Upcoming in Estonian Journal of Military Studies, the journal of the Estonian National Defense College (ENDC) By Yevhen Fedchenko ABSTRACT This article traces the evolution of Russian propaganda as part of active measures from Soviet times through Russian occupation of Crimea and the war against Ukraine in Donbas as the climax in use of propaganda and media manipulations. Fakes and forgeries are a part of active measures conducted by the Kremlin and amending its military capacity and diplomacy efforts to cover it up. The manufacturing of fakes is characterized by centralized and systematic approach to manufacturing and distribution of fakes, their coherence and connection with the Kremlin policies and talking points. The article concludes that the use of media-related active measures is not a new phenomenon and was widely used by Soviet Union before as an instrument for conducting its foreign policy by clandestine means. Through examination of more than 500 items from Russian
“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”
It plays this way (excerpted from the above cited article by Higgins):
Mr. Backman, who also represents the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway state set up with Russian support in eastern Ukraine, denied targeting Ms. Aro as part of any “information war.” Rather, he insisted that Russia was itself the victim of a campaign of disinformation and distortion conducted by the West.
Also in The New York Times (published two days ago):
STOCKHOLM — With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.
The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.
This report analyses Russian propaganda and disinformation – here collectively called strategic deception – concerning the conflict in Ukraine. The strategic deception is not exclusively a Russian term, but it does capture what we think is an essential feature of the current Russian foreign and security policy. It is driven by attempts to put the adversary into a defensive posture and off balance, and thus, to create conditions for surprise.
The methods utilized in contemporary Russian strategic deception are partly the same that were already used in Soviet propaganda. But where Soviet propaganda was anchored in ideological truth claims, the contemporary Russian variant can be compared to a kaleidoscope: a light piercing through it is instantly transformed into multiple versions of reality.
The rise of Novorossya is the most significant political development since the collapse of the USSR. It is a new politics, one that combines nationalism and socialism into a Christian, humane and just political order that has not been seen before. That it rises on the ashes of “independent Ukraine” and on Orthodox territory is no accident.
Posted to YouTube by DailyMilitary.News, Feb. 16, 2016.
Addenda
The characteristics of Russian propaganda are: generating very strong emotions, aggression, and a dramatic departure from reality. Russian television stations, with very few exceptions, create a more and more complicated and unpredictable reality, ‘generate fears, bringing people to the brink of chaos and panic’. Once created, the huge stress damages the mechanism of rational thinking, people are herded into a crowd, where archaic instincts take over, triggered by the simplest of emotions’.[1]
In Russia, whoever is not with the Kremlin, whoever criticizes Putin, or even doubts the righteousness of his policies, is considered a traitor and an enemy. Against the very few who dare express minimal reservations towards official policy, a movement formed recently, with the blessing of power, the Anti-Maidan movement, with the express objective to combat any position, to wipe out the smallest trace of doubt towards Putin’s wisdom. Anti-Maidan fights against the ‘5th column’, the enemy within.[2]
Adopting the overarching humanism expressed in Back-Channels may be part of addressing and attenuating the distress — I know: it’s too mild a word but the clinical approach may help in politics — promoted by our acceptance, approval, or fear of political criminals.
I believe my nation-state has engaged appropriately with pirates, raiders, thieves, and despots over centuries and consistently for the better. However, it too has had to compromise with or work with a “realpolitik” in the world, whether as with “detente” in the Cold War days or with dictators conveniently found in the region between American secular humanist pluralist values and the machinery of a large entity that and attempts cultural transformation with gunships and tanks.
Over time, and perhaps because the dictators can be so bad, a more loving and moderate human soul persists and prevails in a little more of the world’s space.
Because we are so bound together today by virtual wires and immense production and shipping systems plus international investment, a form of buy-in, our wars should be smaller despite “advances” in the lethality of the world’s arsenals, and they should become more about how we live with ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution far beyond ourselves. The fascist nationalist supremacist urge in thought that then develops and drives armies against one another despite the weaving in global communications, economics, and industry seems to me archaic, and it’s on that front, a front in time more than place, that we’re having this conversation.
The enterprise of enterprise and freedom finds its boundaries in the personalities of the despotic and ruthless who command their states through brutality and fear. Crime and corruption complicate matters, but over time, and perhaps a great expanse of it, early Las Vegas, the wild frontier, gives way to law and its enforcement. Still, the conditions that may produce a healthy society anywhere may be fragile x population x area x economy (internal and external trade variables) x education x endemic cultural worldview, and so on. It takes immense courage and fortitude to produce a predominantly civil — lawful — state.
Here I may depart from “Putin bashing” and the constant juxtaposing of Moscow with the horror taking place in Syria and the scare tactics employed by the Ayatollah in Iran. What does it take to turn a multi-tiered “mafia state” that starts out with a big resources grab by free-ranging business guys with rough ways but must become reliable and trustworthy, more or less, partners in the development of capital enterprise and through it the raising of regional economic development?
