From Ritter to Medhurst: Panicked Arrests of Journalists Lay Bare Empire's Major Weakness

Anti-imperialists have found the battle they can win as Empire's nervous reaction reveals its primacy hinges on narrative control.

Veteran voices Scott Ritter (left) and Richard Medhurst regularly collaborate to upend Western propaganda in their joint live programs.

For decades, the Western U.S.-led empire has brazenly flexed its military and economic might across the globe, projecting an aura of invincibility that has caused many to regard the uphill battle against imperialism as insurmountable. However, the recent crackdowns on journalists like Richard Medhurst and Scott Ritter, and outlets like The Cradle expose an Achilles heel - the Empire's reliance on controlling the global narrative to preserve its hegemony.

At its core, the American imperial project has premised its power not just on force and money, but on shaping what stories get told about itself and its perceived adversaries. This narrative dominance involves concerted efforts to cultivate ideologies that justify Western domination, demonize and racialize enemy groups, and silence dissenting perspectives.

Globalization of Euro-centric Racism

One of the most insidious tools has been promoting Euro-centric ideas positioning Western civilization as inherently superior to others. This narrative has been inculcated through cultural indoctrination, propaganda, and education systems - rationalizing the subjugation and exploitation of non-Western peoples as a civilizing burden.

In parallel, the Empire has meticulously crafted enemy avatars like Muslims and Chinese people as existential threats. By instilling fear and hatred of these "Others," public support is manufactured for military interventions, economic strangulation through sanctions, and other coercive measures serving American interests.

This insidious indoctrination of Western cultural and racial supremacy pervades nearly every sphere of modern society. Hollywood has long perpetuated grotesquely racist caricatures demonizing Arabs, Russians, Mexicans and other non-European groups as uncivilized threats, meticulously documented in classic works like 'Reel Bad Arabs'. Core academic fields like economics consistently glorify private property rights, free market fundamentalism, and American-style democracy as end-goals for all societies to emulate. Undergraduate curricula across the West expose students to a canonical literary diet extolling the virtues of Western Civilization while subtly denigrating the ‘authoritarian’ and ‘undemocratic’ non-European world. Social media platforms leverage algorithmic filters to bombard global audiences with a torrent of content rooted in white cultural hegemony, while non-Western voices championing indigenous values get systematically suppressed and deprived of viewership.

This over-representation of narratives venerating Western society as the apex of human progress insidiously cements racial, cultural and religious prejudices worldwide. It indoctrinates populations from America to Asia with the seductive imperialist belief that subjugation of the Other is a civilizing burden to be embraced, not abhorred.

The pervasive penetration of this worldview is strikingly evident in societies that have had little-to-no direct contact or tensions with the marginalized groups now vilified: Rampant Islamophobia has taken root in South Korea, a society with a negligible Muslim population and no historic grievances against the Islamic world. Similarly, anti-Black racism runs rampant across various Asian societies like Malaysia, where indigenous African diasporas barely exist to be the target of such animus. This virulent bigotry overseas mirrors the domestic racism plaguing the West itself. Surprisingly, however, anti-white or anti-Western bigotry does not exist in these societies, nor does it manifest anywhere, despite the fact that these nations have extensive histories of mass violence and oppression inflicted upon them by Western colonial powers.

The implantation of these racist attitudes towards groups like Muslims and Africans in societies like Korea and Malaysia, respectively, who have virtually no ethnic tension or oppressive historical legacy towards them, exemplifies the astonishing reach of Western cultural hegemony. While these nations have endured subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization at the hands of white Christian imperialists, their modern racism is explicitly directed inward towards other marginalized groups equally ‘Othered’ by Western narratives. This strange paradox highlights the self-perpetuating potency of Western indoctrination of the global community with these racist narratives- capable of overriding even the victim's lived experience of racialized oppression from the West itself.

Psychological Research has shown that people all over the world exhibit an unconscious pro-white mental bias.

As one journalist starkly outlined, this systemic dehumanization of the Other also permeates Western institutions, like the intelligence apparatus represented by organizations like the American CIA, Israeli Mossad or British MI6. It influences not just the kinds of intelligence collected on the ground, but also how it gets analyzed, processed into intelligence products, and utilized by decision makers - all become compromised by the Euro-centric mindset hardwired into the West.

Humanizing Arabs is an Existential Threat to Empire

However, the recent brazenly targeted attacks on journalists and media outlets daring to question this narrative hegemony betray the immense insecurity and fragility underpinning the Empire's propaganda edifice. The British authorities' draconian arrest of Richard Medhurst, a journalist whose only supposed crime was broadcasting perspectives from West Asia, under contrived terrorism pretexts, speaks volumes.

So too does the coordinated social media deplatforming of The Cradle media outlet by Silicon Valley tech giants, seemingly also for the transgression of amplifying regional West Asian viewpoints excluded from corporate Western media's myopic coverage. These escalating acts of censorious repression reveal a visceral fear - that any narrative which disrupts and contradicts the canonized Western way of storytelling cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.

The very existence of journalists and platforms willing to humanize the voices of groups deliberately marginalized, demonized and stripped of agency within the hegemonic Western narrative is perceived as such an existential threat that it warrants criminalization and digital erasure. This overreaction encapsulates the fundamental ideological fragility at the heart of American imperial control over the global discourse.

By outing the powerful as having a deep-seated need to silence any heterodox perspectives that poke holes in their indoctrinating official realities, these attacks have crucially exposed a devastating Achilles heel. For an empire to resort to such desperate measures to protect its unipolar narrative monopoly is to admit that a plurality of narratives and truths is its most profound threat.

