DISINFORMATION

JACQUES PAUWELS—Western historiography tends to focus on the Wehrmacht’s spectacular advances and victories in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, while ignoring or minimizing its losses; conversely, the Soviet losses receive plenty of attention, while any Soviet successes tend to be ignored or downplayed. Even though the Wehrmacht’s performance did indeed appear to be very impressive, Hitler’s blitzkrieg in the east started to lose its blitz qualities after only a few weeks. Robert Kershaw, a specialist in the German-Soviet war, has described how “Blitzkrieg momentum petered out” as early as the first week of July, “the tempo faltered” in the following weeks, and the vanguards ceased “sprinting as they had done in the Polish and French campaigns.”

Ben Norton tells it like it is about Cuba, and how the Empire is doubling down on its longstanding demonisation campaign against Cuba in the hope of promoting a regime downfall. Norton denounces the US fake news offensive against Cuba, an effort that has even used pro-government demonstrations as “evidence” of anti-communist protests. The clueless US population, of course,can;t tell which is which.

ERIC ZUESSE—The views of Alexei Navalny in Russia and in the United States are virtually opposites of each other.

In America, for example, on June 20th, the New York Times headlined “U.S. Preparing More Sanctions Against Russia, Sullivan Says”, and sub-headlined “The national security adviser raised the issue of more penalties in the poisoning of Aleksei A. Navalny days after President Biden met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.” The Hill online bannered “Sullivan says US preparing more Russia sanctions over Navalny”, and the “Best” or most popular of the many hundreds of reader-comments was “Putin is too chickenshit to face Navalny in an election”. In other words, the view is: Putin is aiming to kill Navalny because Navalny represents democracy and Putin is the dictator. That is the dominant view of Navalny not only in the United States but in its allied countries.

ED CURTIN—With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive.  It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

JOE LAURIA—Graphika seemed alarmed that on PeaceData’s Arabic-language site “some articles also attacked France in general and President Emmanuel Macron in particular, and accused them of an ‘imperialist’ approach toward Africa.” This is in line with the Times quoting Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika and an Atlantic Council fellow, as saying, “In terms of posting, they were clearly significantly left of the Biden-Harris campaign,” as if this were a threat to “national security” as the FBI contends. PeaceData had a mix of original and republished articles, Graphika tells us, from publications such as The Grayzone, which Graphika smears as a “pro-Kremlin site.”