Open Letter of European security experts to Federica Mogherini: Please start taking the Russian disinformation threat seriously!
The aggressive actions of the Kremlin are unprecedented in the modern era.
Invasion of neighbouring countries, massive bombings and killings of civilians, and the first annexation of a foreign land by force in Europe since World War II, constant violations of other states’ borders, kidnapping foreign citizens, harassment of foreign diplomats, or massive cyber attacks are all in Russia’s current regime toolkit.
(Photo credit: copyright by World Economic Forum, Photo by Remy Steinegger, CC BY-SA 2.0).
All these offensive incidents are accompanied by a massive, persistent, ongoing, brutally aggressive disinformation campaign.* A campaign that has been active in Europe for at least three years, establishing its channels, finding the right amplifiers and multipliers for its message – which is aimed at destabilising our societies, meddling in our elections and referendums, misleading our political leaders and breaking up the EU unity by supporting those who want to destroy it. It has been building a wide range of communication structures in most of the EU Member States, platforms that have already been functioning for a long time and have reached considerable results that cannot be erased without significant long-term counter-effort.
The prize of science: prediction with increasing certainty AKA “predictive validity”.
Why should models in the social sciences, much including political science, differ from those proven useful in biology or physics?
And what if apparent terrorism — the act as defined by the most immediate actor — were to mask another design altogether?
When the Fireman Sets the Fire
In 1999, the KGB appears to have been caught close to the elements involved in rigging an explosion to bring down an apartment building, an event that would have matched similar attacks blamed on Chechen rebels and that provided the causus belli for the Second Chechen War. Candidate for president Putin then praised those alert enough to notice the dead-of-night activity but eluded suspicion. Over time, the persistent of the press and academe combed back through the event and developed independent conclusions adverse to Moscow’s telling.
Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha, author of Putin’s Kleptocracy (Simon and Schuster, 2014) and others have weighed similarly on the subject of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings”, and although the attempted bombing may never be dragged before a jury in Moscow, the sleuths of academe and the press have submitted their public versions of amicus curiae.
What is one to make of the fireman who sets the fire — or the candidate whose probably true false flag operation sets up the greatest national protection racket ever witnessed?
Last year I wrote about the murky role Russia was playing in the Syrian war, bolstering the Assad tyranny while facilitating the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Salafi-jihadists as a means of dividing and discrediting the Syrian opposition. Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.
BackChannels has also long noted Assad’s incubating of ISIL, e.g., “Syria – Assad – ISIL – Background” (December 9, 2016), and the use of the same as a tool for blackmailing and goading the west (forced mass migration works in much the same way).
At the time, so focused seemed the western public on “Allahu Akbar Terrorism”, then Syria — and President Putin’s own return to what President Obama referred to as the “KGB Playbook” — and then Ukraine, that it may have missed Moscow’s ends or purposes in bringing barbarism back to the front pages.
Application of Reflexive Control – The Inspiring of Renewed Patriotism (and Nationalist Fervor)
None who ran off to fight jihad with al-Baghdadi could have imagined the same drawn into existence by being allowed to express itself under the watch of the more powerful, but that may have been what happened, for along with the development of ISIS accompanied by a healthy network of “jihad portals” or “jihad media”, the west has been made to respond repeatedly to “Allahu Akbar Attacks” and in part with predictable authoritarian, patriotic, and xenophobic nationalism.
Those pro-BREXIT and anti-NATO may commence with feeling duped not only by Moscow but by the projection of Islamic Terrorism as the Great Bogie — not that it isn’t an issue — on the part of conservative authoritarian leaders certain to justify the kind of defenses to be launched in transitioning the world’s most open democracies into the more distinct Feudal Estates preferred by Moscow: seal the borders; eject the foreigners; end broad cooperation with the stupid (and liberal) neighbors (if there are any left [after having been colonized by Islam]); pull up the national portcullis, such as it may be, and commence with renewed national “competition” for world domination.
There’s a rub: the knowledgeable of the open democracies and NATO and elsewhere (as in Ukraine) may well comprehend Moscow’s game and gotten just ahead of it, enough so to contain Moscow’s military flexing while it continues drawing down its cash reserves in the self-destructing limbo in which it has gotten itself in both Ukraine and Syria.
Still, Navalny’s most recent revelations tell about how Moscow works, and what it wants in the world and from it, i.e., an Orwellian politics designed for the support of excessive privilege and wealth through the expanded ownership of key assets in other states.
