Tags
Posted to YouTube 5/9/2016.
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Ukraine – About That Russian ‘Hybrid’ Vehicle
04 Saturday Jun 2016
Tag Archives: Russia
All For Show – Russia’s Comeback – High Culture and Lowest Barbarism
31 Tuesday May 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Assad, foreign affairs, political theater, Putin, Russia, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Posted to YouTube 2/8/2014
Posted to YouTube 1/1/2015
While Bashar al-Assad in Damascus must take responsibility for the casualties of 2014 and the shaping of the war to that date, it would seem Vladimir Putin in Moscow — or in Sochi — during that same winter has only sustained in that season the legacy of the Soviet alignment.
Posted to YouTube 5/7/2016
Posted to YouTube 5/6/2016
Related
Ellis, Ralph and Holly Yan. “Airstrike at Syrian refugee camp kills at least 28.” CNN, May 6, 2016:
At least 28 people were killed when warplanes struck a refugee camp Thursday in Syria, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, with many of the dead women and children.
Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the London-based group, told CNN it was not immediately clear whether Syrian or Russian planes conducted the airstrike.
BackChannels — and so BackChannels feels — has been wrong about cozy relationships between dictators, perhaps, but probably right about their colluding in their own practical interests as regards sustaining feudal absolute power.
Kleptocrats, apparently (this inspired by the pieces in the reference section) need not be in love but only realistic about their mutual dependencies.
By incubating the al-Qaeda types in Syria, especially ISIS, by selecting other targets for bombing earlier in the Syrian Tragedy (see in reference BackChannels 2015), Assad and Putin may have developed an unrealistic plan for both blackmailing and goading the west, which appears to be taking refugees, filtering criminals (over time), and fighting ISIS separately. With “Assad vs The Terrorists” backfiring, the two, Assad and Putin, are stuck with one another and Assad needs Putin to get to an endgame that makes sense.
Frederic C. Hof, whose essay for the Atlantic Council has appeared in Newsweek winds through an excellent and most clinical analysis of the options at hand. Here’s a little part of that:
Secretary of State John Kerry nevertheless seeks common ground with Russia on political transition involving a non-Assad, negotiated Syrian consensus.
Is common ground achievable when Moscow sees Assad as personifying a state to save, while Washington sees him as a war criminal and ISIS’s top recruiting asset in the region?
Read Hof — for the boys who made the mess, who produced “Assad vs The Terrorists”, there may be no good exits yet in sight.
The slogan “Assad or We Burn It” has won the day, for now much of Syria has been burned, and Assad has only more to answer for and much, much less to claim.
For Mr. Putin’s part in the Syrian Tragedy, the Russian President may not have been able to direct Assad as regards so many “barrel bombs”, but he has control of Russian air power in the space, and perhaps he should use it to spare noncombatants from assaults, Syrian and Russian, that have built antipathy worldwide for the post-Soviet Moscow-to-Tehran arc of power.
Additional, Cited, and Related Reference
AFP. “Chief Syria opposition negotiator quits over failed peace talks.” ABC News, May 30, 2016.
BackChannels. “Syria — “Assad vs The Terrorists” — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
Hof, Frederic C. “We Must Reject Putin’s Shabby Deal to Work with Assad.” Newsweek, May 30, 2016.
When Pieniążek arrived in Kiev in November 2013 as a young man of twenty-four, he was observing the latest, and perhaps the last, attempt to mobilize the idea of “Europe” in order to reform a state. Ukrainians had been led to expect that their government would sign an association agreement with the European Union. Frustrated by endemic corruption, many Ukrainians saw the accord as an instrument to strengthen the rule of law. Moscow, meanwhile, was demanding that Ukraine not sign the agreement with the EU but instead become a part of its new “Eurasian” trade zone of authoritarian regimes.
At the last moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin dissuaded the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from signing the EU association agreement.
Tilghman, Andrew. “No U.S. combat advisers for Fallujah invasion.” Military Times, May 23, 2016.
Trofimov, Yaroslav. “Russia’s Long Road to the Middle East.” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2016:
“The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other government institutions.
