This is the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and Russia must not have had many decent photographers.
Lookie here.
I am missing Phil Taylor at the moment.
He was considered by many to be the world’s foremost authority regarding propaganda. He passed away four years ago. I spoke with him only a few days before he died.
His legacy lives on, however. Many of the papers he had are preserved on his website, some of the links are below. He is still providing a community resource which is needed now, more than ever.
This past week, at InfowarCon 2015, a number of us were discussing “what is propaganda”, how do we counter it? This discussion will last for a long, long time. Thank you, Phil, for your service.
From his website:
Professor Phil Taylor, Professor of International Communications, one of the field’s outstanding scholars and a founding member of the Institute, died in December 2010.
Phil graduated from Leeds with a First in History in 1975 followed, in 1978, by a PhD. In the same year, he was appointed as Lecturer in the School of History and was subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1987. Phil was seconded as Deputy Director to the Institute of Communications Studies in 1990, this position becoming permanent in 1993, along with his promotion to Reader. In 1998 he was appointed to a Chair of International Communications and was Head of the Institute until 2002.
Phil was an internationally renowned scholar of international communications and propaganda, a charismatic and popular teacher, and an excellent colleague.
From 1995, Phil maintained a website to serve as a key resource for matters relating to:
In 2014, the School of Media and Communication archived the contents of that site here.
N PHOTO: Russia’s envoy to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov arrives for an EU-Russia-Ukraine trilateral energy meeting at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels June 11, 2014. Russia and Ukraine will resume efforts to resolve a gas pricing dispute on Wednesday after a Russian deadline for Kiev to pay some of its debts passed without Moscow cutting off supplies. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir Reuters/Francois Lenoir
By on May 04 2015 9:52 AM
The U.S. has admitted that it is lagging behind Russia when it comes to information and propaganda war. As a remedy to it, the U.S. law makers have now introduced a new bill seeking $30 million to target “Russia’s propaganda, which is posing a challenge to the NATO system.” This new information offensive will also address the social media offensives by Islamic State.
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Forces Mac Thornberry said, “our adversaries are using propaganda to shape the battlefield, drive up their support and inspire imitators. Islamic State and al Qaeda have been using this tool in the Middle East and Russia is using it deftly in Eastern Europe,” reported Washington Times.
Moscow’s Tactics
According to the U.S., Moscow has an array of tactics that include media propaganda, economic warfare, cyber warfare and covert intelligence operations to maintain its edge over adversaries. In Ukraine, Russia is using political subversion, use of proxy forces, movement of forces threatening invasion, large-scale nuclear exercises and tactical negotiations to inhibit Western intervention.
Explaining the rationale of spending at least $30 million to counter Russian and Islamic State propaganda, Thornberry said “America does not always do a good job in countering it.” He recently came from a visit to the crisis-torn Ukraine and did a study on the Russian tactics. The law maker said he is sure that that the bill “acknowledges this serious communications gap, and takes steps to correct it.”
Challenge To NATO
The bill refers to the Russian propaganda and the way it has taken advantage of ethnic disputes in building and equipping a separatist army in Ukraine under its direction. The panel feels that Russian information outlets do pose a direct challenge to the NATO system. The committee believes it is time, the Department of Defense and NATO explored how the U.S., NATO member-states together can establish deterrence mechanisms against activities such as those undertaken by the Russian government in Ukraine.
The new boost in funds for the U.S. Special Operations Command will be to expand “global inform and influence activities” against Russia and terrorist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The committee has asked SOCOM to brief the panel before July on its counter-influence program. The Committee is of the view that Russia uses propaganda, diplomatic and economic measures to play down the impact of Ukraine’s own response to its aggression and succeeded in taming the response from the U.S. and Europe in its domain of influence. The bill also said Russian information operations are undermining NATO’s collective self-defense.
John Kerry’s Advice
The panel’s view is also in sync with Secretary of State John Kerry’s thoughts on the matter. He is of the opinion that the U.S. lawmakers should release more funds to manage propaganda and “democracy promotion” programs of the U.S. across the world. Kerry told the House Appropriations Subcommittee that “Russia Today can be heard in English, do we have an equivalent that can be heard in Russian? It’s a pretty expensive proposition. They are spending huge amounts of money,” But the fact is Voice of America still has a broadcast service in Russian language that it started in 1947.
(For feedback/comments, contact the writer at k.kumar@ibtimes.com.au)
I expected the turret to have a more severe slope.
To have such upright angles it is going to have to be thick, thick, thick, which means it is heavy, which means the engine is going to take a hit. A lot of strain…
The MTBF is going to be lower..
MOSCOW — Russia’s new Armata tank appeared in public for the first time Monday, rumbling down a broad Moscow avenue on its way to Red Square for the final rehearsal of the Victory Day parade.
The Russian Defense Ministry last month released photographs of the tank, but its turret was covered with fabric and only the platform was visible. Monday was the first time that the tank was shown uncovered.
The Armata will be a highlight of the military parade on Saturday, the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. About 200 pieces of military hardware and 16,500 troops will take part in the parade on Red Square.
Russian and some Western military experts say the Armata will surpass all Western versions. The tank is the first to have an internal armored capsule housing its three-man crew and a remotely controlled turret with an automatic weapons loading system, features that allow for increasing both the level of crew protection and the efficiency of the tank’s weapons.
The Armata designers also envisage the use of the same platform for several other machines, including a heavy armored infantry vehicle, a self-propelled heavy howitzer and combat support vehicle. This would cut production costs and streamline technical support and maintenance.
The pioneering design potentially puts the Armata ahead of Western competition, but it is yet unclear whether the Russian weapons industries will be able to meet the ambitious production plan for the new tank.
Under a major weapons modernization program, the military is reportedly set to receive 2,300 Armatas by 2020, but those plans may face revision with the Russian economy reeling under the impact of slumping oil prices and Western sanctions.
