Some of these resistance groups are listed further below:

 

1)             the wealthy, powerful and influential pharmaceutical corporations (aka, Big Pharma) that make and market the highly profitable drugs and vaccines (and their uber-wealthy investor classes, all of whom profit from the inexorable and criminal raising of prescription drug and vaccine prices);

 

2)             the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), AMA, AAFP, etc) that relies on high volumes of endlessly repeated booster-shot vaccines that are injected into their infant and childhood patients the major tool that makes their clinics highly profitable;

 

3)             the CDC that de-emphasizes the enormous risks of injecting cocktails of toxic vaccine ingredients into the muscles of infants but makes a lot of money buying and selling those very vaccines. Note that the CDC, the FDA and the AAP are all heavily subsidized by Big Pharma corporations;

 

4)             the large number of legislators in Washington, D.C. and EVERY state legislature that receives large campaign “contributions” from pharmaceutical companies, medical associations, etc; and who don’t want to risk future campaign funding;

 

5)             the 1400 Washington DC Big Parma-paid lobbyists that concentrate on influencing legislators to enact pro-drug, pro-vaccine legislation, decrease regulatory over-sight and also lower corporate tax rates;

 

6)             the journalists and their mainstream media paymasters that earn 70 % of their revenues from drug company advertising. (Be aware that every journalist and talking head is vaccinology-illiterate [even the ones with PhD’s and medical degrees] and yet each one keeps repeating over and over again the discredited CDC’s and AAP’s mantra (implied) that “100% of vaccines are 100% safe, 100% effective and 100% necessary” – talk about your Nazi-era Big Lie!); and

 

7)             the internet trolls and assorted disinformation agents that enjoy threatening and attacking any good idea that endangers the profitability of whatever corporation is willing to pay or encourage them to do their dirty work. (Recall Socrates’ truism: "When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.")

 

At the end of this column are a number of quotes that apply to what always seems to be happening somewhere to some group of normal folks who, when they see something outrageous that they know isn’t right, can’t keep themselves from pointing out the injustice and then form a group to resist it.

 

<<<The Now-infamous, Totally-biased, Fake “Panel Discussion” About Vaccines >>>

 

And then, since the powers-that-be never seem to respond to logic, un-biased science and fair and open discussions whenever they are challenged; and since they also “own” the media, they occasionally will pretend to listen to objections by arranging (one-sided) “Senate hearings”, or (one-sided) bureaucratic agency public information sessions or (one-sided) “panel discussions” such as Joshua Johnson’s 1A program on vaccines that was broadcast on Wednesday morning (March 13, 2019) on National Public Radio.

 

The panel discussion was supposed to be about the vaccine “debate” but consisted rather of three infamously-prominent and blindly pro-over-vaccination advocates who “performed their pro-over-vaccination duties” reliably.

 

What was really telling about the one-sidedness of the program was the fact that the call-ins commenters were obviously thoroughly screened to keep opposing viewpoints off the air. No caller was allowed to present any of the hundreds of un-biased facts that would have been able to contradict the “experts”.

 

The pharmaceutical and pediatric industry propaganda that was allowed to be presented on the program is the same propaganda that is being used to promote mandatory vaccination programs in state legislatures all around the nation and world, legislation that could eventually, illogically and unscientifically force vaccinations on everybody while legally silencing those well-informed, science-based dissenters who are exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and their ethical duty to warn others of the dangers.

 

When I went to find a link to the program for those who missed the show so that they could see for themselves how outrageously one-sided the discussion was, I came across 1464 blog comments that had been posted withing 16 hours of the program (which can be found at https://the1a.org/shows/2019-03-13/measles-washington-legislation

What impressed (and depressed) me the most were the sadistic nature of the comments from the obvious trolls that represented the majority of the commenters. These trolls called names and made fun or otherwise denigrated every honest commenter that were doing his or her best to expose the propaganda lies made by the experts on the panel.

 

The trolls tried to trash the comments of obviously knowledgeable anti-over-vaccination experts who knew what they were talking about. Even testimony from parents who had vaccine-damaged children were denigrated.

The trolls that dominated yesterday’s online “conversation” that followed the 1A program had anonymous user-names such as “Mean Girl” and “Truck O’Trolls”) and they consistently employed infantile name-calling tactics that would nauseate any rational person. The trolls used denigrating phrases such as “sock puppets”, “ass-buckets”, “selfish cretins”, “morons”, “idiots”, “stupid horseshit”, “flat-earthers”, “bullshit”, and this one: “you're only slightly less qualified than your hero BJ Handjob”, whatever that means.

A 2014 psychology journal article written by Canadian researchers studied the personality traits of internet trolls. The well-designed study was published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences. The article was titled: “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun”.

 

https://www.academia.edu/6016545/Trolls_just_want_to_have_fun included these comments:

 

Here is the article’s abstract:

“In two online studies (total N=1215), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores.

 

“Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus, cyber-trolling appears to be an internet manifestation of everyday sadism.”

 

But internet trolling is only a small, albeit important part of the widespread silencing of justice-seekers and inconvenient truth-tellers.

 

What typically happens when oppressors can’t convince resisters to stop their movement by persuasion or open, honest and balanced debate?

 

The answer is that they will then resort to increasingly aggressive tactics such as censorship, libel, slander, verbal harassment (particularly from entities such as the above-described internet trolls or other disinformation agents) or symbolic book-burnings.

 

Then, if resistance continues against the oppressors, the powers-that-be may be inclined to invoke increasingly brutal tactics that might include firings, threats of physical violence, brownshirt-style harassment, exile, deportation, police action and imprisonment.