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FTAC – A Comment on Obama, The Islamic Small Wars, and the Syrian Tragedy
25 Wednesday May 2016
Tags
foreign affairs, Iraq, ISIS, Islamic Small Wars, Russia, Russian political and military strategy, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Let’s try this model . . . .
We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.
Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?
As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.
While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.
There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.
Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>
Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).
Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”. It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.
The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.
BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting. IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.
Reference
BackChannels. “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
BCC. “Syria conflict: IS ‘destroyed helicopters’ at Russian base.” May 24, 2016 — (breaking story today, May 25, and still frequently updated).
Fox News. “ISIS claims female Russian spy infiltrated terror network.” May 9, 2016.
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Cold War? –> Cold Struggle.
15 Sunday May 2016
Call it “Putin’s Theater”, a publicly viewed juxtaposition of sweetened and soured politics, a program in which the best and the worst have been put up for view at the same time.
The Winter Olympics at Sochi | The Syrian Tragedy Unfolding
The Concert at Palmyra, reported May 5, 2016 | A Refugee Camp Bombing, reported May 6, 2016.
Good and Evil | White and Black | Moscow and NATO
Singular Absolute Power | Representative Distributed Power
In Putin’s world, the “singular absolute”of his feudal realm appears to hold sway over the west’s “distributed relative” approach to managing political power, while the capricious barbarism on display in Syria and the compulsive character of the foray into Crimea may serve as a deterrent to NATO intervention in either place. The dissolving of the insolvent Soviet may have reduced the scope of Russia’s threat potential, but with Putin in charge, deeply threatening it remains.
The Phantom of the Soviet that lurks in Putin’s revanchist neo-feudal Russia has brought to the fore a variety of terms representing the methods of his state’s aggression plus partiality to corruption and crime.
Ready for look-up when you are:
Putin, Corruption
Putin, Far Right, Far Left
Putin, International Crime
Russia, Frozen Conflicts
Russian Hybrid Warfare
Russian Energy Politics
Russian Information Warfare
Russian Nationalism
Russian Reflexive Control
Russian Passportization
This post may have to be the first of several on the theme, as the editor prefers having (or implying) his say at one sitting.
In reference, readers will find a smattering of discoveries based on searching up the above listed terms. Each is a gem and possibly telegraphic enough to suggest that Moscow-centric control, corruption, political manipulation, and political theater in service to a despotic feudalism frames the renewal of conflict with NATO, not that NATO has yawned all the way through the Rise of Putin. There’s more to that story, of course, but the alliance has avoided confrontation in Syria, in essence allowing the tragedy to develop nearly to its full measure in misery, and in Crimea, where Ukraine now struggles to exert sovereignty and move forward with practical governance.
The once hoped for transformation of Russia from the feudal state of other eras appears to have failed with Putin’s ascent from colonel to president to possibly emperor with the full array at his fingertips — the Okhrana to post-KGB FSB, a revived active military presence beyond its borders, and (equivalent to the privileged of the Party) the host of the moneyed and favored by the “vertical of power”.
The west may have gotten a breather at the end of 1991, but it has been challenged this past year with the fallout from events — again: Crimea; the Syrian Tragedy — approved, driven, engineered, or inspired by Moscow.
General Reference
BackChannels. “Books — Agnia Grigas Tours Putin’s Neo-Imperial Russian Revival.” May 6, 2016.
BackChannels. “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy”.
BackChannels. “FTAC — Synopsis — On the Medieval Struggle.” December 27, 2013.
BackChannels. “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.
BackChannels. “Syndicate Red Brown Green”.
BackChannels. “The Big Fade — Or Not? Where Goes the Phantom of the Cold War?” June 23, 2015.
BackChannels. “The Russian Section”.
Grigas, Agnia. “Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
Herszenhorn, David M. “In Crimea, Russia Moved to Throw Off the Cloak of Defeat.” March 24, 2014.
Krastev, Ivan. “Why Putin Tolerates Corruption.” The New York Times, May 15, 2016.
Tharoor, Ishaan. “Europe’s far right still loves Putin.” The Washington Post, February 18, 2015.
