Jacinda Ardern Was Wrong on Disinformation at the U.N.

Biden, Trudeau, Ardern… This Is Not the Way

In one of my previous posts (The LinkIn Lawyer: Unprofessional Network), I wrote this:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—also known by its alternative translation of "Who watches the watchers?"—makes the issue of free speech so thorny. My personal belief? Cancel culture and censorship is more dangerous than free speech absolutism. Can free speech be abused? For sure. Language is a mechanism of oppression, if you want to take that stance—but so is literally anything. The remedy to it is not censorship—it's education. Same as the remedy to misinformation is not a "Disinformation Czar" or any one of the similarly misguided initiatives from the USA's Biden, Canada's Trudeau, our NZ's own Ardern—the remedy is better education with critical thinking being a key element of this.

…and this as a footnote:

Read about the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board from US DHS; G7 Rapid Response Mechanism discussed in Justin Trudeau says he has a plan to fight Russia’s disinformation by Toronto Star on 13 March, 2022; Jacinda Ardern heavily implying that free speech is now being weaponized and thus needs curtailing in Full speech: Jacinda Ardern addresses UN General Assembly on 24 September, 2022:

But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms? To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?

This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.

We recognised the threats that the old weapons created. We came together as communities to minimise these threats. We created international rules, norms and expectations. We never saw that as a threat to our individual liberties - rather, it was a preservation of them.

The same must apply now as we take on these new challenges

Now, I don't know if the actions of these 3 and their ilk are some form of well-meaning but completely misguided attempt at protecting people from harm—or their actions are indeed outright malice—but in either case censorship and "disinformation police" are decidedly not the way to deal with the misinformation problem.

Better education is.

Christopher Hitchens's On Free Speech points are something that I needed some time to get around to. Now that I have, I see no other way of looking at it. You can read the transcript through the link above, or you can watch here:

Here are a couple key passages:

Indeed as John Stewart Mill said, if all of society were agreed on the truth and beauty and value of one proposition, all except one person it would be most important in fact it would become even more important that that one heretic be heard because we would still benefit from his perhaps outrageous or appalling view.

In more modern times this has been put I think best by a personal heroine of mine Rosa Luxemburg, who said that "the freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently".

These, to me, encapsulate the value of free speech, and also the dangers of censorship.

With regard to the conflict of 2022+, take the total removal of the Russian media from the EU and other "Western" countries under the guise of "disinformation". I immediately ask this:

Wouldn't the time of conflict be exactly the time to listen to, understand, and debate the other side?

So, if you're removing this possibility, what else am I to think, except for: you don't want me to listen to the other side because you either don't trust me to judge for myself (i.e., you think me a fool) or you know they're right and you don't want me to know the truth?

Jacinda Ardern is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

Mis- and disinformation is a huge topic, and we've been covering it this Season in multiple posts.

For example, when Jacinda Ardern addresses the UN with the words like these:

But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms? To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?

…and these:

After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?

…she seemingly does not understand that she is speaking about the Western, and her own, stance on the conflict in Ukraine—much more than about the stance within Russia.^[1]

I've shown this Season how these words are all correct, except have a completely opposite meaning to what Jacinda Ardern meant. Feel free to skip to the next section if you've seen this already in my other posts: 👇👇

• "Lie[s], told repeatedly" are the coverage of 2014 Maidan, the Crimean and Donbass referenda, Russia's involvement in the 2014-ongoing Ukrainian Civil War, NATO expansion and threat against Russia, and even the run-up to the 2022 Special Military Operation.^[2]

• "Lie[s], told repeatedly" are the Ukrainian propaganda campaign on social media powered by bots^[3] and the US social media disinformation campaign against China, Russia and Iran that ran for at least 5 provable years.^[4]

• "Lie[s], told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms" against Russia supposedly on behalf of "Ukraine", but in reality in a sort of a near-religious 200-year-old Western jihad against Russia.^[5]

• "Lie[s], told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others […] to threaten the security of others," like NATO's eastward expansion did to Russia since 1991, in multiple waves over 3+ decades, and exactly like NATO aggression against Yugoslavia and Libya and the US aggression against Iraq, Syria and others—all outside the UN mandate, all unprovoked destructions of foreign independent states.

