The KGB and its counterparts in the countries of the Warsaw Pact kept on infiltrating neo-Nazi organisations in West Germany and some other Western countries, but then with a different aim, namely to goad them into extremist activities, only to accuse Western countries of the alleged resurgence of Nazism afterwards. One example of such initiatives was the ‘swastika graffiti operation’ devised by Soviet KGB General Ivan Agayants, who at that time headed the KGB Department D (disinformation), and carried out in 1959– 1960 in West Germany. 79 In that period, KGB agents painted swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on synagogues, tombstones and Jewish-owned shops. Jewish families received anonymous hate mail and threatening phone calls. The initial KGB operation would stir up residual anti-Semitic sentiments in the West German society and, consequently, produce a snowball effect where troublemakers would carry out anti-Semitic activities on their own.
Note: the above relayed passage was highlighted while reading and before encountering Michel Casey’s interview with the author, in which it is described as “One of the most widely cited moments in reviews on your book . . . .”
🙂
It has been BackChannels hope that readers less specialized in political history and dimensions within it will nonetheless appreciate some bridging between the world of the ambitious academic and the information bombarded generalist who may most of all appreciate a point made fast and indelibly.
As its editor and, I’m sure, it’s readers have figured out, more material of interest often winds up in reference than in the main body of the post. At near publication on this post, a quick look-up was given the terms, “Putin, political technologist” — here’s the image of first page results (Oct. 16, 2017):
Also related on BackChannels as regards the “KGB Playbook”, two posts, one related to the incubating of ISIS by Bashar al-Assad and the other the “application” of Islamic Terrorism to the development of what this blog refers to as the “Newest Nationalism”:
“Listen: we engage in foreign policy the way we engage in war, with every means, every weapon, every drop of blood. But like in war, we depend on both the strategy of the general in the High Command, and the bravery and initiative of the soldier in the trench.”
Russian former diplomat, 2017
Russia sees ‘active measures’ (aktivnye meropriyatiya) – from supporting populist parties through disinformation and espionage campaigns, all the way to incidents such as the attempted coup in Montenegro – as an essential part of its efforts to influence Europe. Along with the usual instruments of foreign influence, such as diplomacy and economic levers, Russia is especially active in using covert and non-traditional means, from intelligence operations to military pressure and even organised crime, all of which have been the foci of recent policy briefs for ECFR.3 This final publication in an informal series seeks instead to consider the extent to which these campaigns are carefully planned and coordinated – and, if so, by whom.
And much better than “Newspeak” (revisit Orwell): how dumb I / you / and we may be may be entirely up to ourselves!
We may wish to become aware, however, of our own “dumbing down” through allocation and curriculum priorities in general education and perhaps through our own penchant for entertainment without much critical demand on our own part except to be . . . well, entertained far more than informed or otherwise intellectually engaged.
That’s okay, of course
Allowing ourselves to be entertained is part of how we retreat from other engagements and find rest and restoration for the mind.
Still, perhaps all good citizens would do well to apprise themselves of the following concepts in greater depth as we globally ride out squawking of the discreditable, dishonest, disingenuous, despicable, and entirely disreputable (scorecard: D) among the world’s politicians and their hacks.
Active Measures: from Russia with the high-handed contempt associated with imperious narcissistic state leadership personality, think of “active measures” as the full suite of assaults on the cultural and intellectual framework of the liberal democracies of the world (and nix the “illiberal democracies”, even if members of NATO, for there ain’t no such thing as an “illiberal democracy”).
Hybrid Warfare: every form of sub-nuclear and sub-conventional warfare that might be (is) launched against a target (like Ukraine) so as not to resemble “direct engagement”. From the fielding and infiltrating of agent provocateur to mixing armed men without insignia (“Little Green Men”) in with partisan recruits to denying aggression at all . . . it’s all perfectly surreal bullying and combative bullshit that must draw a firm response from the land and people (and state) so viciously assaulted.
KGB Theater: political events, especially warfare, treated as a show one may produce and control for the delectation of military and political elites and the misguidance of the masses.
Orwellian: what happens when powerful political elites rule the world so as to forestall change, manage war as if it were a fireplace, dispense with the very idea of human dignity, and wreck forever even the hope of freedom, free will, and the possession of integrity.
Perceptual Control: political rhetoric and stagecraft produced so effectively and pervasively as to channel public perception where the politician — or, perhaps tomorrow, the “political technician” or “political technologist” — may with fair predictive capability produce effects as desired.
There is as yet no primer for “Reflexive Control” as the same has been a term of military art involving getting one’s enemy / target to behave in a desired fashion.
