The Censorship of Eric Clapton & Van Morrison’s “Stand and Deliver”, A Noopolitical Exercise of Soft Power
"Stand and Deliver" by Eric Clapton and Van Morrison was censored immediately and with impunity upon release by all major internet content distribution and social media platforms. “Stand and Deliver” exceeded the boundaries of media script deviation tolerance accorded to A-list, market-making establishment celebrities by global companies such as Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. Primary networks of distribution and promotional platforms—Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon et al.—were instantaneously closed to the song.
The subsequent shaming and character assassination of Eric Clapton occurred through a release of 54 year old material in an attempt to rebrand the guitarist as “racist”. Numerous entertainment media hit pieces are emerging to punish both Morrison and Clapton for daring to lend their credibility to lockdowns. Although lockdowns conducted ostensibly to control the spread of the Corona virus are widespread, they are by no means universal. This implies that not all sovereign jurisdictions are necessarily in agreement with or planning to implement lockdowns. Yet the decision to censor “Stand and Deliver” was supranational and made by private corporate actors without any obligation to governments or public health authorities. This censorship decision was not political but noopolitical.
The term Noopolitik was invented by defense experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in a 1999 RAND corporation study.
Formed by a combination of the Greek words νόος nóos ("knowledge") and πολιτικός politikós (πολίτης polítēs "citizen", from πόλις pólis "city"),
Noopolitik is the network-based geopolitics of knowledge.
A.V Baichik and S.B. Nikonov write in “Noopolitik as global information strategy”
“Noopolitics is an informational strategy of manipulating international processes through the forming in the general public, by means of mass media, of positive or negative attitudes to the external or internal policies of a state or block of states, to create a positive or negative image of ideas and promulgated moral values.” *
Citizens and consumers must recognize the emergent threat the noopolitical sphere represents.
Idriss J. Aberkane, writes in
"A Simple Paradigm for Noopolitics: The Geopolitics of Knowledge"
“Very often, states crave not what they need, and need not what they crave. States have a “true” and a “co mmanding self” (an ego). The first asks “give me what I need”, the second “give me what I want”. As a result, states, as human beings, rarely know their true interest.”
The censorship of Clapton & Morrison’s “Stand and Deliver” is exemplary Soft power Noopolitical enforcement of what could be called an emergent Lockdown State. A new, evolving entity of governance is being forced upon citizens in the name of public safety. It is a hybrid—distinctly non democratic form of governance—possessing geopolitical and noopolitical characteristics. These are most easily observed through the public-private sector partnerships regarding policy enforcement. These partnerships involve censorship and information gathering capabilities of private global companies as a decision support apparatus for public sector policy enforcement.
This enforcement has become the norm because it is not effectively opposed by citizens or consumers. Alternative content channels have been created to bypass the primary platforms but they lack in scale and reliability to compete for the mass attention.
It seems appropriate to give the last word to John Arquilla and David Rondfelt.In the opening of their most recent RAND publication
"Whose Story Wins Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft"
Arquilla and Rondfelt write:
“Today, noopolitik remains a promising concept for American and other liberal societies’ information strategies. However, it is not alive and well in the United States, where even soft power is lately in decline as a strategic concept. Instead, U.S. adversaries are the ones who are working on developing noopolitik—but in dark ways and by other names—and they are using it against the world’s democracies. These new circumstances might mean, to echo Charles Dickens (1859), that we are now living in “the worst of times”—yet, because of this adversity, potentially also in “the best of times”—for revisiting and embracing the promise of the noosphere and noopolitik.
Sources:
Arquilla, John and Rondfelt, David
Whose Story Wins (Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft)
Baichik, A.V. and Nikonov, S.B.write in “Noopolitik as global information strategy”
Aberkane, Idriss J. writes in
A Simple Paradigm for Noopolitics: The Geopolitics of Knowledge
https://www.bitchute.com/video/36agxBNWJ2xS/
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