How the Military Industrial Complex Became the Censorship Industry

Mike Benz explains the evolution of the military-industrial complex into the censorship industry.

THE EVOLUTION

“[The]censorship industrial complex is kind of a play on the military-industrial complex, which is a concept really from the 1950s with Eisenhower. It was his Farewell Address where he basically complained that the end of World War II, you know, from the late 40s to the 1950s, there was spawned war as essentially an industry, as a profit-making thing.

“At the time, a lot of manufacturing was wrapped up in the war.  The Pentagon renamed itself from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, and there was this defense industry with – not just contractors  -but also with lobbyists and also with civil society and private sector institutions.

“Really, when the wheel of commerce wrapped itself around war, it completely warped American foreign policy, because now you would start doing wars, not necessarily because they’re best for the country, but because they’re best for the industrial stakeholders of war.

“This is obviously something that predated World War II. Smedley Butler wrote about this in War Is a Racket in 1936.

“But essentially, you have a very similar thing happening right now with the field of social media censorship, and that is a field; it is an industry.

“Before 2016, you could not make a living censoring what other people have to say on the Internet. That was not a job description; that was not something like Borat, where you can make $45 million a year doing it.

“There was no industrial complex to sustain 100 – 200,000 American jobs all in the field of controlling, by tuning down the information that you try to distribute on the Internet. Now it is a massive field. It is an industry. And what’s even more curious about its industrial nature than simply the dollars is who is sort of controlling the flow of those dollars.

“Because when you trace all of these domestic censorship organizations upstream time and again, what you find is what I term … Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes term, but you find this thing, called the BLOB, which is basically the State Department the Defense Department, and the Intelligence services, the same federal agencies that are in control of the American empire on the foreign-facing side, have basically redirected their own statecraft military and intelligence capacities for controlling domestic information flows. And that’s really what you’re up against when you’re trying to uncensor the Internet.”

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