Moscow’s display and approval of brutality on two fronts — Syria and Ukraine — and the developing spirals of poverty in Russia itself tell how the regime regards “the masses” — ordinary people — as being of little account.
Wealthy of the World: Unite!
No need to shout — private global business competition and cooperation are today fait accomplis as regards the deals of the wealthy made while their nations appear at peace.
As has been apparent with transnational corporation for decades, the money goes where it is best suited, i.e., most productive (profitable), most safe (best parked), best entertained, and best enjoyed. In the condition of peace, there would seem no cause to keep an ambitious neighbor from investing in one nation’s own uranium mine or another’s vineyard.
Better still: how should the American public respond to the prospect of the development of a “post-constitutional” feudal state in which private business dominates government and a small cabal of wealthy dictates to the public what its interests are and will be?
All kinds of things spin through our minds with but a little information — or too little information. “The rich rub each other’s backs” or “The rich look out for one another” or “The rich make sure they remain so as a class” — true? Let’s not be so certain. What BackChannels may suggest is that Moscow’s “political absolutism” and related architecture — secret police state | centralized control | aristocracy and its systems of patronage — requires keeping cemented in place the feudal worldview: wealth is beautiful; people may be treated as a cheap commodity without intrinsic worth, much less inherent dignity or rights.
As so often mentioned here on BackChannels, the proofs of those assertions appear on display in Syria (undeniable barbarism) and Ukraine (continuous and “hybrid warfare”) — and often as well in old communist aligned states (Zimbabwe, South Africa) whose governments remain ever kleptocratic and for the leadership personally self-aggrandizing beneath the banner of one or another messianic cause (BackChannels trope regarding dictators: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”).
The American writ in governance has been (so far) very different from the feudal path, and so it may behoove America’s own transnational wealthy to keep in mind the ideals, values, and ends of their home nation’s modern democratic and ultimately humanist ends.
Official Russia today has something greater today than a Navalny issue as regards whatever pretenses to moral clarity and virtue it may have sustained despite the barbarism displayed in Syria and poker-faced dishonesty exhibited throughout the ordeal it has imposed on Ukraine. The Russian State has been hammered for years by capital flight, reduced oil revenues, and reliance on rule-of-law western banking for what it has left of its diminishing cash reserves (and for the “oligarchs” pricey western real estate for parking wealth).
As the truth comes out (and perhaps gets passed around at light speed), the centralized control of information also may be lost to the greater efforts of the less greed ridden and more tenacious and virtuous of the world.
If you’re reading this post . . . that could be you.
However — wait just a minute — what happens where the wealthy, and by whatever means, control the whole of the state far at the expense of those not in the club?
At this time — and as the above video has been viewed more than seven million times — BackChannels may suggest the official response might be a giant narcissistic shrug on the part of the Powers of the State — a big . . . so what?
Moscow and Company — the dictatorships of the world — require that their loyal patriotic subjects live in a feudal information bubble (that’s what state-controlled press is all about) and view themselves as defending their homeland and majority religion. The encouragement of nationalism and religiosity — and the suppression of political competition and criticism — sustains the despotic in power, and that whether nominally “Brown” or “Red-Green”.
To manipulate the western competition — EU/NATO — I believe Moscow has “played” terrorist organizations or media (like Kavkaz Center) to produce the “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” that induces or pushes democracies toward nationalism.
In military and political science circles — and KGB — a part of the the technique of getting an enemy to do what is wanted without firing a shot is called “Reflexive Control”:
If you are democratic, freedom loving, liberal, politically engaged and you have bought into extreme conservative or ultra-liberal politics in the past ten years, you may just have been — as I believe I have been while traveling in the conservative ranks — duped and possibly partly so by “Active Measures”, another lovely term of art for political agitation and propaganda.
Now look again at America’s Trump Administration and its “Russian Question”, the subject of ongoing FBI investigation.
Active Reflexive Control Hypothesis
Stimulation of “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” –> “Patriotic Nationalist Response” (“Brown”)
Complement: “Defensive Socialist Response” (“Red-Green”) to Threatened Reappearance of Fascism)
Moscow’s intention: concentrate power and wealth in the familiar oligarch manner “above politics” as supported by an immense KGB/FSB political control element while producing sufficient division and turmoil in the EU/NATO states to degrade cooperative democratic politics and return power to wealthy and ruthless feudal cabal.
1 million people around the world in support of Ukraine’s fight for freedom
Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans come together from all corners of the continent to show their support for one common cause – support of the good people of Ukraine in their struggle for true independence and freedom from Russia’s all-too-long shadowy grasp.