Addendum – July 18, 2016
Turkey’s failed and possibly false-flag coup, i.e., an event manipulated by President Erdogan to soak out the last of his capable opposition — has altered NATO’s character for the worse and left some untidy and dangerous “poker chips” beneath the ground:
Schlosser, Eric. “The H-Bombs in Turkey.” The New Yorker, July 17, 2016.
BackChannels has just published a post-Cold War comment on the failed Turkish coup in relation to the “medieval vs modern” political processes competition between Russia and NATO: “FTAC – Turkey (and Hungary) – Medieval Absolute Power vs Modern Distributions” (July 18, 2016).
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FNS* – Russia steps up terror offensive with armed raid on mosque in Occupied Crimea :: khpg.org
08 Sunday May 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Crimea, Crimean Tatars, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Russia, Russian foreign political manipulation, Russian history
Crimean Tatars had just ended their Friday prayers and were rounded up en masse. With no suggestion that anybody was suspected of an offence, the raid, by men with machine guns, can only be called an overt attempt to terrorize Crimean Muslims. This is not the first such act of primitive intimidation, with at least one of the previous occasions making it quite clear that the Russian occupation regime is targeting Crimean Tatars in general.
Source: Russia steps up terror offensive with armed raid on mosque in Occupied Crimea :: khpg.org – Reported May 7, 2016.
Commentary
The above cited article will go on to note the following: “Attacks on people who have just left Friday prayers is both intimidation and part of the mounting campaign by Russia as occupying force to treat Crimean Tatars as ‘extremists’. / 10 Crimean Muslims are currently in detention facing ‘terrorism’ charges for alleged involvement in an organization – Hizb ut-Tahrir – which only Russia and Uzbekistan have banned.”
“Hizb ut-Tahrir”?
From the top, Wikipedia’s description: “Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic: حزب التحرير Ḥizb at-Taḥrīr; Party of Liberation) is a radical,[1] international, pan-Islamic political organisation, which describes its “ideology as Islam”, and its aim as the re-establishment of “the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate)” or Islamic state. The new caliphate would unify the Muslim community (Ummah)[2] in a unitary (not federal)[3] “superstate” of unified Muslim-majority countries[4] spanning from Morocco in West Africa to the southern Philippines in East Asia.
From the military perspective promulgated by Global Security: “The group claims to be a political party that proceeds with nonviolent means and whose ideology is Islam. Its objectives are strictly political, and its main goal is to topple an existing regime to resurrect the caliphate with structures and conditions similar to the ones of early 7th century Islam. The proposed Islamic state will be responsible for transforming society in a united Ummah, and for spreading the word of Islam throughout the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects modern, secular state structures and democracy as things that are ‘man-made, humanly derived, and un-Islamic,’ and, therefore, it does not participate in any secular electoral processes. However, Hizb ut- Tahrir does not reject modern technology and its advantages.”
Russia and Crimean Tatars share a brutal history, much of it condensed in an article by Eric Lohr in the Religion and Politics blog (May 28, 2014):
If Russia and the Tatars are to get along, they will have to overcome not only the bitter legacy of the 1944 deportations, but also centuries of conflict. Russian Tsar Catherine the Great’s conquest of the Crimean Khanate in 1774 led to a mass emigration of Tatars to the Ottoman Empire that was encouraged by the new Russian authorities. Catherine then proceeded to distribute vast lands that had been used by Tatars for grazing to Russian, Ukrainian, German, and foreign nobles and farming communities. The Crimean war of 1853-56 spurred another mass emigration of Crimean Tatars. Memories of historical injustices run the other way too. During the three centuries when the Crimean Tatar Khanate was part of the Ottoman Empire (1478-1774), one of its primary activities was seizing captives from Russia, Ukraine, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and selling them as slaves in the Ottoman Empire and Middle East.
In the present, Putin’s Era, labeling Russia’s overt investigation of the Crimean Tatar community and the brushing away of the Islamist taint linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir perhaps signals that disingenuous writing that would promote chaos, at least, if not evil outright under the guise of concern with liberation and human rights.
