In the West, censorship is nothing more than a method of government from another age. NATO is waging a cognitive war, not against ideas and reasoning, but to alter citizens’ ability to take into account the way other cultures think. This war first led to the banning of the Russian media, RT, Sputnik and so on. Then, today, to exert very strong pressure against journalists, such as Scott Ritter or Jürgen Elsässer, who do not perceive Russians as enemies because they are capable of understanding them.

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The Western vulgate on the conflict between the Anglo-Saxons and Russia does not tolerate contradiction. A number of personalities and companies who have reported on a different point of view have been subjected to arbitrary repression.

It all began, in France, during the May 2017 presidential election campaign. Two Russian media outlets, RT and Sputnik, relayed hacked files from candidate Emmanuel Macron’s team and a deputy’s remarks about his alleged off Shore account in the Bahamas. Mr. Macron lodged a complaint against X (i.e. without naming the perpetrator), while the media concerned announced their intention to lodge a complaint for defamation (but the President could not be tried during his term of office).

However, the situation remained unchanged until, a month later, Mr. Macron, who had been elected, held a press conference with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Versailles. He then described the Russian media as “an organ of influence [having] repeatedly produced untruths about my person and my campaign (...) Russia Today and Sputnik did not behave like press organs and journalists, but they behaved like organs of influence, propaganda, and misleading propaganda, nothing more, nothing less.”

In 2020, the British authorities give one interpretation of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, while RT gives another. The media regulator, the Office of Communication (Ofcom), issues a series of notices to the Russian channel and, ultimately, fines it £200,000, which are upheld by the High Court of Justice in London.

On March 10, 2021, the US Director of National Intelligence published a report on foreign threats during the 2020 elections [1]. She asserted that President Vladimir Putin had instructed his media to denigrate Joe Biden’s candidacy and thus support Donald Trump’s. However, none of this is reprehensible and no media is cited.

In 2022, German authorities are concerned by RT’s reporting of “Russian aggression against Ukraine”. The channel presented the Kremlin’s arguments on the “special military operation” made necessary by the presence of neo-Nazis in the Kiev government. They therefore banned it, and were soon followed by the EU. On February 27, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EU-wide ban on RT and Sputnik. A few days later, YouTube closed European access to the channels of the channel and the agency. A month later, Canada also banned RT and Sputnik.

Censorship accelerated in 2024. On March 27, 2024, the Czech government banned the Voice of Europe website and imposed sanctions on former Ukrainian MP Viktor Medvedchuk for allegedly financing it. The same day, Polish police raided the site’s Warsaw offices and seized cash. On May 17, 2024, the EU banned RIA-Novosti as well as Voice of Europe, Izvestia and Rossiïskaïa Gazeta.

Neither in the USA nor in the EU has there ever been a case against RT, Spunik, RIA-Novosti, Voice of Europe, Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Their bans are purely administrative. In the EU, freedom of expression does not apply to Russian media.

The German federal police launched some twenty high-profile raids to suppress an imaginary crime, and seized a large quantity of equipment. The administrative court annulled the entire procedure.

On July 15, 2024, the German Federal Police raided the homes of Jürgen Elsässer, editor-in-chief of Compact, Magazin für Souveränität, and around twenty of his colleagues. They searched for evidence of a coup d’état, seizing a great deal of material but finding nothing. At the same time, the Minister of the Interior, the socialist Nancy Fraeser, administratively banned the magazine.

On August 7, 2024, Scott Ritter’s home was searched by the FBI for evidence of Russian funding. Here too, the federal police seized a great deal, but found nothing. Mr. Ritter’s only fault is that, since the war against Iraq, he has never stopped analyzing the lies of the US government, a form of protest that is in principle permitted in a democracy.

On August 14, 2024, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig annulled the ban on Compact, Magazin für Souveränität, pending the presentation by the Scholz government of evidence of the conspiracy of which it accused the magazine. He demands that the seizures made from Jürgen Elsässer and his collaborators be returned to him. In reality, Mr. Elsässer’s only crime is to have declared that the Scholz government is betraying the German people and that he would like to see it overthrown - an opinion, admittedly radical, but in principle permissible in a democracy. In addition to his magazine, he has set up an Internet channel seen by 1.2 million Germans every day.