Oleg Bochkaryov, a deputy head of the Military Industrial Commission, a government panel dealing with weapons procurement, said last week that the Armata will enter service next year. He said the new tank will not be sold abroad at least for another five years.
Source: http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/russia-s-new-armata-tank-makes-debut-in-parade-rehearsal-1.344176
President Vladimir Putin signed legislation Saturday that will increase tenfold the maximum fine that can be levied on Russian news organizations accused of inciting extremism, raising fears of increased pressure on the country’s remaining independent media outlets.
The changes mean that Russia’s Internet watchdog, in conjunction with magistrate courts, can order news organizations to pay up to 1 million rubles ($19,000) for publishing material deemed to incite or justify terrorism or extremism. Previously, similar fines were restricted to between 50,000 and 100,000 rubles.
The new measure also gives the authorities the right to confiscate all copies of extremist material appearing in offline formats.
A lack of clarity over the legal definition of extremism means the new amendment “is open to abuse and arbitrary application,” said media law specialist Andrei Richter in comments to The Moscow Times on Monday.
The Kremlin has moved to tighten state control over Russia’s already heavily regulated media industry in recent years with the shuttering of more liberal news outlets, new restrictions on foreign ownership and the appointment of outspoken Kremlin loyalists to top media roles.
The amendment, which has been in the process of development for over a year, was first conceived in the wake of violent nationalist rioting in the Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo in 2013, Deputy Communications Minister Alexei Volin told business daily Vedomosti in December last year when the law was introduced in the Russian parliament.
“During its development we decided not to be limited to the interethnic aspects and use the wider concepts of terrorism and extremism,” Volin told Vedomosti.
The amendment was passed by Russia’s State Duma on April 25. Four days later it was approved by the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. Putin signed the measure into law on May 2, one day shy of World Press Freedom Day.
Lawmakers involved in the drafting of the bill said earlier this year that the new rules mean Internet and media watchdog Roskomnadzor will be able to impose fines rather than simply issuing official warnings, according to the RBC news website.
Extremism warnings have been handed out to news outlets critical of the Kremlin. In October, liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy was warned over a broadcast about accounts of fighting in eastern Ukraine and opposition Novaya Gazeta was cautioned over a piece the same month that compared policies of Russian lawmakers to those of Adolf Hitler.
Nineteen news organizations in Russia were warned over the reprinting of Muhammed caricatures by French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov said last week.
In accordance with Russia’s extremism laws, any media outlet that receives two written warnings within a year can have its media license revoked.
Some experts warned that the fines could be used in addition to shuttering news organizations. “There will be a double punishment: a ruble punishment in the form of an administrative fine and punishment in the form of an end to media activity,” the head of the Kremlin’s human right’s council Mikhail Fedotov told Business FM radio station Sunday. “Such things are impossible in a state that observes the rule of law.”
Critics also fear that large fines could be used to bankrupt news organizations that are run on tight budgets and are already suffering from sharp falls in advertising revenue linked to Russia’s economic crisis.
Experts pointed to ambiguities in the definition of extremism, which could be used by the authorities to exploit the legislation for their own ends and silence those critical of the current regime.
“The definition [of extremism] is vague and as such it was criticized by the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Representative on Freedom of the Media, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission… by Russia’s Presidential Council on Human Rights and indirectly by Russia’s Supreme Court,” Moscow State University’s Richter said in written comments.
Legally, extremism is defined as a call to change the constitutional order or a call for separatism, and is punishable by up to five years in prison. More than 600 sentences were handed down under extremism clauses last year, according to Business FM.
Despite concerns, the imposition of penalties under extremism legislation has ticked up.
Since December 2013, Roskomnadzor has had the power to close down websites without a court order.
About 4,500 websites were blocked in Russia in 2014 because of alleged extremist content, Roskomndazor’s head said last week. Blocked online platforms include the blog of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Kremlin-hostile news website Grani.ru.
Contact the author at h.amos@imedia.ru
Dmitry Tymchuk, Head of the Center for Military and Political Research, Coordinator of the Information Resistance group, Member of Parliament (People’s Front)
02.19.2015
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine
Operational data from Information Resistance:
Russian-terrorist forces have taken complete control of the town and the railway junction station of Debaltseve, thus presently creating a kind of “military commandant’s office” in the city. In the direction of Artemivsk (Svetlodarsk – Luhanske), radical enemy units are trying to move in the direction of Luhanske. Ukrainian units that provide a withdrawal of the Debaltseve Ukrainian troop formations, engage in deterrent combat. Also, the enemy began to evacuate disabled and damaged military equipment from the combat fields in the area of Debaltseve (the equipment is evacuated to Horlivka and Yenakiieve).
A tactical group of Russian-terrorist forces from the “Horlivka garrison,” reinforced with a company tactical group…
View original 591 more words
Allah wants oil to be free. Spread the word!
As many investors have found over the past year, the oil market is a tough nut to crack when it comes to predicting price moves.
For those seeking guidance from Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, just follow his gaze to a higher authority. Asked by CNBC on Tuesday if there was a level for oil prices that would force the Saudis to cut production, he replied: “No one can set the price of oil — it’s up to Allah.”
As for the potential for supplies coming to the market from other countries, such as Iran, he held firm in refusing to talk about oil prices. “I’m not worried about Iran crude nor will I try to predict where the price is. If I were to predict, I would be somewhere else, gambling.”
While oil prices plunged in late 2014, they have been broadly rising since mid-March. Even so, many aren’t ready to call the bottom yet, given concerns about oversupply, including the potential for more supply that could come from non-Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. WTI crude CLM5, +0.35% jumped 25% in April, while Brent LCOM5, -0.03% surged 21%.
Tuesday was shaping up to be a big day for oil, with Brent prices cresting above $67 a barrel, partly due to protests at a Libyan oil port.
The oil minister was asked as well about a comment in an OPEC monthly report for April that reportedly blamed on speculators in part for moves in Brent.
“Speculators influence the short changes in price. Long term, supply and demand control the price,” said Al Naimi, who then quipped: “Don’t try to incriminate anybody.”
