The “Active Measures” Links Page

01 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Links, Philology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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Vocabulary Lesson

Active Measures

Disinformation

Fake News

Hybrid Warfare

KGB Theater

Information Warfare

Kompromat

Orwellian

Perceptual Control

Reflexive Control

Troll Farm

Now there’s New Speak indeed!

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”).

So there.

🙂

Active Measures Primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

Disinformation: what comes of defaming, framing, lying, misguiding, spinning.

Primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation

KGB defector providing best insight into the dark art of creating and sustaining mass illusions: Ion Mihai Pacepa.  On BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

Fake News: banner term relating well to the American homily that he who points the finger . . . .

Related Online

https://www.cjr.org/
http://ethics.npr.org/
http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=Integrity
https://www.poynter.org/
https://www.publicintegrity.org/
https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
http://www.timewarner.com/company/corporate-responsibility/telling-the-worlds-stories/journalistic-integrity

https://www.britannica.com/topic/agitprop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

State Controlled Press History

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007655
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17840134

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.

Reference on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

Information Warfare: if you’re here, you’re in it.

Kompromat: see online “Felix Sater“.  Applicable American homily: “Sleep with dogs — wake up with fleas.”  If in office, wake up under investigation.

Primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat

Update: related on BackChannels: “Kompromat – A Compilation“.

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.

Primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Nifty Ted-ed —

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.

Fair example: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

Recommended supplemental reading: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3617244.html

Reflexive Control: sneak up on someone working quietly in their own little world and say . . . “Boo!”

Fair example by way of BackChannel’s observation: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

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.

Related: “Ministry of Truth” – 😉

http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-internet-trolls-and-donald-trump-2016-7

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-trolls-headquarters-media-internet-insider-account/26904157.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house – 4/2/2105

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

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FTAC: Political Islam and the Persistent Past

24 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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The prompt: in relation to anti-Semitism, a statement suggesting Muslims, in general, know little about Islam, and anti-Semitic sentiment in Islam relates directly to the conflict in the middle east.

Religious identification serves as a powerful discriminator and tool for the purposes of leadership in the medieval world, and for some portion of the “Ummah”, small or large, the bond of Muslim identification against the Jew serves to sustain anti-Semitic thought wherever that may be promoted to serve the interests of leaders or spoilers for power.

While the notion that in some general way Muslims know nothing about Islam would seem to confront multiple cultural histories of written clerical thought largely expounding on Qur’an, Hadith, and Sunnah, much of which may indeed have been self-serving — or serving the subscriptions of noted institutions or scholars. In the medieval world, much of power would be suspended between the church (mosque, or temple), then seats of education, and political authority whose legitimacy rested on convincing clerical validation (predicated on beliefs installed).

The “Educated Modern” has a much widened field of view as regards phenomenology associated with psychology, religion, and spirituality. We’re aware of the world’s approximately 7,000 living languages and associated ethnolinguistic cultures; we’re aware of the histories of religions “across the campus”; perhaps most importantly, we’re aware of our own foibles. 🙂 The modern may face some puzzles as regards the perpetuation of the medieval suite of opposed and similar philosophies, but first on the agenda should be the question of how to bring forward those living in the medieval world.

One may practically skip church with that kind of Sunday morning sermonette.

🙂

However,the world’s educated and dedicated or leisured may support their “team”, the same have also access to a sophisticated awareness of their rivals plus awareness and knowledge sufficient to sink everyone’s ship: the good must ask wherever there is conflict what the fighting is about.

BackChannels simple answer to that question: power.

And there follows a question: medieval or modern?

“Medieval v Modern” has been chatted up quite on this blog, so I’ll spare ye another ramble.

Or not.

Appended

The prompt involved a legalistic reinterpretation about respect for Islam (should be equal to that given Christianity and Judaism) that I penned — the addition is italicized: “Jews, Christians, Muslims should accept the validity of each other’s legal interest in their chosen faith.”

I would accept the validity of the interest in religion, not the laws, policies, or practices promoted in the interest of its related fascism.

Even Pakistan has differentiated itself from Islam in its “realpolitik” law.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1366268/man-interfaith-parents-wins-right-religion-choice/

As regards reform — i.e., an end to Islamic supremacism, supersession, bigotry regarding others, barbaric advisement — YES!

However, note the paths and leaders, including this conversation’s original poster:

Intellectualized Islam — e.g., Qanta Ahmed and others who bring a modern sensibility to Qur’anic ambiguity and move away from the supremacist mark, much preferring “no compulsion”.

Heretical Islam — e.g., M. Zuhdi Jasser and others in the Islamic Reform Movement who prefer contemplation and worship to “political Islam” and related militancy.