In that light, strong re-centralization of power and the creating of law that encourages (to say the least) the reinvestment of reserves in Russia’s internal economy makes sense — and as much has come to pass albeit too slowly for the “capital flight” that has already taken place in earlier years.
Still — the future’s the thing.
BackChannels works with everyday news, not a crystal ball. It gets to the intersections in conflict, politics, and psychology and rightly questions the mentality of medieval leadership in an increasingly cross-communicating and trading world. It has also promoted a Maslowian possibility in the region of ethnolinguistic cultural co-evolution as each of the world’s approximately 7,000 living languages represents the invention of a way of life and of seeing others and dealing with environmental challenges in some once more insulated space, i.e., separate enough to keep people together and involved in the creating and using of language as a functioning cultural tool. In essence, but especially with the contents of the sidebar to the left, it has suggested a different vision of a modern future, one that would gently move others in the world away from extremist and supremacist ambitions and into ambitious but distinctive greater cooperation in mutual survival.
My kernel for how languages work would be metonymy with paired, primary, and secondary sound/other signal associations. N. may want to catch this because it’s one of the elements involved in conflict within Islam that make winnowing the issue down to the “God Mob” (such may not be restricted to Islam but may be archaic elsewhere) so difficult. If one asks, for example, what the term “homosexual” means in terms of its resonance — what else does it call to mind? — we have several approaches to analyzing that. The science community might want to know and then refer to the incidence in behavior in nature x species and fit that data and theorizing about it with similar data compiled for Homo Sapiens sapiens.
The bohemian-creative communities, long on hedonism, unconsciously selfish or deep down exploitive and willful, give it a glance, give it a go, paint, write, dance, sing (“Take a Walk on the Wild Side”) about it, include it, dismiss it as trivial, so many other things considered, and move right on to their next scene. Dig? 🙂
And the religious refer to holy scripture and the logic of edict that must follow, which mentality went hard on the witches of Salem, not too many hundreds of years ago, and has visited similar villainy to . . . gays in an Orlando nightclub.
Bored, confused, dead-ended, invisible, still energetic and searching for answers — and then comes imam or speaker Farrokh Sekaleshfar who explains that the Muslim response to homosexuality is death, and it would be merciful to get it over with.
Now we have an issue: how stable is that message in Islamic jurisprudence and scholarship?
That’s really asking a question about metonymy within Arabic and within Islamic thought.
Then: how authoritative and how deep goes the distribution of that thought through the Ummah?
The Dhimmi and infidel on the defensive before such a cultural and political program may approach the same thought with external ideas, and chief among alternatives authoritative secular governance founded on reason undergirded by science and research and wedded to compassion, humility, inclusion, and tolerance.
Counterterrorism is a complex field, but in the language part, many recognize aspects of the talk (e.g., invoking the term “crusader west”) that key into signature by way of talk x behavioral change x foreign travel / association with Muslim Brotherhood figures x media obsessions x planning x arming.
In the west, wild poets alter the meaning of elements in language on an experimental basis, at least, and the public picks up and sustains what it finds “cool” — and, for the most part, the culture, the whole shebang, recapitulates itself into the modern English world.
In the Ummah, one still meets Farrokh Sekaleshfar sincerely plying old and frankly monstrous thought with authority. He’s got his hands full today (as a person of interest to western authorities), but what he’s drawn from in language has “cultural metonymic stability” — i.e., he’s not the only one talking that talk and pushing it into everyone’s future.
The clip dates from 2013. I take note of the time because we’re in changing times where we may not be able to observe change — by what we’re able to see, we’re too limited — but if it’s taking place, there should be fewer of these clips available this year than there may have been in 2013.
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Archaic-Past | Restive Middle | Modern Muslim Reform Movements
That “archaic past” can no longer do any real thing for anyone except enrich its handful of malignant and piratical leaders. It’s going to go away, visible if by way of combat with the al-Qaeda Typicals, invisible if by way of unspoken individual and popular rejection. Out with the old. The new has many channels forward, including a conservative aspect, which I find convoluted but . . . what works might work.
This is the 25th Anniversary Year of the Dissolving of the Soviet, and The Phantom of the Soviet wanders around in such persons as Corbyn, who should be also part of the “archaic past”.
Those “al-Qaeda Typicals”, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the organizations and persons that support them are today readily visible to the public. Perhaps still tender and less visible are organizations like the Muslim Reform Movement and publications like New Age Islam.
BackChannels’ question: has the modern world with its “math, science, and technology” mania passed the age of miracles?
Is new scripture possible?
Are new exegeses based on old scripture possible and useful?
Over the years on this blog, and with such off-hand gems as “anthropolitical psychology”, one may look into the future with clinical observation and certainty, which may or may not be spiritually satisfying.
