TEHRAN - A former U.S. Senate candidate says U.S. liberal democracy is converting to a totalitarian system like the former Soviet Union. 

“I saw a Russia Today story of June 24th quoting Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, as saying that the United States held up as a ‘model of liberal democracy is rapidly turning into a totalitarian regime reminiscent of the former Soviet Union,” Mark Dankof tells the Tehran Times.   

 “I absolutely agree with this as the development of a domestic police state and the ‘irremovability of oligarchic elites’,” Dankof notes.

 Late on Tuesday, the websites of a number of Iranian news media outlets, most notably the English-language Press TV and the Arabic-language Al Alam as well as regional media outlets close to the resistance movement were seized by the United States. The move cast a great shadow over claims of freedom of speech propagated by Washington.

Observers believe the U.S. loss of control over other narratives forced it into taking such a measure against the Iranian media in order to solve its immediate problems.

“These elites want a world government they control in its entirety, with global surveillance, military coercion, economic blackmail, control of fiat currency, control of media, and subversion of nation-states and cultures the weapons used to achieve it,” Dankof remarks.

This the text of the interview:

Q: What is the U.S. goal of taking down Iranian news sites as well as Yemeni and Iraqi ones?

A: It is clear that the United States government has taken the action against Press TV and these other outlets because three things have resulted from their broadcasting operations deemed intolerable by American policy makers and their allies in mainstream media and the social media conglomerates:

 1. The exposure of the degree of control of Zionist neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby over every branch of the American government and media; 

2. The exposure of the quagmire of never-ending American military operations in the Middle East (West Asia) that have been an abysmal failure and which are based on a complete pack of lies used to justify the unjustifiable in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine; 

3. The exposure of the existence of informed, articulate dissidents from these reprehensible policies at either end of the political spectrum in both the United States and Europe.

Press TV has been especially effective in bringing information and analysis to English speaking audiences and readers unavailable otherwise in American and Western media. The American empire finds this intolerable, either in the exposure of its lies regarding Iran, Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, Putin’s Russia, Venezuela and Colombia, and China, or the divisions developing in American society on the empire’s foreign policy, its management of the economy, and a burgeoning polarization of the public on cultural and social issues that can no longer be hidden. 

I saw a Russia Today story of June 24th quoting Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, as saying that the United States held up as a “model of liberal democracy” is rapidly turning into a totalitarian regime reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. I absolutely agree with this. Naryshkin spoke of media monopolies, the development of a domestic police state, and the “irremovability of oligarchic elites.” These elites want a world government they control in its entirety, with global surveillance, military coercion, economic blackmail, control of fiat currency, control of media, and subversion of nation-states and cultures the weapons used to achieve it.

Outlets like Press TV threaten this totalitarian agenda and mindset. This is the reason for the attempts to destroy its outreach. 

I agree with what Dr. Ahmad Ali-Akbari told Ekaterina Blinova of Sputnik International on June 23rd when he called Washington’s calls for freedom of speech a “tissue of lies.”

Q: Western powers always try to portray Iran and the resistance axis as anti-freedom. Now they have launched a propaganda campaign claiming that the Iranian president-elect is a hardliner. How can they justify this paradox while they are banning Iranian media?

A: They can’t plausibly justify the paradox. Actually, if I were an Iranian, I’d have voted for a “hardliner.” No other vote makes any sense whatsoever. Rouhani negotiated with the West in good faith on JCPOA/P5+1. The result was the unilateral American withdrawal from the deal, the imposition of draconian economic sanctions on Iran for abiding by the terms of the agreement, the assassinations of Soleimani and Fakhrizadeh, and the public claiming of responsibility for these crimes by the 45th President of the United States and the Mossad, respectively. The current American Administration is just as owned by the Zionist monolith as the previous one. Is Iran simply going to sit by and allow its own destruction? Of course not. 

Thankfully Putin stands by as a faithful friend and ally, as he has been with Syria. The recent disappearance of Biden and NATO from a direct confrontation with Russia in the Donbass while using Zelensky as a laughable surrogate tiger in the region underscores that Iranian backbone with Russian back-up in a crisis would demonstrate that in a showdown, Biden would join Zelensky in a standup Comedy Club routine in Kyiv. The British HMS Defender flight from the Black Sea region near Crimea is another example of what happens when a bully gets its bluff called in someone else’s neighborhood. Hang tough in Tehran. 

Q: How do American-Zionist media shape the stereotypes in minds of the Western public?

A: The long-term strategy has always been to depict the United States and Israel as beacons of light in the midst of jihadic Islamic darkness and repression. This is becoming harder to sustain precisely because outlets like Press TV have daily exposed American and Israeli crimes in Gaza, Palestine, East Jerusalem, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Colombia among others. Even more significantly, the cost of these miserable efforts by the empire is bankrupting the United States economically and politically, and actually weakening an American military in terms of the latter’s overextension and wasteful spending on wars of occupation and counterinsurgency at the expense of modernization of weapons through research and procurement. As just one example, the Russian development and acquisition of hypersonic missiles have rendered the aircraft carrier-based power projection model of the United States Navy obsolete, at a small fraction of the cost. The balance of political and military forces is shifting against the United States and the West toward Russia and China to the benefit of Iran. This is why the Zio-American rhetorical hysteria toward all three is on the rapid increase. The anti-Press TV actions of the American government, along with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like, must be understood in this larger context. 

Q: How do you evaluate Raisi's victory in the Iranian presidential election? What are its implications for the West?

A: It is a positive development for Iran in that it shows the absolute failure of a Zionist-neo conservative foreign policy based on coercion and force, and what is possible when criminals are confronted with resolute resistance. What has been demonstrated by Assad in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Russian resolve against NATO threats and deployments, is being shown by Iran in this election of a so-called “hardliner” which is presumably defined as anyone who doesn’t lie down for Israeli-American-Saudi-UK destruction of Iran as a sovereign nation-state. 

Q: Do you think the Biden administration is ready to negotiate with the new Iranian administration?

A: No, not in good faith. Anthony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, and Victoria Nuland are the Zionist-Jewish trio in charge of Biden’s foreign policy team. The mere fact that Blinken has been insisting on the attachment of conditions to American re-entry into JCPOA illustrates the point. It has not yet dawned on the United States government and its Zionist media moguls that the failure of Biden to keep his campaign promises on JCPOA guaranteed the subsequent Iranian election results. This result was Iran’s best choice. Sadly, the Soleimani and Fakhrizadeh murders illustrate how little has changed in the American-Iranian relationship since Operation Ajax in 1953. But 1953 is not 2021. The shifting of the balance of power I spoke of earlier in this conversation illustrates this truth. And there is absolutely nothing the American empire and Israel can do about it, as both continue to move toward disappearance from history in the progression of the 21st century.