As now often noted on BackChannels (or on Facebook), the technique has been used to amplify or reinstall the feudal mentality and related political processes in the EU / NATO states in order to produce the kind of world in which autocratic systems — flat out or my measures — may thrive. In the KGB method as perceived by BackChannels makes short work of manipulating Islamic Terrorism to produce in targeted states a “New Nationalism” (strong reflexive patriotism) suited to the political absolutism of the medieval world.
Troll Farm: Moscow-sponsored factories for financially enslaved writers.
There’s one famous Buddhist monk who was on the cover of Time magazine a couple of years ago, and he’s described as a “Buddhist Bin Laden.” His name is Ashin Wirathu. He’s a very strange character because he wears the Buddhist garb, which is worn to demonstrate your withdrawal from the world. At the same time, he has diamond-studded watches; he flies on a private jet. It’s completely contradictory. He’s one of the main instigators of the violence. Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and Wirathu and followers of his Buddhist nationalist 969 movement believe that the Rohingya minority have all reincarnated from snakes and insects. So when you actually kill them, you’re not actually killing people, you’re actually just killing snakes and insects. That laid the foundation for the current situation that we’re in.
Who would know the beauty of a malignantly narcissistic kleptocracy better than Moscow?
And I will add, though it may be irrelevant, what hypocritical kleptocratic and medieval entity would know how to infiltrate and support terrorists worldwide better than Tehran?
Give the transitive formula a moment to sink in:
Chechnya : Myanmar
Ingush : Rohingya
The world has been once again drawn into global warfare, Moscow’s way.
By way of wholesale abuse and slaughter, the innocent of war have been pushed in both regions into flight and defensive conflict while being branded as “The Terrorists” — perhaps not unrelated to the process that has burned through Syria but the very facsimile of it.
Given how Moscow / Moscow-Tehran work, the world gets “The Terrorists” — and, oh, they’re real in an of themselves, they’re channeled with their ranks filled out by the efforts of manipulating “leaders” greater than themselves.
Related in the News
There is an urgent need for de-escalation in levels of violence in Rakhine State as there is a strong possibility of other displaced Rohingyas being radicalised by Sunni fundamentalist groups including the Bangladesh chapter of the Islamic State to take to arms. The Rohingya displacement is a matter of serious concern but the root cause of increased animosity among the Burmans and other ethnic groups against the minority community should also not be glossed over. The international community has questioned Myanmar for the crisis but has forgotten the bloody contribution of Pakistan-based jihadist groups to this catastrophe.
—
His family has been looting, his friends have been looting, and in the process he has weakened the state, divided the ANC, divided the alliance. We continue to deal with the mess, and it will take a long time to clean up.” —
One dictatorship can undo many of the gains made by ethical and modern revolutionaries. A nod here to the South Africans letting Jacob Zuma know he has gone off the track.
Zuma, not unlike Robert Mugabe, may also represent an execrable representation of the claim to leading a “people’s liberation movement” as a means to autocratic and elitist power. This time, however, the communist alignment has turned on the leader over the matter of corruption.
“We never fought the struggle to liberate the country to hand over our economy to the Guptas,” he declared, accusing the ANC leadership’s attacks on “white monopoly capital” of being “a Marxist-flavored narrative [used] as an alibi for parasitic plundering.”
Amen.
Inspiration: Mandela on the promotion of national reconciliation.
Lesson to be learned: if you should happen to develop or inherit high ethical and moral capital and standing, don’t squander it with a now old and tiresome charade.
“Tracking” (in education) aside, there’s a broad overemphasis in the development of “practical” knowledge — so the learner may earn back those student loans! — and an under-emphasis on critical thinking involved with the humanities and spheres in which political philosophy matter indirectly, as with much creative literature, or directly as with “poli-sci / poli-psy. However, appropriate departments (and other intellectual cubbyholes) have not been abandoned but perhaps made a little more elite or special by way of who drifts in at what price and under what terms and with what relationships out ahead.
“Political people” have lives in every state and are certainly not insignificant in numbers.
The greater public media audience suffers the effects of “practical education” and equally dutiful and practical careers, and for so many millions it is questionable what percentage have energy, focus, interest, and discretionary or leisure time for independent political research with some clinical discipline attached. I would bet that percentage of American adults very small or confined to students and retirees.
Here again . . . bloviating.
😦
My apologies (albeit knowing this kind of commentary has become so familiar to me that I may be certain to do it again).
