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 Many links to historical documents that I saved 15 or 20 years ago, are still active, and the documents can still be accessed, but they will no longer appear on a search with any terms.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.
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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).
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Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023