How the U.S. Government Targets Websites for Destruction

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Within just the past few weeks, two more websites that had been publishing some of my articles were shut down by the U.S. Government, and so I now am writing here about the various ways they do this (for any news-site that’s bold enough to publish it).

In both of the latest two instances — the sites southfront.org and orientalreview.org — the blockage appeared to be the same. On 18 August, I received this notice from South Front:

On the night of 18 August, the “international domain name registry” blocked southfront.org without warning or explanation. Despite the fact that this organisation [by which they mean the “international domain name registry”] has been formally independent since 1998, it is actually controlled by the US Department of Commerce. What they have done is an unprecedented action in the history of modern information society. This is the American way of democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law.

Here is our official appeal — SouthFront.Org Blocked By U.S.-Controlled Global Internet SupervisorSouth Front

We met that challenge as well. Now, our official website is southfront.press

Please spread this information as widely as possible.

Sincerely yours,

SF Team

I asked them whether they’re being targeted for destruction under the U.S. sanctions against Russia, and got this answer:

Unfortunately in Russia, apparently no one cares about our activities. No one, no one at all, finances us from Russia.

We were forced to switch to a Russian registrar and Russian servers when our persecution by the globalists began. It started in 2017, then in 2021 and finally in 2022. At that time, members of our team with Russian roots recommended that we have email addresses in Russian email services. And, it turned out to be the right decision at that point in time. For example, Google blocked our official addresses. Also, many global email services block emails from southfront.org, and now from southfront.press. So we use alternative options. What are they? Either Chinese, Russian or Iranian.

So, since no one, at all, in Russia, is financing their operation, there can’t be any U.S. legal authority for targeting them, but South Front does publish lots of information (all of which that I have checked I have found to be truthful) that is favorable to Russia’s foreign policies and critical against America’s foreign policies; so, this is purely content-censorship, instead of anything that has a basis in U.S. law — and, as such (censorship that bans truthful political content), if it does indeed come from the U.S. Department of Commerce, then it is clearly a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment — it then is action by an actually lawless U.S. Government.

Then, shortly afterward, I found that I was having the same inability to access the articles at Oriental Review, which was another of the few remaining websites that had been continuing to publish some of my articles. I inquired of them, and received this reply:

The website orientalreview.org has been blocked by the domain names registry services provider in the U.S.

Now Oriental Review is on www.orientalreview.su.

I inquired further of them, and then received this:

Officially we were blocked because we had got in a black list but [via] some website-scanners. And in order to be unblocked we have to be delisted from the black list. But it doesn’t work so easily. I know it from the previous period, when they were just blocking the security certificates. Also on the ground on [of there allegedly being] some ‘malicious activity registered from your IP’.

So, they were apparently given (and accepted) an excuse, not an explanation. I know that it’s not an explanation because when FBI men came to my house in 2020 to tell me that if I wouldn’t stop having articles published on the strategic-culture.org site, I would be investigated under some alleged anti-Russia law whose maximum penalty is $325,000, and so I did quit submitting articles to that site, but these men also told me that there might subsequently be a problem with Oriental Review. And, now, both of those sites were taken down by some sort of U.S. force. So, I don’t think that the explanation for the take-down of Oriental Review is as innocent as the site seems to think to be the case.

Right now, in order for me to be able to get to read either of those now-replaced sites (South Front or Oriental Review), from my particular location, I see the messages:

Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.

We can’t connect to the server at southfront.press.

If you entered the right address, you can:

    Try again later

    Check your network connection

But, if I first copy the new domain name (Web-site address) into the save-box at

https://archive.is/,

then, the copied page does show up; so, I know that my getting that “We can’t connect to the server” notice is due to something somewhere along the path between the International Domain Name Registry and my computer; there is a malicious entity that’s now obstructing reception of this site from my particular service-area.

By contrast, for example: I now am getting the very same “This site can’t be reached” type of notice from the strategic-culture.org site, and when I try to reach it by saving that Web-address into archive.is I get “Not Found” and when I try to save it into web.archive.org I get “Cannot resolve host strategic-culture.org.” So, the site is gone. Then, when I check further, I find that its last save was this on August 16th at web.archive.org. So, they, too, seem to be now entirely gone.

It’s not only the U.S. Government that is doing this, but also its many corporate partners, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and their many corporate partners, such as NewsGuard and the many ‘fact-checking’ services that are hired by or for them, likewise do. Any site that’s not (in effect) controlled by the U.S. Government, is targeted. For example, many of the news-sites that formerly published my articles were forced by those corporate entities to shut down or sell out; and, as I previously documented, one site that used to publish me had been established originally with the intent to sell it at a profit, but then it got warned by NewsGuard to stop publishing me or else, and he dropped me in order to have at least a hope of finding a buyer for his news-site. (So, now, only softball criticisms of the U.S. Government are published there.)

This is about the supposedly international organization that controls the internet and thus the Web. It mentions that there are also “other organizations [than ICAAN] such as OpenNIC, that are charged with overseeing the name and number systems of the Internet.” However, if one clicks onto that “OpenNIC” it explains that “Like all alternative root DNS systems, OpenNIC-hosted domains are unreachable to the vast majority of Internet users, because they require a non-default configuration in one’s DNS resolver.” In other words: ICAAN, which is controlled by the U.S. Department of Commerce (SouthFront is correct about that), has a global monopoly over the internet and Web. So: not only are they violating the U.S. Constitution, but they are violating the entire world. In order to break that U.S.-imperial monopoly, a new internet/Web must be constructed. Who will do that? (It would be a service to the entire world, if the U.S. empire ends; but at least it would be a service to the publics in all non-U.S.-empire — or non-U.S.-‘allied’ — countries, otherwise; and the result of that would be much faster improvement of the non-U.S.-empire countries.)

This is above and beyond any direct actions by U.S. Government agencies, such as by the FBI and U.S. Department of ‘Justice’. But here are merely a few of the Web-sites that used to publish me but that the U.S. Government has directly shut down:

Any way that one looks at it, America has a lawless Government. But this is the way that any dictatorship functions. And, “Censorship Is The Way That Any Dictatorship — And No Democracy — Functions”. So: it’s the natural result of the dictatorship. And this is a global dictatorship. So, it affects everybody, and not merely Americans such as myself.

As a global dictatorship, it relies upon cooperation from the vassal-aristocracies, with America’s billionaires being at the top. On August 27th, I described how that cooperation works, and headlined “Why Only Suckers Trust America’s Major Media Any Longer”, showing how they fool voters into voting for candidates who will do the billionaires’ bidding — and not for ones who won’t.

Just to top off this report (so as to help get public attention to the sort of thing that Americans and Europeans are funding by the hundreds of billions of dollars that we donate to Ukraine’s government — the massive corruptness of the U.S. empire), consider the August 22nd news-report, “Luxurious Villa owned by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Family Discovered On Egyptian Coast”. It documents the 16 May 2023 (i.e., during the war in Ukraine) purchase by Zelensky’s family, of the five-million-dollar estate adjoining Angelina Jolie’s Egyptian estate. How much will the media that pass muster with the U.S. Government and its agencies allow that news-report to be published, and will any of the mainstream sites be publishing it, and why not? It all makes sense, but not in reports by the propagandists (which is all that the empire will tolerate). And, of course, this censorship is the reason why the U.S-and-‘allied’ publics believe that the war in Ukraine started not with America’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine but with Russia’s 24 February 2022 response to that.

So: with fully documented truths such as these, it’s clear why the U.S. regime censors it all out, and leaves only their myths about these crucial matters, as ‘the news’ and then ‘the history’, about it.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.