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Listen: MP3 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: The title of the program refers–once again–to the Nazi tract Serpent’s Walk.
In that book, the SS go underground in the aftermath of World War II, build up their economic muscle, buy into the opinion-forming media, infiltrate the American military, and–following a series of terrorist incidents in the U.S. which cause the declaration of martial law–take over the United States.
Central to this takeover is the use of the Nazi-controlled mainstream media to fundamentally revise history in a pro-Hitler fashion. Just such a revision is underway in Ukraine, with the heirs to the Third Reich-allied OUN/B characterized as “good guys” who share our values.
Fundamental to the points of argument presented here is the censorship of media both in Ukraine and around the world, including the U.S.
A new law passed by the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) bestows entitlements on surviving members of the OUN and its military wing, the UPA. Furthermore, the law makes it illegal to criticize those Third Reich allies for their activities on behalf of Nazi Germany–it is those activities that constituted Ukraine’s first drive for “independence.”
The Ukrainian Weekly–formerly edited by Michael Borciukiw (who heads the OSCE’s Special Study Mission to Ukraine)–is attacking artists and other public figures who are not supportive of the OUN/B heirs in Ukraine. “Buoyed by this success, the Ukrainian Weekly now has its sights set on two other Western concert performers deemed overly sympathetic to Russia. The ground war in Ukraine sputters on. The ideological purges here [in Canada] are just beginning.”
The Canadian government and higher educational institutions in that country are actively assisting the political rehabilitation of the 14th Waffen SS Division, reinventing them as “Freedom Fighters.”
In past discussion of Ukraine, we have noted not only the Orwellian nature of U.S. media coverage of the crisis, but the manifestation of the Serpent’s Walk scenario. Documented World War II history about the Eastern front and Ukrainian (and other Eastern European ethnic) SS units and their role fighting for the Third Reich and participating in Nazi atrocities is now being written off as “Russian/Kremlin propaganda.”
Furthermore, anyone who dares to discuss this and its relevance to the OUN/B heirs installed by the Maidan coup is labeled as, at best, a “dupe” or, at worst, an agent of an enemy propaganda machine.
Now, things have disintegrated still further. There is a cyber warfare/cyber propaganda offensive underway by Ukraine and its NATO allies, apparently being spearheaded by a U.S. Special Forces and cyber-warfare vet named Joel Harding.
Tragically, Harding seems to have had a pretty realistic grasp of American political and rhetorical reality (see below) as recently as 2012, if we can judge by his pronouncements. Now, however, he castigates critics of U.S. and Western support for the OUN/B heirs dominating Ukraine in the strongest terms.
We also wonder if recent difficulties experienced by Robert Parry’s Consortium News website have anything to do with the substance of George Eliason’s allegations? We have used numerous articles from that website on the subject of Ukraine.
In that same vein, a frightening article in The Nation discusses the development of a neo-McCarthyism in American journalism as a result of the coverage of the Ukraine crisis. Will be accompanied by actual physical violence against critics of U.S. and Western Ukraine policy?
Exemplifying the Serpent’s Walk scenario vis a vis Ukraine is one Vita Zaverukha.
The Western media’s orgiastic fawning over the fascists who have been installed in Ukraine is reaching new heights, or depths, depending on one’s perspective. Seeking to mint heroes (and heroines) from the ranks of the OUN/B heirs governing Ukraine, the French edition of Elle magazine anointed one Vita Zaverukha as Ukraine’s version of Joan of Arc. One of the combatants grouped in the “punisher battalions,” Zaverukha is actually a Nazi, recently arrested for her role in robbing a gas station, a crime in which two Ukrainian policemen were killed.
The other members of the gang to which Zaverukha belongs are also members of Nazi punisher battalions.
Zaverukha’s status as a “heroine” impeded her arrest, despite the fact that she and her Nazi comrades had “long terrorized the city [Kiev–capital of Ukraine].” She also appears to have been one of the participants in the attack on The Odessa House of Trade Unions, in which 46 people were burned alive, while “Sveta” (as she calls herself) and her Nazi comrades voiced celebratory chants.
It is impossible within the scope of this post to cover our voluminous coverage of the Ukraine crisis. Previous programs on the subject are: FTR #‘s 777, 778, 779, 780, 781, 782, 783, 784, 794, 800, 803, 804, 808, 811, 817, 818, 824, 826, 829, 832, 833, 837.
Program Highlights Include:
- Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has proposed eliminating anonymity with regard to internet comments as a result of “Russian trolls.”
- Analysis by Robert Parry of an Australian “documentary” that purports to show that Russian-backed separatists shot down MH 17, using obviously doctored information.
- Canadian government and educational institutions supporting the political rehabilitation of the 14th Waffen SS Division.
1. In Canada, governmental and higher educational institutions are assisting the resuscitation of the 14th Waffen SS Division into “freedom fighters.”
“The Waffen-SS as Freedom Fighters” by Per Anders Rudling; The Algemeiner; 1/31/2012.
. . . . Outside of Europe, Waffen–SS veterans have been more successful in gaining acceptance for their own narrative. In Canada, government authorities, in the name of multiculturalism have agreed to share the construction cost for monuments with the association of the Ukrainian veterans of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian), better known at the Waffen–SS Galizien. Public institutions of higher education institute endowments in the honor of Ukrainian Waffen–SS volunteers. [!] . . .
2. A new law passed by the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) bestows entitlements on surviving members of the OUN and its military wing, the UPA. Furthermore, the law makes it illegal to criticize those Third Reich allies in their activities on behalf of Nazi Germany–it is those activities that constituted Ukraine’s drive for “independence.”
“The state acknowledges that the fighters for Ukraine’s independence played an important role in reinstating the country’s statehood declared on Aug. 24, 1991,” the law runs.
In compliance with the law, the government will provide social guarantees and bestow honors on OUN-UPA fighters.
“Public denunciation of the role of OUN-UPA in restoring the independence of Ukraine is illegal,” the law says.
3. More about the new law in Ukraine aimed at eliminating references to Ukraine’s Soviet past appears poised to censor criticism of the OUN/B and its military wing the UPA.
. . . . “Even if the state won’t be interested in persecuting Ukraine’s marginal, weak leftist organizations, the far right will likely use this law … to harass politicians and also scholars on the basis that they are not critical enough of the Soviet Union or are over-critical of Ukrainian nationalists,” Volodymyr Ishchenko, deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research and a member of the editorial board of the progressive journal Commons, told The Nation.
Meanwhile, another law passed last Thursday recognizes as independence fighters a controversial nationalist group accused of ethnic cleansing and collaboration with the Nazis.