Analysts at Commerzbank said the rise in Brent prices in recent weeks has clearly been driven by speculators.
(3:48)Barron’s writer Chris Dieterich and WSJ’s Simon Constable preview Tuesday’s trading session, including oil’s rise above $60 per barrel. Photo: Getty
Commerzbank analyst Carston Fritsch and his team noted that money managers extended their net long positions for the seventh straight week in the week to April 28, the highest level since the data series began in early 2011.
But he said OPEC blaming speculators for the price slump in the second half of 2014 doesn’t wash. Speculative long positions in Brent hit their lowest point back in October, and the price slide only picked up around the time of OPEC’s meeting in November, he said.
“At this point money managers were actually building their net long positions again because they anticipated recovering prices,” said Fritsch.
The announcement capped a turbulent week for Ehab Al Shihabi. His company was sued for $15 million, AJAM was cited for alleged sexism anti-Semitism, and Al Shihabi was blamed by one departing executive for presiding over a “culture of fear.”
He was replaced by Al Anstey effective immediately, according to a release from the Qatar-based parent company Al Jazeera Media Network.
But Al Shihabi said he won’t be going too far. An hour after Anstey’s appointment was announced, Al Shihabi told AJAM staff in a terse email that he will remain at the channel as chief operating officer.
An employee described the mood in the newsroom on Wednesday as “quite celebratory, though tempered” by the news that Al Shihabi is staying on as COO.
Related: Al Jazeera America loses another exec
Three top officials at the channel, all women, stepped down in the last week. One of those officials, Marcy McGinnis, ripped Al Shihabi in a front-page story in the New York Times on Wednesday.
“I didn’t want to be there anymore because I didn’t like the culture of fear,” McGinnis told the Times. “People are afraid to lose their jobs if they cross Ehab.”
When McGinnis was reached on Wednesday, she had not heard that Al Shihabi had been replaced.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, upon learning the news.
Related: Al Jazeera America exec tells staff he will fight lawsuit
In an effort to contain the crisis, Al Shihabi told staffers at an all-hands meeting last week that the company would fight the lawsuit, which was brought by AJAM’s former director of media and archive management Matthew Luke.
In an indication of the tension in the newsroom, Al Shihabi said to his staff, “I trust all of you. Well, I trust some of you.”
Luke claims that Osman Mahmud, who serves as senior vice president for broadcast operations and technology at the channel, frequently pulled women off projects to which they had been assigned by other managers. Luke also asserts that Mahmud made disparaging remarks about Israel.
Anstey is taking on a difficult task. He will have to restore morale in the newsroom, but even before the company’s problems went public, AJAM had been beset by anemic ratings, reaching a meager 30,000 viewers per night.
Anstey has been with Al Jazeera since 2005. He’s been the managing director of the company’s English language channel since 2010.
“I’m delighted to be leading Al Jazeera America into the next stage of development,” he said in an internal memo announcing the shakeup. “The United States is a remarkable country, with amazing people across the nation who are looking for in-depth, trusted, and inspiring stories.”
CSP, by
In the wake of the foiled attack in Garland, Texas, Islamic State has released a statement promising further attacks in the United States, as well as the assassination of Pamela Geller, the lead planner in the Mohammed cartoon contest. The authenticity of the post remains in question, although Islamic State has frequently used JustPasteIt to publish propaganda and messages for the general public.
The document states that Geller was the focus of the attack, stating “Our goal was the khanzeer (pig) Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her; we will send all our Lions to achieve her slaughter.”
If authentic, the terrorist group appears to be doing damage control for the failed attack, claiming that, “Our intention was to show how easy we give our lives for the sake of…
View original 256 more words
Eyad Abu Shakra
Interesting Arab perspective!
EYAD ABU SHAKRA
Published — Thursday 7 May 2015
Last update 7 May 2015 12:42 am
I feel sad that, as a journalist who was born and raised in Lebanon, and whose journalistic career has taken him to almost all the world’s continents, I have only visited one border point between Lebanon and Israel: The Naqoura UN post.
However, friends and relatives who have visited the border area, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, used to tell me about the unfortunate and stark difference between what they saw on either side of the barbed-wired fence.
The land of occupied Galilee was green and well-tended by the Israeli Kibbutzim settlers, while the land on the Lebanese side was neglected and in bad shape for many reasons, including fear of cross-border attacks and the intentional lack of development under the sway of political feudalism.
But what used to interest the curious visitors most was how Israeli settlers always carried their sub-machine guns while taking care of their fields and farms. This, in my view — personal emotions aside — was pretty symbolic. It meant, and of course continues to mean, that if one is committed to building a homeland one needs to take care of all the aspects and never forsake one priority for another. In Israel, the famous Arab slogan “No voice is louder than the voice of battle” took hold. That slogan, as innocent and honorable as it was then, led to catastrophic consequences for the Arab world.
In fact, Israel has succeeded not only because it is a military powerhouse and is well supported by the West, but also because it is a country that has successfully defined its priorities. Israel has organized its priorities without abandoning anything: Military efforts never meant economic development was neglected, and embarking on economic development took nothing away from paying attention to the media and propaganda machine, while providing resources for that machine was never at the expense of scientific research. As for us, Arabs, as well as Muslims, we must admit that we have failed for at least 60 years in building a homogeneous and effective lobby in the West, particularly in the US.
Today, Arabs in the West, more so in the US, are being subjected to an increasingly ruthless and complicated media onslaught, when compared to what they have previously experienced in their long struggle against Israel’s lobbies. This time their attacker is the Iranian lobby.
Iran’s lobby has been active for a while, and it has been intelligently working, organizing, and cooperating with several pressure groups. Its activities have varied from tempting multi-national commercial and industrial companies with the hidden riches of Iran — to be made available the moment UN sanctions are lifted — to pleading with human rights, progressive and liberal groups by highlighting the “suffering” of Iranian people under the international sanctions and world embargo.
