Phillip DeFranco is WRONG: "No Face, No Name".

and that is why you will never hear me
mention his name he is a terrorist he is a criminal he is an extremist but he will when I speak be nameless how do you think the world is going to make progress on this issue the example of the Christchurch massacre is it gonna be through pious ignorance is it going to be would it have been better would it have been better for the world if they sat back and said oh no no no no I would never speak the name of Osama bin Laden I would never read or sama bin Laden's political platform and understand what his objectives are how he's different from some groups of Muslim extremists and we similar to others and what the linkages are and what the nature of the threat is oh no no no no I am too morally pure I choose to live in a state of pious ignorance over such details because I don't want to give the killer a name I don't want to give the killer a face you're goddamn wrong the least you can do is know the killer's name in the killer's face you should press beyond that and develop a nuanced sophisticated understanding of what the political situation is want to feature and applaud that because it is very nice to see that at a high government level it's a thing that we've talked about for years we've talked about it on a personal and a news organization level the nameless keep them faceless there's a lot that we can learn from the situation without inadvertently making these people infamous what's what is the alternative here do you want to live in a world where journalists think it is their moral responsibility to conceal these things from you rather than reveal them do you want to live in a world where members of parliament whether it's the New Zealand Parliament or the British Parliament or the Canadian Parliament where members of parliament think it's very responsibility to keep you locked in a state of pious ignorance where you don't know the name and you're the face and you don't know the political ideology of the people who are pulling the triggers and blowing up bombs who are having a huge political impact in the world around you and that the government and the CIA are responding to without any democratic oversight with any any involvement of the public of course it wasn't just YouTube there was actually a report where Facebook said they deleted one point five million videos that contain footage of the shooting in the first 24 hours alone really if there's anything that could attach to the end of this is to to the news orgs the companies the the people like the prime minister of New Zealand to your everyday people that are not giving a murderer what they want and you also try and spread this movement of no face no name let's take it all the way back to ancient Greece if you really want to know what went down in the war between Athens and Sparta you have got to read primary sources you have got to read through cities you have got to read Aristotle can even read stuff like Xenophon everybody is lying still in the Year 2019 after everyone falls that war has been dead and gone almost everything you hear from modern sources on that is propaganda even the stuff you hear from ancient Rome were moved by just a few centuries from the events in ancient Greece is propaganda whether the people participating in it or aware that it's propaganda or not one of the most commonly said things about that war between Sparta and Athens is that only Athens represented democracy and that in Sparta they had no democracy at all okay and then you go and read primary source then you go and you read through Citadis describing for you how there was a debate in sparta at the start of the war about whether or not basically whether or not they should go to war with Athens at all guess what public consultation and a debate and voting they didn't follow the same voting procedure as Athens they basically did more like however everyone in the room raised their hands and when that wasn't clear they said okay everyone who wants to go to war stand over there everyone who wants peace stand over there just have people vote by walkie drops in the rooms guess what the more you look in the details whether you look in Thucydides you look at Aristotle it looks like the difference in degrees of democracy between Sparta and Athens is a lot more debatable there were definitely people who could have stood up instead that they preferred Spartan mode of democracy over the athenian still to this day what happened at the Battle of Marathon why do we have this word Marathon in the English language to an unbelievable extent still to this day you are looking at lies and propaganda if you don't get down to the level of primary source the original opinions of the particular people who were really there who really lived through it people with a particular face and a particular name and a particular bias for sure by the way Aristotle has his own bias through cities has his own bias they're all biased sources but there's a world of difference between working with those original sources that were on the ground and working with the opinions of people just a few decades later let alone a few centuries later okay this is political history we're all supposed to be detached about hey hey let me ask you son do you feel you've gotten an unbiased impression of who the Kurdish armies are who the Kurdish rebels are in the still ongoing you know civil wars of you know Iraq this even involves Iran to a limited extent Turkey Syria do you think you think you've you've gotten a really clear view of that I mean the narrative presented in the newspapers has been oh the Islamic state is bad which it is by the way I'm a hundred percent against Isis don't we be wrong the Islamic state is bad but then um these other Islamic states like Saudi Arabia oh there's no problem with America supporting Saudi Arabia do do Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state it is a theocracy that presents itself as a legitimate form of an Islamic state in the same sense that Sparta presented itself as a legitimate