The new laws would likely tap into widespread anger with Russia, which has backed a separatist campaign in eastern Ukraine. But they would also further provoke tensions within Ukrainian society, which has been fractured by a pro-Russian separatist campaign that enjoys popular support in eastern Ukraine. A peace plan sponsored by France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia foresees constitutional reforms giving the rebel-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine greater autonomy.
The anti-totalitarian law is less wide-reaching than a bill introduced last year that proposed banning “communist ideology,” and it’s hard to disagree with its condemnation of the repressions conducted under the Soviet regime. But it also would give the authorities the power to shut down any organization that makes even oblique reference to the communist tradition. . . .
“The legislation bans citations of Lenin, which means that we’ll need to destroy half of our academic works, it bans all communist symbols, which means a war veteran will forbidden from wearing the Red Star medal he shed his blood for,” said Pyotr Simonenko, the leader of Ukraine’s communist party, which will have to change its name. “All this is a path to an even bigger schism in Ukrainian society and a continuation of war.”
Even though the Ukrainian group Left Opposition has criticized the communist party for its defense of Vladimir Putin’s “conservative and imperialistic policies,” it also condemned the law, noting that it had been found to be overly harsh by the Ukrainian parliament’s own research department. In an analysis, the group argued that since the law forbids not only propaganda but also “information justifying the criminal character of the communist regime,” almost anyone can be accused.
“This document will strike a blow to academic discussions, create an instrument for repression, and hinder the struggle against oligarchy and the creation of a real left alternative,” it wrote.
Bill sponsor Yury Lutsenko, a former internal affairs minister who was imprisoned under former president Viktor Yanukovych, argued that the legislation “doesn’t ban ideology, because that’s not acceptable in any democratic country.”
“This legislation bans a totalitarian regime under whatever colors it uses, fascist, communist, any others,” he told journalists.
But the law is not so much anti-totalitarian as it is anti-Russian, and its content dwells more on communism than Nazism. Its sponsors pointedly pushed it through before the celebration on May 9 of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The St. George ribbon commemorating the Soviet victory has become a de-facto symbol for the pro-Russian campaign in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin and the rebels have described as a similar struggle against fascism.
...
Other eastern bloc countries that left Russia’s orbit after the breakup of the Soviet Union, in particular Poland and the Baltics, passed similar anti-communist laws. But Ishchenko, who is working on an analysis of these laws, said the Ukrainian legislation is “far more repressive than laws in other European countries.” In particular, he said it limits academic research by stipulating that you can cite symbols or propaganda of a communist regime only if you’re not legitimizing it.
The legislation could also encourage far-right groups in their conflicts with leftist activists. . . .
. . . . Perversely, the anti-totalitarian law reportedly softens regulations on pro-Nazi speech in one case: A section of article 436 of the criminal cade, which forbids “denying or justifying” the crimes of fascism, the Waffen-SS or those who “cooperated with the fascist occupants,” has been removed, leaving only a ban on using “symbols of the Nazi totalitarian regime.”
While it’s not clear why this article was changed, it could be seen to benefit some nationalist organizations. Notably, the pro-Kiev Azov volunteer battalion fighting in eastern Ukraine, many of whose members have expressed neo-Nazi views, uses the wolfsangel symbol that was also employed by a Waffen-SS tank division. And one of the troubling legacies of today’s Ukrainian nationalists is that members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, their ideological predecessor, have been accused of collaborating with the Nazis.
Another law passed last Thursday declared fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and others to be “members of the struggle for Ukraine’s independence.” While the law would mainly entitle nationalist fighters to more government benefits, it also helps more firmly establish their reputation as heroes of the state, despite the fact that nationalists also reportedly orchestrated ethnic cleansing that killed thousands of Poles and Jews during the war years.
David Marples, a history professor specializing in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine at the University of Alberta, called the law a “crude distortion of the past” that lumps controversial nationalist organizations like the UPA together with less ruthless ones, lending credence to Kremlin claims that the Kiev government is run by nationalists.
“Presumably now historians can be arrested for denying the heroism of [nationalist] Stepan Bandera or the father of the introducer of the bill, [UPA leader] Roman Shukheyvch,” Marples wrote in a blog post. “Russian trolls operating on social networks, very prominently featured in Western media over the past week, have now acquired new and authentic ammunition for their verbal arsenals.” . . . .
4. Next, the program presents analysis by Robert Parry of an Australian “documentary” that purports to show that Russian-backed separatists shot down MH 17, using obviously doctored information.
“A Reckless ‘Stand-Upper’ on MH17” by Robert Parry; Consortium News; 5/28/2015.
Exclusive: Australia’s “60 Minutes” claimed to do an investigative report proving the anti-aircraft battery that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 last July fled into Russia and pinning the atrocity on Russian President Putin. But the news show did a meaningless “stand-upper,” not an investigation, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
In TV journalism, there’s a difference between doing a “stand-upper” and doing an investigative report, although apparently Australia’s “60 Minutes” doesn’t understand the distinction. A “stand-upper” is the TV practice of rushing a correspondent to a scene to read some prepared script or state some preordained conclusion. An investigation calls for checking out facts and testing out assumptions.
That investigative component is especially important if you’re preparing to accuse someone of a heinous crime, say, mass murder, even if the accused is a demonized figure like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Such charges should not be cast about casually. Indeed, it is the job of journalists to show skepticism in the face of these sorts of accusations. In the case of Russia, there’s the other possible complication that biased journalism and over-the-top propaganda could contribute to a nuclear showdown.
We are still living with the catastrophe of the mainstream media going with the flow of false claims about Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now many of the same media outlets are parroting similar propaganda aimed at Russia without demonstrating independence and asking tough questions – although the consequences now could be even more catastrophic.
That is the context of my criticism of Australia’s “60 Minutes” handling of the key video evidence supposedly implicating Russia and Putin in the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. It is apparent from the show’s original, much-hyped presentation and a three-minute-plus follow-up that the show and its correspondent Michael Usher failed to check out the facts surrounding an amateur video allegedly showing a BUK anti-aircraft missile battery – missing one missile – after the MH-17 shoot-down.
In the days following that tragedy, killing 298 people, Ukrainian government officials promoted the video on social media as supposedly showing the BUK battery making its getaway past a billboard in Krasnodon, a town southeast of Luhansk, allegedly en route toward Russia. That claim primarily came from Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, considered one of the regime’s most right-wing figures who rose to power after a U.S.-back coup in February 2014.
From a journalistic standpoint, Avakov and the other Kiev authorities should have been considered biased observers. Indeed, they were among the possible suspects for the shoot-down. Moreover, the Russian government placed the video’s billboard in the town of Krasnoarmiis’k, northwest of Donetsk and then under Ukrainian government control. To support that claim, the Russians cited a local address on the billboard. . .
