Washington’s crackdown on RT is “connected with the desire to preserve the already virtually non-existent unipolar world order of Western dominance, which of course also means dominance in the information space, the media space, in order to preserve one point of view for everyone and suppress and destroy all others,” political analyst Alexander Asafov told Sputnik.
“The ramping up of efforts in this direction is tied to the fact that the average Western citizen, voter and taxpayer paying for everything no longer understands why they should fund the desire of their political elites to help some distant dictatorial regime like the one in Ukraine, and is starting to ask questions, and finding answers quite easily. In order to prevent them from doing so, measures like these are taken, factually constituting total censorship,” Asafov explained.
The US war on journalism – not just with the crackdown on RT, but the blocking of social media, the harassment of independent journalists, etc. constitutes the practical implementation of the “horror stories British writer George Orwell once used to terrify the entire world. In essence, the persecution of journalists is an attempt to punish them for ‘thought crime’, for a person thinking differently and being willing to tell the truth,” according to the observer.
As for the new restrictions and charges against RT, these are just another attempt to silence Russia and rob it of its right to present an alternative perspective on world events, Asafov said, noting that the US will continue to raise the stakes in its attempt to reach this “impossible” goal.
US actions are “based on a pretext,” not facts, “and there are certainly no legal grounds for such actions,” the political analyst stressed, pointing out Washington’s behavior is not just a violation of international law and lofty ideas about freedom of speech and media, but America’s own legislation. Instead, they constitute the practical “application of the so-called ‘international rules-based order’,” which in its essence “can be compared to a pirate’s code” that the US is trying to force on everyone.