• Home
  • About
  • Concepts, Coins, and Terms
    • Anthropolitical Psychology
      • Civilizational Narcissism
      • Conflict – Language Uptake – Social Programming and Scripting – A Suggestion
        • Language Uptake – Programming – On Learning to Listen
        • Mouth –> Ear –> Mind –> Heart System
        • Social Grammar
      • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
      • Malignant Narcissism
      • Narcissistic Scripting
      • Normative Remirroring
      • Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation
    • FTAC – “From The Awesome Conversation”
    • God Mob
    • Intellectual Battlespace
    • Islamic Small Wars
    • New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left
    • Political Spychology
    • Shimmer
  • Library
    • About Language
    • Russian Section
  • Comments and Contact

BackChannels

~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

BackChannels

Tag Archives: propaganda

Agitprop: Biden 1994 Crime Bill Meme

19 Thursday Nov 2020

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

agitprop, American character, American Integrity, disinformation, National Character, political agitation, propaganda

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!

–33–

From Correspondence: Power’s Tool: Ideology (Any): And the Journalist’s Predicament

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Asides, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

despotism, dictatorships, information warfare, journalism, perceptual control, political manipulation, political power, propaganda, public relations, war reporting

I don’t know how far back in modern history the penchant for exploiting or killing journalists go, but as much has been a part of the peril for the intrepid since I signed on here in 2006/7.  The evildoers haven’t the innocence required to boast their programs with authentic faith; instead, they manipulate their programs — the Communism, the Islamism, possibly the Capitalism as well, and all other such — to assault their enemies while corralling their believers. Power has become a deeply cynical game beloved of dictators. They will say anything to direct, focus, and incite their mobs. It’s into that environment that it seems modern “war reporters” now walk. They are no longer “telling the other side of the story” — they’re either helping the other side produce their “optics” — or they’re getting whacked.

What the west may do in conflict is adhere convincingly through doctrine to their own arguably superior ethical and moral codes.

Would only that there were that “Hail Dorothy” moment when the Wicked Witch has melted and the army subjected to the poor bitch is found to have no complaints.


Related in Titles

Committee to Protect Journalists

Dictators Without Borders

Murder Without Borders

The First Casualty


BackChannels trope regarding dictatorships —

“Different Talks — Same Walk!“



–33–

 

FTAC: Absent of Boundaries; Absent of Conscience: Dictatorship

17 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Active Measures, agitprop, aristocracy, authoritarianism, Chinese and Russian Totalitarianism, dictatorship, Global Information Space, information space, information warfare, malignant narcissism, oligarchy, propaganda

The prompt from my conversational partner: “. . . to solve these problems, we need cooperation, not war. And the main question is why does the government not understand this?”

The response:

Paper, scissors, stone,  and “paper” (money) covers and suffocates all beneath it while “liberating” those who have it and, perhaps (I don’t want to find out!), those who might believe themselves above it – or those of merely modest material ambitions.

My personal approach has been “Money Matters!” but is not everything; however, and this especially with our health care industry, there are forces producing polices I can’t field, and of course that inspires a yet impotent resentment.

Our government should be Christian, good-willed, and muscular (academic term “muscular Christianity” works in this regard), but it’s bending toward the criminals in the great mansions and penthouse suites, and I’ not talking about Bill Gates or most “plutocrats” but rather those who believe there are no boundaries between their perfect embodiment of the “isness” (I will find the word, literally) of their state and themselves. The businesses, the courts, the military and paramilitary elements, and legislatures are all theirs to exploit and manipulate on behalf of their preferred . . . associates. That’s dictatorship.

Let me see if I can find the word for existence as the authentic expression of spirit . . . .

“Esse” and “essence” were not what I was looking for but for an esoteric term having to do with the being of the thing within the thing. Believing in the singularity of person and state (as Ceausescu had; as Erdogan and Putin do) may comprise part of the messianic delusion suffered by dictators but unfortunately visited (with fist in the velvet glove, at best) on their subjected people.

