by ANDRE DAMON
Visualization of Internet routing paths IMAGE/Wikipedia
There are few public figures more justifiably reviled by thinking people than Thomas Friedman. As a columnist for the New York Times, Friedman has served as a propagandist for every war the United States has started over the past two decades, from the bombing of Serbia, to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the “regime change” operations in Libya and Syria.
It was Friedman who infamously declared, hailing the US bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.”
In another column, he threatened the population of Serbia, “Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1398? We can do 1398, too.”
In a column publsished in 1997, and entitled “Head Shot,” Friedman wrote that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “is the reason God created cruise missiles. Cruise missiles are simply the only way to deal with him.”
Friedman’s malice is outdone only by his stupidity. Former Times journalist Chris Hedges summed up Friedman’s persona when he recently noted in a WSWS interview that he might as well be writing for the satirical publication, The Onion.
Friedman’s columns consist of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual rants worthy of Shakespeare’s Polonius. In his public appearances, he gives the impression of a small-town police chief who has gone mad and proclaimed himself a world-class intellectual, and whom everybody is humouring as a malicious prank.
But like the proverbial holy fool, Friedman’s tirades often spell out his reactionary arguments more directly than those of his smarter co-thinkers, who have the sense to speak with more reserve.
Such is the case with Friedman’s latest column, “From Russia with Poison,” in which he serves as a cheerleader for Senator Mark Warner and Congressman Adam Schiff, who have spent the last several months hounding Facebook and Twitter into confessing that they were unwitting accomplices in Russia’s attempt to subvert the 2016 US election.
In so doing, Friedman spells out a sweeping justification for state censorship that makes clear the deeply authoritarian impulses behind the hysteria whipped up by the Democrats, the Washington Post, and the New York Times against Russian “fake news,” used by the social media companies and Google as the framework for censoring oppositional views.
“There is an abiding dream in the tech world that when all the planet’s people and data are connected it will be a better place,” Friedman writes. “But getting there is turning into a nightmare—a world where billions of people are connected but without sufficient legal structures, security protections or moral muscles among companies and users to handle all these connections without abuse.”
The last elections, Friedman asserts, show that Facebook and Twitter have “connected more people than they can manage and they’ve been naïve about how many bad guys were abusing their platforms.”
These companies’ lack of “morals” was expressed in the insufficient enthusiasm with which they accepted Warner’s absurd lie that $44,000 in “Russian” advertisements swung the 2016 US election, and their resistance to publishing a blacklist of accounts supposedly belonging to “Russian agents.”
Friedman smugly notes, “Last November, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as ‘a pretty crazy idea’ evidence that people were using Facebook to generate fake news to tip the US election.” But after he got a personal visit by Warner, no doubt accompanied by threats, Zuckerberg admitted, “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it.”
World Socialist Web Site for more