The price of stifling dissent is not only dishonesty, it’s self-harming incompetence
The governments and media elites of the West pride themselves on providing and promoting freedom of thought, opinion, and debate.
Together with a selective feminism that easily sacrifices the women of, say, Libya, Iraq, and Palestine, and a very odd understanding of “democracy” that includes the use of miscounts and lawfare to shape elections, their claim to a superior public sphere features among those “values” routinely invoked to justify Western regime change aggression.
But the Western claim to superior freedom of mind, information, and discussion doesn’t just serve as a pretext for subversion, interference, and violence elsewhere. It is also extremely weak (to put it very politely) on its own terms and at home.
Whoever has followed, for instance, the manner in which the BBC and other Western mainstream outlets have (not) been covering the Gaza genocide knows that Western establishment media are ruthless instruments of unaccountable and immoral power and geopolitics, and have no moral or intellectual inhibitions.
While a genocide is a particularly crass example of the West’s great capacity for Orwellian manipulation, it would be easy to enumerate further instances, including the mendacious justification of brutal and devastating wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to name a few.
A key element in these campaigns of deliberate bias, omission, misinformation, and, in effect, disinformation is the use of credentialed experts, who lend their apparent authority to mainstream, that is, government and elite narratives. But, of course, not just any experts. Western expertise is now carefully cultivated and pruned to fit what the establishment wants its populations to hear and believe.
As a result, throughout the West and, in particular, the EU, we have been witnessing a severe narrowing of the opinion spectrum that citizens are permitted to even access, much less to have a debate about.
One side of this curbing operation is viciously repressive: Those experts daring to think differently and speak about it in public are personally targeted by a truly Kafkaesque system of life-spoiling punishment. Using the cover of “sanctions,” its originators in the EU and its national governments are proud of following no acceptable standards of evidence and of not granting their victims any hearing, legal process, or defense.
Once upon a time, in East Germany, a drab authoritarian-socialist place, the dreaded Stasi secret police called this method “Zersetzung,” literally “disintegration.” Instead of jailing dissidents, their social and professional lives – and livelihoods – were systematically disrupted and, in effect, destroyed. Between the dour authoritarian-socialists of the old Cold War and the high-handed EU radical-centrist extremists of the new ‘values’ crusade, les extrêmes se touchent, as they used to say.
The expectable psychological consequences of this repression – anxiety, stress, and trauma – are, of course, not a by-product of the procedure but its real core aim. Obviously, every independent voice silenced by arbitrary assault is meant to serve as a deterrent to terrorize many others into submission. All of it happens without legal due process and by an unaccountable bureaucracy hiding behind anonymity. Welcome to the EU, 2025 ‘values’ edition. Rule of law was yesterday (if ever).
The other side of the great curbing and shaping of the permitted spectrum of opinion, information, and debate consists of rewarding and promoting. As under Stalin (if less bloodily), cutting down and raising up are two prongs of the same authoritarian strategy of control. Those experts who say what the powers-that-be like to hear make (materially) gratifying careers. More importantly, the mainstream media, with television in the lead, draw on them, and almost exclusively on them, for interviews, quotes for articles, news appearances, and, crucially, to fill TV studio seats for influential primetime talk shows.
Even with the addition of the occasional fig leaf – a (moderately) odd man or woman put there basically for the others to beat up on – the result is absurdly monotonous, reminiscent of the dreary diet once on offer on, for instance, Cold War East Germany’s state TV.
Over the last decade, all of now-united Germany has developed into a stark example of this model, particularly with regard to Israel’s (unacknowledged) Gaza Genocide and the Ukraine War. With regard to the war, barely two handfuls of experts have rotated through the mainstream studios for years, with a stamina that would be admirable if their contributions, predictions, and recommendations were not so boringly repetitive and consistently wrong.
Their names are secondary and all too well-known. An almost complete sample of major figures would include Claudia Major, Florence Gaub, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Carlo Masala (currently a little preoccupied with fending off plagiarism accusations), Sönke Neitzel, Christian Mölling, and Marcus Keupp.
