Antony Blinken Demands Censorship to Stifle Anti-War Ferment

At the same time U.S. Secretary of State Blinken was consolidating a U.S.-U.K. agreement to provide long-range missiles to Kiev to strike deep in Russian territory, he released a lengthy State Department Fact Sheet, which detailed U.S. sanctions against RT, its owner Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian news outlets, and anyone working with them. Speaking to the press on Sept. 13, Blinken called on other governments to do the same, demanding that they join the U.S. to end freedom of the press and stifle any speech which does not support the official narrative on Russia.

Blinken accused the Russian entities not only of spreading propaganda and disinformation, but also of being “engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus”. In other words, the twisted old argument that comes down to claiming that free exposure to information undermines democracy.

The Fact Sheet goes on to provide for sweeping action against persons collaborating with the sanctioned media, including the seizure of their property and blocking of their bank accounts. As a result of the sanctions threatened, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, an outspoken opponent of the war party, has had to end his contractual relationships with RT and Sputnik, although rejecting on X the notion that “the work I have done over the past years with the newly sanctioned Russian media organizations has been anything other than legitimate journalism, the content of which has been factually correct and analytically sound, and always of my own creation”.

However, the European Union was even ahead of the United States on the issue of Russian media, since it banned RT and Sputnik as of March 2022. The offensive against free speech in Europe includes the recent arrest by authorities in France of the CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, in all likelihood at the request of the State Department (cf. SAS 35/24). Telegram describes itself as a “cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app with a focus on security and speed.” Durov is accused of failure to cooperate with law enforcement in investigations of drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud. His defenders say Telegram‘s real crime is using encryption to protect the privacy of its users, to shield them from data collection by the surveillance state.

The pattern of attack on opponents of the neocon warmongers includes the raid on Scott Ritter’s home, and flagging former Congresswoman and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a risk, by the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration, making her subject to enhanced surveillance whenever she takes a flight.

Why engage in such heavy-handed tactics against opponents of the U.S.-NATO permanent war faction now? The simple answer is: as the “endless war” strategy is heading to an end-game of nuclear war with Russia, opposition is growing, with more public figures speaking out against this lunacy (see the next item).