Attacks on RT reveal the sad truth about the West

With their crusade against their own dissident, the US and its allies betray the desperation of their collective propaganda machine

The US and its ever-loyal minions Canada and Britain have launched a new offensive in the information war. As “fresh” is the word: In a new season of the long-running, seemingly never-ending Russia Rage show (also known as “Russiagate”) that at least the American “elites” just can’t get enough of it, it’s RT that’s being targeted again – drumroll please – this time it’s being accused not “merely” of distribution “disinformation” (that is, any information that Western governments don’t like), but also intelligence work.

And then some. Like trying to influence the US elections (yaaawn) and somehow being linked to collecting voluntary contributions for the Russian war effort in Ukraine – a form of outreach, by the way, that is exactly what Ukrainian organizations are doing. There is also an even more frightening revelation. It has dawned on some troglodytes in the US State Department that RT does not rely on mechanical typewriters and the telegraph, but a “cyber” assets!

Or something like that. That charge seems to boil down to internet literacy, a very special skill that must seem devilishly futuristic to some in the US government. And who can blame them? Can you imagine the – official – leader, Joe “A kind of still president if he can remember anything” Can Biden handle something as prehistoric as a laptop? That is, as we know, better left to his son Hunter “The-naked-and-the-paid” Biden. And even then, the consequences are often dire.

Of course, the whole show also comes with more sanctions. Because sanctions are to US policy toward Russia what popcorn is to a really bad B-movie: essential but it doesn’t make things better.

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Inevitably, this latest American initiative has drawn ridicule, and for good reason. In essence, it is yet another piece of self-possessed, sad shrinkage from a regime struggling – and never making any progress – to come to terms with its steadily declining power, authority and relevance. It is also easy to see that these self-appointed guardians of the “rules-based order” and are “values” have taken the hypocrisy to the extreme. Seriously? Do you want to talk about “disinformation”? While Western media, from the American CNN, via the British BBC to the German ZDF, have become complicit through silence, bias and even the dissemination of outright Israeli propaganda in the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and increasingly also in the West Bank, which has been going on for almost a year now?

Of course, we could look back and list example after example of blatant Western lies with horrific, often massively deadly consequences. Indeed, so many that we can’t really do that here. So, consider two: the brazen campaign of government lies and media propaganda that the same powers used to “to justify” their unjustified war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. In March 2023, the Costs of War project, based at the prestigious Brown University in the US, estimated the losses among Iraqi civilians alone at, as a very conservative minimum estimate, between almost 281,000 and over 315,000 “killed by direct violence since the US invasion.”

Note the word “directly.” If, as we realistically must, we add the dead “indirectly,” that is, through avoidable malnutrition, disease, destruction of infrastructure, etc., then the actual death toll, thus the Costs of War project, “probably much higher” again. Also keep in mind that those killed are just the tip of a dark iceberg of the ruined, wounded, amputated, displaced, physically and psychologically scarred for life and generations. These are the real, countable results of blatant Western lies. And now the US and its cronies are here to preach about “disinformation.” What else is there to say? Except maybe that Western “elites” are not only literally mass murderous, but also completely shameless and toneless.

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The second example of blatant Western lies, again by the mainstream media, that we should remember in this context is the persecution and torture of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who among other things exposed American atrocities in the Iraq war. For that extraordinary service to humanity – and other “sins,” in the eyes of the powerful in the West – he was subjected to various forms of imprisonment for more than two decades, including long periods that one UN expert rightly called torture. He was also constantly threatened with extradition to the US, where he would have been slowly murdered by even more torture in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, US officials also occasionally considered having him killed outright. Now Assange is finally free. But the brutal retribution meted out to him when he was, without exaggeration, the world’s most important political prisoner was, of course, designed to frighten others into submission and silence.

And that brings us back to a particularly sinister aspect of the renewed US attack on RT, namely the claim that RT is – somehow – “de facto” (oh, what an elastic term!) concerned with intelligence. Not a “Real” journalist and publisher, but instead some kind of spy was precisely the cornerstone lie on which Washington built its many crimes against Assange and his family. And far too many people in the Western media played along. Connect the dots. By making the same baseless accusation against RT, the US “elite” sends a mafia-style message – just like the mafia clan it really is – about what it can and could do to any journalist caught working for RT, namely what it did to Assange, or worse.

Yet other journalists are not the only ones under threat. The other major target, outside of Russia, is the entire Global South, where, the Americans claim, RT has contributed greatly to the fact that its elites and populations do not follow the American example in the West’s proxy war in Ukraine. That is clearly a message of breathtaking arrogance. Hell, the thought that people in the Global South might have chosen to see things differently! All that “desk” that we have been urged to include in our evening prayers regarding Ukraine, there it goes, right out the window. No “desk” for the Global South! Thereso Washington is not ashamed to tell us that any deviation from its perverse two-party war party line can only be attributed to bad Russian “external agitators.”

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US uses sanctions to cover up its own weaknesses – analyst tells RT

That is of course the patronizing “logic” of a deeply colonial mentality steeped in narcissism and unquestioned assumptions of supremacy. What is interesting – though not really surprising – is that the Washington blob, for example, applies the same arrogance to the “ordinary people” of the West. They too, under the stern gaze of their “better” 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 get ideas, or to be more precise, ideas of their own. In that perspective, the pursuit of RT is just part of a desperate, futile attempt to close down every platform for alternative, including a great deal of alternative Westernvotes. If you like, think of RT as the conspiracy from the West, to recall the conditions of the Soviet dissent process.

But here is the tragedy of the West’s information warriors. Too many, inside and outside the West, are already “out of control,” unwilling to believe the nonsense that mainstream views spread, must The deepest reason for this was explained by Plato some two and a half millennia 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 case. And rhetoric based on an awful case will not prevail, even with the biggest, meanest, most CNN-level-funded bag of tricks. Ultimately, that is the real problem with the West. From the proxy war that devastated Ukraine to the genocide in Gaza, the West has nothing to stand on, both in terms of morality and reason. Therefore, it will lose.