. . . .In the initial program, you see the “60 Minutes” team doing exactly that on some videos of lesser significance by superimposing some of its own shots over amateur footage. However, when it came to the key piece of evidence – the “getaway” video – the program deviated from that pattern. Instead of matching anything up, Usher just did a “stand-upper” in front of one of the billboards.
Usher boldly accused the Russians of lying about the location of the billboard and asserted that he and his team had found the real location. Usher gestured to the billboards on the intersection in rebel-controlled Luhansk. He then accused Putin of responsibility for the 298 deaths.
But none of Usher’s images matched up with the “getaway” video. The scene in the video was clearly different from the scene shown by Usher. After several people sent me the segment on Australia’s “60 Minutes,” I watched it and wrote an article noting the obvious problems in the scene as presented.
My point was not to say where the video was shot. As far as I know, it might even have been shot in Luhansk. My point was that Usher and his team had failed to do their investigative duty to verify the location as precisely as possible. Under principles of English-based law — and of Western journalism — there is a presumption of innocence until sufficiently corroborated evidence is presented. The burden of proof rests on the prosecutors or, in this case, the journalists. It’s not enough to guess at these things.
But Usher and his team treated their job like they were just doing a “stand-upper” – putting Usher in front of some billboards in Luhansk to deliver his conclusions (or those of Higgins) – not as an investigative assignment, which would have skeptically examined the assumptions behind citing that location as the scene in the video.
Usher offered no details about how he and his team had reached their conclusion on where the video was shot beyond referencing their meetings with blogger Higgins, who operates out of a house in Leicester, England.
Though there was no dispute that the images of the “getaway” video and Usher’s “stand-upper” didn’t match, an irate “60 Minutes” producer released a statement denouncing me and defending the show. The statement did, however, acknowledge that the team had not tried to replicate the scene in the “getaway” video, saying:
“We opted to do our piece to camera as a wide shot showing the whole road system so the audience could get the layout and see which way the Buk was heading. The background in our piece to camera looks different to the original Buk video simply because it was shot from a different angle. The original video was obviously shot from one of the apartments behind, through the trees — which in in summer were in full leaf.”
Those claims, however, were more excuses than real arguments. The wide shot did nothing to help Australian viewers get a meaningful sense of the “layout” in Luhansk. There was also no map or other graphic that could have shown where the apartments were and how that would have explained the dramatic discrepancies between the “getaway” video and the “wide shot.”
After the public statement, there were other rumblings that I would be further put down in a follow-up that “60 Minutes” was preparing. I thought the update might present out-takes of the crew seeking access to the apartments or at least lining up a shot from that angle as best they could – you know, investigative stuff.
Instead, when the update aired, it consisted of more insults – references to “Kremlin stooges” and “Russian puppets” – and a reprise of earlier parts of the program that I had not disputed. When the update finally got to the key “getaway” scene, Usher went into full bluster mode but again failed to present any serious evidence that his crew had matched up anything from the original video to what was found in Luhansk.
First, Usher pulled a sleight of hand by showing a traffic-camera shot of the intersection apparently supplied by Higgins and then matching up those landmarks to show that the crew had found the same intersection. But that is irrelevant to the question of whether the “getaway” video was taken in that intersection. In other words, Usher was trying to fool his audience by mixing together two different issues.
Sure, Usher and his team had found the intersection picked out by Higgins as the possible scene, but so what? The challenge was to match up landmarks from the “getaway” video to that intersection. On that point, Usher cited only one item, a non-descript utility pole that Usher claimed looked like a utility pole in the “getaway” video.
However, the problems with that claim were multiple. First, utility poles tend to look alike and these two appear to have some differences though it’s hard to tell from the grainy “getaway” video. But what’s not hard to tell is that the surroundings are almost entirely different. The pole in the “getaway” video has a great deal of vegetation to its right while Usher’s pole doesn’t.
And then there’s the case of the missing house. The one notable landmark in that section of the “getaway” video is a house to the pole’s left. That house does not appear in Usher’s video, although “60 Minutes” partially obscured the spot where the house should be by inserting an inset, thus adding to a viewer’s confusion.
Yet, one has to think that if Usher’s crew had found the house – or for that matter, anything besides a utility pole that looked like something from the video – they would have highlighted it.
Some of the show’s defenders are now saying that the pole was shot from a different angle, too, so it’s not fair for me to say it doesn’t line up. But, again, that’s not the point. It’s “60 Minutes” that is making an accusation of mass murder, so it has the responsibility to present meaningful evidence to support that charge. It can’t start whining because someone notes that its evidence is faulty or non-existent.
So, here’s the problem: As angry as “60 Minutes” is with me for noting the flaws in its report, it was Usher’s job to check out whether the “getaway” video matched with the intersection identified by Higgins as the possible scene in Luhansk. Based on what was shown in the first show and then in the update, Usher’s team failed miserably. . . .
5. The Western media’s orgiastic fawning over the fascists who have been installed in Ukraine is reaching new heights, or depths, depending on one’s perspective. Seeking to mint heroes (and heroines) from the ranks of the OUN/B heirs governing Ukraine, the French edition of “Elle” magazine anointed one Vita Zaverukha as Ukraine’s version of Joan of Arc. One of the combatants grouped in the “punisher battalions,” Zaverukha is actually a Nazi, recently arrested for her role in robbing a gas station, a crime in which two Ukrainian policemen were killed.
The other members of the gang to which Zaverukha belongs are also members of Nazi punisher battalions.
Zaverukha’s status as a “heroine” impeded her arrest, despite the fact that she and her Nazi comrades had “long terrorized the city [Kiev–capital of Ukraine].” She also appears to have been one of the participants in the attack on The Odessa House of Trade Unions, in which 46 people were burned alive, while “Sveta” (as she calls herself) and her Nazi comrades voiced celebratory chants.
They just aren’t making those saints like they used to.
This brings to mind Gandhi’s response when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”
Good grief, Charley Brown!
A neo-Nazi portrayed as Ukraine’s version of Joan of Arc by French fashion magazine Elle for her ‘brave’ fight against the Russian separatists has been arrested in connection with the deaths of two policemen.Vita Zaverukha was taken into custody after two officers were killed and three more injured on May 4, following a gang’s failed attempt to rob a petrol station in the capital Kiev.
The gang, who all have links to the far-right in Ukraine, and allegedly were involved in a shoot out as they tried to flee the scene.
At first glance, it seems shocking that this slight, blonde teenager could be involved at all.