I’m finding my reading of Russian history steeped in punitive control, and that doesn’t come with interest in “the masses” half so much as in the developing and sustaining of wealth beneficial to the image and power of the central figure in power.


Related, Recent, and Singular

On today’s Chinese and Russian totalitarian aggression in Global Information Space:

Walker, Christopher and Jessice Ludwig.  “The Meaning of Sharp Power”.  Foreign Affairs, November 16, 2017.

BackChannels maintains a brief bibliography of accessible and general volumes on Russia’s political history in the “Russian Section” of this blog.  For greater insight into the authoritarian-patrimonial experience of the political culture from the 9th Century forward, I would recommend Richard Pipes’ fine history, Russia Under the Old Regime.

Punitive control: in geopolitical space and in the various ages of the “rule of the strong”, including for Russia and surrounds domination by the Mongols, the power to control space produces arrangements with in to produce wealth.  Pipes’ — in the above cited volume — steps off with economic variance in the productivity of Russian land compared to soil fertility to the south to explain motivation for the social arrangements that would ensue in history and effect Russian political arrangements to this day.  What Pipes appears to find essential — and what most concerns this blog — is the prince’s (or equivalent or greater in power) considering the ownership of property and persons the same thing.  Worse — the test of sovereignty becomes the permit to engage in the wholesale destruction of both!

Now have another look at Assad’s destruction of Syria and incubation of ISIS as a useful foil and political tool (“Reflexive Control’s” little helper) as well as the very emblem of the worst of the worst of destructive forces.

Who has the control of it?

Moscow-Tehran.


Note: keyword tags are related this time but not directly addressed except beneath the category that is “Dictatorship” and its essential and unfailingly malign narcissism.

–33–

Also in Media – “Soviet-Nazi Collaboration and World War II” | World Affairs Journal, Essay by Alexander J. Motyl

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Nazis, political manipulation, post-WWII, propaganda, reflexivism, Russian history, Soviet

For starters, the Moscow-controlled Communist International, and its sidekick, the Communist Party of Germany, made Hitler’s rise to power possible, if not indeed inevitable, by tarring the German Social Democrats as “social fascists” who threatened to split the proletariat and were, thus, a greater evil than the Nazis. Had the German left remained united against the real threat—Nazism—Hitler might not have come to power. (Many leftists make a similar mistake today, preferring Vladimir Putin’s fascism to American capitalism and thereby promoting war in Europe.)

Source: Soviet-Nazi Collaboration and World War II | World Affairs Journal – April 30, 2015.

Also in Media – From 2014 – Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog: “Pro-Russian network behind the anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign”

21 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2014, agitation, agitprop, disingenuous speech, political rhetoric, propaganda, Russia, Russian disinformation, Ukraine

3 February 2014

Pro-Russian network behind the anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign

Read this article in German, French, Russian and Ukrainian.

There has been a huge tide of false, incorrect and bloated reports that exaggerate or overemphasize the significance of the far right in the current Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. A Moscow-based journalist Alec Luhn writes in The Nation about “the Ukrainian nationalism at the heart of ‘Euromaidan’”, a leftist Seumas Milne argues in The Guardian that “in Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis”, while a self-styled “independent geopolitical analyst” Eric Draitser, in his nauseatingly misleading piece for his own Stop Imperialism (later re-published by The Centre for Research on Globalization), even goes so far as to claim that “the violence on the streets of Ukraine […] is the latest example of the rise of the most insidious form of fascism that Europe has seen since the fall of the Third Reich”.

These and many other similar articles are all written according to the same pattern, and their aim is to discredit the Euromaidan protests as the manifestations of fascism, neo-Nazism or – at the very least – right-wing extremism.

