Tag Archives: disinformation

Agitprop: Biden 1994 Crime Bill Meme

19 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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Here’s the culprit —

— and you know how it’s done: someone pastes up the art, slips it into the Internet Wild absent of context and any thematic evaluation, and out it goes to intellectually poison the gulls.

Here’s a note From the Awesome Conversation with reference to “Biden on the 1994 Crime Bill” on the FactCheck website.

Biden on the 1994 Crime Bill

Agitation/Propaganda (agitprop) is never clear, accurate, or complete. It is always twisted, lacking in context, in detail, and integrity.

Excerpted from the above URL.

“Nearly 40 African American religious leaders released a statement supporting the bill, saying: “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.”

Now I have to ask my fellow Americans: what kind of person, what mentality, what measure in irresponsible character grabs an attention-getting image with potent political content or suggestion and goes with it without at least a look into the claim?

That person — the person who would do that — that’s not an American.

We’re a real country full of real GOOD people working difficult issues as we go along, and if we’re not that today, let’s get back to that real fast!

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Active Measures

13 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Psychology

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As BackChannels Would Define It

Active Measures — The collection of Russian Agitation, Disinformation, and Propaganda Methods made evident through covert or subtle Influence Campaigns applied to wrecking the political coherence and cohesion of EU/NATO for the purpose of reestablishing Political Absolutism in the same and then using the most thuggish of feudal and medieval methods to leverage loyalty and wealth from them for contribution to the Greater Imperial Glory of Moscow, the Russian “mafia state” it has come to represent, and the immense enrichment of its oligarchy.

Indeed the west, the melange of classically liberal democratic open societies built and structured around fair dealing, freedom, and integrity and related humanist and liberal ethics, principles, and values has been unprepared for covert agent provocateur, e.g., covert agitators Far Right and Far Left, disingenuous publications, false front organizations, trolls, etc.

I’ve chosen to demur from producing “long copy” and a lengthy reference section for this post. Awareness of “Active Measures” — the kernel of Russia’s covert campaign to degrade and ruin the democracies of the west — should suffice for both the interested and the unwittingly vulnerable.

Related Online

Cull, Nicholas J., Vasily Gatov, Peter Pomerantsev, Anne Applebaum, and Alistair Shawcross. “Soviet Subversion, Disinformation and Propaganda: How the West Fought Against It.” Final Report (PDF). LSE Consulting, London, October 2017.

Darczewska, Jolanta and Piotr Zochowky. “Active Measures: Russia’s Key Export.” (PDF). Center for Eastern Studies, Point of View 64, Warsaw, June 2017.

Linville, Darren and Patrick Warren. “That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.” Rolling Stone, November 25, 2019.

Lipton, Eric, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane. “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.” The New York Times, December 13, 2016.

Pond, Elizabeth. “The West wakes up to the dangers of disinformation.” The Christian Science Monitor, February 28, 1985.

According to rough Central Intelligence Agency estimates presented in US congressional hearings in 1980 and 1982, Moscow spends some $4 billion a year on overt and covert propaganda, with some $3 billion of this going to Pravda, Tass, and other overt activities and the residual $1 billion presumably going into covert disinformation. Georgetown University Prof. Roy Godson, coauthor with Richard H. Shultz of the book “Dezinformatsia” says the Soviets employ 15,000 in “active measures.”

“Active measures” — the term came into use in the Soviet Union in the 1950s — include international front organizations, agent-of-influence operations, and forgeries. Front organizations straddle overt and covert measures, Godson and Shultz explain. The International Department of the Soviet Communist Party “coordinates the activities of these organizations,” but “the fronts actively attempt to maintain an image of independence.”

The flagship of these fronts is the World Peace Council.

Shane, Scott. “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election.” The New York Times, September 7, 2017.

Wikipedia. “Active Measures”.