democracy so did be OSHA and a lot of other states that competed with um Athens to what extent or another Athens Oh even Crete the island of Crete they felt they had the legitimate democracy right and there were courses that are interesting between these different democracies in in the ancient Hellenic word the ancient like well guess what there were different ideas about what an Islamic state should be different ideas about Islamic orthodoxy and they kind of sort of go to war with each other all the time do you think that the Taliban don't think that they represent a legitimate Islamic state yet the Taliban you get Saudi Arabia of course Iran has its own idea of what a modern theocracy is supposed to be so on and so forth and you know the kind of white Western english-speaking newspapers they step into this as if they're gonna tell us in the public oh don't worry the Muslim fundamentalists who happen to be convenient for the American Empire to be allied with like the Kurds and like Saudi Arabia those people those aren't Islamic States oh no no only Isis is an Islamic state and the way to pierce this illusion is just to start working with primary source materials I know somebody who knows somebody who actually flew over and joined the the Kurdish rebel armies so I know somebody on the Internet we've never met face to face and he was friends with somebody who believed the white Western left-wing hype about the Kurds that the Kurds represented some kind of secular socialist feminist ideal and she a white Western english-speaking female she flew over to sign up to fight for the Kurds and now she's dead she died not even fighting for the dream of a Kurdish homeland or something that had nothing to do with her she died fighting for [ __ ] propaganda on the Internet okay the Kurds are Muslim they are deeply profoundly Islamic however you want to put it their idea of what an Islamic state should be differs from Isis and differs from here Iran and differs from Saudi Arabia and by the same token the government of Saudi Arabia has its differences from the Taliban and has its differences from Isis and they all demonstrate those differences by killing large numbers of people and spending up a huge military budget okay I either you're working from primary source materials to understand what's going on or you are not when people really want to understand who Osama bin Laden was what motivated him what political faction or tendency he represented anyone who worked with primary source materials very rapidly got into difficult questions about the geopolitical relationship between Saudi Arabia and Yemen and even where Osama bin Laden's own family stood in relation to Yemen versus Saudi politics right they opened the door onto this whole world of jihadists anti-imperialist discourse and you start to figure out the different directions and cross currents and what it is precisely that Osama bin Laden represented what kind of threat going for what type of objectives in contrast to other players in that political game okay how do you think the world is going to make progress on this issue the example of the Christchurch massacre is it going to be through pious ignorance is it going to be would it have been better would it have been better for the world if they sat back and said oh no no oh no no I would never speak the name of Osama bin Laden I would never read Osama bin Laden's political platform and understand what his objectives are how he's different from some groups of Muslim extremists now he's similar to others and what the linkages are and what the nature of the threat is and you know what if what's gonna happen in Scenario XY instead of you oh no no no no I am too morally pure I choose to live in a state of pious ignorance over such details because I don't want to give the killer a name I don't want to give the killer a face you're goddamn wrong the least you can do is know the killer's name in the killer's face you should press beyond that and develop a nuanced sophisticated understanding of what the political situation is know who it is you're disagreeing with and why what's what is the alternative here do you want to live in a world we're journalists think it is their moral responsibility to conceal these things from you rather than reveal them do you want to live in a world where members of parliament whether it's the New Zealand Parliament or the British Parliament or the Canadian Parliament where members of parliament think it's very responsibility to keep you lock in a state of pious ignorance where you don't know the name and you're the face and you don't know the political ideology of the people who are pulling the triggers and blowing up bombs who are having a huge political impact in the world around you and that the government and the CIA are responding to without any democratic oversight with any any involvement of the public that this is worse than the kind of standard dystopian fantasy it's worse because what they're inviting you the public to do is feel a sense of moral self-righteousness in preserving your own ignorance and encouraging the self-righteous ignorance of others the way to respond to the shock and horror of history whether it's the assassination of JFK President States President Kennedy or Osama bin Laden or the unbelievable atrocities committed by by communists around the world okay okay let's get more specific here there is a famous massacre that took place at an airport by Japanese political extremists I'm probably gonna get the names subtly wrong here the Yogo doe massacre oh sorry I could at Google that um a group of Japanese extremists it deeply shocked and horrified the people of Japan people of Japan up to that point really felt that this type of terrorist attack was something that happened in the Middle East and happened various other foreign exotic cultures people in Japan were deeply shocked that educated Japanese people would engage in this type of terrorist attack it was horrifying to the people of Japan for a decade it was one of the most talked-about things do you think it would have