On September 4, Washington announced criminal proceedings and sanctions in response to attempts to interfere in the elections, which it blamed on Russia. The State Department imposed visa restrictions on the Rossia Segodnia media group.

On September 13, 2024, in an interview with the press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized the destabilizing activities of RT, which he described as a “branch” of Russian intelligence around the world. Almost two years earlier, his department had published a special report: Kremlin-funded media: the role of RT and Sputnik in the Russian disinformation and propaganda system [2]. Three days after the Secretary of State, on September 16, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, declared, “Rossia Segodnia, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps worldwide due to their foreign interference activities.”

Of course, one might think that these cases are unrelated, even though they all involve media outlets. This is unlikely, given that the US and EU authorities have violated the principle of freedom of expression enshrined in the US Constitution and in European law. The question arises as to which body is coordinating these actions and for what purpose.

In 2016, I reported on the creation of NATO’s Strategic Communications Center [3] and, in 2022, of the Disinformation Governance Board by the Biden administration [4]. The former unit still exists and is expanding, while the latter has been dissolved, its director moving to the British Foreign Office.

The whole system now aims to intervene as far upstream as possible. Drawing on the latest discoveries in neuroscience, the aim is to steer brains before they even think: this is “cognitive warfare”. This theory is a French invention, the brainchild of three Bordelais, François du Cluzel, Bernard Claverie and Baptiste Prébot [5] within NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, under the command of Generals André Lanata and Philippe Lavigne.

From the point of view of cognitive warfare, we need to intervene as soon as possible, before certain ideas gain ground. That’s why, in February 2022, when Russia implemented UN Security Council Resolution 2022 (misleadingly dubbed “Russian aggression” by Atlanticist propaganda), Russia’s opponents hesitated to ban Russian culture, then fell back on banning Russian media. Ultimately, the ideal for them is to ban not Russian relays in the media, but media that attempt to understand Russian thought.

The enemy is no longer the one who anonizes Kremlin communiqués, but the one who tries to understand the Russian way of thinking. This used to be the function of diplomats: to understand other people’s way of thinking. But on April 16, 2022, President Macron dissolved the diplomatic corps just after he had Russian media banned in France, and a few weeks ago his administration arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, guilty of giving his users a private means of communication and thus chatting with Russians.

These efforts are most likely being coordinated by NATO’s Strategic Communications Center, the only body with both experience of cognitive warfare and the authority to have particular media banned and individuals arrested.

According to our information, the targets are determined by the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bayerisches Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz). This office was set up in 1950 by the US High Commissioner to occupied Germany, John McCloy. It was staffed by former SS and Gestapo officers. Nothing has changed since then: a few months ago, for example, this office classified around a hundred opposition groups, including the Attac association and the Die Linke party, as “left-wing extremist”, accusing them of links with terrorism and recommending that they be banned.

To my great surprise, I had the opportunity to verify that this office classifies me as a “Russian agent of influence” because of my defense of international law drawn up by the government of Nicholas II and the French Nobel Peace Prize winner Léon Bourgeois [6]. Apparently, these sleuths only reacted to the reference to the Tsar, ignoring that of the illustrious French politician, President of the Council and President of the Senate.

Key takeaways:

• Rather than practicing widespread censorship of dissident ideas, NATO wants to influence our way of thinking. This is “cognitive warfare.” All ideas are allowed, but no one must have any general culture, that is, any intellectual means of verifying them.

• The bans on Russian media and the high-profile searches by Scott Ritter and Jürgen Elsässer make mass arrests unnecessary. It will no longer be necessary to terrorize the population once we have silenced those who are preventing us from going around in circles.

Notes

[1] Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections, Avril Haines, March 10, 2021.

[2] Kremlin-Funded Media : RT and Sputnik’s Role in Russia’s Desinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem, Global Engagement Center, January 2022.

[3] “The NATO campaign against freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 5 December 2016.

[4] “The West renounces freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation TheAltWorld, Voltaire Network, 10 November 2022.

[5] Cognitive Warfare, François du Cluzel, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, November 2020.

[6] “What international order?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 7 November 2023.

Courtesy Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé

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