If you look up fascism [fash-iz-uh m] in a dictionary, you will find “a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism”.

This week, we saw alternative interpretations of the word, as German democracy was called into question with accusations of fascism coming from the initiative for founding the German Pro Putin party. And we saw Angela Merkel’s democratic credentials questioned as she was accused of being a dictator. Estonia was also accused of being a fascist state, along with being blamed for Russophobia. Last time we checked, both Estonia and Germany were doing pretty good on democracy rankings.

Accusations towards Europe did not stop there. We also learned from a Czech outlet that the EU threatens its member states with violence should the countries refuse to abide by the policies decided in Brussels. There are several curiosities with this disinformation.

First of all, as the EU is made up of its member states, the policies are in fact decided by the member states together with the European Parliament which gathers democratically elected representatives of all 28 member states. Secondly, as the EU does not have any security forces of its own – who would enforce the alleged violence? EU bureaucrats perhaps? Europe was also accused of trying to destroy Russia through participating in a global war against it, a disinformation we have heard many times before but for which we have never seen any evidence.

Everyone is a terrorist

We saw some watering down of the terrorism concept in pro-Kremlin disinformation this week, as virtually everyone seems to be a terrorist. A Ukrainian major was accused of planning a terrorist attack at the G20 meeting last week – not by any law enforcement officials of course, but by pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets.

Ukraine was accused of training future terrorists and according to similar misinforming outlets, the US is soon to launch a new terrorist group in the Middle East, as they supposedly did with ISIS. There is no mention of the fact that the US is part of the coalition that fights ISIS.

Oh, and the West is apparently currently designing the “script” for the next chemical attack that will be ascribed to Assad, if you believe pro-Kremlin outlets.To inoculate you against that, we recommend that you take a look at previous disinformation concerning Syria here and here. For further reading on how pro-Kremlin disinformation abuses the tragedy of real terror attacks see this.

The claim that Ukraine are training terrorists was emphasized by a manipulated image, where the text that appear on the flag used by ISIS was put on the Ukrainian flag.

Disinformation cases reported in the previous week