According to a gaggle of academics at the University of Calgary, all news reports and opinions contrary to the pretzel twisted narratives of the state on the situation in the Ukraine are nothing less than Russian propaganda and “foreign interference.”
“Our research team has been collecting more than 6.2 million Tweets globally since January 2022 to monitor and measure Russian influence operations on social media,” Jean-Christophe Boucher, Jack Edwards, Jenny Kim, Abbas Badami, and Henry Smith write collectively for the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
We find that pro-Russian narratives promoted in the Canadian social media ecosystem on twitter are divided into two large communities:
1) accounts influenced by sources from the United States and 2) those largely influenced by sources from international sources from Russia, Europe, and China.
In other words, any news, despite its country of origin, is “Russian propaganda” if it does not support US, European, and Canadian narratives on the war in the Ukraine.
“First, pro-Russian discourse on Canadian Twitter blames NATO for the conflict suggesting that Russia’s invasion was a result of NATO’s expansionism or aggressive intentions toward Russia,” the authors argue.
There can be no doubt, since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has pushed its armaments and soldiers, at the behest of the US, ever closer to the border of Russia. The US made a promise to not move further to the East. Of course, history demonstrates how such promises made by the US State Department are routinely broken.
James Goldgeier writes for War On the Rocks:
More than a quarter-century ago, in February 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discussed NATO’s future role in a unified Germany. Baker told Gorbachev that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east” and agreed with Gorbachev’s statement that “Any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” (Emphasis added.)
David K. Shipler, writing for Washington Monthly, explains how unclassified documents
tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by NATO, then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.
“Second, it is suggested that Western nations are propping up fascists in Ukraine, thus justifying Russia’s actions,” the authors write.
The fourth narrative justifies the invasion by framing it as a war waged against a state that is either fascist or heavily fascist-influenced. They point to the presence of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the Ukrainian National Guard as proof. The Tweets spread the common Russian government talking point that Ukraine is run by a fascist regime.
One has to wonder if these esteemed academics bothered to delve into factual historical information about Ukrainian “fascism.” Following the US-orchestrated violent coup in 2014, these ultranationalist “fascists” (akin to Nazi ethnic cleansing racists) gained influence within the Ukrainian government and military.
Three members of the Nazi-saluting Svoboda were positioned as members of the first post-coup government. The co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years. He founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine along with Oleh Tyahnybok (seen giving a Nazi salute in the above-linked photo). The party’s Wolfsangel logo (basically a rearranged Nazi swastika) and its ultranationalistic philosophy are not “Russian disinformation,” but indisputable historical facts.
According to the propaganda media in the West, Mr. Paruby has changed his ways and has become a respectable member of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. He was a leader of the so-called (and laughably titled) “Revolution of Dignity” (the US-orchestrated Maidan Revolution) that violently overthrew the elected leader of the country, Viktor Yanukovych.
Paruby is an admirer of Stepan Bandera, a Nazi Germany collaborator responsible for mass murdering Jews, Russians, communists, Poles, and other minority groups during WWII.
Despite the counter-reality pronouncements of narrative pushing academics tenured at “prestigious” universities, the fact is the ultranationalist movement in Ukraine has grown in scope and influence.
Read the whole article here.
