Cyber-attacks on quality independent media sites

Truth may be an early casualty of war. But that casualty can be repaired with more supportive truth and time.

STRATEGIC CULTURE FOUNDATION

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The Strategic Culture Foundation’s online journal was this week hit by a massive cyberattack. The assault resulted in the forum being shut down on its regular internet site. Readers who normally access the journal were informed that the site was no longer available.

The online journal has safely migrated to strategic-culture.su and, in addition, we continue to post articles via SCF’s Telegram channel in order to exercise our inalienable right to freedom of speech.

The SCF online journal has been up to now accessed via the “.org” domain. The domain is operated by an organization called Public Interest Registry (PIC) based in the United States. PIC proclaims to be a “trusted” non-profit company “dedicated to the integrity of the internet” and free speech.

The outrageous action to obliterate SCF is a sign of the sinister times. There can be little doubt that the sabotage was carried out by state agencies: those of the United States and its NATO allies. This should not be seen as some kind of petty hacking by cyber vandals, but rather as cyber-warfare at the state level.

This is not the first time that this journal has been subjected to cyberattack. In recent years, SCF’s publishing business has been forced offline on several occasions by malicious attack. The latest incident this week seems to have been the most serious endeavor to eliminate our publishing forum.

For over 12 years, Strategic Culture Foundation has been publishing articles by authors from all over the world. The forum has earned widespread acclaim for providing a diverse range of intelligent commentary and analysis on international politics. It has gained respect among many readers from a worldwide audience for its open-minded perspectives on geopolitics. In particular, we have provided in-depth critical reporting and analysis of how the United States government and its Western allies have systematically abused international law and the United Nations Charter in their unlawful pursuit of strategic interests in various parts of the globe, from Asia to Africa, and from the Middle East to Latin America.

As the United States and its NATO partners have become increasingly reckless and lawless over recent years in their imperialist depredations, the SCF forum has likewise become increasingly critical. Consequently, the attacks on our journal have apparently intensified.

The U.S. State Department three years ago smeared our journal as a Kremlin propaganda outlet. The U.S. authorities have vilified writers for SCF as “Kremlin agents” even though our writers are based in different parts of the world and have nothing to do with the Russian government.

Subsequently, all our American-based authors were approached in person by U.S. state security agents knocking on their doors and threatened with prosecution and massive financial penalties if they did not stop publishing articles with SCF. All of our former American colleagues were compelled to break off what had been fruitful relations of intellectual exchange.

None of this unprecedented harassment prevented us from continuing to exercise our right to free speech and critical thinking.

However, since the U.S.-led NATO proxy war against Russia escalated with armed conflict in Ukraine 18 months ago, the SCF site has come under intensifying cyberattack.

This proves that Washington and its Western allies are indeed waging a determined proxy war. As the old adage goes: the first casualty of war is the truth.

We have provided trenchant commentary and analysis on the conflict in Ukraine. Our writers have exposed the bigger picture of geopolitical motives behind the confrontation including: NATO’s decades-long expansionism, the desire by Washington to maintain its global hegemony, the U.S. strategic need to exert control over its European vassals, Washington’s objective to displace Russia as an energy provider to Europe, the paramount importance of militarism to Western capitalism, and the imperative objective for the West to thwart the emergence of a multipolar world as advocated by Russia, China and many other nations associating with the BRICS and the Global South.

As the stakes grow higher for Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, so too has the West’s desperation to shut down all critical voices that undermine the West’s bogus posturing as a “defender of democracy”.

Russia-based media have been heavily censored by the United States and European Union. It has become increasingly difficult for an international audience to access Russian media and, more significantly, any media that publishes critical voices and thinking about Western policies. (ER: In France, we still can’t access Rumble, Sputnik News and RT at minimum. They were all rendered inaccessible or shut down completely.)

The internet domains controlled by U.S. companies have shut down many American and European-based alternative media simply on the grounds that such alternative media provide an intelligent and informed critical analysis of the policies of Western governments. Sometimes the censorship is not so overt, conducted by algorithms that relegate accessibility for readers.

Critical thinking and truth-telling are intolerable for liars and despots, which the Western regimes are increasingly devolving into, absolutely discarding their pretensions of virtue, democracy, legality and integrity. The charade of “Western liberal democracy” is increasingly threadbare as Western states become ever more warmongering, authoritarian, dictatorships of economic austerity and elitist, unaccountable rule. In a word, fascist. The Western powers’ full-on association with the Nazi regime in Ukraine is entirely consistent with their own political degeneration.

In the case of SCF, the West’s censorship has degenerated to the level of outright sabotage of our forum.

Here it is appropriate to pay special tribute to Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks. He has paid for his truth-telling about the crimes of the U.S. empire and its vassals with the loss of his personal freedom, incarcerated for years in solitary confinement in a British dungeon on wholly fabricated spying allegations.

At such a perilous time in history when all-out war between nuclear powers is a dreadful danger, the world’s public needs more than ever open access to information and understanding of what are the causes of conflict. Western corporate media have increasingly shown themselves to be nothing but propaganda tools that promote risible pro-war narratives, such as the West “defending Ukraine from Russian aggression”. The Western media are misleading the public with false propaganda that distorts and conceals the real causes of conflict. Thus, making all-out catastrophic war a real danger.

Nevertheless, despite this propaganda onslaught and execrable dereliction of journalistic duty, the international public and the Western public, in particular, have shown an admirably healthy resistance and skepticism towards the Western media and their so-called governments. What is becoming more apparent is the toxic propaganda and the hypocrisy of Western governments and their servile media. This public resistance is fatally undermining the authority of Washington and its NATO allies.

This is reflected in growing public awareness and criticism around the world but in particular in the United States and across Europe leveled at the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. People are increasingly critical of how the Western powers are reprehensibly fueling the war with endless weapons while the Western public’s own social and economic needs are unconscionably neglected.

So-called leaders like America’s Joe Biden are ridiculed as decrepit clowns while European non-entities like Germany’s Olaf Scholz and France’s Emmanuel Macron are routinely booed in public.

Strategic Culture Foundation has empowered Western public knowledge and critical thinking through its open forum of intelligent and independent articles.

That is why it has become essential, from the point of view of the Western regimes, to shut us down with a vengeance. This, in turn, only exposes all the more the hypocrisy of Western states who claim to respect free speech and democracy.

It needs to be more widely appreciated what is going on at this time. The Western states, under the sway of ruling elites and corporate propaganda services, are at war. Not just against Russia, China and other dissenting nations. They are at war against their own public who are growing increasingly discontent and angered by the despotism that is the real, inherent condition of Western rulers and their bankrupt capitalist system.

Truth may be an early casualty of war. But that casualty can be repaired with more supportive truth and time. What might be said to be the last casualty of war are liars and their despotism.

And they can’t be repaired – when the damage to their deception is finally done.

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