been better or worse for the people of Japan if their journalists and their members of parliament their government responded to this by trying to obscure and hide the names faces and political ideologies of the people who participated in that massacre and that terrorist attack know you should know the names you should know the faces you should learn what the political ideology is and then you can respond participating in a democracy not handing over your right to think and judge and make decisions to a de facto aristocratic elite who make those decisions on your behalf and we all know that is the reality of u.s. foreign policy in the 21st century there is nothing Democratic about how America decided that they were going to support the Kurds there was no public debate there was no vote there was no referendum oh gee guess what a tiny number of aristocrats living in Washington DC decided that America's foreign policy interests are compatible with Kurdish nationalism so now billions of dollars of US taxpayers money will go into supporting the dream of a Kurdish state or several plural Kurdish states right why was there some kind of public discourse maybe the American people would prefer to support turkey or would prefer to support Syria what possible basis would the American public engage in and make a judgment as to supporting the Kurds as opposed to the Turks or the Syrians or even the Iranians of the iraqis of the iraqis meaning of the Iraqi population in Baghdad and what they want as opposed to what the Kurdish might already wants who engaged in this this public democratic discourse nobody all of those decisions are made in a black box and then the rationale for them is presented to you through a completely dishonest and slanted mainstream media coverage that's willing to pretend that Kurdish people are secular and democratic and reasonable or even that they're anti-muslim because they're the ones voting they're the ones fighting against the Islamic state guess what the Kurds are no more anti Islamic than the government of Saudi Arabia is anti Islamic these are competing notions of what an Islamic state might be could be or should be that Ardi not merely engaging in debate as to the future of the religion of Islam they're in a state of war against one other okay this example of the Japanese terrorists so people in Japan were shocked and the next step was figuring out what the ideology behind these these people were the so called a Red Army Faction in Japan and guess what the people engaged in this terrorist attack they were communists and they represented a particular school of thought particular ideology within communism and then became incredibly important for Japanese parents to talk to their own students and Japanese university professors to talk to their pupils to engage in a discourse with young people who might really be seduced by the radical claims of some of these communist extremists say look guys I know this is what they're telling you but here's the reality or here are some other things for you to consider to it to enrich and deepen the discourse surrounding communism in Japan at that time communism was an ideology then that was actively recruiting followers and a tiny minority of them engage in terrorist attacks but this became a really important learning moment talk about learning the lessons of history that all of Japan had to engage in and guess what the Communists in the end lost but the Communists were not defeated by people living in a state of pious ignorance they lost because people engage in a really meaningful discourse about all of these issues claims and counterclaims etc and the people of Japan like the people of Western Europe came to new conclusions and new insights about communism is this unrelated to the massacre that just took place in Christchurch New Zealand no it is not did you know that the man who just pulled the triggers in Christchurch New Zealand was a communist I searched really quickly the internet Google is an imperfect tool I could not find any example of a mainstream newspaper that included this information I think that discussed the extent to which he was communist and the extent to which he specifically said that he admired communist China as his model of a society there are some non mainstream sources I found Breitbart address and there is a Chinese newspaper which is specifically an anti-communist Chinese newspaper called the F Hawk times and they they covered it but when you look around new york times other mainstream news sources they either downplayed they D emphasized or they completely omitted the extent to which the Christchurch mass murder of the Christchurch terrorist was connected to communism okay so again the extent to which human beings are dishonest and engage in propaganda consciously or unconsciously intentionally or unintentionally it plays out still to this day in giving an account of what happened in the war between Athens and Sparta it played out in a very significant way when human beings in Japan had to grapple with the shock and horror of seeing their own young people recruited to an extremist ideology and then carrying out a terrorist attack right and it plays out again now but people's complicity in propaganda increases through social media you on Facebook you on Twitter you on your own YouTube channel if you have one you on social media get to play the role of the sensor and the propagandist to a small extent and what these sources including philip defranco are doing is inviting you to feel self-righteous and moral in your own small way by you refusing to read the manifesto refusing to know this guy's face or his name refusing to say his face or his name no don't live in pious ignorance don't pull the wool over your own eyes don't pull the wool over other people's eyes if we're going to solve these problems it's gonna be through truth honesty analysis active research informed opinion living lives that ultimately are rooted in nonfiction I mean really people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that my name is I don't know