Imposed on the German public with relentless obtrusiveness, what all of them have in common is staunch support for fighting Russia in and via Ukraine (and Ukrainians), a foolish disinterest in and pompous dismissal of diplomatic alternatives to going on with (others) killing and dying, and, last but not least, what Brian McDonald has brilliantly diagnosed as Russophrenia: the simultaneous belief that Russia is about to march to the Pyrenees and that it is a decrepit country with a fragile regime eternally on the verge of defeat, if not outright collapse.
In addition, a little racist and embarrassingly silly stereotyping of Russians is also welcome. Florence Gaub’s highlights include holding forth on Russians as fundamentally different and, by implication, clearly inferior members of the human species who don’t value life. That’s a revoltingly callous take from a German, as their country’s insanity and aggression, less than a century ago, claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens, who would have preferred to live and were mourned no less than elsewhere.
Reckless optimism – really, delusional fantasizing – also helps: In April 2023, Marcus Keupp confidently predicted that Russia would be out of tanks within less than half a year. A military economist by profession, Keupp is clearly incapable of understanding the Russian military-industrial complex and the country’s immense potential for mobilization. Again, after the experience of World War Two, it is almost Dada art to be so blinkered.
Also in April 2023, Carlo Masala, too, was certain that Russia had really already lost the war. Betraying total ignorance does no harm either. Masala has managed to display his bizarre belief that “Girkin” and “Strelkov” are two different people. Like, say, “Eric Blair” and “George Orwell.” Likewise, elementary lack of logic and prudence is no obstacle. Take, for instance, Christian Mölling, who has a history of fetishizing Germany’s Taurus missiles like a schoolboy mistaking slick video games for bloody reality. He has argued, with impeccable bureaucratic pedantry, that Moscow could not possibly retaliate against Germany if these German weapons were handed over to Ukraine and fired at Russia from there. Why? Because Germany would make it clear, so Mölling argues, that the missiles had been given away and had nothing to do with Berlin any longer. Apparently, it never crossed Mölling’s mind that Moscow need not follow such silly – and factually wrong – sophistries.
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has had substantial interests in both the arms industry and its lobbying organizations. That has never kept the masters of talk show spin from giving her an easy platform. If possible utilitarian bias is no problem, neither is biographical inconsistency: A history of military service is entirely unnecessary to be a German expert in love with war. Unlike the author of these lines, who actually has served in the then-West German military, Mölling is only one example of the many newly bellicose boomers who refused to join the army when younger: Late-bloomers on the warpath, so to speak. This is particularly striking when these former refuseniks are now adamant that today’s young must be made to march again.
Last but not least, spreading the Orwellian untruth that Germany is already not at peace and that a Russian attack is imminent is part of the basic repertoire of this sort of expertise. Military historian and Bundeswehr fanboy Neitzel hardly stood out with silly ramblings about “a last summer of peace.”
The above is only a very short sketch of how lopsided and unpersuasive the selection and presentation of security and military information by experts has become in the German mainstream media. It is not about information for citizens expected to make up their own mind, but about cognitive warfare on the home front. This is the “expertise” of mobilization. And that, in the final analysis, is no genuine expertise at all.
There are some scant signs of hope. Conservative mainstream newspaper Welt has now admitted that Ukraine will lose the war (wakey, wakey, but better late than never). NIUS, a right-of-center German news site with great reach, has finally at least broached the issue of selective, misleading expertise. NIUS has rightly called for a “reckoning” (“Aufarbeitung”) of the scandalous, lazy, and often incompetent one-sidedness that has taken root and for more access for alternative voices.
We will see if things will change. I would not bet on it. One thing, however, is sure: A country that systematically rewards conformism over professionalism and independence of mind does not only insult its citizens’ intelligence. It is also likely to pay a real price in bad decisions and political fiascos caused by them. Germany has started doing so already. Alas, Berlin’s elites seem determined to stay this pernicious course.