As if this is not enough, the Iran lobby is now busy engaging with anti-terrorism groups, of all people, after managing to re-define terrorism, and exonerate Tehran of accusations of sponsoring and aiding religious and sectarian extremism throughout the Middle East.
For some time, the Iranian lobby has been keen not to mention what Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been doing in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, preferring instead to focus on the “peaceful nature” of Iran’s nuclear program and the suffering of its people “as a result of sanctions” (rather than the nature and policies of the regime). However, the situation is now different. This lobby is now more sophisticated and skillful, to the extent that it has managed to build a propaganda machine that has allowed it access even to mainstream, respectable US media.
This lobby is now more confident in moving forward in the service of Iran’s regime — not only its people —while still claiming it is not directly connected with the leadership. This is being cleverly done after cleansing the West’s collective memories of the terrorism of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw many victims in Iran, Lebanon, Kenya, Tanzania, Europe, and throughout the world, that has always been supported and venerated by Tehran’s rulers.
At present Iran’s lobby describes what is happening in Yemen as nothing more than a “Saudi attack” or “Arab aggression,” without touching on the military arsenal Iran has supplied to the Houthi rebels and their accomplices since 2009, which has recently been uncovered, according to the latest UN reports. Its discourse also totally ignores Iran’s master plan for hegemony in the region, which includes controlling international waterways like the Strait of Hormuz and Bab El-Mandeb. On the contrary, the glossy message this lobby is promoting is that Iran is a “natural ally” to the West and the US in the ongoing fight against IS, Al-Qaeda and their ilk after confirming the exclusive Sunni nature of terror and terrorism.
We are now encountering a challenge that we can ill afford to underestimate.
We must not comfort ourselves with the thought that Iran’s poor economic conditions will convince the Tehran leadership to stop its meddling and aggression. This regime seriously believes it can fight, plan, arm and twist facts, all at the same time.
Score: Texas, 2. Islamic State, 0.
-—–—–—–—–•–—–—–
CSP, by Sean MacCormac, May 6, 2015: In the wake of the foiled attack in Garland, Texas, Islamic State has released a statement promising further attacks in the United States, as well as the assassination of Pamela Geller, the lead planner in the Mohammed cartoon contest. The authenticity of the post remains in question, although Islamic State […]
http://counterjihadreport.com/2015/05/06/islamic-state-promises-more-attacks-like-garland/
The unveiling of the “polite people” monument in Belogorsk on May 6.
May 07, 2015
Russia’s first monument honoring the “polite people” behind last year’s armed annexation of Crimea has been erected in the Far Eastern city of Belogorsk.
Veterans, residents, and a phalanx of local officials gathered amid a May 6 snowfall for the unveiling of the life-size statue, which depicts a heavily armed, insignia-free soldier holding a cat.
The monument, cast from 400 kilograms of Chelyabinsk iron, is reportedly based on an image by TASS photographer Aleksandr Ryumin of a soldier in Crimea handing an orange-and-white cat to a young boy.
A boy attending the Belogorsk unveiling was asked to pose with his arms outstretched toward the soldier, whose stance is otherwise suggestive of a man dumping a cat into a wastebasket.
Unlike the soldier in the original, Belogorsk’s “polite person” is unmasked, a detail that didn’t pass unremarked on social media:
@mashant where did his mask go? lol http://t.co/ZqsCt35DHk—
Jovan (@jovanowitz) May 06, 2015
Stanislav Melyukov, the mayor of Belogorsk and the mastermind behind the project, says he hopes the monument will become a major tourist attraction. The city has already laid special decorative tiles around the statue and installed a video surveillance system to discourage vandalism.
The memorial is a tribute to the armed men in unmarked olive-drab uniforms who entered Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in February 2014, seizing control of airports, administration buildings, and other key structures in a purported effort to “protect” the territory’s majority-Russian population from Ukrainian unrest.
The soldiers, originally referred to as “little green men,” were later given the “polite people” moniker in an attempt to improve their image.
Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted the men were Russian troops only after Crimea had been annexed following a widely criticized public referendum.
Asked if Belogorsk had been too hasty in immortalizing a particularly controversial chapter in Russia’s recent history, Mayor Melyukov said the statue was a matter of patriotism, not current events.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reportedly has thrown his support behind erecting a second “polite person” monument in Moscow.
— Daisy Sindelar
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-monument-polite-people-crimea-invasion/27000320.html
As Russia prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of defeating the Nazis, the Kremlin is rewriting history for political convenience.
MOSCOW — When prosecutors and police officers from the anti-extremism division showed up at Dmitry Lazarenko’s antique shop in Sochi a few months ago, they took him by surprise. After rummaging through the wares in the small space he keeps with two other collectors, they accused him of spreading Nazi propaganda before seizing a World War II-era German uniform hanging in the corner.
“There was a price tag on the swastika on the cap, but sometimes it falls off,” Lazarenko told me, as if still searching for an explanation for what befell his business. The officers said he violated a law forbidding Nazi propaganda. A local court sentenced him to a 1,000 ruble (about $20) fine. The affair left him shaken and puzzled — and angry about losing an expensive antique. “Some people collect Red Army uniforms and others German uniforms,” he said.
“It’s an historic article, it’s intended for collectors. We don’t go waving it around,” Lazarenko said. “What sort of extremist am I?” Lazarenko told me he’s a patriot who frequently gives Soviet army paraphernalia to local museums; he planned to wear a Soviet uniform for Russia’s celebration of its 1945 victory over Nazi Germany on May 9.
The raid on Lazarenko’s shop was not unique. As Russia gears up to mark 70 years since the end of World War II — and the Great Patriotic War, as the country calls its own four-year struggle against the Axis forces — the Kremlin’s fight against the specter of Nazism, fascism, as well as any perceived insults to the war’s memory has been revived with a fervor unseen even in Soviet times.