Read More at the Source: Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog: Pro-Russian network behind the anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign – 2/3/2014

Truth Telling about Israel by Think Tank EMET

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Middle East, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

agitation, BDS, conservative thought, Dershowitz, disinformation, Far Left, Israel, Jewish interests, propaganda, Zionism

Dershowitz focused on largely unsuccessful efforts to promote Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel among American universities, campaigns that nonetheless helped “mis-educate a generation of future leaders.” BDS leaders admitted to wanting “to destroy Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people” contrary to rhetoric of pressuring Israel to conclude a peace settlement with Palestinians. Simultaneously the “very anti-peace” BDS movement “sends an erroneous message to the Palestinian street and the Palestinian leaders that says you don’t have to compromise…we will get you your state through extortion.”

Read more: Family Security Matters – 6/23/2016

Hate, In the Name of Love – How a Portion of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Defames and Demonizes Israel and the Jews

04 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

agitation, agtiprop, anti-Semitism, Far Left Politics, fascism on the left, middle east conflict, political language, post-Soviet Era, propaganda, religion, religious succession, Unitarian Universalist Association, UUA, UUJME

This curriculum is informed and inspired by many sources, including the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Standing on the Side of Love campaigns, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Churches for Middle East Peace, World Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee, the Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Just Vision, Jewish Voice for Peace, Open Hillel, Nakba Education Project, Zochrot, many Palestinian organizations working for peace with justice, the UUJME Newsletter, Kairos Palestine, Steadfast Hope, Zionism Unsettled, Middle East Research and Information Project Primer, and Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Links to information about these and other resources are in the lessons and/or the Resource page at the end of the guide and the UUJME website. We are inspired also by those who choose to implement this part of the UUJME Reflection & Learning Project, and wish you the best in this endeavor to stand on the side of love with the people of Israel-Palestine.

The 7 Unitarian Universalist Principles and Palestine-Israel / Adult RE Study Guide / Curriculum Team of Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East / June 2015, First Edition, Revised with URL Sept 2015.


Posted to YouTube February 1, 2013.


Who would argue with Love?

However, and with all that love accepted, let’s have a look at some of the other contributors to the curriculum promoted by the Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME).

Churches for Middle East Peace

CMEP, as the organization is often called, does not promote the cause of peace and human rights in the most troubled region on the planet.

It promotes the cause of Palestinian statehood and that’s about it.

Van Zile, Dexter.  “Time for Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) to Change its Name.”  The Algemeiner, August 29, 2013.

World Council of Churches

To advance their “justice and peace” initiatives, they collude with Islamic and Palestinian friends in a covert scheme to sabotage Israel. Their web of anti-Zionism extends throughout Europe, the Americas and Africa. While this may seem a bold assertion, it is nonetheless worth examining some undeniable evidence.

WCC is among the many coalitions of Christians that embrace the extreme left and the jihad agenda as appeasers and collaborators.

Warner, Susan.  “World Council of Churches Feeds the Monster.”  Frontpage, February 8, 2015.

Additional Reference: NGO Monitor.  “World Council of Churches (WCC)”.

American Friends Service Committee

In 2008, the AFSC, along with other similarly minded religious groups, hosted a gala dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the guest of honor, despite Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and genocidal threats against the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad, however, is only the most extreme example of the AFSC making dubious friends. The participants in its BDS summer camp were mostly Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization notorious not only for its vicious rhetoric against Israel, but for going so far as shouting down pro-Israel speakers on campus and harassing Jewish students.

Romirowsky, Asaf and Alexander H. Joffe.  “When Did the Quakers Stop Being Friends?  The religious group known as the Quakers has sacrificed its founding religious principles at the altar of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.”  The Tower, December 2013.

Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

Washington Presbyterians who engage in dialogue with Jewish groups are scrambling to undo what they say is the damage caused by a congregational study guide assailing Zionism distributed by a group affiliated with their denomination. 

JTA.  “Presbyterians push back against church group’s anti-Zionist study guide.”  The Jerusalem Post, February 19, 2014.

