The West’s Sad Struggle against its Dissidents

The futile, if sinister, attack on RT only reveals that Western propaganda is desperate

The US and its ever-loyal followers Canada and Great Britain have launched a fresh information war offensive. If “fresh” is the word: In a new season of the long-running, apparently never-ever ending Russia Rage show (aka “Russiagate”) that at least the American “elites” simply cannot get enough of, it is again – drum roll – RT that is the target. This time, it stands accused not “merely” of spreading “disinformation” (that is, any information Western governments do not like) but of intelligence work as well.

And then some. Such as trying to influence the American elections (yaaawn) and somehow being linked to collecting volunteer contributions for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine – a form of outreach, by the way, which is exactly the same as what Ukrainian organizations do. There also is an even more terrifying revelation. It has dawned on some troglodytes in the US State Department that RT is not relying on mechanical typewriters and the telegraph but has a “cyber” capability!

Or something. That charge really seems to boil down to being internet-literate, a very special skill set that must appear fiendishly futuristic to some in the US administration. And who can blame them? Can you imagine its – official – leader, Joe “Kind-of-Still-President-When-he-Can-Remember” Biden handling even something as almost antediluvian as a laptop? That is better left, as we know, to his son Hunter “The-Naked-and-The-Paid” Biden. And even then, the consequences tend to be dire.

Of course, the whole performance comes with more sanctions, too. Because sanctions are to American policy on Russia as popcorn is to a really bad B movie: indispensable yet also not making things any better.

Inevitably, this latest US initiative has attracted ridicule, with very good reason. In essence, it is yet another piece of self-owning, sad cringe 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 spot that, once again, these self-appointed guardians of the “rules-based order” and its “values” have dialed the hypocrisy up to eleven. Seriously? You want to talk about “disinformation”? While Western media, from American CNN, via British BBC, to German ZDF, have become complicit through silence, bias, and even the spreading of outright Israeli propaganda in the by now almost year-long genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, too?

Of course, we could look back and name one example after another of Western flagrant lies with horrific, often mass lethal consequences. Indeed, so many that we can’t, actually, do that here. So, just recall two: the brutal campaign of government lying and media propaganda that the same powers used to “justify” their 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, put 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 “direct.” If we add, as we realistically have to, those killed “indirectly,” that is by avoidable malnutrition, disease, infrastructure destruction etc., then the real death toll, so the Costs of War project, was “likely much higher” again. Keep in mind also that those who were killed are only the tip of a dark iceberg of the ruined, injured, amputated, displaced, physically and psychologically scarred for life and over generations. Those are the real, countable results of brazen Western lies. And now the US and its accomplices are here to preach about “disinformation.” What’s left to say? Except perhaps that Western “elites” are not only literally mass-murderous but absolutely shameless and tone deaf, too.

The second example of brazen Western lying, very much including by the mainstream media again, that we should recall in this context is the persecution and torture of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who, among other things, exposed US atrocities in the Iraq War. For that outstanding service to humanity – and other “sins,” in the eyes of the West’s powerful – he was subjected to more than two decades of various forms of incarceration, including long stretches that a UN expert has rightly called torture. He was also constantly threatened with extradition to the US, where he would have been slowly murdered by even more torture via isolated incarceration. Meanwhile, US officials also occasionally entertained the idea of simply having him murdered. Now, Assange is finally free. But the vicious retaliation visited on him when he was, without exaggeration, the single most important political prisoner in the world, was, of course, meant to frighten others into submission and silence.

And that brings us back to an especially sinister aspect of the renewed US assault on RT, namely the allegation that – somehow – RT is “de facto” (oh, what an elastic term!) engaged in intelligence. Being not a “real” journalist and publisher but instead some kind of spy was precisely the keystone lie on which Washington built its many crimes against Assange and his family. And all too many in the West’s media played along. Connect the dots. By leveling the same unsubstantiated charge against RT, the US “elite” is sending a mafia-ish message – like the mobster clan it really is – about what it can and might very well do to any journalist caught working for RT, namely what it did to Assange, or even worse.

Yet other journalists are not the only ones being threatened. The other major target, outside Russia, is the whole Global South, where, so the Americans claim, it is RT that has mightily contributed to its elites and populations not following the US lead on the West’s proxy war in Ukraine. Obviously, that is a message of breath-taking arrogance. Perish the thought that people in the Global South might just have chosen to see things differently! All the “agency” that we have been admonished to include in our evening prayers with regard to Ukraine, there it goes, straight out of the window. No “agency” for the Global South! There, so Washington is not ashamed of trying to tell us, any divergence from its perverse bipartisan war party line can only be due to wicked Russian “outside agitators.”

That is, of course, the patronizing “logic” of a deeply colonialist mindset steeped in narcissism and unquestioned assumptions of supremacy. What is interesting – though not really surprising – is that the Washington blob, for instance, applies the same arrogance to the “ordinary people” of the West. They as well, under the stern gaze of their “betters” at the top, must 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 precise, ideas of their own. In that perspective, going after RT is only one part of a desperate, futile effort to shut down any platform for alternative, including very much alternative Western, voices. Think, if you will, of RT as the tamizdat (the less well-known cousin of samizdat, meaning underground publishing at home, tamizdat stood for publishing abroad what the authorities did not like) of the West, to recall the terms of Soviet dissidence.

But here is the tragedy of the West’s information warriors. All too many, inside and outside the West, are already “out of control,” unwilling to believe the nonsense dished out as the mainstream views they must hold. The deepest reason for that has been explained about two-and-a-half millennia ago by Plato in his dialogue Phaedrus: even the most brilliant rhetoric (here we can translate that term as “propaganda”) can only get you so far. What really wins the argument is having the better case. And rhetoric built on an atrocious case will not prevail, even with the biggest, meanest, most CNN-level-resourced bag of tricks. 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 both morality and reason. That is why it will lose.

First published on RT.com, 15 September 2024