The unabashed censorship of Russian media, RT and Sputnik, across Europe, and of anyone who expresses a viewpoint contrary to the official Western narrative that Putin is the Hitler-like “aggressor” who is murdering innocent civilians in Ukraine, is becoming noticed and coming under attack. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called such censorship “fascism” in his daily press briefing today, pointing out that anyone who even cites RT, “likes” its content, or that of other Russian media is immediately labeled as being linked to the Putin government. “This is against all freedoms,” he said. “This is blacklisting.”
Veteran Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone put it succinctly in her article today, under the headline, “Defending Freedom and Democracy Sure Requires an Awful Lot of Censorship.” She detailed the banning of Kremlin-backed media—RT—throughout the EU, both on TV, apps and online platforms, and the fact that Twitter is placing warning labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message “informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform.” Every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of those platforms is now also labeled “Russia state-affiliated media,” which is what López Obrador was referring to. (https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/02/defending-freedom-and-democracy-sure-requires-an-awful-lot-of-censorship/)
Johnstone warned that there is a “post-9/11-like anti-Russia hysteria that’s currently turning Western brains into clam chowder…. You’d think a society devoted to truth and freedom, the kind of society Western powers purport to be trying to defend in Ukraine, would not require a Ministry of Truth to protect us from `disinformation’ about a government long targeted by the U.S.-centralized empire, or from trying to seek out alternative perspectives beyond the homogeneous blanket of authorized mainstream narratives….
“You’d think a free society would have no objection to people trying to learn the other side of the debate about a war which NATO powers very plainly had a hand in starting, rather than being forced to consume only Western mass media narratives which tell us this is happening exclusively because Vladimir Putin is evil and Hitlery and hates freedom….”