Related: NGO Monitor.  “The Role of Antisemitism in the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Decision to Support Divestment.”  June 25, 2014, updated March 31, 2016; Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reporting on tension within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the offshoot Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church: “Polling data con­sis­tently show that “main­line” Protes­tants over­whelm­ingly sup­port a safe and secure Israel, even while also being con­cerned about the sit­u­a­tion of Pales­tini­ans in the West Bank and Gaza. The efforts at the PC(USA) and other churches to pass divest­ment res­o­lu­tions reflect the views of a minor­ity of activists within those churches who take advan­tage of the struc­tures of those churches to press their agenda.”

Jewish Voice for Peace

JVP, like other prominent Jewish anti-Zionist individuals and groups, uses its Jewish identity to deflect allegations of anti-Semitism leveled against the anti-Israel movement in order to provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility. In this guise JVP views itself as the “Jewish wing of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM)” and is an integral part of this anti-Israel coalition, serving as its “Jewish shield”, espousing the belief that if there are Jews demonizing Israel, it can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.

Also like other aggressively anti-Israel organizations, JVP members regularly attempt to shut down dissent by disrupting pro-Israel events such as a 2010 talk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the events at a 2011 Taglit Birthright reunion in New York and the 2012 AIPAC conference. Brandeis University Prof. Ilan Troen, who calls JVP “self-appointed saints with no mass following”, explains that “If you’ve ever dealt with the JVP, they themselves are a semi-terrorist group, promoting the disruption of free speech and the inability of others to conduct public discourse.”

Canary Mission.  “Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)”.

The JVP advisory board includes leaders in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate, such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Sarah Schulman. All three of these anti-Israel advocates deny the Jewish right to self determination, legitimize the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas, and support the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

Zionist Organization of America.  “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Anti-Semitic Leaders and Partners” (PDF), n.d.

Related in the news: Shahmoon, Shani.  “Jewish Woman Forced to Hide From Anti-Israel Activists at UC-Irvine.”  Observer News & Politics, May 20, 2016: “Earlier this month, Jewish and pro-Israel students found themselves caught in what they describe as a “fire of hate” and feelings of mourning as they observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Muslim Student Union, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and the American Indian Student Association just happened to organize a week of anti-Israel activity marketed under the title, “Anti-Zionism: The Roots of Oppression,” during the same week.”

Open Hillel

 . . . while Open Hillel phrases their intentions in the context of a free and unfettered debate (hence “open”), their events, speakers and partners actually seem to be far more interested in institutionalizing a set of radical opinions—and browbeating the mainstream into accepting it: That far from being a lonely liberal democracy facing daunting challenges from without and within, Israel is actually an illegitimate, oppressive, colonial state that might be better off not existing; and that Jewish students cannot truly understand it without teaming up with extreme pro-Palestinian groups.

Pink, Aiden.  “‘Open Hillel” Is a Much Bigger Problem Than You Think.”  The Tower, November 2014.

Nakba Education Project

While “Nakba” points to disaster it also brings up the uncomfortable matter of whipping legions to genocidal war and losing the same.  In the immediate aftermath of “1948”, the Arab world took revenge on the Jewish residents of Arab states, and that history may be read about on this blog:  Point of No Return.

Middle East Research and Information Project

BackChannels appreciates the “Primer on Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict” as well as data it appears to have omitted from the telling of the tale (like the KGB’s involvement in the creating of the PLO).

Zochrot

. . . the group’s founder has written the following about his vision of the future:

When the refugees return, Jews will become a minority in the country. Israel as a Jewish state will change radically, and it will no longer be defined as such. Jews will no longer be able to determine their future…by themselves…. There may be Jews, most of them of European origin, who won’t be able to adjust to a non-Zionist reality, and prefer to use their other passport to move elsewhere…”

Levick, Adam.  “Want the Jewish state wiped off the map?  Guardian approved NGO has an app for that!”  UK Media Watch, May 4, 2014.

Phyllis Bennis

Posted to YouTube 12/10/2013

What’s a nice Jewish girl like Phyllis Bennis doing at the head of the class of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, (anti-Semitic) leaders, the kind who stand shoulder to shoulder with those inclined to label the Jewish-majority state “Israhell”?

