The Kremlin will use different disinformation tactics to sow confusion and apathy in the West. | POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas/Photos by Getty Images; iStock
Opinion by Rory Finnin and Jon Roozenbeek
03/22/2022 04:30 AM EDT
Rory Finnin, associate professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity.
Jon Roozenbeek is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of psychology at the University of Cambridge. Both are members of Cambridge’s Disinformation and Media Literacy Working Group.
On Sept. 1, 1939, the New York Times ran a banner headline reading, “German Army Attacks Poland, Cities Bombed, Port Blockaded.” What became known as World War II had begun.
Weeks later, however, the banner headlines were gone. On Oct. 27, in a slim column below the Times masthead, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed any “talk” of the United States entering the war in Europe as “fake.” “‘Boys of American mothers’ won’t go abroad, [Roosevelt] says, reaffirming neutrality,” the article read.
Today we rarely recall Roosevelt’s early assertions of “neutrality” or his categorical pronouncements of what the American military would not do when faced with a war of aggression and conquest in Europe. (Given his own recent statements about what the American military will not do in Ukraine, President Joe Biden seems to have forgotten some of this history.) We have also...
The President of the Association of Yorubas in Diaspora, South Africa, Dr Olusola Agbeniyi, has asked the senator representing Edo North, Adams Oshiomhole, to desist from making what he described ...