Renewal Through Reinterpreting Translation (goodbye Pickthall) and narrowed focus on the Qur’an — the claimed “word of God” — so as to diminish the merely mortal factor in the receiving of the Qur’an.

If any should think up other Islamic Reform options, let me know.

There is a greater and more challenging anachronism in the persistence of medieval worldviews about God and about power in a modern day that requires for greater wealth and security and the wider distribution of both plus justice a greater cooperation and integrity in global social relationships.

–33–

FTAC: Middle East Conflict (MEC): On the Facing of Uncomfortable Truths . . . Together

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology

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Affect –> Negative or Positive Emotion x Intensity

Attitude = Belief x Affect

Is a thing true or false, and if true, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

So

Belief +/- contributes to Attitude.

Beliefs have also two properties: early or late establishment (primacy) and importance – degree of relevance (to survival).

The really evil thing about a misguided belief (via disinformation or the manipulation of perception) is that if set in early (e.g., childhood indoctrination), all that follows may be made to set atop what have become basic principles.

George Orwell’s _Animal Farm_ uses “Two legs good, four legs bad” to make about the same point.

In social psychology, the term for look-up would be “Attitude-Behavior Correspondence”.

It has been a rich field for the narrowed.

Atheist Christopher Hitchens has in his decease on offer a marvelous volume about adherence to basic principles and related observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Orwell_Matters

Kind words — actually: civil conversation — makes possible reconciliation by allowing discomfiting discoveries to be shared with one’s adversary, and later, former adversary, without fear of disaster or punishment. While its true that in much of the world, the “loyal lie” may account for one’s lifestyle and very life itself, the principle of facing an uncomfortable truth proves stronger than lies over time.

On many of these posts, the conversational partner has been Mohammed Dajani Daoudi who has been exploring a middle way in Islam beneath the banner of his Wasatia Movement.

–33–

Also in Media: From Chechnya to Myanmar — Military Brutality and Political Control: The Creation of War

16 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Asia, Burma, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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False-Flag Fire Starter:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

Brutalizing of Chechnyan noncombatant villagers:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3617244.html

Backgrounder, published yesterday, on the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/what-the-hell-is-happening-in-myanmar.html :

The monks, too?

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.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/pakistan-is-fuelling-unrest-in-myanmar-s-backyard/story-LXHqEMzdW5mE4Ut1EwtefO.html – 9/15/2017.

–33–

FTAC: Mandela –> Zuma –> Perhaps the end of ‘Aristocommiecrats’

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, South Africa

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2103: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/12/09/zoom-zoom-zuma-hail-the-presence-of-another-african-aristocommicrat/

—

2017: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/07/will-the-party-of-nelson-mandela-die-so-that-jacob-zuma-can-live-anc-no-confidence-vote/

—
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.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/03/jacob-zuma-calls-confiscation-white-land-without-compensation/

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.

http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/south-african-communists-ban-president-zuma-from-party-congress/

“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.

–33–

FTAC: Observation – Broad Public Critical Thinking on Politics

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Politics

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“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!

–33–

FTAC: 9/11 – Sixteen Years of Accelerating, Expanding Conflict Between Archaic Worlds and the Modern One

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, transnational crime

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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.

–33–

FTAC: “At War Every Day”

09 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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Paraphrasing the famous lecture from “Behind Enemy Lines” — “Every day we wake up, we’re at war!”

With the Russo-Sino axis engaged in sub-nuclear military activity and provocation with intent to produce imperial gains in business or area of influence, I think we’re indeed being played.

Moscow has a long acknowledged history as a polity endorsing or exploiting terrorism and practicing totalitarian theater.

Regarding al-Qaeda, any may look up “Zawahiri, Russia, 9/11” and “Afghanistan, Russia, Taliban”.

What do today’s most feudal societies defend?

Answer for yourself.

If you have been leveraged and enriched without soul or, alternatively, dispossessed by political anachronism and barbarism, consider what has been stolen by the latest editions in dictatorship.

Check pulse for signs of conscience and integrity.

For western military and politicians and assorted analysts and planners, the “war by other means” would seem now to include the spreading of intellectual confusion (“Active Measures!” “Disinformation!” “Fake News!”); intellectual infiltration (big on campus and off, Farthest Left, Farthest Right); frozen and low-intensity conflicts (like the middle east one, which has proven great for criminal businesses, corrupt politicians, and entrenched families — and not too great for the Palestinian People enthralled by power while being themselves kept from it); provocations eliding engagements (stimulates worry in the targets and thereby promotes greater allocations in broad and continuous defensive spending); “Little Green Men” charades and possible manipulation of noncombatant elements, like commercial or private boats, to produce situations that produce damage to western military assets.

Beijing, Damascus, Moscow, Pyonyang, Tehran.

Nice people up top.

The best.

–33–