Here’s a partial transcript leading to Bennis’s becoming swept up in the radical politics of the Vietnam Era — her further transformation into parroting the catechisms of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left comes in the back half of the video:

The short answer is the Vietnam War.  I grew up right through highschool with this focus on Zionism.  That was my social environment.  Those were my friends.  That’s who I hung out with.  And then I went away to college.  And I started college in 1968, the big year, if you will, and in that context, I spent my first year being very much a serious student . . . you do grow up as a Jewish kid with . . . it’s all about education, all about getting good grades . . . so here I am, a seventeen year old kid, showing off, linking up with a group of graduate students and taking their courses, their postdoctoral seminars, thinking of myself as quite the intellectual, but by the end of my freshman year I’m suddenly immersed in the student movement, anti-war stuff . . . the Black Student Union had taken over the computer center  the year before in the struggle to get an ethnic studies department on campus — I’m at the University of California in Santa Barbara — and suddenly I’m joining SDS [Students for Democratic Society], I’m part of the new student government . . . we have an alliance with the Latino movement and the Black Student Union, and we take over student government, and suddenly I’m the chair of the lectures committee .  . . you know what the hell is that?  I didn’t really know, but I had a budget of ten thousand dollars, which at that time was really a lot of money, to bring people to campus.  So I brought Angela Davis, I brought half the defendants of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and the lawyers from the trial, and suddenly I was involved with meeting all these people I had only heard about, and school suddenly was not really about going to classes  . . . none of us went to class very much.  We were publishing an underground newspaper, and we were doing radio — we took over the campus radio station . . . . 

Related: CAMERA.  “Phyllis Bennis Mendaciously Bashes Israel on C-SPAN While Promoting ISIS Book.”  August 29, 2015.


New Old
Now Old
Far Out
&
Lost Left

This is the political Left that masks off Hamas and its record in human and political rights — also its war crimes (human shields) and its myriad crimes against children (child soldiers), including those it has killed in the process of getting its tunnels dug.

This is the Left / Far Left that doesn’t want its public to know just how big a KGB project was involved in the inventing of Yassir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which today wears the prettier assignation “Palestinian Authority” but remains an essentially fascist organization behind the coattails of Mahmoud Abbas AKA “Abu Mazen”.

In the region of historic anti-Semitism associated with Christianity and Islam resides the concept of “religious succession”, i.e.,the idea that one true church — one true connection with God — will and must displace less authentic, less true competitors, and that includes the Judaism from which Jesus emerged.

BackChannels believes Constantine and Muhammad have made their points and that a medieval portion of their following in legacy continues to take unholy license in the doing of their bidding.

What is to give the new fascists (whether out of the Christian Far Right, the Islamist camps, or the Far Left) pause for reconsideration?

 

Look to 21st Century sophistication in ethnology, linguistics, and psychology to help us appreciate and comprehend how our species develops and sustains its cultures.  That dawning self-awareness and knowledge may well improve general resistance to medieval manipulation and unintentional support of the ambitions, martial powers, and sadism of feudal tyrants  — the most malign of narcissists — in their contemporary forms.

This post started with but a single paragraph from the introduction to a full multi-part curriculum developed to lead Unitarian Universalist congregants in the discussion of the middle east conflict, but a glance back at the contributors to that program may tell what its politics are really about.  As had a large portion of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2014, those most responsible in the Universalist Unitarian Association may wish to investigate who — and what — may be served by the subgroup curriculum disseminated through their organization.


Waitstill Sharp was a minister in the Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His wife, Martha, was a noted social worker. During World War II, Martha and Waitstill Sharp helped hundreds of people escape from Nazi persecution.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, honored the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  “Martha and Waitstill Sharp.”  Holocaust Encyclopedia.


Additional Reference on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/04/24/reference-two-articles-bds-on-campus-bds-and-related-networks-undercover-investigative-reporting/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/06/02/ftac-haaretzs-noticing-the-anti-bds-community/

Additional General Reference

Bederman, Diane Weber.  “Tell Me Again — Never Again!”  Jews Down Under, June 7, 2016.