We demand that Crimea be returned to Ukraine and that the Russian army immediately vacate the Donbas region.
If these demands are not met, we insist on the Canadian and American governments sticking to their promises made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide for the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by all means necessary, in order to restore the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian nation.
Appeasement is not the answer.
Now Ukraine is fighting for itself and for Europe, in the future this breach of international law may come even closer to our doorstep if not resolved.
Date: Sat., 05/20/2017
Time: 9:00am – 4:00pm EST
Location: Washington, DC
Slava Ukraine!
Please sign up below we are looking for 10,000 plus marchers!
Even outlined, there’s a lot to know — but the Palestinians today should know it too: Moscow and its cronies have made good use of them, i.e., made a lot of money skimming off the money thrown into the middle east conflict.
If you get the chance to read about Moscow / Russia and anti-Semitism and the middle east, take the time. The conflict will look very different and the criminal motivations for it all the more clear.
For those benefiting financially and socially from programs associated with a sustained “middle east conflict”, the resolving of the same may spell “nakba” – a sudden loss in institutional and personal organization. Not only has the middle east conflict turned out its share of profiting millionaires and billionaires, it has provided Far Left (mostly) and some Far Right entities a good reason for getting up in the morning.
BackChannels wonders what readers think: should the Middle East Conflict be regarded as a necessary evil, a useful grinder between “eastern” and “western” — despotic and democratic — political interests?
Or should it be resolved before another generation of Palestinians — given 70 years of Arab-driven isolation and The Preoccupation With Israel, they may now be a People even though it remains unclear which jailer, Hamas or the PLO, may best exploit them — suffocates beneath the will of its Moscow trained or aided handlers?
Note that while Moscow turned briefly westward, President Putin has revived the state as an ultra-nationalist neo-imperial enterprise with its barbarism on display in both Syria and Ukraine. As such, it has sustained its relationships with other autocratic and kleptocratic entities, including at the highest level Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny and Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutal theocracy — and then at lower levels relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
Beyond talk, what have dictators ever done for their people?
Men of honor?
Well, they have made themselves powerful millionaires and billionaires, but they have taken from the mass of their own people their dignity and independence.
Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Power
♠
Medieval Dissimulation v Modern Integrity
♠
President Putin’s feudal Moscow has set the new low standard for the obliteration of human conscience, empathy, and reason. His state has defied the open democracies of the west by perverting their politics into a polarized circus with the help of “Allahu Akbar Terrorism”, and to the extent that the open democracies have turned reflexively toward Right / Far Right Nationalism, that may be the measure of Putin’s success with the installing of a new feudalism in the once free and secure states of the post-WWII political order.
President Trump’s Drift Toward Feudalism
Posted by YNN February 16, 2017.
To be asked of President Trump: Still campaigning? Still defensive? Still bending the questions to yourself? Still missing policy?
Glaringly clear in the above video clip (now making rounds the in the “fake” — major, established, institutional, high-integrity — media, e.g., CNN’s take as alluded to in the above video) is President Trump’s refusal to offer assurance to Americans regarding the Jewish Community and with it the general security of America’s minority communities (that’s how equality works) or to offer insight into related domestic security policy.
To be asked of you: how far back toward feudalism — the rule of the strong, not the rule of law; the law of the absolute, not the law of the compassionate and reasoning; the way of the criminal in the death of conscience and consideration for others, not the way of the righteous in the embrace of human consciousness and conscience and related promotion of care for the dignity, freedom, and security of others — do you now wish to travel on your journey into the future?
What part of the civilizational past — absolutism, barbarism, caprice in the possession and application of political power — should we wish today to have looming before us?
Islam
Those who believe they have been fighting Islam have been fighting the medieval signatures of the religion, e.g., the tirades against the infidel; the differentiation between believers and unbelievers; the subjugating of Christians and Jews to Muslim political will; and a reprehensible raft of barbaric punishments (like “contralateral amputation” for thievery) and repugnant misogynist and rigged legal precepts.
Should you happen to be Muslim bent on the destruction of Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian post-Enlightenment western civilization and its now representative democracies, for how long should you wish to wallow in the dismal blood-soaked pools of the feudal past?
And is feudalism the best you can do?
In BackChannels opinion, it is no accident that Moscow, Hezbollah, and Hamas (and Moscow and the New Nationalists — for a start: Erdogan, Le Pen, Orban, perhaps Trump — appear to have a relationship plus stakes in shared authoritarian narcissistic psychology.