But Vita, 19, is charged with ‘an attempt on an officer of the law’, reported news outlets in Moscow — and a quick search reveals she is an active promoter and supporter of vile neo-Nazi ideals.
What’s more, she is also suspected of being linked to an attack on a traffic police post in Bykovnya two days beforehand, and it is also claimed she participated in bloody attacks on the Odessa House of Trade Unions in May last year in which 46 perished and 200 were injured.
Yet just six months ago, Elle magazine’s French edition was portraying her as a Joan of Arc-type figure, bravely defending her home from Russian separatists — taken in, it seems, by her innocent appearance.
...
But the magazine’s mistake was quickly picked up: Vita is a well-known member of the Aidar Battalion, which last September was slammed by Amnesty International for its campaign of terror through the war-torn Luhansk region.
Among the 400-strong volunteer unit’s alleged crimes were abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.
The battalion is known for its links to the far-right, and members have previously been pictured with Nazi insignia.
But it is Vita’s VK page — the Russian equivalent of Facebook — which provide unequivocal evidence of her own extreme views.
Pictures of the blonde teenager performing the Nazi salute, posing in a t‑shirt covered in the fascists’ emblem and even decorating her tent with a colourful swastika populate the page, while pictures she shares include things like ‘Ukraine with Yids’.
What Vita — who says she is ‘Aidar from the beginning’ and will continue to be so — writes on the page makes her vile views even more startling obvious.
‘I promote Nazism, terror, genocide,’ she wrote in December last year. ‘For all this, I’m not a bad person. The justification is the “War for Peace”. If you go bringing the work to the end, only in this case, justify my actions would not. Winners are not judged.’
. . . .Ekaterina Roshuk, former Managing Director at The Kyiv Times, claimed she had ‘long ‘terrorised’ the city, with no one able to do anything about her.
’The police were afraid to touch a hero of the Anti-Terrorist Operation, which in turn was used as license to engage in lawlessness.’ . . .
. . . . Vesti reported that Vita’s four male accomplices were members of volunteer battalions fighting in country’s eastern conflict zone.
They were named as Vadim Pinus, 23, a decorated Azov Battalion fighter who was killed in the shootout with police, Evgeniy Koshelyuk, 20, sniper Andrei Romanyuk, 17, and Nikolai Monishenko, 17. . . .
6. The Ukrainian Weekly–formerly edited by Michael Borciukiw (who heads the OSCE’s Special Study Mission to Ukraine)–is attacking artists and other public figures who are not supportive of the OUN/B heirs in Ukraine. “Buoyed by this success, the Ukrainian Weekly now has its sights set on two other Western concert performers deemed overly sympathetic to Russia. The ground war in Ukraine sputters on. The ideological purges here [in Canada] are just beginning”:
Surely it is enough that Canadian politicians have taken sides in Ukraine’s bitter conflict.
All three major parties in Parliament agree that Ukraine’s central government in Kyiv is heroic and that eastern rebels battling it are mere cats-paws of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Must we now punish any piano player who dares to dissent?
Apparently, the management of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra thinks we should. It has cancelled two performances this week by U.S. pianist Valentina Lisitsa, simply because it doesn’t like her position on Ukraine.
Symphony managers apparently didn’t realize that Kyiv-born Lisitsa has definite views on political developments in her native Ukraine.
Nor did they seem to realize that the politically powerful Ukrainian-Canadian establishment finds these views outrageous.
. . . . In a Facebook posting this week, Lisitsa describes herself as someone who initially supported last year’s revolution in Kyiv, saying she hoped the so-called Maidan movement would rid Ukraine of its corrupt, oligarchic ruling class.
But, she writes, she soon became disillusioned when the same oligarchs commandeered the revolution and, in her words, started to turn Ukrainians against one another.
Her critics, of which there are many, say she never supported an independent Ukraine and has always been a Russian stooge.
To supporters of the Ukrainian central government, however, she was an abomination. . . .
. . . . The Ukrainian Weekly was also outraged when, in another tweet, she referred to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as “cluster-bomber in chief.” And the publication was beside itself when she reprinted a cartoon depicting the Western media’s coverage of Ukraine as a daisy chain of individuals with their heads up one another’s rectums.
Critics also objected to a tweet regarding a battle in Eastern Ukraine in which she wrote “Kiev kills scores of civilians.” And they attacked her for observing that some who support Ukraine’s central government are neo-Nazis.
In retaliation, supporters of the Ukrainian government picketed her appearance last fall at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Hall. They carried signs suggesting she was a Nazi and calling her racist.
...
Buoyed by this success, the Ukrainian Weekly now has its sights set on two other Western concert performers deemed overly sympathetic to Russia. The ground war in Ukraine sputters on. The ideological purges here are just beginning.
7. In past discussion of Ukraine, we have noted not only the Orwellian nature of U.S. media coverage of the crisis, but the manifestation of the Serpent’s Walk scenario. Documented World War II history about the Eastern front and Ukrainian (and other Eastern European ethnic) SS units and their role fighting for the Third Reich and participating in Nazi atrocities is now being written off as “Russian/Kremlin propaganda.”
Furthermore, anyone who dares to discuss this and its relevance to the OUN/B heirs installed by the Maidan coup is labeled as, at best, a “dupe” or, at worst, an agent of an enemy propaganda machine.
Now, things have disintegrated still further. There is a cyber warfare/cyber propaganda offensive underway by Ukraine and its NATO allies, apparently being spearheaded by a U.S. Special Forces and cyber-warfare vet named Joel Harding.
Tragically, Harding seems to have had a pretty realistic grasp of American political and rhetorical reality as recently as 2012, if we can judge by his pronouncements. Now, however, he castigates critics of U.S. and Western support for the OUN/B heirs dominating Ukraine in the strongest terms.
Harding also appears to be directing active interdiction and propaganda efforts against those critics, who face something that might be called “cyber-McCarthyism.”
We also wonder if recent difficulties experienced by Robert Parry’s Consortium News website has anything to do with the substance of George Eliason’s allegations? We have used numerous articles from that website on the subject of Ukraine.
We note in passing that we view with a jaundiced eye the overwhelming majority of the websites and individuals cited as targets of the Harding information warfare effort by George Eliason. We also remind the casual reader that we are very supportive of the NSA and GCHQ in “L’Affaire Snowden.” We also believe that the Underground Reich attack on NSA/GCHQ and its attack on Russia/Eastern Ukraine are part of the same “mega-op.” We MIGHT be the only folks on earth who are very supportive of both Russia vis a vis Ukraine and NSA/GCHQ vis a vis Snowden/WikiLeaks.
Nonetheless, we feel that the implications of this story are sinister.