Harrod, Andrew.  “Religious Freedom: Writer Battles Jihad Against Israel and Beyond.”  Philos Project, June 7, 2016.

Isaacs, Anna.  “How the Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Movements Converged.”  Moment, March-April 2016.

Additional Media

Posted to YouTube 12/8/2014.

# # #

Russia’s Disinformation History – Elements

01 Sunday May 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

disinformation, overview, propaganda, Russia

Of BackChannels’ several inventions in political psychology, the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” might apply best to President Putin’s way of looking at western liberalism, developing cause to consider it threatening, and then, at last, accusing the west of possessing his own true motives as regards political control through disinformation, force, and manipulation.

For history, start with Czar Nicholas III’s “Okhrana“, the political secret police tasked with influencing and shaping the Czar’s own opposition — Ayatollah or Emperor, why not play both sides of the chessboard?  The political theater is either yours or it’s not — prove it’s yours: put on a play; give the opposition its head; slip it a script; settle back and enjoy the show.

On BackChannels, that line has been applied to “Assad or The Terrorists” AKA “Assad OR The Terrorists.

Dang if it hasn’t worked!

Of course, there’s more to the story of Russia’s romance with autocracy, state-controlled information and the perversions that are disinformation and propaganda, and secret political police.  What follows on this post is an afternoon’s brief compilation of articles pertinent to the challenge posed today by Putin’s approach to throwing the wool over so many eyes, including, possibly, his own.


In general, the Russian media portrays anything going on from the point of view of Vladimir Putin. He has unlimited access to the media and they explain everything that’s going on according to his official statement. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a war in Syria or any other topic.

Gordts, Eline.  “Putin’s Press: How Russia’s President Controls the News.”  The World Post, The Huffington Post and Berggruen Institute, October 24, 2015.


Russia today is the first intelligence dictatorship in history. It is a brand new form of totalitarianism, which we are not yet familiar with. Now the KGB, rechristened FSB, is openly running Russia.

Ion Pacepa in an interview with Blaze Books as reported by Benjamin Weingarten in The Blaze, February 10, 2014, citation included in reference.

BackChannels also possesses in its library a small “Russian Section” that boasts many volumes on the Russian experience in the 20th Century, on the Soviet, and on the transition from the Soviet to “Putin’s Kleptocracy”.


When the Soviet Union collapsed, its people had a unique opportunity to also cast off the country’s political police, that peculiarly Russian instrument of power created by the 16th century’s Ivan the Terrible, which had changed its name many times, from Okhrana to Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to NKGB, to MGB, to MVD, to KGB. Unfortunately, the Russian people were not yet ready — or able — to seize that opportunity.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “Brand-New Russia, Same Old Disinformation.”  National Review, November 8, 2014.


The international community faces serious challenges arising from a new mode of information warfare, which Russia has deployed during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014-2015. This ongoing “propaganda war” is the most recent and frightening example of information warfare. It reflects the wide array of non-military tools used to exert pressure and influence the behaviour of countries. When skilfully combined, disinformation, malicious attacks on large-scale information and communication systems, psychological pressure, can be even more dangerous than traditional weapon systems, since they are extremely difficult to discover and combat.

Veebel, Viljar.  “Russian Propaganda, Disinformation and Estonia’s Experience.”  Foreign Policy Research Institute, October 2015.


The Kremlin’s disinformation campaign goes far beyond controlling its own media. It is aimed at nothing less than presenting a parallel version of reality and disseminating it as if it were news. The Kremlin’s goal is to make people question the value of media at all; to reject the idea of an absolute truth; and to persuade the public that “reality” is relative.

Emerson, John B.  “Exposing Russian Disinformation.”  Atlantic Council, June 29, 2015.


If someone—some lost, ersatz-port-begotten ghost—materializing before me at that moment, had told me that, thirty years later, I would be writing about Andropov’s death in English, in America, on the week when post-Soviet Russia’s ruling class—made up, to a considerable extent, of the old K.G.B. cadre—would be celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a large exhibit dedicated to his life, at whose opening a glowing telegram from his spiritual successor, President Vladimir Putin, would be read—well, I would have known for certain that I had finally and irrevocably, once and for all, lost my mind.