• "Lie[s], told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others […] to turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them," meaning the post-2014 Kyiv and the Ukrainian far-right genocidal campaign against Donbass, and widely against the Ukrainian South-East, since the bloody and unconstitutional US-backed coup in 2014 against the democratically-elected President and Government in Kiev.^[6]

• "Lie[s], told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others […] to turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them," meaning the Western—and the NZ specifically—complicity in the Kyiv atrocities and war crimes against the population of Donbass and increasingly against its own population.^[7]

• "After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? […] How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?"—How, indeed? When the West self-righteously believes that their jihad against Russia, its proxy war against Russia till the last Ukrainian, it's total war against Russia including economic sanctions is not only legal but noble? When Western unilateral sanctions against everyone (Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Russia, etc.) are not only legal but noble?^[8]

How, indeed, do you stop this?

Most certainly not by giving the Western entities the power to decide what's mis- and disinformation and the power to censor dissent—that's for damn sure not how!

Let us all be clear, Russia's war is illegal. It is immoral.

It is a direct attack on the UN Charter and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for.

Putin's suggestion that it could at any point deploy further weapons that it has at their disposal reveals the false narrative that they have based their invasion on. What country who claims to be a liberator, threatens to annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate?

This war is based on a lie.

• The NATO+ war against Russia is most certainly "based on a lie"—many lies perpetrated by the Western mainstream media (I addressed some in my NY Times Disinformation article).^[9]

• "Putin's suggestion that it could at any point deploy further weapons that it has at their disposal reveals the false narrative that they have based their invasion on. What country who claims to be a liberator, threatens to annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate?"—This statement is an outright lie itself, and I don't know if Ms Ardern knows this or not. Putin never, not once, threatened to nuke or otherwise destroy or "annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate". This literally never happened. The Kremlin keeps repeating that they can and will use their whole arsenal to protect the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation in case it gets threatened—this is literally proscribed in the Russian Constitution and is part of the Russian Nuclear Doctrine going back decades,^[10] so it's nothing new and it had never been directed against the Ukrainian people. It is part of the Western mainstream hysterical narrative, but this doesn't make it true.

  Furthermore, as President Lukashenko of Belarus recently told a Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko (whose TV channel was closed down by Zelensky in February 2021, to show how "democratic" Ukraine works, because Diana among others was on record for years calling for the peaceful resolution to the Donbass conflict and to stop the escalating hatred inside Ukraine), President Putin told Lukashenko that the Russian army never intended to take Kiev, so as to save the civilians from unnecessary harm.^[11] A US Senator and a retired Col. Richard Black confirmed the difference between the Russian military caring for Ukrainian civilians vs the US military caring for the civilians in Vietnam.^[12]

• "Let us all be clear, Russia's war is illegal. It is immoral."—Well, this is not at all clear, at least not to the majority of "us" the World population. First of all, this isn't a "war"—at least, it hadn't started like that. Second, how can a humanitarian intervention on behalf of the long-suffering Donbass population be "immoral"? I very rarely say anything that could be misconstrued as condoning violence—I quite explicitly denounce any violence of any kind, starting with the 2014 Maidan and the subsequent Ukrainian Civil War that was started by the Kyiv regime. I would have chosen a different course of action in February 2022, too. On the other hand, I do not possess all the information that the Kremlin possessed, and it's since then been proven that the Kremlin tried for 8 years to insist on the diplomatic solution to the post-Maidan Ukrainian disaster, via the Minsk Accords, which were sabotaged by Poroshenko, Merkel, and Hollande personally and successive Kyiv governments collectively. In this environment, I do not understand how a side that did everything possible diplomatically and peacefully for 8 years, a side that had been lied to for 8 years, a side that had a moral obligation to save the Donbass population from genocide…—how can such a side be demonized so much in these circumstances—while the side that started the aggression in 2014 and perpetuated the aggression against ostensibly its own people in Donbass can be lauded, supported, lionized even?^[13]

• "It is a direct attack on the UN Charter and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for."—I'm no expert in international law, but the UN Charter is both straightforward and internally-inconsistent, so the actions of Russia are in no way an attack on it, direct or indirect. In fact, one could make a case that the Russian actions in Donbass are upholding the UN Charter, insofar as they assist the people of Donbass to self-determine their future. This is the fundamental right inside the UN Charter.