Addendum — From the Awesome Conversation

Through the Cold War Era and now with Putin leading the Russian Federation, the purpose of Soviet / post-Soviet “Active Measures” has been to fragment EU/NATO for the purpose of Russian expansion and its feudal practices. A video like this one — the same as above on this page — will help a little bit with understanding the greater east-west politics and the tension between the worlds of “Absolute Power” and the open democracies of the west.

Active Measures” represents an international (RF v EU/NATO) dispute over the future, not only an American one.

If we are at one the other’s throat, Moscow will have succeeded in exploiting our natural political arguments and issues by heightening them and undermining our national political cohesion and coherence, thereby weakening our state and degrading our democracy.

Regarding “Far Out Left” and equally distant Far Right tendencies, the related foreign and disingenuous domestic manipulations of political perception targets us all.

Addendum – Miscellaneous Quotations and Reference Having to Do with Disinformation

“It was unthinkable before Trump for anyone to run this kind of disinformation campaign from the White House against the American public,” according to Jonathan Rauch, the author of the forthcoming book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. As a result, we live in an era defined by epistemic chaos and noetic disarray, one in which a large portion of the population embraces falsehoods and fairy tales and thinks of them as “alternative facts.”

The deceit being dispensed by Trump & Company is hardly universal, but it is extensive, which is why defeating Trump was essential if we’re going to move away from perspectivism as the interpretive theory in our politics. But objective reality as a concept—truth as something that exists independent of affect, independent of subjective narratives, independent of whatever a partisan information silo claims is true—has been badly damaged. Among the most urgent tasks facing America, then, is to strengthen our regard for what Plato called episteme over doxa, true knowledge over opinion, reality over fantasy.

Wehner, Peter. “Trump’s Most Malicious Legacy.” The Atlantic, December 7, 2020.

A Diffuse, Unregulated Network of Propagandists

In the Cold War, the Communist Party defined the USSR’s information strategy from the top down. Today, Russian information warfare is waged by a variety of groups that have different interests, domestically and internationally, and different connections to the outside world. Modern Russia is a loose, networked state with multiple actors allowed to conduct domestic and foreign policy, usually to benefit corrupt political groups around (and including) Putin. These different groups influence state strategy both directly and indirectly;some have their own areas of interest, such the oil company Rosneft’s interests in Africa and Latin America.

As a result, Russian information warfare is not consistent and strategic; its fundamental quality is tactical opportunism, which of course leads to inconsistency. This inconsistency makes attribution difficult or even misleading. We still cannot be certain, for example, which particular vested interest was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee in the US. It is possible that business groups under sanction in the US organized the hack because they believed that a President Trump would lift the sanctions; it is equally possible that the FSB organized the hack with the idea of undermining Hillary Clinton, for geopolitical reasons. Either way, it is likely that the actual hackers were criminals, hired for this particular purpose, and not state employees.The Kremlin, in other words,is just one of myriad actors pumping out disinformation, alongside domestic media as well as the teenagers in Macedonia who produced anti-Clinton fake news for personal profit.

Excerpt (on page 68) from Cull, Nicholas J., Vasily Gatov, Peter Pomerantsev, Anne Applebaum, and Alistair Shawcross. “Soviet Subversion, Disinformation and Propaganda: How the West Fought Against It.” Final Report (PDF). LSE Consulting, London, October 2017.

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FTAC: On the Tetanus Vaccine Mass Sterilization Rumor and Potential Interaction with East-West Conflict

09 Thursday May 2019

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

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Inspiration for anger: http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/mass-sterilization-kenyan-doctors-find-anti-fertility-agent-in-un-tetanus-vaccine/ (banner: “Health Impact News: News that Impacts Your Health that Other Media Sources May Censor!”).

One might wish that others posting in the world’s open and socially networked web environment would be responsible about it and take the additional 30-seconds it may take using Google search (or Bing, whatever) to check out claims. This particularly vicious sterilization-by-vaccine rumor has been in circulation for decades.

BC’s immediate response to the post follows.

Disinformation.

