First The Jews Came For The Journalists & The Academics!

"The sun is now setting on democracy as we know it."

vanessa beeley: “It is clear that such a major campaign against Germany’s peace and security cannot go unanswered. World propaganda against us will be answered with world propaganda for us.” – Joseph Goebbels [1]

“I just think that what I’d like people to understand is that so many of the things that as Canadians we’d like to think are sacrosanct, you know, whether it’s we live in a democratic society, we have a free and open media, we have academic institutions, like you said, Michael, that are these open spaces of knowledge exchange, all of these things are being severely eroded, seriously eroded. And I think that really what, you know, if Canadians don’t wake up pretty soon, you know, that democracy is going to slip through our hands, like grains of sand, you know, because it really is getting that intense.” – Kevin MacKay, from this week’s interview.

In her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf wrote about how the “blueprint” for crushing a democracy always took the form of ten steps:

Invoking an external and internal threat

Establish secret prisons

Develop a paramilitary force

Surveil ordinary citizens

Infiltrate citizen groups

Arbitrarily detain and release citizens

Target key individuals

Restrict the press

Cast criticism as ‘espionage’ and dissent as ‘treason’

Subvert the rule of law [2]

It is shocking to reflect on how many of these steps have been taken in many countries. And not just in places like Ukraine and Israel, as spelled out throughout this website. Canada, too, is not the crusader for democracy it bills itself to be. Several past guests of the Global Research News Hour have experiences with the majority of these repressive measures. And this is a situation that should concern all of us.[3]

We have rocket high inflation, largely due to the war in Ukraine (NATO vs Russia). We have enemies (Russia and Palestine supporters). And increasingly, the “pawns” they set up in academia and in journalism are contributing “dis-information” to stir up harmful dissent in our conversations about war torn regions on the globe.[4]

We are now witnessing innocent people, from independent journalists to intellectuals of high esteem facing open challenges in the public sphere. In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have put their women and men on notice to set their sites on any “person of interest” that could pose a threat. And far too many are being detained. [5]

Germany was a democratic society just a few years before suspicion and despair drove it toward a constitutional abyss. If Canada has begun to follow the same path then the subject deserves a fair hearing on the Global Research News Hour. [6]

Our show starts with two women, Eva Bartlett and Tamara Lorincz, who got detained in Canadian airports and asked unusual questions for daring to – gulp – speak with Russians! Later in the program, we hear from three more people: Professor Radhika Desai, Professor Kevin MacKay, and independent journalist Vanessa Beeley about similar encounters in airports and in academia more generally. These individuals through what they experienced tell us more about what happened, how much worse this could get, and what can be done about it.