Suspicion of within-mosque association with Hizb ut-Tahrir might rightly call any number of authorities, Ukrainian no less than Russian, to alert and to action. The same may not condone The Bear’s hamfisted and often suspect methods, but it may excuse them in the interest of further explicating political drifts and their strength within so many conflicted and conflict-creating communities within Russia and within the Russian “sphere of challenge” — defined by annexations, frozen conflicts, infiltrations, information warfare, etc. — redeveloped KGB-style by Vladimir Putin.
As regards the Russia-in-Crimea act of fascist assertion and intimidation in surrounding with police a presumably peaceful mosque (“Shimmer” always applies): where is and where was the crime?
Ukrainians (a lot more than Russians) will need to know who is modern, i.e., who has become accustomed to and positively willing to embrace a world adjusted beneath the umbrella of compassionate, practical, and tolerant secular law?
Ukrainians also may wish to know who is not modern, i.e., who would embrace and reconstruct the medieval world and worldview, the same that has been on bloody display in Syria since 2011?
Midway down the left sidebar of this blog comes a bit of Jewish advice to those who would for kindness or naivete abet the designs of those inclined toward intolerance, sadism, and willfulness:
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
As Halya Coynash’s writing makes the rounds, the example of that with which this post was started and titled, one may wish to keep in mind post-Soviet Russia’s deeply feudal revanch under Putin’s guidance. The “mafia state” — the same that supported the rightly deposed thug Yanukovych — has also a nationalist drive and a revived Russian Orthodox Church attached: for the want of its own greater aggrandizement and not a little criminality, Russia appears to believe it has cause to induce extremism — or more extreme response — in the path of its own habitual imperialism.
As with the delinquent fireman who sets the fire that he can put out, Russia’s state game appears to involve creating the problem (as with the incubating of ISIS in Syria) that its own “heroic” self might solve — an evil design, for sure, but if it has worked so far, and for Russia, so well, lol, in Syria, may God let it not take off in Crimea.
The method worked at least once (upon a time) in Somalia.
Additional Reference
If the symbolic attributes of Mejlis are banned, uncertainty will prevail concerning the use of the flag of Crimean Tatars. The latter is not a symbol of Mejlis, but of all Crimean Tatars. It is used by Mejlis to represent the community’s identity.
“The decision to ban Mejlis for alleged “extremist activities” may open the way to a massive wave of prosecution of Crimean Tatars for whom Mejlis is a symbol of struggle against century long repressions,” – said Karim Lahidji, FIDH President.
*FNS: “Fast News Share” — BackChannels may be using the WordPress application “Press This” to swiftly share items of interest to its readers.
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Books – Agnia Grigas Tours Putin’s Neo-Imperial Russian Revival
06 Friday May 2016
Tags
Russia’s information warfare vis-a-vis the Baltic States has centered on its own interpretation of Soviet history, smearing Baltic governments and societies as fascists and Nazis, and creating propaganda about alleged abuse of the Russian minorities. The prominence given to these matters has ebbed and flowed. However, since Crimea’s annexation in 2014, the narrative of discrimination against the Russian minorities has intensified. The propaganda has served to reinforce Russia’s soft power efforts to create a network of co-opted communities of compatriots in the Baltic States as well as sow societal ethnic divisions. The goal has been to encourage Russians and Russian speakers (but not only these) to develop loyalty to modern-day Russia, including its interpretation of history and current events.
Where Putin goes about the business of growing Russia back to Soviet size, at least in presence and as much in body as it may persuade, Agnia Grigas counts and examines the ways. Covered in depth: Ethnic Russian and Russophone-based (and often disingenuous) compatriot and humanitarian policies, frozen conflicts, information warfare (including within near abroad states the development of Moscow-controlled media), “passportization” (instant citizenship based in nominal ethnic and linguistic affiliation), separatism, civil conflict, and annexation.
In the course of her writing, Grigas captures the spirit of Putin’s revanchist script that is bound to glorify, sanitize, and revive the past while keeping himself at the center of the universe so projected. Of greatest interest to lay Kremlin watchers may be the many explications of historically near Moscow-engineered lies and manipulations recounted throughout the book.