The law banning Nazi propaganda, which has existed in some form since the 1990s but was significantly amended last November, now has toy stores, book sellers, and museums trembling with fear. Previously, the law forbade “propaganda and public demonstration” of Nazi insignia. In the new version, lawmakers changed the “and” to an “or” — formally making any depiction of the swastika a punishable offense. Panicking bookstores went through their stocks, removing anything that had a swastika on its cover in a purge that swept from shelves even anti-fascist books, such as Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, the son of a Holocaust survivor. The law’s wording was so broad that one over-cautious exhibit of wartime posters in the Russian Far East covered up the Nazi insignia with fluorescent stickers.
The new law was one in a raft of measures phased in not long after the conflict in Ukraine began. Russian lawmakers called for a wider interpretation of Nazi propaganda that would include any extremist groups, including some Ukrainian nationalists who were fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. According to Moscow’s official line, they are fascists because some take inspiration from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its leader Stepan Bandera, who fought the Red Army in the 1940s.
“Fascist youth flaunt these symbols daily and call for genocide,” deputy speaker of the State Duma — Russia’s lower house of parliament — Sergey Zheleznyak, who authored the amendments, said last May. “These groups are what led Ukraine to chaos, disintegration and de facto civil war.”
In the same vein, a law against “rehabilitation of Nazism,” passed last spring, calls for up to three years in prison for those who deny Nazi crimes, “disseminate disrespect” about Victory Day, or desecrate monuments of wartime glory. While in Russia almost nobody — with the exception of a tiny faction of fanatics — deny Nazi crimes, the law is being used to launch nominal probes into incidents of vandalism of Soviet war memorials in Ukraine. In Russia, people like Lazarenko are unfortunate casualties of Moscow’s widening definition of support for Nazism and of law enforcement officials who are only too willing to crack down.
In many Russian circles, the narrative surrounding the conflict in eastern Ukraine borrows from the rhetoric of World War II, with talk of “liberating” cities now under Kiev’s control and even retaking Kiev from U.S.-backed “Ukrofascists.” The mythology of the Great Patriotic War is woven tightly into the narrative of the two “people’s republics,” and their fighters frequently adorn their uniforms and Kalashnikovs with the St. George’s ribbon, the orange and black stripes that appear on military medals and which have made a comeback in recent years as a government-backed symbol of Soviet World War II glory.
Speaking to local veterans this week, the separatist leader in Luhansk, Igor Plotnitsky, promised to “defeat Nazism for good and raise the Victory Banner over the new Reichstag of Banderites.”
With the conflict in Ukraine, Victory Day is changing in Russia, said Andrei Kolesnikov, who heads the Russian domestic policy program at Carnegie Moscow Center. “There is additional aggression, hysteria, and one-sidedness of interpretation of historical events, when any sort of critical discussion about what happened before during and after the war is unacceptable,” he said.
World War II has always been a symbol of perseverance and unity for Russia, and looms large in the collective consciousness.
World War II has always been a symbol of perseverance and unity for Russia, and looms large in the collective consciousness. Even today, over half of Russians say they lost at least one close family member in the war. That public memory is used as a tool to boost the “personalistic regime” of Vladimir Putin, Kolesnikov said. “It works in favor of Putin’s charisma. In this way, the regime accomplishes the goal of consolidating most of the population around itself, and it is very effective.”
A decade ago, Putin stood over the military parade on Red Square attended by foreign leaders from the United States, Germany, France, and many other countries. Putin, then in his sixth year in power, delivered a message of friendship and peace. “We have never divided Victory into ours and someone else’s and we will always remember the aid of the allies,” he said.
This year, with almost no Western leaders planning to attend Victory Day celebrations, his message is bound to be different. In recent months, Putin has repeatedly accused the West of revanchism: rewriting the history of the war in order to “weaken the power and moral authority of modern Russia, to rid it of the status of victor.”
Victory worship went into overdrive this year as Putin attempted to further legitimize his rule, said historian Pavel Aptekar, a columnist for the daily newspaper Vedomosti. “It’s easy to say: if you are against us, then you are against victory and against our grandfathers who died in the war,” he said. “Our leaders are parasitizing on victory” in a way that is similar to “early Mussolini, who parasitized on the Great Roman empire.”
As the Kremlin uses the memory of World War II for political expediency, the interpretation of the 1945 victory put forward by officials is “less bloody and more presentable than it really was,” Aptekar said. Few people in today’s Russia understand the nature of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, though more people than in the post-Soviet period believe that the secret protocols to that pact, which carved Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence, were fake. And today, more Russians than ever before blame the start of war on France and Britain’s inking of the Munich Agreement, which permitted Germany to annex some provinces of Czechoslovakia.
With fewer and fewer Russians alive who remember World War II, its legacy is shifting.
What in Soviet times was unequivocally a “holiday with tears in our eyes,” in the words of one well-known Soviet song, now inspires jingoistic messages of conquest and tone-deaf marketing.
What in Soviet times was unequivocally a “holiday with tears in our eyes,” in the words of one well-known Soviet song, now inspires jingoistic messages of conquest and tone-deaf marketing. The Great Patriotic War has been featured everywhere frombody art contests to cake-baking competitions, while ribbons and medals are plastered on store promotions — even in sex shops.
Meanwhile, the “never again” message of the older generation is getting lost, at a time when Russia has positioned itself as the great power challenging American unilateralism in world affairs. Pro-Kremlin youth sport T-shirts boasting nuclear missiles, and Putin has said openly that he was ready for nuclear war over Crimea during last year’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.
Bumper stickers reading “To Berlin!” — the Soviet Red Army’s counter-offensive slogan sometimes painted on tanks and missiles — have been popular in Russia for years. But this year, new bumper stickers have appeared, bearing even more provocative slogans. One boasts, “1941-1945. We could repeat it again,” illustrated with a stick figure with a hammer and sickle for a head sodomizing another stick figure representing the Nazis.