If you are a journalist writing about or a person concerned about issues like Free Speech, read or write in alternative media or news, Occupy movement, Ferguson, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, police brutality, US interventionism, fair government, homelessness, keeping the government accountable, representative government, government intrusions like the NSA is doing, or you are liberal, progressive, libertarian, conservative, separation of church and state, religion, …
If you have a website, write, read, or like something in social media that strays outside the new lines the war isn’t coming, it’s now here.
What would we do? Disrupt, deny, degrade, deceive, corrupt, usurp or destroy the information. The information, please don’t forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber. That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary’s leader who is the ultimate target.”- Joel Harding on Ukraine’s cyber strategy
Welcome to World of Private Sector IO (Information Operations)
IO or IIO (Inform and Influence Operations) defined by the US Army includes the fields of psychological operations and military deception.
In military IIO operations center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.
The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audience’s emotions, motives, and reasoning.
These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.
Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill informed, or irrelevant.
Meet Joel Harding-Ukraine’s King Troll
According to his own bio- Joel spent 26 years in the Army; his first nine years were spent as an enlisted soldier, mostly in Special Forces, as a SF qualified communicator and medic, on an A Team. After completing his degree, Joel then received his commission as an Infantry Officer and after four years transitioned to the Military Intelligence Corps. In the mid 1990s Joel was working in the Joint Staff J2 in support of special operations, where he began working in the new field called Information Operations. Eligible Receiver 1997 was his trial by fire, after that he became the Joint Staff J2 liaison for IO to the CIA, DIA, NSA, DISA and other assorted agencies in the Washington DC area, working as the intelligence lead on the Joint Staff IO Response Cell for Solar Sunrise and Moonlight Maze. Joel followed this by a tour at SOCCENT and then INSCOM, working in both IO and intelligence. Joel retired from the Army in 2003, working for various large defense contractors until accepting the position with the Association of Old Crows.
According to TechRepublic -The career of Joel Harding, the director of the group’s (Old Crows) Information Operations Institute, exemplifies the increasing role that computing and the Internet are playing in the military. A 20-year veteran of military intelligence, Mr. Harding shifted in 1996 into one of the earliest commands that studied government-sponsored computer hacker programs. After leaving the military, he took a job as an analyst at SAIC, a large contractor developing computer applications for military and intelligence agencies.
Joel Harding established the Information Operations Institute shortly after joining the Institute at the Association of Old Crows; he then procured the rights to InfowarCon and stood it up in 2009. Joel is an editor of “The IO Journal”, the premier publication in the field of IO. Joel formed an IO advisory committee, consisting of the 20 key leaders from Us and UK corporate, government, military and academia IO. Joel wrote the white paper for IO which was used as background paper for US Office of the Secretary of Defense’s QDR IO subcommittee.
For ten years the Association of Old Crows has been the Electronic Warfare and Information Operations Association, but there has been no concerted effort to rally the IO Community. This has changed, the IO Institute was approved as a Special Interest Group of the AOC in 2008 and we have already become a major player in the IO Community. This is especially important with the recent formation of the US Cyber Command, with the new definition of Information Operations coming out of the Quadrennial Defense Review, with a new perspective of Electronic Warfare and a myriad of other changes. The IO Institute brings you events, most notably InfowarCom. Our flagship publication is the IO Journal, already assigned reading by at least two military IO educational programs. IO classes are integrated with Electronic Warfare classes to educate, satisfy requirements and enable contractors to be more competitive.
When you look at the beginning of the NSA’s intrusive policies you find Joel Harding. Harding helped pioneer the invasive software used by government and business to explore your social networks, influence you, and dig out every personal detail. In Operation Eligible Receiver 1997 he used freeware taken from the internet to invade the DoD computers, utilities, and more. It’s because most of it is based in “freeware” that NSA snooping has a legal basis. If you can get the software for freeand use it, why can’t the government use it on you?
Ukraine-Bringing it into Focus
Looking back at Joel Harding in 2012 seems like a different man. This is the same accomplished professional described above before Maidan. Here’s how he describes the Russian, Chinese, and American experience before his involvement in Ukraine.
…These experiences, and the fact that I spent nine years in Special Forces and that kind of thing, caused me to think. Then I began to wonder. How much of what we read and what we see is propaganda? Not foreign propaganda, but domestic? How much of that domestic ‘information’ is propaganda? …We are being smothered in one lie after another. All in the name of politics. It seems to me that these politicians are almost complacent with us behaving like suckling pigs, absolute ignorant morons…Free, unfettered, uncensored information exposes the lies their governments prefer to feed them, allowing their citizens to know and understand the truth. Authoritarians, like dictators, communists, fascists and many sectarian or religious governments, are said to enhance their authority over their citizens with the use of filters.”
So I ask you, do you see more lies and propaganda here than I saw in China or Russia? I would say it depends on your perspective. I see more lies aimed at us from our own politicians than I have ever seen anyplace else in the world… you tell me. Are Americans more susceptible to propaganda?-Harding
Joel Harding has quite a different opinion in 2014 after taking control of Information Operations (IO) in Ukraine.
Part of USIA formed what is now called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the BBG, who oversee VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, MEBN, Radio Marti and other international broadcasting bureaus – their mission is to broadcast “fair and objective” reporting to what I called ‘denied areas’, such as Russia – Harding
Ukraine
Febuary 22nd 2014 marks Harding’s first involvement in the Ukrainian crisis. “Yesterday I agreed to help present the information of this situation, bringing in representatives from many of the sources cited above. It is time International Broadcasting is examined.”- Harding
On February 28th 2014 he was announced director of the NSE Strategy Center. Harding reached out immediately to the IO community to see what information anyone had on current Russian cyberspace operations. On March 1st 2014 Harding announced cyber options for Ukraine. . . .
8. A proposal to subject American publications to a kind of neo-McCarthyism is discussed in a Nation magazine piece. This would seem to indicate that Eliason’s concerns are warranted.
“Neo-McCarthyism and the US Media” by James Carden ; The Nation; 6/08/2015.
The crusade to ban Russia policy critics
As a result of the civil war that has raged in Ukraine since April 2014, at least 7,000 people have been killed and more than 15,400 wounded, many of them grievously. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 1.2 million eastern Ukrainians have been internally displaced, while the number of those who have fled abroad, mainly to Russia and Belarus, has reached 674,300. Further, the United Nations has reported that millions of people, particularly the elderly and the very young, are facing life-threatening conditions as a result of the conflict. Large parts of eastern Ukraine lie in ruins, and relations between the United States and Russia have perhaps reached their most dangerous point since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
And yet a special report published last fall by the online magazine the Interpreter would have us believe that Russian “disinformation” ranks among the gravest threats to the West. The report, titled “The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money,” is a joint project of the Interpreter and the Institute for Modern Russia (IMR), a Manhattan-based think tank funded by the exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Cowritten by the journalists Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev, this highly polemical manifesto makes the case for why the United States, and the West generally, must combat what the authors allege to be the Kremlin’s extravagantly designed propaganda campaign. If implemented, the measures they propose would stifle democratic debate in the Western media.
