The imperialists’ media lies are essential to their genocidal war efforts; workers must refuse to allow their propaganda to go unchallenged.
Proletarian writers
Friday 31 October 2025
As the drive into WW3 accelerates, it is no coincidence that increasing numbers of journalists and political activists in Britain are being targeted under draconian ‘anti-terror’ legislation. The ruling class knows that keeping its grip on the narrative is an essential prerequisite for keeping its grip on power and continuing to prosecute its criminal wars abroad and vicious austerity at home. Mass opposition from the organised working class is the only force that can withstand and reverse this trend.
Note to trade unionists: The following text has been compiled to help you frame a motion on this topic to your union branch or annual congress. Feel free to take as much or as little as you deem suitable, depending on the rules operating in your organisation, and to choose from or adapt the final demands depending on the sector in which you work. Remember that any points you leave out of the motion itself can always be brought into your speech in support of the motion.
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This [conference]* notes with grave concern the arrest and harassment of noted journalists and political figures.
Over a period of just over two years, Steve Sweeney, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, Dr Ranjeet Brar and George and Gayatri Galloway have all been arrested, either on their arrival into Britain or at a pro-Palestine protest.
This [conference] further notes the arrest and state-backed harassment of these journalists and political figures by British police, which has included:
The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg, a British born, Serbian-based journalist, who was detained on 17 May 2023 by six plain-clothes police officers under Schedule 3, Section 4 of the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act. Mr Klarenberg was interrogated for over five hours on his journalistic work, which included, according to Mr Klarenberg himself, questioning on “his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. His trade union, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), withdrew its support for Mr Klarenberg shortly after his arrest.
On 25 November 2023, Dr Ranjeet Brar, a surgeon and senior member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CBGB-ML), was arrested while on a party stall at a pro-Palestine demonstration in London. He was accused by the police of committing a ‘racial offence’ when the party stall he was attending was selling a book which detailed the history and origins of zionism. Copies of the book were confiscated by the police at the time of Dr Brar’s arrest, while one of the arresting officers told onlookers that “free speech has limits” as Dr Brar was put into the police van.
Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-born British independent journalist, was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport on 15 August 2024 and detained under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was removed from the plane he had boarded by five plain-clothed police officers and one wearing tactical gear, not offered legal support and detained for 24 hours. In May 2025, some nine months after his arrest, the police sent Mr Medhurst’s file to the Crown Prosecution Service for them to determine whether to prosecute him with terrorism. Mr Medhurst has refused to give up the passwords to his electronic devices, which in itself could lead to his imprisonment for up to five years under this country’s brutal ‘anti-terrorism’ laws.
Steve Sweeney, a former foreign correspondent for the Morning Star and now working for RT, was arrested on 11 July 2025 whilst travelling on a plane from Beirut to London Heathrow Airport. Mr Sweeney was detained, had DNA samples and fingerprints taken and his electronic devices seized. He is currently under investigation under ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation and has since left this country via Ethiopia. He cannot return to the country of his birth to see his friends or family under pain of arrest and subsequent charges. Mr Sweeney has reported extensively on the crimes of Nato/Ukraine against the people of the Donbass and on the crimes of Israel against the peoples of southern Lebanon and Beirut.
George Galloway, leader of the Workers’ Party of Britain and his wife Gayatri were arrested at Gatwick Airport on Sunday 28 September when returning to Britain on a flight from Abu Dhabi. Mr and Mrs Galloway were travelling back from Russia when they were arrested and detained and questioned for four and five hours respectively. Their mobile phones and laptop were seized and Mr Galloway missed his engagement to speak at an event in London that was attended by the Chinese ambassador.
All of these journalists and political figures were arrested under various pieces of ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation in statute and have been subject to a variety of violations of their personal freedoms and rights, including prolonged detainment, interrogation, having their bank cards and their electronic devices seized and their DNA and fingerprints taken. They have all been threatened with charges, exiled and/or subjected to a prolonged and deeply stressful process only to have any charges against them quietly dropped.
This [conference] believes that Britain’s absolute plethora of anti-terrorism legislation is not intended to prevent terrorism at all, but is specifically drafted and enforced to crush dissent and intimidate journalists and political activists who have highlighted the many crimes of British imperialism into silence.
As the British ruling class continues its inexorable decline, and workers feel the full force of relentless attacks on their pay, conditions, public services and communities, organisations like trade unions, whose reps and activists toil every day to defend their members from these attacks, will inevitably find themselves in the crosshairs of the state.
This [conference] therefore resolves to:
1.Convey the terms of this motion to the [insert appropriate body].