To the people who remember the war, in which the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people, such statements are unfathomable. “There is no need to repeat that triumph. War is human blood and loss, and we don’t need it,” said Galina Golovlyova, 95, who spent the war in the Moscow region digging trenches, scouting for enemy warplanes, and surviving on a small daily ration of bread. While she likes seeing the return of Soviet symbols and the red flag at the May 9 celebrations, “much of them are for show,” she said. She would rather see the money go to helping poor veterans with housing, medical care, and pensions.
“I don’t like the attempts to make Victory Day into some cartoonish holiday, with trite posters, ‘patriotic’ products, and tons of St. George ribbons, all while moving to flatten the past. Negating the swastika is precisely in the flow of this aggressive window-dressing,” said Polina Danilevich, a Russian journalist who also fell afoul of the “Nazi propaganda” law this spring.
Danilevich, who hails from Smolensk — a city in Western Russia that was occupied by the Nazis after some of the most devastating combat on Soviet territory early in the war — was browsing through archived images when she came across a photo of her own house. A Nazi flag flapped over a group of soldiers assembled in front of their commanding officers. “Found a picture of my yard,” Danilevich wrote when she posted the black and white photo on her social networking page, VKontakte. She was found guilty of Nazi propaganda and paid a fine.
“It was like finding a picture of a great-grandfather or some lost family relic,” she told me. “But our anti-extremism officials only saw the swastika and in it, Nazi propaganda…. They ignore the full picture, the historic memory, to focus on the particulars.”
Aptekar, the historian, is so fed up with the historiographical mistakes and exaggerations in state media that he has stopped watching state channels at all, only tuning in for sporting matches. “Leave history to the historians so that they look into the difficult and complicated details,” he said. “As long as history is made into ideology by all sides, it will be a constant reason for insults, resentment, and the squaring of accounts.”
May 7, 2015 2:00AM ET
by Christian Christensen
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/citizens-are-speaking-up-against-corrupt-media.html
Standing on the streets of Baltimore to cover what his employer Fox News was calling a “riot,” Geraldo Rivera found himself at the receiving end of a passionate and articulate lecture from Kwame Rose on skewed, sensationalist and racist media coverage. As Rose attempted to engage Rivera in a conversation, the reporter kept walking away, refusing to even make eye contact. The episode was captured on video, uploaded and went viral. Rose became a sensation. Rivera would later intone that Rose’s actions represented “exactly that kind of youthful anarchy that led to the destruction and pain in that community.”
The Rivera confrontation was one of many between media professionals and citizens and activists in Baltimore. What is becoming clear is that many people are more than aware of the ways in which the news media have the power to frame and reframe events through words, images, suggestion and omission. What is also clear is that these people are no longer willing to put up with it.
In an on-air interview with activist DeRay McKesson, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer went to extraordinary lengths to get McKesson to condemn protesters who had damaged property. After listing the number of arrests, vehicle fires and structural fires in Baltimore, Blitzer asked, “There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?” McKesson, unwilling to play Blitzer’s game, responded, “Yeah, and there’s no excuse for the seven people the Baltimore police department have killed in the past year, right?” Blitzer, unused to having a guest who was willing to challenge CNN’s simplistic worldview, had an incredibly telling response, saying, “We’re not making comparisons. Obviously, we don’t want to see anyone hurt. I just want to hear you say there should be peaceful protests, not violent protests, in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King.” McKesson, noting that by demanding he condemn protester violence but not police violence, Blitzer was taking a position, then offered this coup de grace: “You are making a comparison. You are suggesting that broken windows are worse than broken spines, right?”
What we have seen in Ferguson, Baltimore and other American cities is the intersection of media savvy on the part of citizens and activists and an ability to reach large numbers of people via social media.
The challenge to media storylines has also come from local politicians. When Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby was stopped on the street by a Fox News reporter and was asked, “When you’re watching this, tell me what this means for your city,” Mosby responded pointedly, “What do you mean, what does it mean for my city?” Realizing that no deeper question was forthcoming, Mosby explained that what was being seen in Baltimore was the result of structural inequality and a lack of investment in inner-city youth and that these were circumstances not unique to Baltimore but common in many places in he described as “socially and economically deprived America.” Unwilling (or unable) to engage with that deeper point, the reporter said that we saw similar events in Ferguson, at which point Mosby cut in and said, “We also see it in Kentucky, like when Kentucky lost that basketball game. We see crowds that loot and that flip over cars … but unfortunately, all the 95 percent of all the positive rallying that has been occurring here in Baltimore? The national media is going to focus on this. And that’s the problem.”
What we have seen in Ferguson, Baltimore and other American cities is the intersection of media savvy on the part of citizens and activists and an ability to reach large numbers of people via social media platforms and direct on-air confrontation. Imagine if the interaction between Rose and Rivera happened two decades ago. No mainstream news channel would have run the confrontation, and without an outlet to exhibit the material to a significant audience, the spread would have been close to zero. In other words, it never happened. Those days are now over, and that’s a good thing.
In these critical interactions between citizens and media professionals, an important issue is made visible: the extent to which the media have avoided discussions on media power and performance. The irony is striking, given that the news media generally define themselves as watchdogs over those in power on behalf of citizens. The problem is that media organizations are also purveyors of massive political and social power. This, I would argue, is one reason “The Daily Show” became such a hit. While politicians were regular fodder for ridicule, people were itching to see large media corporations taken down a peg over their weak coverage of topics such as the Iraq War, global warming, white-collar crime and racism as well as over their perpetual refusal to even acknowledge their close relationships to corporate and political power.
When people such as Rose, McKesson and Mosby question dominant media storylines on race, they not only challenge the facts as presented by CNN or Fox News; they are also peeling away the veneer of journalistic objectivity and questioning the power of all media companies to define events in broad and stereotypical terms, regardless of the consequences those definitions might have for those who remain in Ferguson and Baltimore after the cameras have been turned off and the reporters have left.
We can’t shoot them down, so let’s pay them back.
A lot of countries have been insulted by Russia and had their airspace approached by Russian fighters and bombers. The general NATO response is to launch fighters and escort them away from NATO airspace.
These are clearly provocations. Provocations are what Russia accuses NATO of doing to them.