Iossel, Mikhail.  “The Night Andropov Died.”  The New Yorker, June 17, 2014.


As a former KGB officer and head of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, Putin knows the value of information. His concept of the media, however, is a far cry from the First Amendment. For him, it’s a simple transactional equation: Whoever owns the media controls what it says.

“There should be patriotically minded people at the head of state information resources,” Putin told reporters at his 2013 annual news conference, “people who uphold the interests of the Russian Federation. These are state resources. That is the way it is going to be.”

Dougherty, Jill.  “How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons.”  The Atlantic, April 21, 2015.

Additional and Cited Reference

Applebaum, Anne and Edward Lucas.  “The danger of Russian disinformation.”  The Washington Post, May 6, 2016.

Abrams, Amanda.  “Fighting Back: New Bill Aims to Counter Russian Disinformation.”  Atlantic Council, March 17, 2016.

Bershidsky, Leonid.  “Primakov Would Have Run Russia as Putin Has.”  Bloomberg View, June 26, 2015.

Deutsche Welle.  “German media worries about Russian-led disinformation campaign.”  February 19, 2016.

Dougherty, Jill.  “How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons.”  The Atlantic, April 21, 2015.

Gilbert, Martin.  “Andropov and the Jews: The Five Blows.”  Viewed on Soviet Jews Exodus, reprinted from Jewish Chronicle, March 2, 1984.

Goble, Paul.  “15 Characteristics of Russian Propaganda.”  Stop Fake, April 18, 2016.

Goble, Paul.  “Hot Issues — Lies, Damned Lies and Russian Disinformation.”  The Jamestown Foundation, August 18, 2014:

Disinformation is always a conscious policy and part of a larger policy agenda. It is not simply dishonesty of this or that official in response to a particular event. It is implemented with a clear understanding that a combination of truth and falsehood is useful and effective. And it is pursued as long as it is effective, being sacrificed only when there are reasons to believe that either it is no longer necessary or it is no longer being accepted. All of those things have characterized Putin’s approach to information about Ukraine, a pattern that makes what Moscow is doing all the more disturbing.

Gordts, Eline.  “Putin’s Press: How Russia’s President Controls the News.”  The World Post, The Huffington Post and Berggruen Institute, October 24, 2015.

Iossel, Mikhail.  “The Night Andropov Died.”  The New Yorker, June 17, 2014.

Johnson, Alan.  “The Rehabilitation of Felix Dzerzhinsky.”  World Affairs, October 14, 2014.

Kofman, Michael.  “Russian Hybrid Warfare and Other Dark Arts.”  War on the Rocks, March 11, 2016.

Luhn, Alex.  “European Union Prepares ‘Myth-Busters’ Team to Combat Russian Disinformation.”  Vice News, April 17, 2015.

Martosko, David.  “Exclusive: New book reveals how KGB operation seeded Muslim countries with anti-American, anti-Jewish propaganda during the 1970s, laying the groundwork for Islamist terrorism against U.S. and Israel.”  Daily Mail, June 25, 2013.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “Brand-New Russia, Same Old Disinformation.”  National Review, November 8, 2014.

Schumann, Efim.  “Putin’s ‘secret sleepers’ waiting for signal.”  Interview with Boris Reitschuster.  Deutsche Welle, April 18, 2016.

Stop Fake.  “Russian Propaganda”.  Compilation of articles.

Weingarten, Benjamin.  “An interview with Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc intel officer to ever defect.”  The Blaze, February 10, 2014.

Wikipedia.  “Active Measures”.

Wikipedia.  “Okhrana”.  The following comes from the “Pre-1905” section of the Wikipedia entry:

While P.I. Rachkovsky, as head of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, had long ordered Okhrana agents to infiltrate and influence revolutionary movements abroad, Zubatov brought these tactics to a new level by creating Okhrana-controlled trade unions, the foundation of police socialism.

