Researching, Searching, Sources and References
By Larry Romanoff, February
26, 2023
There is no
question that it is more difficult to search the Internet today than was the
case 15 or 20 years ago. Especially on the English-language Internet,
information control is much more apparent and effective, and censorship is now
fully in the open with little or no pretense or disguise. Many web pages or
documents which would always appear on the first page of a search in the past,
cannot now be accessed by normal means, and many sources have actually been
deleted. Many links to historical documents that I saved 15 or 20 years ago,
are still active, and the documents can still be accessed, but they will no
longer appear on a search with any terms. It is now often true that even if you
know the complete title of a document, the search engines - especially Google -
will refuse to produce it. This is so true that Google (particularly) no longer
functions as a useful search engine; it is instead a "gate-keeper"
with two main functions. One is to feed you information it wants you to have
(or things it wants you to think), and the second is to ensure you never find
information it doesn't want you to have (or things it doesn't want you to
think).
No country,
to my knowledge, censors information today as heavily as does the US. The
entire English Internet is bad, but the US is notably the worst, at least in my
experience. This is true not only in the sense of making domestic information
unavailable to Americans, but also an increasing amount of foreign information
is unavailable in the US, with many foreign websites either blocked, or simply
not appearing on any searches made from within the US. It is also true in the
sense of restricting access to US Internet information from outside the
country. In searching American websites today, I increasingly receive notices
like the one above, indicating that the (often false) version of current events
being promulgated is for domestic consumption only, and that the US does not
want citizens in other countries to know the stories they are telling. It is
surprising that many of the most prominent US mass media outlets engage in this
practice, which is not rare.
Increasingly,
with all the turmoil in our domestic and international societies, the
"official narrative" adopted by various governments and echoed by the
mass media is the only permitted version of events. All other thoughts,
theories, and even indisputable facts, are now labeled as
"misinformation" or "conspiracy theories" and are often
tagged as such or simply deleted and banned. It is increasingly true that we
are no longer permitted to question the "official" version of events,
even when these versions are either obviously false or seriously lacking in
critical details, this questioning rapidly taking the form a criminal felony.
This essentially fascist-dictatorship attitude definitely applies to Internet
searches, making research much more difficult, especially when relating to
events and incidents in our historical past where a quite nasty bit of history
has been deeply buried and the official version of events is clearly wrong.
There are powerful people who do not want inaccurate buried history to be
uncovered.
Since the
information blockage and censorship are strongest and most widespread on the
English Internet, it is possible to bypass this censorship to some useful
extent by searching in other languages. With most search engines, if one types
search terms in English, it will search only English-language websites, but if
one enters search terms in Italian it will search only Italian websites. From
my experience, content from foreign websites is not closely monitored from the
US and, while censorship and information blockage do exist on foreign content,
this can be limited to only a few topics. Perhaps most countries have some
cultural or historical topics which are sensitive and where the authorities are
not eager to encourage wide public discussion, but these are not universal and
usually apply only to the country in question. Thus, searching in foreign
languages can be fruitful. As a kind of aside, the French do not like to
publish news that is unfavorable to France, but the Italians seem to enjoy
spreading negative news about France. So, if you want the bad news about Paris,
you can do your searching in Italian. As another example, information and
details on deaths and injuries from Pfizer's COVID vaccine are heavily
monitored and controlled - and sanitised - in the US, but not so in many other
countries.
It is also
possible to search the English Internet by abandoning Google and its brethren
altogether and using search engines from other countries, while still using
English search terms and thus searching the English-language websites. The
English content won't be as comprehensive from other countries, but they will
not be censoring the items that are so controlled on the English Internet, and
thus may provide much information one would not otherwise see. I often use
Baidu in China or Yandex in Russia, for example, to search the English Internet
for documents Google refuses to provide. It is possible, and often quite
useful, to do the same in many countries. However, the ability to obtain
censored political content by searching in multiple languages, is a window that
will not likely be open for very long. This kind of searching is more common in
Europe and Asia where people are more accustomed to foreign languages, and not
at all common in the US since most Americans are only dimly aware that other
languages exist. Still, it is clear that the thrust is for total information
control, so this avenue will almost certainly be affected.
Searching
on sensitive political or historical topics, especially the nastier aspects of
history which are always deeply buried, is always problematic for two main
reasons. Virtually all of the information offered by the mass media outlets is
normally badly tainted, Photoshopped and sanitised, with most of the critical
details omitted so that a false narrative is presented. The other problem is
that there must be a literal army of "story-tellers" out there who
specialise in concocting false narratives on all of the dirty historical
secrets, to the extent that they flood the Internet and print media with what
are largely fairy-tales. As one example, for decades it was impossible to learn
the truth about the origin of Panama and the Canal. All of the media, the
official government sources, the history textbooks, and volumes of articles
written by "private academics and scholars" simply told us the US
government negotiated with "Panama" for permission to build the canal
- with the story then quickly proceeding to tell us what a magnificent feat of
engineering this was and how wonderful were the Americans. It has been only
recently that information became widely available that "Panama" was a
province of Colombia, that the US demanded the right to build a canal through
the isthmus of that country, and further that the US would own both the canal
and the canal zone in perpetuity. When Columbia declined, the US sent in its
military, severed the province from Columbia, created a new country named
Panama, appointed a President, and got their agreement as desired. But there
were literally hundreds of articles and news items written about Panama,
including many in prestigious journals, that deliberately omitted all this
vital information.