The report seeks to awaken a purportedly somnolent American public to the danger posed by the Kremlin’s media apparatus. According to Weiss and Pomerantsev, the Russian government—via RT, the Kremlin-funded international television outlet, as well as a network of “expatriate NGOs” and “far-left and far-right movements”—is creating an “anti-Western, authoritarian Internationale that is becoming ever more popular…throughout the world.”
While it would be easy to dismiss the report as a publicity stunt by two journalists attempting to cash in on the Russophobia so in vogue among American pundits, their thesis has gained wide acceptance, nowhere more so than in the halls of Congress. On April 15, Pomerantsev testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee on the supposed threat posed by “Russia’s weaponization of information.” Committee chair Ed Royce and ranking member Eliot Engel are now expected to reintroduce a 2014 bill to reform the Voice of America, which fell into disarray following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his opening statements at the hearing, Royce argued that the bill “will help us fight Putin’s propaganda,” though some critics believe it would turn the federal government’s international broadcasting service into “something fundamentally not American.”
Who Are These Guys?
Weiss and Pomerantsev are an unlikely pair. Weiss, youthful yet professorial in manner, has become a nearly constant presence on cable news because of his supposed expertise on, among other things, Russia, Syria, and ISIS. A longtime neoconservative journalist, he began his rise to cable-news ubiquity as a protégé of the late Christopher Hitchens. After working with Hitchens, he made his way to the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a London-based bastion of neoconservatism that, according to a report in The Guardian, has “attracted controversy in recent years—with key staff criticised in the past for allegedly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant comments.”
The historian Marko Attila Hoare, who resigned in protest from the HJS in 2012, has written that the organization publishes “polemical and superficial pieces by aspiring journalists and pundits that pander to a narrow readership of extreme Europhobic British Tories, hardline US Republicans and Israeli Likudniks.” According to Hoare, Weiss reinvented himself at the HJS “as an expert on Russia—about which he has no more academic expertise than he does about the Middle East.” Weiss served as HJS communications director before moving on to found the Interpreter under the auspices of the US-based IMR in 2013. Solidifying his mainstream-media credentials, he will join the Daily Beast as a senior editor on June 1.
Where Weiss’s moderate demeanor belies a deep commitment to neoconservative ideology, Pomerantsev exudes a kind of louche nonchalance. A British citizen of Russian extraction, this rumpled television producer has parlayed his career in the less-than-reputable districts of the Russian media landscape into a role as a kind of latter-day Cassandra, sounding a clarion call about the danger that Russian state propaganda poses to the West.
An assiduous self-promoter, Pomerantsev chronicled his journey into the belly of the Russian media beast in a recent book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. A launch party in early 2015 at the Legatum Institute, a London-based research organization with close links to the IMR, offered a glimpse of the esteem that Pomerantsev enjoys. At the event, the American director of the institute’s Transitions Forum,Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, told the audience that she believes his book is “an extraordinary achievement.”
Pomerantsev, it turns out, is an experienced lobbyist too. In his book he recalls visiting the British Parliament in 2013 to make the case for “why Europe needs a Magnitsky Act.” The original version of the bill, pushed by British hedge-fund magnate Bill Browder and passed by the US Congress in 2012, imposed bans on a group of Russian officials deemed responsible for the prison death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. This in itself is notable, since Browder was an enthusiastic supporter of Vladimir Putin’s decision to jail Khodorkovsky in 2003.
Like Weiss, Pomerantsev has become a frequent presence in the US media. He appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times last December to inform readers that at the core of the Kremlin’s information strategy is “the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth.” Two months later, he was the subject of a fawning Times profile in which he described his book as being “about the Faustian bargain made by an ambitious youngster working in Russia’s medialand of opportunity.” In joining forces with the editor of a Khodorkovsky-funded webzine, he seems to have traded one Faustian bargain for another.
Because of his decade-long imprisonment, Khodorkovsky has attained the stature of a secular saint in some circles. But it should not be forgotten that the oil tycoon made his fortune in a spectacularly corrupt and sometimes violent fashion. Indeed, in 2000, Foreign Affairs described him and his fellow oligarchs as “a dangerous posse of plutocrats” who “threaten Russia’s transition to democracy and free markets” as well as “vital US interests.”
According to a recent profile of Khodorkovsky in The New Yorker, staff members of a Riga-based news outlet in which he planned to invest objected. “He’s a toxic investor,” said a person “close to the project.” The article added that “his views of journalists haven’t changed much since the nineties, when reporters could be bought and sold, and ‘hit’ pieces could be ginned up for the right price.” Khodorkovsky’s agenda—to bring regime change to Russia—is faithfully reflected in the work of IMR, the Interpreter, and the “Menace of Unreality” report.
With the report’s publication, Weiss and Pomerantsev have joined the long line of Western journalists who have played to the public’s darkest suspicions about the power, intentions, and reach of those governments that are perceived as threats to the United States. In his seminal essay on McCarthyism, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that in the worldview of these opportunists, “very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing).” There exists no better précis of Weiss and Pomerantsev’s view of Putin and the Russian government’s media apparatus.
The report asserts that Putin’s Russia is “arguably more dangerous than a communist superpower.” Any effective response to the virus of Russian propaganda, Weiss insists, must combine “the wisdom of Orwell…with the savvy of Don Draper.” Readers will certainly cede that the duo has led by example, since the report and its set of “modest recommendations” are nothing if not Orwellian.
The authors call for the creation of an “internationally recognized ratings system for disinformation” that would furnish news organizations and bloggers with the “analytical tools with which to define forms of communication.” While they throw in an obligatory caveat that “top-down censorship should be avoided” (exactly how is left unexplained), they nonetheless endorse what amounts to a media blacklist. “Vigorous debate and disagreement is of course to be encouraged,” the authors write, “but media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community.”