What does it mean to observe and say our global inventory of languages stands at fewer than 7,000 living languages, we are losing several every year, and each represents through sound and other signal a distinct way of living with others in proximity and with the land on which The People have been cultured?
Is that all there is?
Could be.
It could be magnificent as well if we continue to find God, Nature, and The Universe awesome beyond our comprehension.
Of BackChannels’ several inventions in political psychology, the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” might apply best to President Putin’s way of looking at western liberalism, developing cause to consider it threatening, and then, at last, accusing the west of possessing his own true motives as regards political control through disinformation, force, and manipulation.
For history, start with Czar Nicholas III’s “Okhrana“, the political secret police tasked with influencing and shaping the Czar’s own opposition — Ayatollah or Emperor, why not play both sides of the chessboard? The political theater is either yours or it’s not — prove it’s yours: put on a play; give the opposition its head; slip it a script; settle back and enjoy the show.
Of course, there’s more to the story of Russia’s romance with autocracy, state-controlled information and the perversions that are disinformation and propaganda, and secret political police. What follows on this post is an afternoon’s brief compilation of articles pertinent to the challenge posed today by Putin’s approach to throwing the wool over so many eyes, including, possibly, his own.
In general, the Russian media portrays anything going on from the point of view of Vladimir Putin. He has unlimited access to the media and they explain everything that’s going on according to his official statement. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a war in Syria or any other topic.
Russia today is the first intelligence dictatorship in history. It is a brand new form of totalitarianism, which we are not yet familiar with. Now the KGB, rechristened FSB, is openly running Russia.
BackChannels also possesses in its library a small “Russian Section” that boasts many volumes on the Russian experience in the 20th Century, on the Soviet, and on the transition from the Soviet to “Putin’s Kleptocracy”.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, its people had a unique opportunity to also cast off the country’s political police, that peculiarly Russian instrument of power created by the 16th century’s Ivan the Terrible, which had changed its name many times, from Okhrana to Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to NKGB, to MGB, to MVD, to KGB. Unfortunately, the Russian people were not yet ready — or able — to seize that opportunity.
The international community faces serious challenges arising from a new mode of information warfare, which Russia has deployed during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014-2015. This ongoing “propaganda war” is the most recent and frightening example of information warfare. It reflects the wide array of non-military tools used to exert pressure and influence the behaviour of countries. When skilfully combined, disinformation, malicious attacks on large-scale information and communication systems, psychological pressure, can be even more dangerous than traditional weapon systems, since they are extremely difficult to discover and combat.
The Kremlin’s disinformation campaign goes far beyond controlling its own media. It is aimed at nothing less than presenting a parallel version of reality and disseminating it as if it were news. The Kremlin’s goal is to make people question the value of media at all; to reject the idea of an absolute truth; and to persuade the public that “reality” is relative.
If someone—some lost, ersatz-port-begotten ghost—materializing before me at that moment, had told me that, thirty years later, I would be writing about Andropov’s death in English, in America, on the week when post-Soviet Russia’s ruling class—made up, to a considerable extent, of the old K.G.B. cadre—would be celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a large exhibit dedicated to his life, at whose opening a glowing telegram from his spiritual successor, President Vladimir Putin, would be read—well, I would have known for certain that I had finally and irrevocably, once and for all, lost my mind.
As a former KGB officer and head of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, Putin knows the value of information. His concept of the media, however, is a far cry from the First Amendment. For him, it’s a simple transactional equation: Whoever owns the media controls what it says.
“There should be patriotically minded people at the head of state information resources,” Putin told reporters at his 2013 annual news conference, “people who uphold the interests of the Russian Federation. These are state resources. That is the way it is going to be.”
Disinformation is always a conscious policy and part of a larger policy agenda. It is not simply dishonesty of this or that official in response to a particular event. It is implemented with a clear understanding that a combination of truth and falsehood is useful and effective. And it is pursued as long as it is effective, being sacrificed only when there are reasons to believe that either it is no longer necessary or it is no longer being accepted. All of those things have characterized Putin’s approach to information about Ukraine, a pattern that makes what Moscow is doing all the more disturbing.
Wikipedia. “Okhrana”. The following comes from the “Pre-1905” section of the Wikipedia entry:
While P.I. Rachkovsky, as head of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, had long ordered Okhrana agents to infiltrate and influence revolutionary movements abroad, Zubatov brought these tactics to a new level by creating Okhrana-controlled trade unions, the foundation of police socialism.
The belief in an ethical God makes it possible over time, to move from a society of tribes to a society of many tribes, held together with commonly shared beliefs, stories, and traditions, because this God demands that we care for the other, the stranger, because we know how a stranger feels; we were once strangers in a strange land (see Exodus 23:9) (p. 60).