To only the simple minded should it appear that the Ummah of Islam presents a unique destructive challenge to the modern world when in fact it is the entire feudal assembly of autocratic regimes — never forget what applies to dictatorships worldwide: “Different Talks — Same Walk!” — that serve to undermine the naturally progressive (and progressing) modern democracies of the world.
Various of the world’s Muslim-majority states have suffered mightily themselves from Islamist attacks. Pakistan especially has had to weather mass murdering attacks against its Frontier Corp and other military targets, including an elementary school, also against numerous mosques, countless businesses, and tribal organizations. These days, one may find at least one article 🙂 like this one in Pakistan’s premier defense publication:
Call it a start or look for more article like it (for the sake of focus on this post, BackChannels will demur on the topic of Muslim states in or entering a transition toward a more globally cooperative peace and prosperity).
Medieval Signal: Anti-Semitism
On the left sidebar of this blog, BackChannels maintains a statement about anti-Semitism:
Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
There are many tropes today but here favored among them and in relation to the tension between the feudal world and the modern one, this one applies well: “What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews”.
Here’s another example, which BackChannels may have to retract but will dare the reprinting because the message is so applicable to understanding the barbarism of the feudal mode and the role played by “authoritarian” leaders — dictators in fact or resemblance, essentially — in bringing that excess of egotism and idolatry to full and cruel realization.
In the feudal mode, one may like and defend the Jews — see BackChannels on Putin’s “anti- anti-Semitism” — or excoriate the Jews (revisit Moscow’s relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, Tehran), but the main thing is that the Jews be separated from others and deemed useful (usually because they’re perceived as being good with money for the realm of interest, or because they’re easy — and considered lucrative — targets for plunder and murder).
Feudalism and Rebellion
What soul not directly profiting from feudal (and unconscionable) behavior in any given institution would fail to rebel — or, worse, fail in spirit — against the iron fist of a modern fascism?
For that, installing conflicts around the world for the benefit of one’s own Big Defense Economy might turn out a great business!
Russia is growing its military budget by roughly $10 billion next year, even as tumbling oil prices and sanctions from Europe and the United States will see Moscow slash its welfare spending by $6 billion in 2017, the Gazeta.ru news website reported Tuesday, citing a government source.
The Kremlin announced Monday it would decrease its welfare spending from $210 billion to $203 billion dollars. Alexandra Suslina, an economic analyst, said Russia has made defense and social spending its priorities, while all other spending would receive “whatever is leftover,” the Moscow Times reported.
Defense aside, feudalism dampens the spirit for creating, purchasing, living. The state, or the corrupt and powerful of the state, may take all of whatever one has created.
As much related to mafia, then state mafia, and related skimming or “take” has damped capital investment in Russia while for many years also adding to the encouragement of capital flight. The too centralized a state and its power plus the “kleptocrat” at the controls ruins the exuberance produced by freedom and the concomitant dreaming and effort that produces cool and desirable new everything.
For souls who may come to believe — or worse, know — the “fix is in”, how great may be their effort to swing into the marketplaces confident in their own powers and the promise of rewards?
For the nominally Communist Soviet Union, methods had to be produced to keep people watched and inside the state (talk about an “open air prison”!) and in today’s uncertain ultra-nationalist imperial Russian Federation, something similar may be noted in the immense poverty spreading through a region with ample natural resources for producing basic industries and an affluent middle class throughout.
All that has gone wrong?
Idolatry of another “Great Leader” bent on looking good — more: heroic! — in state-controlled / state-inhibited press.
Additional Reference
What follows: excerpts or remarks related to the “charms” of feudal authoritarian control (of “the masses”).
At present, the authoritarianism business is booming. According to the Human Rights Foundation’s research, the citizens of 94 countries suffer under non-democratic regimes, meaning that 3.97 billion people are currently controlled by tyrants, absolute monarchs, military juntas or competitive authoritarians. That’s 53 percent of the world’s population. Statistically, then, authoritarianism is one of the largest — if not the largest — challenges facing humanity.
POPULIST parties of both right and left, many pro-Russian, did well in last May’s European elections, taking between them a quarter of the seats. This has raised fears of a coherent pro-Russian block forming in Strasbourg.
In Greece, the now-ruling radical-left Syriza party leans towards Russia. On February 11th Nikos Kotzias, the new foreign minister, went to Moscow—his first visit to a foreign capital outside the European Union. Syriza is cool on sanctions against Russia, and opposed to expanding them. Another left-wing, broadly pro-Russian upstart is Podemos in Spain, which leads in the polls. Its leader has accused the West of double standards in dealing with Russia.