What qualifies as “conscious deception” is also left undefined, but it isn’t difficult to surmise. Organizations that do not share the authors’ enthusiasm for regime change in Syria or war with Russia over Ukraine would almost certainly be “excluded from the community.” Weiss, for instance, has asserted repeatedly that Russia is to blame for the July 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. But would a news organization like, say, The Atlantic or Der Spiegel be “excluded from the community” for writing about a German intelligence report that indicated the missile in question did not come from Russia? Would journalists like Robert Parry be blacklisted for questioning the mainstream account of the tragedy? Would scholars like the University of Ottawa’s Paul Robinson be banned from appearing on op-ed pages and cable-news programs for challenging the notion that there is, in the words of Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, “no civil war in Ukraine,” but rather a war “started and waged by Russia”?
Weiss and Pomerantsev accuse the Kremlin of “making deception equivalent to argumentation and the deliberate misuse of facts as legitimate as rational persuasion.” Maybe so. But these tactics are hardly unique to the Kremlin. In December, a group of Kiev parliamentarians presented photographs to the Senate Armed Services Committee purporting to show Russian troops and tanks invading eastern Ukraine. Subsequent reports revealed that the images had been taken during the Russian-Georgian war in 2008. Did the Interpreter denounce the Ukrainian delegation for trying to pass off doctored photos? No. Its warnings about disinformation cut only one way.
So do its oft-expressed concerns about transparency. Time and again, the authors call on pundits and think tanks to be more transparent with regard to their affiliations, financial interests, and funding. But the Interpreter doesn’t necessarily practice what it so ardently preaches. In addition to the support provided by Khodorkovsky, the publication identifies its other initial source of funding as the Herzen Foundation of London. Weiss responded to a query asking about the provenance of the foundation by admitting, “I don’t know Herzen’s current organizational status, board of directors, etc. You are most welcome to inquire with the Charities Aid Foundation in the UK.” Multiple requests to the Charities Aid Foundation, with which Herzen had claimed to be registered, have all gone unanswered. Indeed, there is no evidence Herzen exists.
The authors believe active measures must be taken to shield gullible Americans from the depredations of Putin’s propaganda. That American newspapers employ public editors to monitor their news reports isn’t enough; they should also staff “counter-disinformation editors” who “would pick apart what might be called all the news that is unfit to print.” Such professional censors are necessary, we are told, because the Kremlin “exploits systemic weak spots in the Western system, providing a sort of X‑ray of the underbelly of liberal democracy.” Worse, the authors charge, are the legions of “senior Western experts” providing aid and comfort to the enemy, whether by appearing on RT, accepting positions on the boards of Russian companies, or simply attending Russian-sponsored forums. “The blurring of distinctions between think tanks and lobbying helps the Kremlin push its agenda without due scrutiny,” they write.
According to Weiss and Pomerantsev, the most severe threat is the one posed by RT, a network to which they impute vast powers. They are hardly alone. In January, Andrew Lack, then chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors—the federal agency that oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other US-funded media outlets—likened RT’s threat to those posed by “the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.” (Lack was recently named chairman of NBC News.)
RT is allegedly so skillful at masking its nefarious message that “anyone tuning in would not immediately know it is Kremlin-run or even associate it with Russia,” the authors write—even though the network’s news broadcasts begin with the statement “Coming to you live from Moscow, this is RT.”
The Phantom Menace
The leading authority on Soviet and Russian mass media, Duke University professor Ellen Mickiewicz, disputes the entire premise of Weiss and Pomerantsev’s report. She told me that the hypodermic model of media effects (in which messages are “injected” into the audience simply by virtue of being disseminated) was scientifically disproved decades ago. “It’s the most simpleminded mistake you can make in evaluating media effects,” she said.
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Slouching Towards McCarthyism
One might expect that such neo-McCarthyism, reeking as it does of a barely concealed attempt to censor and intimidate, would have touched off protests, if not condemnation, in the establishment media. But the Interpreter has been given a rapturous reception on both sides of the Atlantic.
Among its most visible proponents has been the Legatum Institute. As Mark Ames recently reported in the online publication PandoDaily, Legatum is the brainchild of billionaire venture capitalist Christopher Chandler. Like Browder and Khodorkovsky, Chandler made his billions in post-Soviet Russia. According to Ames, he and his brother “reportedly were the single biggest foreign beneficiaries of one of the greatest privatization scams in history: Russia’s voucher program in the early 1990s.”
To mark the publication of the “Menace of Unreality” report, Legatum hosted a panel discussion that featured such luminaries as Anne Applebaum, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, former US ambassador John Herbst, and Ukrainian Ambassador at Large Olexander Scherba. All expressed grave concern over the threat that Putin’s propaganda machine poses to the West.
The event was followed by similar sessions hosted by the Harriman Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy. At the latter event, Weiss and Pomerantsev were joined by Freedom House director David Kramer; a young functionary of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative; and the NED’s International Forum executive director, Christopher Walker, who touted the endowment’s “close ties” with both the Interpreter and the Institute for Modern Russia.
Two of the report’s most visible supporters have been Applebaum and Edward Lucas, a senior editor at The Economist. Soon after the launch party at Legatum, Applebaum took to the pages of The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books to plug Weiss and Pomerantsev’s crusade. In an essay for the former, she warned that “for democracies,” Russian disinformation poses “a serious challenge.”Russia’s use of what Weiss and Pomerantsev refer to as Internet “trolls” is especially worrying to Applebaum, who fears readers will be unduly influenced by their “negative or mocking remarks.”
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In the end, apart from being a frontal attack on the core tenets of free speech, the Weiss-Pomerantsev crusade lets Western pundits and policy-makers off the hook for their complicity in the Ukraine crisis by discouraging any kind of critical thinking or reconsideration of US policy. The incessant focus in “The Menace of Unreality” on the Kremlin’s media apparatus obscures the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine, as well as the growing danger of a larger US-Russia war. The policy of belligerence toward Russia that Weiss and Pomerantsev so staunchly support has been one of the primary culprits in the Ukraine crisis. The fact that they now seek to silence, smear, and even blacklist critics of that policy makes their project all the more egregious.
One would have hoped that journalists, of all people, would object to this project in the strongest possible terms. That no one has yet done so is an ominous sign.
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9. Concerned about “Russian trolls” making comments on the internet, the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum has a solution in mind. End internet anonymity.
“Another Reason to Avoid Reading the Comments” by Anne Applebaum; Washington Post; 11/28/2014.
If you are reading this article on the Internet, stop afterward and think about it. Then scroll to the bottom and read the commentary. If there isn’t any, try a Web site that allows comments, preferably one that is very political. Then recheck your views.