  I am taking Jacinda Ardern's words not as a reflection of ignorance or lack of intellect in understanding even the basics of international law, but as simple propaganda and a lie. How can she be this ignorant, when even a cursory read of the UN Charter or the material about the UN Charter would easily uncover that the UN Charter is internally inconsistent? In the article Self Determination and the Territorial Integrity on the site LawTeacher.net, published on 18 July, 2019, the author writes:

  Conflict between the principles of territorial integrity and self determination

  […]

  When both principles come into conflict, it is my opinion that the self determination principle should be upheld since it possesses superior qualities to the territorial integrity principle. The self determination principle empowers states to determine their future through internal decision making as opposed to external interference. This is a principle which is consistent with democracy which supports decision making by the majority in order to determine the future of a country. The territorial integrity principle is weaker since it defines territories as a means of determining sovereignty as opposed to the will of the people. Democracy advocates for the will of the people hence if they decide to change their territory or borders, the will should be respected. The self determination principle can be seen to be one of the roots of democracy in the modern world.

  So, from the Donbass and Crimea points of view—indeed, from any region of Ukraine's point of view, including Kherson and Zaporozhie and also Odessa, Nikolaev, Kharkov, and any other region—the will of their people should be paramount, Ukraine's territorial integrity be damned. This, my dear former PM Jacinda Ardern, is truly upholding UN Charter—both in spirit and in letter of the international law.

  There are many other elements that make the Russian actions fit perfectly well into the UN Charter and the international law, but I'll defer to Scott Ritter, former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and UN Weapons Inspector (who was against the 2003 Iraq invasion), on this: Russia, Ukraine & the Law of War: Crime of Aggression

Even If I Am Wrong…

Now, I could be wrong. On every single point, I could be wrong—regardless of all the evidence that I presented.

What does this mean for the position of Jacinda Ardern and the rest of the Western leadership on censorship and mis-/dis-information? Does it make them right?

We cannot both be condemning the political censorship inside the Russian Federation while at the same time introducing political censorship in the West. Let's ignore for the time being that it's long since here, the censorship that is, except it's working in other ways, as I discuss with Professor of Media Oliver Boyd-Barrett who specializes in the US war propaganda.^[14] Let's ignore this. It is simply a logical fallacy that you can control mis- and dis-information through censorship, through a "Disinformation Czar" or some such.

I tried to lay out my case based on the facts that my view of the Ukraine conflict is correct, and the view of Jacinda Ardern and others like her is wrong. Any rational person holding the opposite opinion would engage with the facts and tell me where I went wrong, which can be in only one of two (or both) places: either the facts I'm citing are wrong, or my interpretation of them is wrong. Therefore, to reach the truth, we need more conversation, not less. What a rational person acting in good faith would certainly not do, is that person wouldn't advocate for censoring me, for deplatforming me, for forbidding my views to be heard, for labelling them as "not factual" by the judgement of some entity.

Because to quote Lenin (in a nod to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?), "But Who Are the Judges?"

Trust is earned, not legislated. We cannot trust some entity that legislates what's true and what's not to tell us what to believe and what not to believe.

We can and should trust the people to be able to make up their own minds, given access to all the information. Yes, even to "misinformation".

More Education

So, what is the answer, then?

Better education in general and especially in critical thinking.

The problem is, of course, that in most places education serves several goals, none of which is development of critical thinking: Building cohesive society? Yes. Preparing people for the workforce? Yes. The latter is basically literacy and numeracy, and the former is basically teaching history in one way only ("history is written by the victors" is a saying for a reason).

Critically thinking? OMG! If this is well-developed, people might figure out that the current system is BS—so God forbid, no!

Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterhouse present a much better case for this thesis than I can here, in their book from their series of public lectures at the University of Arizona: Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance. See in particular their attack on "common sense":

Is our “common sense” understanding of the world a reflection of the ruling class’s demands of the larger society? If we are to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet, Chomsky and Waterstone forcefully argue that we must look closely at the everyday tools we use to interpret the world. Consequences of Capitalism make the deep, often unseen connections between common sense and power. In making these linkages we see how the current hegemony keep social justice movements divided and marginalized. More importantly, we see how we overcome these divisions.

We'll get to explore these themes later in more detail…

P.S. Devils and Advocates: Theory and Practice

If you want the theoretical underpinning against the Disinformation Legislation or some such, listen to my 2-part talk with Prof. Ananish Chaudhuri on the experimental economics, decision-making under uncertainty, Devil's Advocates, wisdom of the crowd vs information cascades here—subscribe to paid version for the full talk + subscripts + my own additional notes:

• "'Oh no, I am so completely fair and rational…'—That's not true" with a free version here

• "Look, There Is a Trade-Off Here. And It's Not Really a Win-Win"

Footnotes