BackChannels happens to have a page open detailing “a campaign that contributed to the 2007 riots by Russians and Russian speakers in Tallinn.” The incident appears to have been less about “bending and twisting it some” and more about outright fabrication and incitement:
According to Estonian perceptions, Moscow was instrumental in inciting unrest and discontent by spreading false accounts in the Russian-language press that the monument, and presumably the nearby tombs of unknown soldiers, had been destroyed . . . The Russian embassy allegedly also took part in organizing the riots, while Russian activists, including members of the Nashi pro-Kremlin youth movement, traveled from Russia to take part in the violence. (p. 164).
That’s one incident recounted on one-third of a page — and the book runs 256 pages before the recounting of each chapter’s copious notes.
The Winter Olympics at Sochi and the dreadful fracturing of Syria may not be so unique, for Russia appears to have had plenty of experience at managing and putting on a show — and controlling information and perception in spaces it either exploits or would wish to exploit.
In her concluding chapter, Grigas notes, ” . . . Russian compatriot policies go hand in hand with coercion, disinformation, and use of force against the governments of the target states. These policies at times verge on blackmail to manipulate the compatriots and even allies like Armenia Belarus, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan into participating in the Russian reimperialization project. Moscow offers and extends its protection to compatriots in some cases despite the preferences of the compatriots themselves” (p. 243).
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FTAC – Russia’s Not So Appealing Turn in Syria
06 Friday May 2016
In the bloody theatrical production that has been “Assad OR The Terrorists” — and guess who’s responsible for casting “The Terrorists”? — Russia and Syria, who have ejected the terrorists from Palmyra, have turned to assert the values of their feudal aristocracies against the barbarism of their foes. http://www.nytimes.com/…/syria-russia-palmyra-isis…
While classical music may set the tone of a better deal, the larger picture sustains political absolute power over “the masses”, an affront and challenge to the democratic and deeply humanist character of those the Russian Federation has chosen to label as its enemies.
***
Posted to YouTube May 5, 2016.
If the reader has no memory, then the reader may obtain one of two possible impressions: civilization, as represented by the symphony, is “winning” in Syria; civilization, as represented by the aftermath of an air strike against a refugee camp, is losing in Syria, and only barbarism is winning across that godforsaken land.
The truth has finer points.
In recent weeks, despite Russia’s promised pullback from Syria, Russia has instead strengthened its presence in the embattled state.
In early April, according to Fox News’s Lucas Tomlinson, Russia moved significant manpower and machinery towart Palmyra under the cover of demining the area.
Moscow’s Line
By strengthening Moscow’s hand in Syria, Putin may be firming up Assad’s perception of Syria as a Russian client state after all. As argued repeatedly on this blog, the true axis appears to be “Moscow-Tehran” and the purpose of it the sustaining of feudal absolute power enabling both imperial ambitions and further unrestrained kleptocracy.
Perhaps symphonies play louder than murder in so many state-controlled presses, but in the Open Source Environment, the same may be juxtaposed in a timely manner with the slaughter of noncombatants that would appear to secure their stay in service to the feudal aristocracies that appreciate them.
Also, the upgraded Russian military and political presence in Syria may leverage Washington into compromising with Moscow over Damascus in the control of situation. Given the horrors of the “Syrian Tragedy”, the ancillary humanitarian and political fallout that coalesces around refugee camps and mass migration, western resistance to the feudal program(s) on display may stand diminished and neither Moscow nor Tehran changed very much if at all.
Additional and Cited Reference
Pleltgen, Fred. “Russia flexes its military might in Syria.” CNN, May 6, 2016.
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Russia’s Disinformation History – Elements
01 Sunday May 2016
Tags
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Additional and Cited Reference
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.
Goble, Paul. “15 Characteristics of Russian Propaganda.” Stop Fake, April 18, 2016.
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.
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.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai. “Brand-New Russia, Same Old Disinformation.” National Review, November 8, 2014.
Stop Fake. “Russian Propaganda”. Compilation of articles.
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.
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Posted to YouTube March 5, 2014.
Addendum – July 11, 2016 and Forward
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BackChannels 