Strategic Culture Foundation Editorial
US authorities take Scott Ritter off plane to Russia, seize his passport
The sinister prevention of Scott Ritter travelling to speak and broadcast from Russia this week by United States authorities is a sure sign that the Western imperialist warmongers are afraid of the truth.
Indeed, there is a dark shadow cast on their pretensions of “democracy and freedom” – ironically in a week that supposedly commemorates the D-Day landings and the historic fight against fascism.
The former U.S. Marine and United Nations weapons inspector has gained worldwide respect as an independent political commentator and analyst. Ritter has become a powerful critic of the United States and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. He has staunchly appealed for dialogue and diplomacy, warning that the reckless provocations by Washington and its allies towards Russia are driving the world to a nuclear conflagration.
This week, Ritter was due to fly from New York to Istanbul, on his way to attend the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia. The annual forum is attended by thousands of delegates from all over the world. He was hauled off the flight by U.S. police officers and his passport was confiscated before being escorted from the airport. There was no official explanation for the draconian interdiction to his travel plans. The U.S. State Department refused to comment on the matter, saying it was a private matter.
However, there is no doubt, whatsoever, that the humiliating move was politically organized by powerful people, as Ritter claims. It was aimed at preventing him from going to Russia simply because of his outspoken political views. That is an incredible infringement of democratic rights and a revelation of the dark forces at work, which are now increasingly public and blatant.
The incident is a grave illustration of how legally protected free speech rights are being trampled on in the United States and other NATO countries. Numerous other instances of censorship and “cancelling” are testimony to the intensity of the information war that the Western states are waging, not just against supposed foreign adversaries but against their own citizens.
Millions of Western citizens are being denied access to important independent news and other media simply based on official designation by unaccountable Western authorities that said information is “Russian disinformation”. Russian news outlets such as RT and Sputnik are banned from being accessed through normal channels.
Scott Ritter is one of several respected American voices of sanity and genuine intelligence who are banished from so-called mainstream Western media. Other figures include Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson and former senior Pentagon experts Doug Macgregor and Earl Rasmussen.
All of these figures are articulate and informed critics of the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. They have been eminently capable of explaining how the war was fomented through illicit intervention in Ukraine over many years and how the prospects for a diplomatic and peaceful settlement are deliberately being sabotaged by Washington and its NATO vassals. In the laudable spirit of 1930s U.S. Marine Major General Smedley D Butler, they have shown how “war is a racket”.
The war in Ukraine has been sold to the world based on a fetid pile of lies and Russophobic prejudices. A heinous fraud is taking place, putting the world’s future at imminent peril.
Scott Ritter, like the other voices cited above, is never or rarely interviewed on the corporate-controlled Western media channels precisely for the reason that the critical analysis he and they articulate debunks the war propaganda emanating from the U.S. government and its NATO allies – propaganda that is pumped and laundered non-stop to the Western public and presented as “news”.
No dissenting voices are permitted under the tyranny that is Western imperialist warmongering. Just ask Robert Fico, the Slovakian prime minister who was shot and seriously wounded by a gunman on May 15 because, as Fico believes, he opposes the NATO war against Russia. As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, assassination is just an extreme form of censorship.
A demonstration of the nefarious propaganda system was seen this week during the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy landings. U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders used the commemorative event in France to issue doom-laden warnings that “democracy is under attack” and to portray the war in Ukraine as a re-run of the standing up to Nazi Germany in World War Two with Russia projected as the reincarnation of Hitler’s Third Reich. The whole D-Day pomp and ceremony was a travesty. And yet such nauseating distortion of history was relayed to Western audiences by the likes of CNN and BBC, to mention just two channels, as if it were a noble reflection.
Democracy and freedom are under attack alright – from Biden and the rest of the Western ruling elite whose basis of oligarchic power is increasingly appearing as outright fascism – albeit with “liberal” sounding rhetoric.
Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian puppet president and now de facto dictator due to his cancellation of elections, was among the dignitaries in Normandy. So, too, was Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Only a few months ago, Zelensky and Trudeau gave a standing ovation to a Nazi veteran in the Canadian parliament.
Biden and the Western elite are the ones who are inciting a world war in Ukraine against Russia. If comparisons are to be made it is that NATO is the heir to Nazi fascism and warmongering.
On the same day that Biden, Macron, Sunak, King Charles and other non-entity Western elites were extolling the “fight for democracy and freedom”, the Israeli regime that they support with weapons and political cover killed over 40 Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp in Nuseirat, Gaza. Nearly nine months of genocide have been enabled and facilitated by the United States and duplicitous, mealymouthed Western allies.
These imperialist powers are as of last week escalating the war in Ukraine by giving public approval for NATO weapons to be used to strike Russia. Macron is now officially sending French military instructors to help the NeoNazi Kiev regime forces to use weapons to hit Russian territory. How close can this be to all-out war without actually saying it?
Biden and other degenerate Western war criminals dismiss legitimate public concerns by asserting there is only a “theoretical” risk of a nuclear World War Three.
Scott Ritter and those respected others cited above have irrefutably exposed the lies and criminal warmongering by the United States and its NATO accomplices.
Ritter has gained a wide following on his Telegram channel and via alternative media outlets.
That shows a potentially huge public openness to critical information and opposition to relentless war-making. In short, an openness to objective information and truth.
The shutting down of mainstream and internet access to alternative media voices is a classic testament to the maxim that the first casualty of war is the truth.
Global survival is in danger in large part because people are being denied the power to resist the crazy warmongers who are projected by lying media outlets as paragons of virtue and peace.
When advocates of truth-telling are locked up in solitary confinement dungeons like Julian Assange or denied freedom of movement and speech like Scott Ritter, or targeted for assassination like Slovakian premier and critic of NATO policy in Ukraine, Robert Fico, then you know we are in dark and sinister times.
If history could be flipped from past to present, we dare say that the hundreds of thousands of ordinary American, British and other allied soldiers who landed on the beaches of Normandy 80 years ago to fight against fascism would have stormed against the likes of Biden and his elitist ilk assembled there this week exploiting their memory and sacrifices.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 