[Peace-discuss] Noam Chomsky gets it wrong about hearing from RT, Lavrov, and Russian news

[J.B. Nicholson]

https://twitter.com/SizweLo/status/1550548521882947586 appears to have an excerpt 
from a recent and (as far as I know) new Chomsky interview by Russell Brand. I 
couldn't find the whole interview. Here's a transcript of that excerpt.

> Noam Chomsky: Take the United States today -- it is living under a kind of
> totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime and is much worse in
> many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970's, people in
> Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television if they wanted
> to find out the news. If today in the United States you wanted to find out what
> Prime Minister Lavrov of Russia is saying, can't do it. It's barred. Americans are
> not permitted to hear what Russians are saying. Can't get Russian television,
> can't access Russian sources. That means also that fine American journalists like
> Chris Hedges, one of the best, is cut out, barred from Americans 'cause he happens
> to have a program running on RT (Russian television). You wanna find out what the
> adversary is saying, which is of utmost importance, you can maybe tune into Indian
> state television and find it out or you can read it on Al Jazeera. But the United
> States has imposed constraints on freedom of access information which are
> astonishing. And which, in fact, go beyond what was the case in Stalin Soviet
> Russia.


My response:


RT America, RT's US branch, was shut down. This means that all RT America shows 
(including Chris Hedges' show "On Contact with Chris Hedges") were cancelled. YouTube 
also removed all RT channels including RT America's YouTube channel. Therefore you 
can't find "On Contact" on YouTube now. Some American journalists have moved to 
Russia and continued their RT careers (like Fiorella Isabel of Convo Couch and Rachel 
Blevins). You can find reports of their lives in Russia on their own channels on 
Odysee[1].

Each of the following are fully accessible to Americans:

RT's website
https://rt.com/

RT's channel on Rumble.com publishes RT's videos and is constantly updated.
https://rumble.com/c/RTNews

RT's channel on Odysee also publishes RT's videos and is constantly updated. Odysee 
is a decentralized alternative to YouTube (hosted on LBRY, a blockchain-based 
file-sharing and payment network)
https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@RT:fd

VK.com (a Russian social media service) also hosts an RT channel with videos.

The same as above is also true for other RT outlets such as RT Documentaries and 
RUPTLY, RT's video service which makes documentaries and dead-roll camera footage. 
RUPTLY is, famously, the only news outlet to be on-site when Julian Assange was 
forcibly expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy[2].

RT.com also hosts pages for each of its shows & their transcripts, including RT 
America shows. "On Contact" shows and transcripts, for instance, are found at 
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/

Lavrov's speeches can be found online including English translation (where Lavrov, 
who speaks fluent English, chooses to speak Russian instead). Here's a recent RT 
video segment which includes footage clipped from a Lavrov speech (the same video 
from two sources):
https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@RT:fd/lavrov_cairo_2407:1
https://rumble.com/v1dgckx-west-should-eliminate-obstacles-theyve-created-themselves-lavrov.html

RT also has 24/7 running news on Rumble.com & VK.com.

By now it should be clear that Chomsky's claim:

> If today in the United States you wanted to find out what Prime Minister Lavrov of
> Russia is saying, can't do it. It's barred. Americans are not permitted to hear
> what Russians are saying. Can't get Russian television, can't access Russian
> sources. That means also that fine American journalists like Chris Hedges, one of
> the best, is cut out, barred from Americans 'cause he happens to have a program
> running on RT (Russian television).


is not true.

All of these video-hosting services have YouTube-like user interfaces on their 
respective websites and so do so many of the privacy-respecting front-ends (like 
Invidious and other services). They're all just as easy to use as YouTube. They only 
require one to (literally) click another link and try. That's not a lot to ask, even 
of a non-technical computer user.

I fully understand that YouTube (Google) is among the American companies which are 
currently cooperating with American government-led censorship instead of suing the US 
government for 1st Amendment violations (as Glenn Greenwald says Google could do in 
https://rumble.com/vtyr34-democrats-are-pressuring-companies-to-censor-for-them-a-violation-of-the-fi.html 
and https://youtube.com/watch?v=g_uSPwYiVFs entitled "Democrats Are Pressuring 
Companies to Censor For Them: a Violation of the First Amendment" and a corresponding 
article).

YouTube is not the only way to see video online, nor is YouTube the only way 
Americans get videos online no matter how popular YouTube currently is. There are 
other ways of getting to RT's shows and segments, old and new. If Americans choose to 
remain ignorant of this fact and limit themselves to what YouTube distributes, that's 
unfortunate and only they can fix that for themselves. That is not an example of 
"living under a kind of totalitarian culture which [...] is much worse in many ways 
than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev".

I recommend using Firefox because Firefox respects user's freedoms to run, inspect, 
share, and modify the program. A Firefox add-on called "LibRedirect" offers an easy 
way to automatically use alternative front-ends for many privacy-disrespecting 
websites (such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Imgur, search engines, 
and Wikipedia) as well as front-ends that are fast and don't require privacy-busting 
Javascript (including Reuters, Medium, and Odysee). Visit 
https://libredirect.github.io/download.html for more details and complete source 
code. LibRedirect costs no money and is free software (free as in freedom) as well.



[1] Rachel Blevins in Moscow: 
https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@RachelBlevins:5/testing%2C-testing...-live-from-moscow:a

Fiorella Isabel in Moscow: 
https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@TheConvoCouch:3/fiorella-in-moscow%2C-what-it%27s-really:3


[2] Despite the world being told ahead of time that Assange was about to be expelled 
from the embassy, establishment outlets didn't stick around to capture their own 
footage. This means that those outlets which chose to show that footage had to 
license that footage from RT.