That army
of "story-tellers" referred to above, is by no means idle today; if
anything, it is much more active than it has ever been, with these false
historical tales changing the focus and adding such huge amounts of irrelevant
extraneous detail that they manage to smoke up the room so badly that most
readers might throw up their hands in frustration and abandon the topic
altogether - which is the intent.
But there
is something additional in this context that is even more serious: there exists
today literally an army of people scouring the Internet for historical and
political content that is criminally incriminating, and making strenuous
efforts to have all that content deleted. And, from my experience, I would say
they are achieving considerable success. These efforts can apply to a wide
range of historical and political events and circumstances, but I find the
concentration in two main areas, both involving the Jews. One area seems to be
a determined effort to erase any identification of individuals as being Jews. I
won't discuss the reasons here, but Jews definitely prefer to not be identified
as such. The evidence of this is everywhere. Consider the recent scandal
involving Jeffrey Epstein; of the hundreds of articles in the media about this
case, I cannot recall seeing a single one that mentioned Epstein was a Jew.
That cannot possibly be an accident; the mass media, being almost entirely
Jewish-owned or controlled, do not want such associations made in the public
mind, and the censorship is severe.
We have no
trouble finding news items and articles making this identification if a Jew is
a celebrity, but such identifications are essentially prohibited if the person
is a felon or has been involved in serious war crimes or other atrocities in
the past. And the more serious the crimes, the greater the determination from
this "army" to prevent such identifications being made, or to have
them deleted if already made. In keeping with this, there are members of this
army who write not only articles but entire books that aim to "prove"
a particular individual was not a Jew, the length of the treatise corresponding
to the seriousness of the crime. I encountered one such article recently about
a man who was very clearly a Jew and who was very clearly involved in serious
international atrocities, where "someone" wrote that this man had
"converted to Christianity" and offered what purported to be a quote
from this man claiming he depended on God every day for the fulfillment of all
his daily tasks. It was obviously a fraud, but must have been considered important,
and many will now provide this little treatise as a reference to prove the man
was not a Jew and, by association, that Jews do no wrong and are being unfairly
maligned.
The other
area where scouring the Internet has become exceedingly active is in removing
any reference to Jewish involvement in war crimes and historical atrocities. I
will digress here for a moment to make a point about information sources and
references. An author normally will provide citations and references to sources
of information so that readers can obtain more detail and also some comfort as
to the accuracy of statements. But there are times when a source, even if on
the Internet, is sensitive and needs to be protected. There can be many reasons
for this, one of which is that if one is revealing unpleasant historical
truths, especially if they affect one particular nation or ethnic group, there
are many influential people with full access to the microphone who will use
that power in attempts to trash that source and destroy its credibility. Thus,
it can be important to not reveal the source directly. Simply put, it isn't
possible to discredit a document if you don't know what it actually says, in detail.
Especially if the source involves the Jews, without access to the actual
content, the best they can do is make wild claims of "conspiracy
theorist" or "anti-Semitic holocaust denier", but these
accusations no longer gain much traction and are becoming useless.
The point
of the above is the deletion of these important sources by those army members
who are active in scrubbing the Internet. This was brought home to me a while
back, and it had to happen twice before I learned my lesson. Briefly, in two instances
about one month apart, I received an email from individuals I thought would be
trustworthy, asking for the source of a particular item. These appeared to be
emails from a person innocently and sincerely asking for "a few source
references", requests with which I complied. But I was surprised to
discover a few days later that the source was gone; it had been deleted from
the Internet. My first thought was that this was merely an unhappy coincidence
but, when it repeated a month later, I realised I'd been duped, not by the
Internet-scrubbers directly, but by others assisting them.
In my
experience, this "scouring" of the Internet and the deletion of
historically-important documents and information is increasing almost
exponentially compared to decades past. This is certainly part of the same
process, and organised by the same people who are responsible for the
information blockage and censorship that now occurs in the mass media, the
social media, on Internet platforms like Wikipedia, on search engines and more.
The intent appears to be total information control, and all in the hands of a
very few people. Research is becoming more difficult, Internet searching is
becoming increasingly unproductive and, with Google, basically useless. And,
more than ever, valuable sources need to be protected so they don't disappear
forever.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing
has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150
foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well
as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired
management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions
in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export
business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University,
presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr.
Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books
generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to
Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His
full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/and
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He
can be contacted at:
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023