The story may be a good example of Soviet Era “Active Measures” carried forward into the post-Cold War period. It appears this claim has been in circulation for decades, and not only in Kenya but several other developing nations.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tetanus-vaccine-sterilization/ | https://africacheck.org/2016/05/25/analysis-why-does-an-old-false-claim-about-tetanus-vaccine-safety-refuse-to-die/ | https://www.vaccineconfidence.org/old-rumours-resurface-the-tetanus-vaccine-story/ | https://www.unicef.org/kenya/media_15665.html

Take note of the nations involved — Mexico, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Philippines, Argentina, Bolivia — and their interaction with east-west (Moscow v Washington) conflict.

https://www.workers.org/2009/world/julius_nyerere_1105/

I cannot prove my thesis, such has been the nature of manipulation from “behind the curtains” down through the ages, but often enough, it would seem those who most claim to be interested in Justice turn out also to be the most obsessed with acquiring Absolute Power — and that “by any means necessary”.

In 2014, The Washington Post got involved in this surreal silliness, noting that, “The issue is far from settled: The government says it tested the same vaccine for the presence of the hormone and found none. The government and the Catholic leadership group even used one of the same labs to test the samples, apparently receiving different results” (Abby Ohlheiser, “The tense standoff between Catholic bishops and the Kenyan government over tetanus vaccines”, November 14, 2014).

The possibility of chicanery should not be overlooked in relation to deeply partisan interests.

While the history of the Catholic Church and Communist Movements has been complex, both systems counsel power as absolute, whether the Power of Almighty God or the Power of Communal Man. At least one source-at-a-glance notes the blending of the two in the 1960s through infiltration.

Whatever the fine points of history may be — and the devils are always in the details — “framing” a medical miracle, whether vaccination for polio or vaccination for tetanus as an evil thing, would seem itself a deed most evil and intended to sow discord and fear. Why? Those who promote malicious perception may then portray themselves as the bearers of hope and order.

Related online and associated with similar partisan religious motivations:

Shalzad, Asif and Jibran Ahmad. “Monstrous rumors stoke hostility to Pakistan’s anti-polio drive.” Reuters, May 2, 2019.

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Live at Posting: Addressing Disinformation — “RIGA STRATCOM DIALOGUE 2018 | Day 2 Evening session”

13 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech

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The event may be wrapping up, but it should persist on YouTube and remain here in the BackChannels’ record of witness.

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Books: Arkady Polishchuk’s _Dancing on Thin Ice_ Due Out July 3, 2018

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Political Psychology, Russia

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From the publisher’s promotion:

In this memoir, replete with Jewish humor and sardonic Russian irony, exiled Russian journalist and human rights advocate Arkady Polishchuk colorfully narrates his evolution as a dissenter and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s Soviet Russia. Told primarily through dialog, this thrilling account puts the reader in the middle of a critical time in history, when thousands of people who had been denied emigration drew international attention while suffering human rights abuses, staged show trials, forced labor, and constant surveillance.

From 1950–1973, Polishchuk worked as a journalist for Russian state-run media and as an editor at Asia and Africa Today, where all foreign correspondents were KGB operatives using their cover jobs to meddle in international affairs. His close understanding of Russian propaganda makes this memoir especially eye-opening for American readers in today’s political climate.

https://doppelhouse.com/dancing-on-thin-ice/

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FTAC: Antidote to What Poisoned the Palestinians

29 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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. . . the Palestinian street doesn’t learn because they’re disinformed and misdirected by leaders who have been “handled” by Moscow / and, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, by Moscow-Tehran in their bid to sustain our world in their politically feudal mode.

Do those in the “middle east peace industry” really want to sustain the conflict by limiting the scope of observation to the Palestinian masses?

For the _earlier_ Arab world, post-WWII, latched previously to Hitler, and afterward courted by the Soviets who used anti-Semitism as a lever with which to seduce a few powerful leaders and their followers, the refugees as refugees conventionally managed would have been a lasting reminder of a lost war — a shame, in other words. The creation of a People’s Liberation Movement with a history to match handily solved that issue and “weaponized” the minds of the dislocated population.