So let’s give it to Russia, in spades.
I say that every country that Russia has launched a provocation by gesturing and intruding into their own airspace should launch their own aircraft towards and into Russian airspace. Constantly, continually and consistently, all around Russia, until Russian air defenses are just plain worn out from launching interceptors. Until further provocations are meaningless and seen for what it is. Needless and useless provocations. 
Russia wants to act like a child. Treat Russia like a child.
MountainRunner.us is written by my friend and colleague, Matt Armstrong. Matt is one of the governors at the US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), so he has unique insight into “public diplomacy, international media and the struggle against propaganda” at the national level, internationally. On behalf of the BBG, he negotiates and investigates much of what I write about – with the people involved.
Matt wrote MountainRunner.us previously, before he was hired into government, and the blog was widely regarded as “must read”. Matt takes a much more formal approach, a more studied and rigorous approach to his subjects. Therefore, he produces far fewer blogs, but most are really impressive to read.
It is really nice that his blog is no longer dark. Welcome back, Matt!
In the very near future, a new MountainRunner.us site will be launched. The new site has a clean and fresh look and better readability across different devices.
To subscribe to updates from the new site, including headlines (usually annotated) and posts, you will need to subscribe to the new e-letter system. If you previously signed up to receive email from MountainRunner.us, you will need to re-subscribe. Registration is here: http://eepurl.com/bkl6In
A new tagline reflects the purpose of the new site: public diplomacy, international media, and the struggle against propaganda.
The purpose of the blog is to develop understanding of the challenges of today’s international environment. The goal is to raise the quality of the discourse around these topics, to create informed decisions; to empower the fox over the hedgehogs that ignore or miss the messy details and then stumble right into the traps of our adversaries.
Show your good judgment and signup here: http://eepurl.com/bkl6In
See you soon!
Only truth — not propaganda — can beat back Russia’s misinformation offensive
In March, as the eastern Ukrainian town of Debaltseve suffered heavy fighting despite a recent ceasefire agreement, journalist Nastya Stanko made a disturbing report: “People from Debaltseve told us that the army from NATO, the Polish army, and the U.S. army were all in Debaltseve,” wrote Stanko, a co-founder of independent Ukrainian broadcaster Hromadske.tv. “These people believed that if they were evacuated, they would be killed. So they wouldn’t come out of their basements.” These residents believed what they had seen on Russian television broadcasts. Employing World War II references that trigger traumatic memories, these broadcasts propagate a narrative that paints the popularly elected regime in Ukraine as a Western-backed, ultra-nationalist, fascist junta, conducting pogroms against the Russian-speaking population of eastern and southern Ukraine.
For Ukrainians and observers of the crisis, the Kremlin’s steady campaign of misinformation is a cause of serious concern. Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev have convincingly argued that the Kremlin “weaponizes” information by disseminating outlandish lies, seeking to sow confusion and manipulate public opinion. Initiatives in Europe and the U.S. seek to counter the influence of RT, the well-funded Russian international TV channel that has proven a highly effective disseminator of Kremlin propaganda, with expanded Russian-language reporting from government-run broadcasters such as Voice of America. The Ukrainian Ministry of Information recently announced plans to respond to RT’s international broadcasts with a channel they will call Ukraine Tomorrow. They also plan to combat Russia’s online trolling campaigns with its own “iArmy,” all on the ministry’s modest annual budget of $184,000. By comparison, RT’s 2015 budget is roughly $247 million.
The western and Ukrainian approaches — even if they were adequately resourced — are not the right ones. Fighting propaganda head-on with counter-propaganda is not just unrealistic, but also deeply flawed. My colleague Katya Myasnikova from Ukraine’s Independent Association of Broadcasters memorably likened it to “treating cancer with tuberculosis.” It’s a dirty fight that takes the low ground and has proven highly ineffective at changing minds and winning trust. Instead, fighting propaganda with counter-propaganda only breeds despair, cynicism, and confusion among the target populations.
The people of eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region — those bunkered in their basements in Debaltseve as well as the over one million displaced — are ill-suited as targets for a western PR offensive and the hyper-patriotic messages of the Ukrainian media. What they urgently need instead is factual and highly practical information — “news you can use,” as one U.S. publication once referred to it — that will make an immediate difference in their lives. Rather than fighting Russia’s media spin doctors with bombastic “messaging” from the west or from Kyiv, we should concentrate instead on supporting excellent local journalism and furthering the distribution of objective news and information. This includes detailed reporting on ways to keep people safe, fed, clothed, sheltered, connected with families and friends, and how to rebuild their lives. There are already media outlets stepping up to this challenge in Ukraine, and we should be supporting them.
These informational needs of Ukraine’s war-torn eastern communities are detailed in Internews’ rapid response report, “Ukraine: Trapped in a Propaganda War. Abandoned. Frustrated. Stigmatized.” This report suggests that humanitarian information about where to get much-needed fundamental resources is the most immediate need for these populations. Beyond this immediate information, these people need to regain a sense of agency –which can only be supported by well-targeted, objective information. While propaganda and endless conspiracy theories erodes people’s right to know, diminishing their dignity and respect, the reporting of locally relevant information can be a powerful first step toward rebuilding trust among these disaffected communities — trust in both the Ukrainian government and in quality media as a reliable source of information.
Long before hostilities erupted in the east, Ukrainians had only a wavering trust in media. Major broadcast media outlets were controlled by oligarchs or political interests and served as instruments through which they waged their political and economic vendettas. After the Maidan revolution was followed quickly by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the rise of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass, moderate voices could be — and often were — characterized as anti-patriotic. Today, Ukraine’s national media focus largely on covering the war, following “patriotic” editorial policies that dedicate little time or attention to the humanitarian crisis and its consequences.