Canadian author Diane Weber Bederman, a friend of BackChannels’ editor, has put together a brief compelling volume about the origins of compassion, empathy — a pervasive thoughtfulness most of all — in contemporary western thought by way of Biblical language and lore and the interaction of the Judeo-Christian vision of God and man as woven through the western experience.
Although composed as defense and reminder of western values, it may turn out the right book at the right time as regards broadening the channels for the appreciation of a number of aspects of cultural and intercultural survival:
Ethical monotheism is not the enemy.
Belief in the ethical God of the Christians and Jews counterbalances egoism and the idolization of another human being. I cannot place belief in any man perfecting himself. The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. I wrote about that earlier, in my chapter “The Snake Tempted Me,” about the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism. More people have died from wars that embraced secular fundamentalist propaganda than have been killed in wars based on religious differences. Encyclopedia of Wars authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare. From their list of 1,763 wars, only 123 are classified as involving a religious cause; these wars account for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. It is estimated that more than 160 millions civilians were killed in genocides in the twentieth century alone, with nearly 100 million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China. Think of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, and Adolph Hitler.
Why do we allow ourselves to give up our free will and instead by swayed by others? Why do we so easily forget God’s admonition, “Beware of letting your heart be seduced; if you go astray, serve other gods and bow down to them . . . you will quickly perish”? (Deuteronomy 11:16-17) . . . . (p. 101)
Bederman is right and rightly quotable, page after well researched and thoughtfully written page, for her book reminds of basic principles and tenets that form the bulwark of a healthy and productive western society.
The tour begins close to the thought, “Before ethical monotheism and the revelation at Mount Sinai, there was little concept of the intrinsic value of a human being. There was little concept of the sacredness of human life” (p. 11).
Given the spectacle created by dictator and “eye doctor” Bashar al-Assad in Syria with the help of Putin, Khamenei, and Baghdadi, one cannot discount Bederman’s observation of history and its present corollaries, for conscience, empathy, kindness, human rights, freedom, and love itself may not be givens in human affairs but transmitted through the oral and written traditions in language of a civilization born of suffering beneath the words, whips, and yokes of tyrants. For that, the Judeo-Christian experience has been (from Pharaoh to Hitler) immense.
Where Bederman quotes Thomas Paine — “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man” — she precedes the presentation of it with an observation drawn from commentary on the God of the Torah:
There is a commentary in one of the many books about the Bible that imagines God’s response to the happiness of the Israelites after the drowning of the Egyptians. God hears the angels singing and celebrating His great victory. But instead of rejoicing weeps and rebukes them. “Why are you singing?” He asks. “Why are you rejoicing? The Egyptians are My children, too, and they are dead, drowned in the sea. There is no cause for you to sing. Their deaths are not to be celebrated” (p. 38).
True, and to BackChannels’ mind memory of a passage in an old Haggadah serves up the same lesson.
We — of the Jews and the “mixed multitudes” that joined the flight from Pharaoh, of “the west”, of the world’s democratic open societies, of the realms of the considerate and lawful (as opposed to those more familiar with capricious justice) — don’t rejoice at death, not even the death of mortal enemies.
As a philosophy of ethics, Bederman takes on abortion, utilitarianism, geneticism, too accepting a multiculturalism, and, of course, moral relativism: “If ethics have no extrinsic or intrinsic substantive base, then ethical decisions will be made by those in power who can impose their beliefs on others” (p. 75).
Again, page after page, Back to the Ethic proves a rich and thoughtful reading, one also at times personal as when Bederman encounters her own passage through hell in the form of a costly medical misdiagnosis and the path she takes in response to it. However, the author does not dwell in the region of her own mortality but rather in the realm of the universal and its reflection in scripture and the defense through time of Judeo-Christian belief in the structuring of the western tradition and today’s compassionate, democratic, open, and most vibrant societies.
I don’t know how everyone else acquires their faith or lack of! But I do know how I found mine (I found it after 19 lost souls blew themselves up and took 3000 innocents souls with them ! This was not a religion I wanted to be a part of! So I picked up the scripture with no commentary and read it for myself. God was in there. They were not ! ). The short compressed version of what is religious never gave me faith. It gave me fear and nothing else. I am not suggesting that we should not fear God. Oh, we should fear him alright! We should tremble in awe of the day we shall all answer to why was a single drop of blood spilt in His name. And if the only answer we have is : “er, em, well, Sheikh Know-It-All said Jerusalem must have an Arabic and Muslim governor at all time even at the risk of fast tracking the apocalypse. We listened to him because he looked quite pious, sounded well versed you know. Oh, and he had a zillion followers on Facebook, Twitter and everything!” If that is all we have got to answer for then I am guessing we all are going to have a serious problem on the day. Because that is not an answer that will get anyone a pass into second grade never mind into heaven!
BackChannels 