With their crusade against their own dissidents, the United States and its allies betray the desperation of their collective propaganda machine.
The United States and its faithful supporters, Canada and Great Britain, have launched a new information warfare offensive. “cool” is the word: In a new season of the long-running and seemingly endless show Russia Rage (aka “Rusiagate”) that at least the American “elites” We just can't get enough, it's again – drum roll – RT that is the target. This time, it is accused of not “merely” Of propagation “disinformation” (that is, any information that Western governments do not like), but also intelligence work.
And more. Like trying to influence the US election (gross!) and being somehow linked to collecting voluntary contributions for Russia's war effort in Ukraine – a form of outreach, by the way, that is exactly what Ukrainian organisations do. There's also an even more terrifying revelation. Some troglodytes in the US State Department have noticed that RT doesn't rely on mechanical typewriters or the telegraph, but has a “cybernetic” ability!
Or something like that. That charge seems to really boil down to knowing how to use the Internet, a very special set of skills that must seem devilishly futuristic to some members of the US administration. And who can blame them? Can you imagine their official leader, Joe Biden? “He will still be president when he remembers it” Biden handling something as antediluvian as a laptop? That It is best left, as we know, to his son Hunter. “The Naked and the Paid” Biden. And yet, the consequences are often dire.
Of course, all this action also leads to more sanctions, because sanctions are to US policy towards Russia what popcorn is to a really bad B-movie: indispensable, but they don't make things any better either.
Inevitably, this latest US initiative has been ridiculed, and with good reason. In essence, it is yet another example of self-acceptance and shame from a regime struggling – and never making any progress – to come to terms with its ever-declining power, authority and relevance. It is also easy to spot that, once again, these self-appointed guardians of the “rules-based order” and his “values” They have raised hypocrisy to the maximum. Really? Do you want to talk about “disinformation”Meanwhile, have the Western media, from the American CNN to the German ZDF and the British BBC, become complicit in the almost year-long genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and, increasingly, in the West Bank as well, through silence, bias and even open dissemination of Israeli propaganda?
Of course, we could look back and name example after example of blatant Western lies with horrific and often lethal consequences for the population. In fact, there are so many that we really can't do that here. So let's just recall two: the brutal campaign of government lies and the media propaganda that the same powers used to “justify” its unjustifiable war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. By March 2023, the Costs of War project, based at the prestigious Brown University in the US, estimated losses among Iraqi civilians alone at, as a very conservative minimum estimate, Between almost 281,000 and more than 315,000 “killed by direct violence since the US invasion.”
Please note the word “straight.” If we add, as is realistic, the dead “indirectly,” That is, through preventable malnutrition, disease, destruction of infrastructure, etc., then the actual death toll, according to the Costs of War project, was “probably much higher” again. Keep in mind too that those who were killed are just the tip of a dark iceberg of the ruined, wounded, amputees, displaced, physically and psychologically scarred for life and for generations. These are the real, accounting results of blatant Western lies. And now the US and its accomplices are here to preach about “disinformation.” What is left to say? Except perhaps that the West “elites” Not only are they literally mass murderers, but they are also absolutely shameless and tone deaf.
The second example of blatant lies from the West, including those of the mainstream media, that we must remember in this context is the persecution and torture of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who, among other things, He exposed the atrocities of the United States in the Iraq war. For this outstanding service to humanity – and to others “sins,” In the eyes of the powerful in the West, he was subjected to more than two decades of various forms of imprisonment, including long periods that a A UN expert has rightly said that torture is a. He was also constantly threatened with extradition to the United States, where he would have been slowly killed with further torture and solitary confinement. Meanwhile, American officials also occasionally considered the idea Of simply having killed himNow, Assange is finally free. But the brutal retaliation he suffered when he was, without exaggeration, the world's most important political prisoner was, of course, intended to scare others into submission and silence.
And that brings us back to a particularly sinister aspect of the renewed US attack on RT, namely the accusation that RT is somehow… “Actually” (Oh, what an elastic term!) dedicated to intelligence. Not being a “real” The fact that the journalist and editor was actually some kind of spy was precisely the cornerstone on which Washington built its numerous crimes against Assange and his family. And too many Western media outlets played along. Let's connect the dots. By leveling the same baseless accusation against RT, the US “elite” He is sending a mafia-like message – like the mafia clan he really is – about what he can and very well could do to any journalist discovered working for RT, i.e. what he did to Assange, or even worse.
But it is not only other journalists who are under threat. The other main target, outside of Russia, is the entire Global South, where, the Americans claim, it is RT that has contributed mightily to its elites and populations not following the US lead in the Western proxy war in Ukraine. Obviously, that is a message of breathtaking arrogance. Don’t even think that people in the Global South could have chosen to see things differently! “agency” that we have been warned to include in our evening prayers regarding Ukraine, there it goes, straight out the window. “agency” For the Global South! ThereSo Washington is not ashamed to try to tell us that any divergence from its wicked bipartisan war party line can only be due to evil Russia. “external agitators”.
That is, of course, paternalism. “logic” of a deeply colonialist mentality steeped in narcissism and unquestioned assumptions of supremacy. What is interesting – though not really surprising – is that the Washington crowd, for example, applies the same arrogance to the “ordinary people” of the West. They too, under the severe gaze of their “best” Those at the top should not be left alone to decide what they want to watch, read and listen to, because if they did, they might have ideas, or to be more precise, ideas of their own. From that perspective, attacking RT is just one part of a desperate and futile effort to shut down any alternative content platform, even very alternative ones. westernvoices. Think, if you will, of RT as the samizdat of the West, to recall the terms of Soviet dissent.
But herein lies the tragedy of the Western information warriors. Too many, inside and outside the West, are already “out of control”, They are not willing to believe the nonsense that is spread as dominant views. has to The deepest reason for this was explained by Plato some two and a half thousand years ago in his dialogue Phaedrus: even the most brilliant rhetoric (here we can translate that term as “propaganda”) can only take you so far. What really wins the argument is having the best argument. And rhetoric built on an atrocious argument will not prevail, even with the biggest, meanest, most resourceful CNN-level media outlet. Ultimately, that is the West’s real problem. From the proxy war devastating Ukraine to the genocide in Gaza, the West has nothing to stand on in terms of morality and reason. That is why it will lose.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