In the rebel-held territories, media freedom has been all but dismantled, as most of the region’s journalists have fled and separatists have asserted strict control over information resources. They have launched at least four new TV stations and a host of radio stations broadcasting programming ranging from traditional Cossack songs to talk shows on which guests debate the finer points of Russian Orthodoxy — clearly an ideological project. They have allowed few Ukrainian journalists to enter the areas under their control. As a result, neither Ukraine’s national nor its local media have been able to function effectively as a public service media for the east.
That is not to say that there are no media outlets in Ukraine doing the right thing. Moderate voices such as the online Hromadske.tv, the Hromadske radio network, and its affiliates in Kyiv, the Donbass, and Zaporizhzhya are standing up to the challenge. Almost all of these outlets are new players that emerged from the grassroots during the Euromaidan revolution. They belong to the journalists and activists themselves, rather than to oligarchs or the state, and their focus is on local rather than national news. They are not only covering the conflict, but giving those affected by it a voice, allowing genuine and important grievances to be aired, and demanding accountability from the government.
It is unfortunate that most of these outlets are online-only and that their reach among the elderly and the poor — two of the groups most dramatically affected by the conflict — is limited. Helping these outlets spread their message and diversify the way they deliver it — and not fighting Russian lies with lies of our own — is one way Ukraine and the West can win the information war.
#AceNewsReport – Spain:May.12: Spanish police detained two people on Tuesday in Barcelona on suspicion of distributing Islamic State propaganda, Reuters reported.
The suspects used several online profiles to disburse their own material and official content from the militant group, according to the Interior Ministry.
More than 40 people have been arrested in Spain this year for suspected militant-related activity, preventing young Muslims joining armed groups in Syria or Iraq.
#ANS2015
Armed men, believed to be Russian servicemen, forced their way into a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea with armored vehicles, automatic fire, and stun grenades on March 22, 2014. As Russia seized Crimea, mobile telephone services were blocked, Russian naval ships jammed radio communications, Crimean government websites were knocked offline, telecommunications offices were raided, and cables cut. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov
Hackers have consistently used low-level cyber warfare tactics to advance Russian goals in Ukraine.
A dedicated group of hackers successfully infected the e-mail systems of the Ukrainian military, counterintelligence, border patrol, and local police. The hackers use a spear-phishing attack in which malware is hidden in an attachment that appears to be an official Ukrainian government email. For the most part, the technologies are not advanced but the attacks have been persistent. Lookingglass, a cybersecurity firm, suspects the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is the culprit behind the virus dubbed Operation Armageddon.
The Russian government is likely behind an even more dangerous virus. Since 2010 BAE Systems has been monitoring the activities of malware they dubbed Snake, and numerous digital footprints point to the Russian Bear. Moscow time zone stamps were left in the code and Russian names are written into the software. Other clues point to the Kremlin. “It’s unlikely to be hacktivists who made this. The level of sophistication is too high. It is very well written—and extremely stealthy,” observed Dave Garfield, BAE’s Managing Director for cyber security.
According to the IT security company Symantec, Snake has infected dozens of computers in the office of Ukraine’s Prime Minister and at least ten Ukrainian embassies since 2012. Snake was used against the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairsto access documents on the Ukraine crisis. The malware establishes a “digital beachhead” that allows its operators to deliver malicious code to the targeted networks. The implications are far-reaching: “Russia not only now has complete informational dominance in Ukraine,” an intelligence analyst told the Financial Times, “it also has effective control of the country’s digital systems, too. It has set the stage.”
Another hacker group in Russia exploited a security flaw in Microsoft Windows software to spy on NATO, Ukraine, and several other targets. Dubbed Sandworm Team after researchers discovered references in the code to the Dune series of science-fiction novels, the group used a “zero day” attack—a flaw in the software that has not been previously identified and for which there is no preexisting fix—which is usually associated with deep pockets. In Ukraine, the malware was targeted at regional governments, another clue that the hackers were not criminals.
So far, Russian cyberattacks have been relatively low key. There’s an obvious reason why: the Kremlin already has access to Ukrainian telecommunications. Russia built the system. Even the system Ukraine uses to monitor the activities of its own citizens, System for Operative Investigative Activities or SORM, was originally developed by the Russian KGB. When Russia invaded Crimea it gained access to the national telephone company’s operations center on the peninsula. If the Russian government wanted to shut down Ukraine’s power and telecommunications, it could do so easily. “And there’s nothing that Ukraine could do to stop it,” said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cybersecurity firm TAIA Global.
Cyber activity was used kinetically as Russia seized Crimea. Ukrainian law enforcement agencies reported Russian cyberattacks had collapsed the communication systems of almost all Ukrainian forces that could pose a danger to the invading Russian troops. Mobile telephone services were blocked, Russian naval ships jammed radio communications, Crimean government websites were knocked offline, telecommunications offices were raided, and cables cut.
“Russia has cutting-edge electronic warfare equipment and personnel trained in proper EW/SIGINT doctrine (what they called Radio-Electronic Combat) and Ukraine is playing catch-up. A generation’s worth of neglect of the Ministry of Defense and the security services by Kyiv…cannot be made good in a few months,” said John Schindler, an expert on information warfare.
US technology is also vulnerable: Russia claims (and the Pentagon denies) that it used its control of the cyber battlefield to intercept a US drone as it patrolled Crimean skies on March 14, 2014.
Cyberattacks have increased in frequency around the time of military action, possibly indicating that the attacks are part of the overall offensive. The number of callbacks—computer communications showing someone is hacking a computer—to Russia increased as the turmoil rose.
Russia controls the airwaves, the phone lines, and the computers. The Ukrainian government needs to rebuild its telecommunications network using non-Russian companies and technology. In the short term, US diplomats and military trainers in Ukraine should avoid using Ukrainian communications. The United States also needs to harden its communications to avoid incidents such as the rumored drone intercept. In the long term, the United States must face the reality that it is engaged in a decades-long contest for the Eurasian heartland and will have to adjust its tactics accordingly. Cyber warfare is merely the latest battlefield in which politics is pursued by other means.
James J. Coyle is a research fellow at the Atlantic Council and the Director of Global Education at Chapman University
