An Unhappy New Year

With two major wars, a flood of propaganda, a rising tide of censorship, and a new authoritarian regime about to take control of the world’s most powerful nation, there’s nothing happy about this new year.

By Will Novosedlik

Up until very recently, every holiday season in my privileged life has been peaceful. That’s over seven decades in which the spirit of the season has managed to make the world’s problems disappear behind a frosty gauze of holiday sentiment, even if only for a moment.

Not this year. The gauze is being used to bandage the wounded in Ukraine and Gaza in a massacre of the innocents unseen since the second world war. Both conflicts have not only invaded those whose cities, towns and villages lie in ruins within the war zones, but have reverberated all over the western world in the form of street protests. Powerful special interests threaten any institution, business or individual that dares challenge the official narrative. The fog of war is thick with propaganda.

We must stand with the innocent victims of these conflicts. War crimes have been perpetrated by Russians against Ukrainians, and Israelis and Palestinians against each other. Several thousands of non-combatants – men, women and especially children – have been and are being killed. Thousands more are likely to die. 

Western governments and the mainstream press are peddling the same good guy/bad guy narratives, expressed in stark black and white terms with no patience for examining the complex histories that have led to these conflicts. Anyone who attempts to present facts that challenge the mainstream rhetoric is quickly silenced, fired, censored, imprisoned, or targeted with death threats. 

No dissenting voice is safe

A highly respected curator at a prestigious museum loses her job because she voices her objection to the Israeli occupation; an Israeli history teacher is arrested, jailed and fired for Facebook comments opposing the killing of innocent Palestinians; American university bookstores and libraries are pressured to remove books about settler colonialism and racism from their shelves. 

We used to live in a society that boasted freedom of expression. It is one of the foundational pillars of our democracy. Now we walk in fear of retribution for speaking out. 

Despite these threats, there is a handful of brave dissenting voices that you won’t see in the mainstream press. They can be found on podcast platforms and subscriber-funded public interest news channels where corporate advertisers and government pressure don’t get in the way of reporting. 

In Canada those channels include The Breach, The Maple, The Tyee, National Observer, Indiginews, Canadaland and the Narwhal. In the US and internationally, it includes media outlets like The Intercept, Jacobin, The Real News Network, Ha'aretz, and The People’s Dispatch. Some of the key dissenting voices at work today include Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Yanis Varoufakis, Gideon Levy, Chris Hedges, Matt Kennard, John Mearsheimer and Naomi Klein.

My wish for the new year? The truth, and the right to pursue it and express it without persecution. 

Will Novosedlik is a Toronto-based writer, designer and editor. He is known for a critical perspective on the socioeconomic impact of design, advertising and marketing.