2.Call upon the [insert appropriate executive body] of this trade union to found and lead a campaign that will publicise this issue amongst the wider working class, and will come to the defence of journalists, political activists and anyone else who challenges the actions of the British ruling class, ensuring that they are able to tell the truth about imperialist crimes without pernicious state persecution.
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* Change as required: eg, branch, meeting, union etc.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/10/31/ne ... activists/
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They Want You Relying On Artificial Intelligence So That You Will Lose Your Natural Intelligence
Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It’s the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats.
Caitlin Johnstone
November 1, 2025
Your rulers want you to depend on machines to do your thinking for you.
They want you relying on AI to do your reasoning, researching, analysis, and writing.
They want you to require easily controllable software to form your understanding of the world, and to express that understanding to others.
They can control the machines, but they can’t control the human mind. So they want you to abandon your mind for the machines.
They want you relying on artificial intelligence so you stop using your organic intelligence.
They want your critical thinking skills to atrophy.
They want your ability to locate and parse inconvenient pieces of information to deteriorate.
They want your inspiration and intuition to decay.
They want your sense of morality to waste and wither away.
They want you perceiving reality through interpretive lenses controlled by plutocratic tech companies which are inextricably intertwined with the power structure of the western empire.
Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It’s the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats.
They want us to abandon our humanity for technology.
They don’t want us making our own art.
They don’t want us making our own music.
They don’t want us writing our own poetry.
They don’t want us contemplating philosophy for ourselves.
They don’t want us turning inwards and getting in touch with an authentic spirituality.
They want to replace the dynamic human spirit with predictable lines of code.
Our brains are conditioned to select for cognitive ease, and that’s what the AI merchants are selling us. The sales pitch is, “You don’t have to exert all that mental effort thinking new thoughts, learning new things, and expressing yourself creatively! This product will do it for you!”
But it comes at a cost. We have to trade in our ability to do those things for ourselves.
Historically when a new technology has shown up, that kind of tradeoff has been worth it. Not many people know how to start a fire with a bow drill anymore, but it rarely matters because modern technology has given us much more efficient ways of starting fires and keeping warm. It didn’t make sense to spend all the time and effort necessary to maintain our respective bow drill skills once that technology showed up.
But this isn’t like that. We’re not talking about some obsolete skill we won’t need anymore thanks to modern technological development, we’re talking about our minds. Our creative expression. Our inspiration. Our very humanness.
Even if AI worked well (it doesn’t) and even if our plutocratic overlords could be trusted to interpret reality on our behalf (they can’t), those still wouldn’t be aspects of ourselves that we should want to relinquish.
In this oligarchic dystopia, it is an act of defiance just to insist upon maintaining your own cognitive faculties. Regularly exercising your own creativity, ingenuity and mental effort is a small but meaningful rebellion.
So exercise it.
Don’t ask an AI to think something through for you. Work it out as best you can on your own. Even if the results are flawed, it’s still better than losing your ability to reason.
Don’t ask AI to create art or poetry for you. Make it yourself. Even if it’s crap, it’ll still be better than outsourcing your artistic capacity to a machine.
Don’t even run to a chatbot every time you need to find information about something. See if you can work your way through the old enshittified online search methods and find it for yourself. Our rulers are getting better and better at hiding inconvenient facts from us, so we’ve got to get better and better at finding them.
Get in touch with the fleshy, tactile experience of human embodiment, because they are trying to get you to abandon it.
Really feel your feet on the ground. The air in your lungs. The wind in your hair. Teach yourself to calm your restless mind and take in the beauty that’s all around you in every moment.
Repair the attention span that’s been shattered by smartphones and social media. Learn to meditate and focus on one thing for an extended period. Don’t look at your phone so much.
Read a book. A paper one, that you can touch and smell and hear the pages rustle as you turn them. If it’s an old one from the library or the used book store, that’s even better.
It doesn’t have to be a challenging book if your attention span is really shot. Start simple. A kids book. A comic book. Whatever you can manage. You’re putting yourself through cognitive restorative therapy. Your first steps don’t have to impress anybody.
Get in touch with your feelings. The ones you’ve been suppressing for years. Let them come out and have their say, listening to them like a loving parent to a trembling child.
Learn to cherish those moments in between all the highlights of your day. The time you spend at red lights, or waiting for the coffee to brew. There is staggering beauty packed into every moment on this earth; all you need to do is learn to notice it.
Embrace your humanity. Embrace your feelings. Embrace your flaws. Embrace your inefficiency. Embrace everything they’re trying to get you to turn away from.
What they are offering you is so very, very inferior to the immense treasure trove that you are swimming in just by existing as a human being on this planet.
You are a miracle. This life is a miracle.
Don’t let them hide this from you.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/11 ... elligence/