IMPERATIVE

It is a tribute to the Red Army’s organisational virtuosity that it managed to amass these enormous quantities of fire-power, accessories and provisions without giving their game away. Battle-hardened veterans Marshal Georgiy Zhukov and Marshal Alexander Vasilevskiy were made responsible for planning, coordinating and directing two fronts each: Zhukov for the two southern fronts (2nd and 1st Byelorussian) and Vasilevskiy for the two northern fronts (1st Baltic and 3rd Byelorussian). The front commanders were Generals Bagramyan (1st Baltic), Chernyakhovskiy (3rd Byelorussian), Zakharov (2nd Byelorussian) and Rokossovskiy (1st Byelorussian, the largest formation, also tasked with covering the most ground).

Historical Victory Parade on June 24, 1945. Full version. The POBEDA TV channel, part of Channel One’s Digital TV Family, presents the full version of the 1945 Victory Parade. Together with the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents the editorial team did a unique job. Frame by frame the entire newsreel of the celebratory day of June 24, 1945 – from the early morning hours to the evening fireworks. A lot of new authentic information from archives was added to the programme and the logic and sequence of actions was restored.

These and many, many other glaring irregularities in the Swedish preliminary investigation documented by Melzer are vital to decoding what comes next. Or as Melzer concludes “the authorities were not pursuing justice in this case but a completely different, purely political agenda”. With the investigation hanging over his head, Assange struggled to build on the momentum of the Iraq and Afghanistan logs revealing systematic war crimes committed by the US and UK. “The involved governments had successfully snatched the spotlight directed at them by WikiLeaks, turned it around, and pointed it at Assange,” Melzer observes. They have been doing the same ever since.

At least for the moment, the bipartisan project to muzzle the US population is hitting a bump on the road and causing even a bit of a ruling class fracas due to the Biden admin’s oafish move to create a DHS department dedicated to “combat online disinformation”, seen by many as a transparent attempt to really police free speech, which is totally unconstitutional.

This is being done because the empire is actually losing the battle of communications at a critical moment in its troubled history. Global capitalism simply cannot cope with the very issues it continually trigers:  economic immiseration for the masses and grotesque inequality; endless wars; an unstoppable ecocide, and, perhaps, the most politically flammable issue, incurable unemployment.

MARGARET KIMBERLEY—On April 21, 2022 former President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University on the subject of social media. In typical Obamaesque fashion, he didn’t state his point plainly. He used a lot of time, more than an hour, to advocate for social media censorship. He only used that word once, in order to deny that it was in fact what he meant, but the weasel words and obfuscation couldn’t hide what Obama was talking about.