However, the point stands: the more complex an issue and the more publishing (with agenda or hardened stance) about it, the less capable most will be to research and evaluate the same as a citizens. The talk on most issues has to drift up into specialized circles, and many of those would seem to need to become plainly and industrially incestuous, i.e., de facto cabal of experienced executives cum lobbyists.
Still, oh ye free citizens: choose your field of public interest and . . . dig it up, sift, find the moving parts, and make the make sense!
🙂
Not that anyone online needs the suggestion: be certain to share your findings!
The medieval worldview and its marriage to financial and political power may be archaic in the modern world. Faith in God and religion may be good things, but as demonstrated by the Islamists, by the Saudi Royals and their spreading of Wahhabi madrasas, and by related clerical wealth dependent on subscription plus political repression, too much of that kind of “religion” suffocates creativity, freedom, and economic exchange.
I believe the modern world wishes not to be dragged back into the “medieval mode” — or your nation should have a new King with his legitimacy validated by Bishops and the Pope.
Yours has also a different kind of contest going with archaic systems: the tribal systems (with chiefs) are absolute and often worlds unto themselves, and they may well be discomfited by seeing their children yanked into mines and (perhaps) abused.
The Third World War seems to me quite healthy and under way as regards barbarism and the most cynical and evil worship of money by those encouraging horrific acts worldwide.
Thank Putin who has been most visible in relation to the barbaric horrors of Syria, the creeping warfare ongoing in Ukraine, numerous “frozen conflicts”, which become transfer points for smuggling, potentially on a nearly unimaginable scale, and today the support of al-Qaeda-like Taliban in Afghanistan.
When, and since we woke up sixteen years ago this day, has the modern world — the civilization of open democracies — not been at war with barbarism?
My South American correspondent counseled the various forms of “sword” against the evils wrought by bankers who sought deregulation that invited the 2007/8 financial meltdown, by the godless forces of still nominal and virulent communist and socialist politics, and by indigenous either living in older worlds or lost in this one.
Since 9/11, a curtain in time has come up on the world that surrounds all of us as we have come to casually and commonly access cultural activities and political news around the world via Internet. Perhaps the community of foreign affairs and international relations enthusiasts as well as professionals has been grown as a consequence of access to . . . the online universe of media, political institutions, and, of course, fellow travelers — and, perhaps, we have become or started on the path toward greater cognizance and sophistication about the world’s myriad conflicts and their true underlying drivers.
For brevity, BackChannels will leave this post “airy” — short on specifics — but note that we — “the west”, “EU / NATO”, “the open democracies of the world” — may be more at war today with feudal despots and medieval illusion and “The Terrorists” — the global network of clerical power bound to media production and incitement and transnational crime (arms, diamonds, drugs, for a start) and related and active cells than was the case before this day sixteen years ago.
The prompt came also from the Qur’an (“5:82-83”) as presented this way: “You will surely find those closest in friendship to the believers to be those who say, “We are Christians.” That is because among them are priests and monks who are not arrogant.”
Response —
“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people”. – https://quran.com/5/51-61
Apparently, if one is not close to a monk or priest (or perhaps a recluse with a library), one may be in danger of trusting an untrustworthy friend.
Note: one might ask whether caliphs, kings, and emperors are not inherently arrogant in their assumptions of power over all others, and therefore particularly sensitive to arrogance in those whom they would subjugate.
Compact between shaman and chief and cleric and king spans the ages but may not be a permanent feature in humanity’s intellectual and political evolution. That may be something to think about in the experience of language, both in political rhetoric and in scripture (no matter to whom the words belong), and that of power as dominion over others.
The region of the Qur’an cited, 5:82 and 5:83 presents in English through several well-remarked translations — and of a standard four — Asad, Malik, Pickthall, and Yusuf Ali — the conveyances of none would seem as sweet as the statement quoted as the prompt.
Here is the presentation of the verse as translated by Yusuf Ali:
“Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans; and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say: “We are Christians:” because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world and they are not arrogant.”
One thought attending the description of “men devoted to learning” and “who have renounced the world and are not arrogant” is that such men would seem less than challenging to martial or political power and therefore dismissible by any speaker intent on monopolizing and wielding such power.
Qur’an 5:83 although cited in the prompt appears not present in the statement at the top of this post. Here is that verse in the Yusuf Ali translation from the Alim library URL noted:
“And when they listen to the revelation received by the Apostle thou wilt see their eyes overflowing with tears for they recognize the truth: they pray: “Our Lord! we believe; write us down among the witnesses.”
If thou woulds’t be apostle, caliph, king, or emperor would though not note the sweetness of the complete and grateful surrender of thine greatest potential resistance?
Given that question and thought, one might appreciate attempts at transitional revisionism.
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