… As the Kremlin has spearheaded anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation, and as Putin has made moves to formalize the supremacy of the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia, so, too, have myriad members of far-right social conservative movements in the United States praised Putinist policy. Thankfully, such linkages have seen further coverage than the relations between the “alt-right” and secessionists — see, for instance, research from the University of South Florida’s Christopher Stroop — but it remains worth noting a few highlights of this relationship. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, one of the most well-known faces of American Christian fundamentalism, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Paleoconservative politician Pat Buchanan, meanwhile, has alluded that God may be on Putin’s side. And Franklin Graham, the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham and perhaps America’s foremost remaining televangelist, recently visited Russia to praise Putin for remaining “steadfastly against the rising homosexual agenda” in Russia.
This tripartite blend, of white nationalists, of secessionists, of social conservatives, have all formed some of the primary bulwarks of the Trump campaign over the past few months, and there is little reason to believe they’ll refrain from supporting Trumpian policies moving forward. Moreover, all three have seen their leading proponents — those within the “alt-right,” most especially — construct rhetorical, organizational, and financial links with the Kremlin and Kremlin-financed groups over the past two years.
Widely referred to as Putin’s Rasputin, Dugin has also elaborated a Russian version of Manifest Destiny known as Eurasianism. Eurasianism is a totalitarian political ideology that “rejects the view that Russia is on the periphery of Europe, and on the contrary interprets the country’s geographic location as grounds for a kind of messianic ‘third way’,” according to a report released by the Wilson Center.
Aleksandr Dugin is a radical, Trump supporting, self-proclaimed philosopher from Russia. Traditionalism and cultural purity are two of his most valued philosophical tenets. And while his influence may be overstated in Russia, his ideology has infiltrated white nationalist circles in the United States and parts of Europe.
At a security conference in Munich on Friday, Mr. Poroshenko warned the West against “appeasement” of Russia, and some American experts say offering Russia any alternative to a two-year-old international agreement on Ukraine would be a mistake. The Trump administration has sent mixed signals about the conflict in Ukraine.
But given Mr. Trump’s praise for Mr. Putin, John Herbst, a former American ambassador to Ukraine, said he feared the new president might be too eager to mend relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense — potentially with a plan like Mr. Artemenko’s.
On Tuesday the Anne Frank Center released a statement denouncing Trump’s response to the anti-Semitic string of attacks as inadequate.
“The President’s sudden acknowledgment of Anti-Semitism is a Band-Aid on the cancer of Anti-Semitism that has infected his own administration,” the statement said. “His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Anti-Semitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The Anti-Semitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have seen from any Administration. The White House repeatedly refused to mention Jews in its Holocaust remembrance, and had the audacity to take offense when the world pointed out the ramifications of Holocaust denial. And it was only yesterday, President’s Day, that Jewish Community Centers across the nation received bomb threats, and the President said absolutely nothing. When President Trump responds to Anti-Semitism proactively and in real time, and without pleas and pressure, that’s when we’ll be able to say this president has turned a corner. This is not that moment.”
Where feudalism appears as though it might prevail, those invested in their most parochial definitions of culture — x gender x race x religion — take license to express views congruent with their view of power.
Our world has come to naturally combine states founded on ethnolinguistic traditions (our inventory stands below 7,000 living languages with several lost to disuse annually), and most have come to recognize the legitimacy of that course, with the existence of accommodating but still assertive mixed states. Baloch, Hebrews, Kurds, Pashtun, and Russians have coherence in legacies far predating the uptake of Christianity or Islam, and one may wish for each such some more peaceful survival and co-evolution in the world. The English — the British Empire and the surviving Crown System states — have taken a more heterogeneous course founded in “modern” or more recently established post-Enlightenment ideals and values.
Moscow begs to object, but in deeply hypocritical fashion, and often criminal, it cuts deals before the immense force of “realpolitik”. Kadyrov, Moscow’s tribal anchor for Chechnya, has validated honor killing and imposed (I think) the wearing of traditional “Islamic” dress in his state. The authoritarian minerets-are-our-helmets Erdogan needs little description as regards his sense of mission. And Mahmoud Abbas . . . alas, KGB — he doesn’t represent “The Palestinians”: he represents political absolutism.
In our lovely all-mixed-up democratic estate, the “absolutists” whom I conflate with “malignant narcissists” appear to have similar ideas about their exceptional character in the history of the world.
The mention of a white supremacist organization serves as a topic starter. The conversational partner wanted to know whether the same related to Russian ultra-nationalism.
BackChannels 