From Medhurst to Traoré: How Dissident Journalism Catalyzes Revolutionary Defiance

In explicitly criminalizing information that does not serve its agenda, the Empire has admitted the potency of truth-telling in disrupting its iron grip over the global discourse. Indeed, its self-portrayal as a torchbearer of free speech and democracy must be maintained at all cost. Far from snuffing them out, the overreaction has amplified the threat these alternative narratives pose to American empire.

The crux is that while America's military and economic clout are immense, they are essentially derivative powers that can only be perpetuated because of a much more fundamental ideological dominance - the ability to control the overarching narratives and portrayals of reality that get imprinted onto the global consciousness. Why else would Hollywood relentlessly glorify the US military as a virtuous force, while corporate propaganda outlets like The New York Times strip away any sense of Palestinian agency when covering the Israeli regime's genocidal oppression? Such monolithic storytelling serves to manufacture the perceived legitimacy required for American imperialism to function and intervene within sovereign borders worldwide.

Media critic and friend of BettBeat Media, Dr. Assal Rad, regularly exposes the New York Times’ blatant servility to Empire’s narrative.

After all, the projection of hard power through economic strangulation or military occupation cannot be sustained in the long term within societies where the foundational narrative indoctrination has not taken root. This very dynamic is exemplified by the revolutionary government of Burkina Faso expelling American troops and rejecting neocolonial interventionism - a decisive refusal made possible because revolutionary figures like Captain Ibrahim Traoré hold similar anti-imperialist viewpoints to journalists like Richard Medhurst. Their ideological defiance against American narrative hegemony has seamlessly translated into a reassertion of full sovereignty over their lands.

This is where alternative media outlets opposing the corporate Western propaganda machine wield tremendous power - by telling the stories and narratives that revolutionary movements like in Burkina Faso internalize, they instill the defiance required to rid entire nations of imperial dominance. Herein lies the paramount vulnerability that anti-imperialist forces must persistently exploit. By continually rupturing the U.S. sphere of influence over what stories get amplified and translated into societal realities, they can incrementally erode the insidious cultural and psychological groundwork required for hard power subjugation to be enacted anywhere.

Relentless Truth-Telling is the Path to Victory

While overcoming the American war machine seems an improbable Goliath, dismantling its stranglehold over the global public mind represents an eminently achievable path to undoing the very legitimacy that imperialism relies upon. For the anti-imperialist struggle, this is where the path to dismantling American global dominance lies - in relentless truth-telling and amplifying long-muzzled voices. Not in the almost impossible uphill battle of taking on the U.S. war machine or dollar supremacy head-on, but in waging a battle of narratives to retake the story.

The very palpable fear displayed by the panicked suppression and censorship of outlets like The Cradle, Chinese state media CGTN, Iran's Press TV, and Russia's RT validate just how effectively their narratives are fracturing the propaganda edifice upholding the American empire's facade of inviolable righteousness and omnipotence. These acts of desperation unmask a creeping realization within the imperial centers of power - that the monopolistic control over what versions of reality get imprinted onto the global consciousness is finally eroding under an onslaught of counter-hegemonic storytelling.

What seemed like an interminably insurmountable battle against the planet's most potent military-economic force is gradually being rendered surmountable. By strategically sidestepping the overt instruments of coercive American hard power, these media warriors are bypassing the Empire's brute strengths to relentlessly bombard its greatest vulnerability - the manufactured mirage of moral, civilizational and intellectual supremacy it governed through for decades.

China is Showing us the Way Forward: Information Sovereignty

The critical solution is for the Global South to build alternative digital platforms and communications infrastructure outside of Western corporate control. Currently, over 95% of global internet traffic flows through US Big Tech companies, systematically marginalizing non-Western perspectives. This domination reveals a lack of urgency and, perhaps, laziness prevalent in the Global South, even among nations vocally opposed to Western neo-imperial influence.

As long as cafes, social spaces, and youth communities across the Global South remain digitally tethered to Western television, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley's corporately-owned social media, the subconscious acceptance of American/European cultural supremacy will persist. Even staunchly anti-imperialist politicians are fighting an uphill ideological battle when the surrounding information sphere is utterly controlled by narrative hegemons like CNN, BBC, Google, X/Twitter, Amazon and Meta.

This explains why the US empire opposes China's efforts to decouple its digital space from Western corporations. Beijing recognizes that insulating its 1.7 billion citizens from manufactured realities emanating from American storytellers safeguards sovereign consciousness and cultural integrity. Only by robustly firewalling its digital realm from Big Tech's ability to imprint US-aligned "truths" can China resist the subtle perpetuation of Western dominance worldwide.

American accusations of "authoritarianism" actually reveal China’s sharp understanding - Its ability to nurture digital/narrative ecosystems free from US hegemony undermines America's power to script the stories, norms and myths absorbed globally. This deprivation of discursive control is why only China can genuinely contest American power, necessitating the Global South to urgently build impregnable information and narrative sanctuaries.

America’s Slipping Chokehold

With a multipolar world order more resistant to American interference taking shape, the chokehold over international discourse is slipping. The perpetuation of the U.S. imperialist project was always predicated on the absence of viable counter-narratives potent enough to demystify its carefully constructed rhetorical façade of benevolence, exceptionalism and universal civilizational leadership. However, that critical Achilles' heel shielding Empire from overdue accountability is now being exposed by an onslaught of subversive storytelling.

With each amplification of a Palestinian's story, each testimony, each revival of a historical perspective erased by colonial domination, another fracture devastates the ideological foundations upholding Pax Americana's dominion over the world's mindscapes.

- Karim