Some readers are aware I have been permanently suspended from Twitter as @wemeantwell.
This followed exchanges with several mainstream journalists over their support for America’s wars and unwillingness to challenge the lies of government. After two days of silence, Twitter sent me an auto-response saying what I wrote “harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence someone else’s voice.”
I don’t think I did any of that, and I wish you didn’t have to accept my word on it. I wish instead you could read what I wrote and decide for yourself. But Twitter won’t allow that. Twitter says you cannot read and make up your own mind. They have in fact eliminated all the things I have ever written there over seven years, disappeared me down the Memory Hole. That’s what censorship does; it takes the power to decide what is right and wrong away from you and gives it to someone else.
Hate what I write, hate me, block me, don’t buy my books, but please don’t celebrate handing over those choices to some company.
I lost my career at the State Department because I spoke out as a whistleblower against the Iraq War. I’ve now been silenced, again, for speaking out, this time by a corporation. I am living in the America I always feared.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.
Everyone needs to wake up and see the US for what it is.
See the US government for what it is. Most plain folks in the US are just that…
I’d expand that to include the US govt and the US elites (including the heads of tech companies). You’re right, the average people are OK, except, like people everywhere, they’re much too easily manipulated and too quick to engage in tribalism/us-vs-them thinking.
Fascism is alive and well and it’s not even the Orange Fuhrer leading the parade. You know you’ve d*cked up good when you’ve out-fashed the master. This country is a sinking ship. I’m hopping the first freighter to Iceland to ride out the apocalypse.
Beyond belief. Alternative media is being smashed by Washington and their corporate masters. However as Peter Van Buren remarks they can’t control the internet as readily as they control the legacy media. Perhaps this outrage will lead to the recognition that both Scott Horton and Peter Van Buren deserve.
I suppose Jimmy Dore and others are next?
There’s a poem about this.
“First they came for Chris Cantwell…”
” I wish instead you could read what I wrote and decide for yourself. But Twitter won’t allow that.” … The Internet Archive is a thing…
https://web.archive.org/web/20180804022710/twitter.com/wemeantwell
That’s a pretty neat thing!
The archive includes this recent tweet, in response to a tweet saying “A GoFundMe so Andrew Sullivan will stop writing”:
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Peter Van Buren@WeMeantWell
I’m available to be deplatformed at much lower cost.
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Prophetic?
You could make another account, if they let you.
There’s a way to combat Twitter’s censorship machine: Chttr.co
Americans DON’T WANT WAR, Zionists want war, zionists run the media, the media pushes for war, so they need to silence Americans to insure the wars keep going.
The Corpratocracy is flexing it’s censorship muscles. I am afraid it is about to get ugly.
These guys tout themselves as libertarians but libertarians are supposed to stay courteous no matter what. They use vicious language then get banned? Sounds like entryists trying to make libertarians look bad. They’re just not libertarians…
What makes you think that “libertarians are supposed to stay courteous no matter what?”
Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a sub-school of How to Make Friends and Influence People.