Instead of continuing to reinforce negative Palestinian self-concept through condemnation, which is what write-offs do, perhaps moving better information into the main base of the community would undermine the sources of the kind of energy it puts on display when it “chest bumps” Israel on flimsy pretexts and outright lies.

We should be dismantling the political culture informed by the Nazis and later the Soviets. It’s the phantoms of those vicious political movements — plus the fascist or supremacist element in Islam — that may be keeping the Palestinians locked into too small a worldview and boiling with anger.

Almost an aside: a lot of these movements associated with dictators or dictatorship won’t concede their absurd positions until force or freedom alters their political perception.

I would prefer that it was freedom that reached the Palestinians.

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Live at Posting: Atlantic Council, “Disinformation Week”

29 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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How Putin’s Moscow and its information  warfare work.

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

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FTAC: MEC – Passing Into History (One Hopes One Day Soon)

04 Sunday Jun 2017

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

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Q: “Is it our psychology or our nature that prevents us from being peace loving people?”

A: As regards the “middle east conflict”: _malign and manipulated_ psychology.

Post-WWII, post-Nazi Germany, Soviet Era agitation-propaganda leveraging anti-Semitic sentiment –> “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“, i.e., the myth that the Jews were out to take over the middle east —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

_Reflexive Control and the Encouragement of Absolute Nationalism_

Terrorism promotes intense concern with basic security wherever, however, and for whatever reason politically-focused violence takes place. In crayon fashion here (I’m pressed for time this morning), political violence associated with the Palestinian cause, from the air hijackings of the 1970s to the latest murder by car, essentially promotes Israeli nationalist fervor and the western program. The deeper problem: it never helped the Palestinians but rather the piratical leaderships drawing income from the sustaining of the conflict. Arafat passed away a multi-millionaire; Abbas has accumulated a similar share of wealth; Haniyeh and Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Israelis and Palestinians genuinely tired of near 70 years of artificially sustained conflict — and the “information / disinformation psychology” has been a part of keeping things just as they have been — may need to bring these questions up with “Moscow”.

Historically, Moscow has been intensely anti-Semitic — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/ — but under Putin’s guidance, somewhat opposite today. Things have changed even though Putin continues to foster or control or appreciate (choose any option) kleptocratic absolute power. This seems to me something Palestinian intelligentsia need to consider and research independently.

I often note that “the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews”, a trope that lends emphasis to authentic ethnolinguistic cultural affiliation with land. At the moment, there are fewer than 7,000 living language cultures on the planet, and each developed their language somewhere at some time. Baloch, Kurds, Hebrews, Pashtun have land claims as do others. I may grant that after 70 years of isolation and wicked disinformation, the Palestinians need not be the leading edge of “Arab pan-nationalism” which should have passed away with the Soviet Union (at the end of 1991). One may urge reconsideration for having become unique but perhaps misguided by the politics of a much earlier era and, all may hope, one passing finally into history.

 

End the Preoccupation With the Jews!

Easier said than done?

The world’s political science scholars may be unraveling the relationship between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany in the first half of the 20th Century,  and today there’s plenty for reading as regards Moscow’s efforts to sustain a piratical feudalism even as it runs short on ready cash and the rest, less ready, appears sunk in western assets and banking institutions.

Change, so BackChannels may observe, must come slowly where it involves BIG Family, Military, and Religious Institutions.  In the feudal mode, money moves along more by way of relationships than by way of merit or virtue.  That’s life.  Such themes will never be black and white but they may be better balanced for ethical and moral merit — greater rule of law; greater real justice — in the long run.

Whether the latest assault on innocents will be quelled by security organizations or grown into an absurd set of what should be archaic struggles based in race and religion and any number of assorted lesser discriminators — black/white; Asian/European; gay/straight; single/married; poor/rich; etc. — we together shall see.

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