 

Eventually blood could be shed with mysterious accidental deaths, overdoses and “suicidings”.

 

As the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine said so prophetically (predicting what happened in Nazi Germany): "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings as well."

 

So intelligent conversation about this important issue was an impossibility. The Big Pharma oppressors that are trying to shut down intelligent conversation very likely appreciate the bullying tactics of their trolls. Its significant to acknowledge that the Nazis thrived on using bullying and name-calling tactics in the 1930s.

 

The Godfather of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels (Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment), didn’t have an internet, but he had radio and he had his brownshirt thugs who, on Hitler’s orders, burned every book that they could get their hands on that had been written by anti-fascist intellectuals throughout history. Brownshirt thugs also joyfully smashed every liberal printing press in Germany and imprisoned every liberal newspaper editor and journalist, thus accomplishing more efficiently what the other six tyrannical powers-that-be are all trying to do in our supposedly democratic society.

 

Authoritarian entities inside wealthy, powerful and influential Big Corporations like the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries put a lot of money and strategizing effort into silencing pro-justice activists that pose threats to their profits, even when the activists have unbiased science on their side. Two perfect examples that I am personally involved in are the world-wide anti-over-vaccination movement and the opposition to the experimental copper mining planned for the lakes area of northeast Minnesota. The nefarious efforts to silence the truth-tellers in those two movements will soon be applied to other resistance movements that are happening simultaneously.

 

Therefore, in the spirit of Martin Niemoller’s profoundly important message to the oppressed, or the soon-to-be oppressed, activists that are involved in pro-justice movements need to be vocally and physically supportive of each other’s movements. If Big Government and Big Business and Big Media entities are seen to be working to silence somebody else’s justice-seeking movement, they are probably eventually going to be trying to silence yours.

 

And so, every humanitarian activist that has been inspired to stop global warming, corporate globalization; air and water pollution, militarism, war, racism, fascism, proliferation of lethal weapons, the suppression of the truth about 9/11, Palestinian abuses, PolyMet’s copper mine, human rights abuses, GLBTQ rights abuses, indigenous rights abuses, America’s latest imperialist assault against oil-rich nations such as Venezuela, etc. etc.

 

If Martin Niemoller were alive today (and of course, his spirit and message are still alive and well to those whose souls have not yet been crippled), he would warn every resistance movement that tyranny comes about in orchestrated small steps. He would encourage members of every justice-seeking resistance movements to join together against their common enemies – and do it early. There is strength in numbers, but there has to be active collaboration to realize the strength.

 

Here are a few quotes that should give courage to small groups of dissenters and supply some of the reasons to continue resisting:

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“Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or frightened to speak up or speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.” – Robert F. Kennedy

 

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State (or the Corporation) can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State (or the Corporation) to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State (or the Corporation).” -- Joseph Goebbels

 

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic." -- Dresden James

 

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” -- George Orwell

 

"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." -- George Orwell

 

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian philosopher

 

"Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." -- Anonymous

 

"It is difficult to get a man (or a profession or a corporation or a politician) to understand (or act upon) something, when his salary (and job security) depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author

 

“Capitalism is merely cannibalism without getting one's teeth dirty.” – Bernard Martin

 

“The economic system in the USA is not capitalism. Rather, it is corporate fascism, individualism and money worship, not capitalism.” – Anonymous

 

“Globalization is but another name for colonization -- nothing has changed but the name. And, just as the East India Company was the instrument for colonization, today's corporation is the instrument for globalization. And, corporatization is but another name for Fascism.” -- Urban Kohler

 

“Our citizens should know the urgent facts...but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths..." -- Oliver Stone

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

 

We are living in a system that is rigged to benefit special interests and billionaires, all at the expense of working people." -- Lily Eskelsen García

 

“Industry-controlled ‘science’ is not really science but a smokescreen to pave the way for products that may be harmful - but what do they care as long as they profit? There are many great scientists but there are also some who are willing to be hired to ‘prove’ that something doesn't cause cancer, or that something is ‘safe’. You cannot trust the EPA, the FDA, or industry ‘science’.” – Anonymous

 

“Nor can you trust the CDC, the ACIP, the NIMH, the NIH, the AMA, the AAP, the AAFP, the APA, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, etc, all of which have unethical, morally-crippling financial relationships with sociopathic, for-profit corporate entities that comprise what is known as Big Pharma (and Big Vaccine, Big Medicine and Big Business).” – Gary G. Kohls, MD

 

“One of the greatest national security and public health threats to the United States of America is a poorly trained, apathetic, and gullible media. Because in such a world not only does there cease to be a watchdog against government, industry, and general hucksterism, the media itself becomes prone to manipulation, deception, coercion, and outright recruitment by precisely those it is supposed to be watching for the good of the people.” -- Marco Caceres Di Iorio

 

“Corporations should not be involved in any aspect of the democratic process. They should not be involved in education at any level. Corporations should not be involved in health care. Corporations should not be involved in the administration of social services. Corporations should not be involved in the administration of justice. WHY? Because they are incapable of understanding and conforming to higher human aspirations and needs. Better to leave these areas to government and to non-profit organizations, both of which are administered by humans in the human interest…The corporation is sociopathic in its disregard for human goals and values; in fact its behavior fits the World Health Organization’s criteria for defining the psychopath.” – Wade Rowland, author of Greed, Inc. Why Corporations Rule the World. (Roland’s book was written 5 years before the 2010 US Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling that gave greedy, super-wealthy, sociopathic corporations the same rights as normal citizens with regard to spending unlimited amounts of money on election campaigns.)