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On Wednesday, while reading stories on the situation in Ukraine, I discovered SouthFront was taken offline. I read both corporate and alternative media to get both sides of a story. But on Wednesday I wasn’t allowed to do this, the web browser wouldn’t pull up the website.
On Thursday, I tried again. Now the site was online. “On March 9, the Germany-based Hetzner webhosting removed SouthFront from its network and suspended our IP,” SouthFront explained in a lead story following the takedown and restoration of the website.
Unfortunately the Hetzner Team was tricked by manipulations of the recently established propagandist structure (like this) that works to instigate international hatred. Structures like this one are not satisfied with our independent position and alternative point of view on the ongoing military developments.
After reading this story, I attempted to retweet it. A dialog box popped up and informed me that SouthFront’s alternative to the biased and selective pro-war propaganda coming out of corporate media will not be tolerated.
Twitter believes reposting dispassionate and straight-forward news reporting on the “war” in Ukraine is “harmful” to those of us that peruse social media.
This is not the first time SouthFront has faced censorship for the crime of relating facts that are not part of narratives cooked up by the state.
In December, 2016 the online payment system PayPal terminated South Front’s account as part of an effort to strangle support for the website. “We know that the pressure is being exerted by forces connected to the US government,” the site related in an Open Letter.
We have so far been able to deal with all efforts to harm our project. In 2015, the project faced hostile acts by the Atlantic Council and a number of European organizations linked to NATO. We have been deprived, without any warning, of the project’s YouTube channels, Facebook pages, and the main site has been subjected to cyberattacks. There have been cases of leaks of false information aimed at discrediting us. Until recently, our team was able to deal effectively and these and other challenges, which are similar to those faced by other entities attempting to bring alternative points of view to light, such as Wikileaks.
SouthFront’s Youtube channel was restored after more than a hundred people contacted the corporation (owned by the crony corporatist leviathan Google) and protested the move.
It is important to note that the 2016 actions were taken after SouthFront had posted an article from Nordic Filmworks LTD over a critical montage of their “Stand with Ukraine” video. I attempted to link to a Fort-Russ article on this incident, but it now appears Fort-Russ is also offline for the crime of relating Russia’s side of the story on Ukraine following the State Department and Victoria Nuland’s successful “color revolution” in 2014, dubbed the “Revolution of Dignity” by the US government and its media.
On that note, a paper presented at the virtual 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies at Concordia University, in Montreal during August, 2021 examined a massacre (49 killed, 157 wounded) during the Nuland and State Department arranged Maidan protests against the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych.
The cannonade of propaganda, misinformation, and distortion in the West about the situation in Ukraine has once again resulted in turning the ill-informed into a mob demanding a “no-fly zone” be established in the skies over Ukraine, never mind Russia has declared this to be a firm redline. (See: Alison Durkee, “More Support Military Intervention In Ukraine Than Oppose It, Poll Says—But Financial Aid Still Preferable.”)
The Wall Street Journal posted an article by the former Connecticut neocon senator and outspoken war proponent Joe Lieberman on Wednesday arguing in favor of a no-fly zone the Russians have warned will result in WWIII. “There are moral reasons for the U.S. and NATO to act that are rooted in our Good Samaritan laws and values,” Lieberman writes,
Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut U.S. global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.
Joe Lieberman may actually believe President Putin and the Russians want to recapture western territories of the former Soviet Union, but this is nonsense.
Putin, as should more than obvious to even casual observers, is demanding NATO stop pushing its troops, missiles, and other weapons of mass destruction up against Russia’s western border. Putin understands very well what the US and its clients in Europe want–the destruction of the Russian Federation and capture of its vast territory (and abundant natural resources, including gas and oil) opened up for exploitation by transnational corporations.
Joe Lieberman’s “Good Samaritan laws and values” are in fact a cover for continued suffering in Ukraine under the rule of the Zionist Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former actor and comedian with connections to Russian oligarchs (Zelenskyy appointed Andriy Bohdan as head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine; Bohdan had been the lawyer of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi). Despite this, Zelenskyy initiated a supposed crackdown on the oligarch billionaires.
The former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, widely considered to be an oligarch, is founder of several state-owned confectionery enterprises, owner of a number of car and bus factories, the Kuznia na Rybalskomu shipyard, and the 5 Kanal television channel.
Finally, the endless barrage of anti-Russian propaganda in the West, and especially the US, has apparently taken ahold of the cognitive behavior of millions of Americans.
“A broad bipartisan majority of Americans think the United States should stop buying Russian oil and gas and work with NATO to set up ‘no-fly zones’ to protect Ukraine from Russian air strikes, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Friday,” the corporate news corporation reported. “It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict” and, left unmentioned, the threat of thermonuclear war.
Similar propaganda brought support of George W. Bush’s neocon invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama’s actions in Libya and Syria.
“A key reason seems to be that that powerful, opinion-molding institutions—the mass communications media, government, political parties, and even education—are controlled, more or less, by what President Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’,” writes Lawrence Wittner. “And, at the outset of a conflict, these institutions are usually capable of getting flags waving, bands playing, and crowds cheering for war.”
However, as a result this latest preplanned war, it is entirely possible the flags, bands, and crowds may be vaporized by nuclear explosions.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Distract The Media