Chances are your thinking will have changed, especially if you have read a series of insulting, negative or mocking remarks — as so often you will. Once upon a time, it seemed as if the Internet would be a place of civilized and open debate; now, unedited forums often deteriorate to insult exchanges. Like it or not, this matters: Multiple experiments have shown that perceptions of an article, its writer or its subject can be profoundly shaped by anonymous online commentary, especially if it is harsh. One group of researchers found that rude comments“not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.” A digital analyst at Atlantic Media also discovered that people who read negative comments were more likely to judge that an article was of low quality and, regardless of the content, to doubt the truth of what it stated.
Some news organizations have responded by heavily curating comments. One Twitter campaigner, @AvoidCommentsperiodically reminds readers to ignore anonymous posters: “You wouldn’t listen to someone named Bonerman26 in real life. Don’t read the comments.” But none of that can prevent waves of insulting commentary from periodically washing over other parts of the Internet, infiltrating Facebook or overwhelming Twitter.
If all of this commentary were spontaneous, then this would simply be an interesting psychological phenomenon. But it is not. A friend who worked for a public relations company in Europe tells of companies that hire people to post, anonymously, positive words on behalf of their clients and negative words about rivals. Political parties of various kinds, in various countries, are rumored to do the same.
States have grown interested in joining the fray as well. Last year, Russian journalists infiltrated an organization in St. Petersburg that pays people to post at least 100 comments a day; an investigation earlier this year found that a well-connected businessman was paying Russian trollsto manage 10 Twitter accounts apiece with up to 2,000 followers. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Guardian of London admittedit was having trouble moderating what it called an “orchestrated campaign.” “Goodbye ‘Eddie,’ ” tweeted the Estonian presidenta few months ago, as he blocked yet another Twitter troll.
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For democracies, this is a serious challenge. Online commentary subtly shapes what voters think and feel, even if it just raises the level of irritation, or gives readers the impression that certain views are “controversial,” or makes them wonder what the “mainstream” version of events is concealing. For the most part, the Russian trolls aren’t supplying classic propaganda, designed to trumpet the glories of Soviet agriculture. Instead, as journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weisshave written in a paperanalyzing the new tactics of disinformation, their purpose is rather “to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods.” In a world where traditional journalism is weak and information is plentiful, that isn’t very difficult to do.
But no Western government wants to “censor” the Internet, either, and objections will always be raised if government money is even spent studying this phenomenon. Perhaps, as Weiss and Pomerantsev have also argued, we therefore need civic organizations or charities that can identify deliberately false messages and bring them to public attention. Perhaps schools, as they once taught students about newspapers, now need to teach a new sort of etiquette: how to recognize an Internet troll, how to distinguish truth from state-sponsored fiction.
Sooner or later, we may also be forced to end Internet anonymity or to at least ensure that every online persona is linked back to a real person: Anyone who writes online should be as responsible for his words as if he were speaking them aloud. I know there are arguments in favor of anonymity, but too many people now abuse the privilege. Human rights, including the right to freedom of expression, should belong to real human beings and not to anonymous trolls.
“Sooner or later, we may also be forced to end Internet anonymity or to at least ensure that every online persona is linked back to a real person: Anyone who writes online should be as responsible for his words as if he were speaking them aloud”
10. If the Guinness Book of World Records had a category for sheer political and historical ignorance, the Polish foreign minister just might lay claim to that dubious prize.
The Red Army units that liberated Auschwitz were part of the Soviet force amalgamated under the command rubric “Ukrainian Front.” Seizing on that, the Polish foreign minister claimed that “Ukrainian” soldiers liberated Auschwitz.
We don’t know what he has been drinking or smoking, but it must be really strong stuff!
Good grief, Charlie Brown!
. . . . Presiding over preparations for the Russia-wide festivities this week, Putin said attempts to belittle Russia’s role in WWII were aimed at stripping it of its “moral authority.”
“Occasionally we hear sheer lunacy — it’s amazing how people even come to that.”
Poland angered Moscow when its foreign minister said it was Ukrainian soldiers — rather than the Soviet Red Army — who liberated Auschwitz in 1945. . . .
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
The Telegraph has a report on Ukraine’s ‘history laws’ that make it illegal to criticize Ukraine’s fascist Nazi collaborators. The article contains lots of the expected “some people say these groups were involved with [insert historic crime here], but others disagree”-back and forth when a topic like this gets reported on. But it also contains this little fun-fact: The MP in the Radical Party that wrote the “freedom fighters” law, Yury Shukhevych, is the son of Roman Shukhevych, the former head of the UPA:
Goodbye Lenin, hello Superman? Well, if they’re going to tear down the statues are Lenin everywhere, at least it doesn’t sound like they’re replacing them with Stepan Bandera statues. So as appalling as these laws are, let’s hope Ukraine decides to go with the Superman-statue plan because you could do worse than making a bunch of statues of Superman as part of your national historical revisionism push. Hopefully.
Right Sector just had a march in Kiev with all of their usual fanfare including the white supremacy symbols. The message of the marchers? Drop the Minsk cease-fire and wage full-scale war in the East
So the folks that have repeatedly threatened to ‘march on Kiev’ when the war is over just marched in Kiev demanding more war. How helpful.
And in other news, on the same day of march in Kiev, the separatists in the East withdrew had their own symbolic march, of sorts: the marched out of strategic positions and made renewed pleas for constitutional guarantees for semi-autonomous status in the breakaway regions as a path towards long-term peace:
“For his part, Poroshenko is trying to avoid losing credibility with more nationalist Ukrainians who backed the pro-European protests last year and remain a powerful voice in the crisis-torn country’s fractured political system.”
Well, as the saying goes, the squeaky wheel waving the white supremacy flags and chanting “Death to the Enemy” gets the grease. It’s one of the more unfortunate characteristics of contemporary socioeconomic maintenance and repair.
Dave,
Today I went back into the archives to look up something connecting Odessa 2nd May 2014 with Berlin 2nd May 1933. I wanted to send a link to the authors of a recent article on the anniversary of the May 2nd sacking of the Odessa House of Trades (Stalinist jargon for “trade-union hall”) and your work didn’t disappoint me. Moreover I wanted to overwhelm the authors with your anti-fascist scholarship.
One note: In Eastern Slavic languages, an ‘e’ usually implies the sound /yeh/. When transliterated into Roman letters, it’s sometimes left as ‘e’ and other times written as ‘ye’. The latter is the case with the name of the country Byelarus /byeh-lah-ROOS/ and the former may be the case with the title “The Belarus Secret”, so /byeh-lah-ROOS SEE-kreht/ (having to do with 300 Byelorussian Nazis smuggled out to the West, but here the term for the language comes from Russian, which weakens the ‘o’ to a short ‘a’ before a stressed syllable).
Lastly, can you find a way I can send you a donation electronically? I almost never use checks and may have run out of them. You can inform me at my Twitter address as a “Tweet”.