______

Posted to YouTube March 5, 2014.

Addendum – July 11, 2016 and Forward

Applebaum, Anne and Edward Lucas.  “The danger of Russian disinformation.”  The Washington Post, May 6, 2016.

Foster, Patrick.  “Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT offers Nigel Farage his own show.”  The Telegraph, September 7, 2016.

# # #

← Older posts
  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Justice
  • Humility
  • Inclusion
  • Integrity
____________

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.
___________

Recent Posts

  • Nicolas Tenzer On A Russia That Must Be Condemned, Defeated, Taken Apart, and Taken Down
  • FTAC: Why Putin Won’t Stop Until Stopped
  • KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y
  • FNS: Morning Lies
  • FTAC–A Note: Iron River, Narcotics, and the Ecology of Latin American Mass Migration
  • Surrealpolitik: Orban & Putin & ‘Illiberal Democracy’

Categories

  • 21st Century Feudal
  • 21st Century Modern
  • A Little Wisdom
  • Also in Media
  • American Domestic Affairs
  • Anti-Semitism
  • Asides
  • BCND – BackChannels News Day
  • Books
  • Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology
  • COVID-19
  • Epistemology
  • Events and Other PSA's
  • Extreme Brown vs Red-Green
  • Fast News Share
  • foreign aid
  • Free Speech
  • FTAC
  • FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
  • International Development
  • Islamic Small Wars
    • Gaza Suzerain
  • Journal
    • Library
  • Journalism
  • Links
  • Notes On Reading BackChannels
  • Philology
  • Philosophy
  • Poetry
  • Political Psychology
  • Political Spychology
  • Politics
  • Psychology
    • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
  • Qualities of Living (QOL)
  • Referral
  • Regions
    • Africa
      • Central African Republic
      • Guinea
      • Kenya
      • Libya
      • Mali
      • Morocco
      • Nigeria
      • South Africa
      • Sudan
      • Tunisia
      • Zimbabwe
    • Asia
      • Afghanistan
      • Burma
      • China
      • India
      • Myanmar
      • North Korea
      • Pakistan
      • Turkey
    • Caribbean Basin
      • Cuba
    • Central America
      • El Salvador
      • Guatemala
      • Honduras
      • Mexico
    • Eastern Europe
      • Serbia
    • Eurasia
      • Armenia
      • Azerbaijan
      • Russia
      • Ukrain
      • Ukraine
    • Europe
      • France
      • Germany
      • Hungary
      • Poland
    • Great Britain and United Kingdom
    • Iberian Peninsula
    • Middle East
      • Egypt
      • Gaza
      • Iran
      • Iraq
      • Israel
        • Palestinia
      • Jordan
      • Kurdistan
      • Lebanon
      • Palestinian Territories
      • Qatar
      • Saudi Arabia
      • Syria
      • United Arab Emirates
      • Yemen
    • North America
      • Canada
      • United States of America
    • Norther Europe
    • Northern Europe
      • Sweden
    • South America
      • Argentina
      • Brazil
      • Columbia
      • Ecuador
      • Venezuela
    • South Pacific
      • Australia
      • New Zealand
      • Papua New Guinea
      • West Papua
  • Religion
  • Spain
  • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • transnational crime
  • Uncategorized
  • Visual Data

Europe

  • Defending History
  • Hungarian Spectrum
  • Yanukovych Leaks

Great Britain

  • Stand for Peace

Israeli and Jewish Affairs

  • Chloe Simone Valdary

Journals

  • Amil Imani
  • New Age Islam

Middle East

  • Human Rights & Democracy for Iran
  • Middle East Research and Information Project

Organizations

  • Anti-Slavery
  • Atlantic Council
  • Fight Hatred
  • Human Rights First Society
  • International Network Against Cyberhate
  • The Center for Victims of Torture

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • BackChannels
    • Join 351 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • BackChannels
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar