Liveuamap, Ukraine, Luhansk and Azov Sea regions, November 20, 2018 @ 5:35 a.m.
Russian “Active Measures” and “dezinformatsiya” frame Moscow’s targets with multiple libels, the most infamous its depiction of Ukraine as a hotbed of neo-Nazi hotheads. In the false flag fashion of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings“, Russia has produced an image of Ukraine suited to its ambitions as an invader.
From The Guardian, March 20, 2014 (Luke Harding, “Ukraine nationalist attacks on Russia supporters – fact or Kremlin fairy tale?”):
According to civil rights groups, however, the Kremlin’s account of anti-Russian persecution is a dark fairytale – “entirely fictional”, as one put it. It is, they say, a made-up scenario scripted in Moscow for state TV, and now played out on the ground by pro-Russian activists and bussed-in professionals. Russian propaganda has been extremely effective, they add. Many trust Russian state TV rather than what they see on the streets, which are strikingly bereft of fascists.
“There’s no discrimination against Russian-speakers actually,” Yevgeny Zakharov, from Kharkiv’s human rights protection group, said earlier this week. Zakharov said support for the idea of Kharkiv following Crimea and joining Russia was low – 15% according to the latest survey. He believes last week’s bloody shoot-out was deliberately provoked. “This [Kremlin] campaign is being conducted very aggressively. The idea is to give the false impression that Russians are being humiliated and Kharkiv wants union with Russia,” he said.
— In President Vladimir Putin’s Soviet / post-Soviet way, that which best serves the dictator’s political ambitions and ends becomes “pravda” — “truth”. —
Tomorrow the Dutch government will be inviting all EU member states to The Hague to propose an EU wide Magnitsky Act. In advance of that, the Russian government today has accused me of murdering Sergei Magnitsky. Kafkaeske to say the least https://t.co/oHjfUJlFTR
If a Kremlin officer is allowed to run Interpol, it will have no credibility at all. Russia already abuses it to persecute political enemies. It's putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department. https://t.co/7OEBL308tq
It appears Moscow would dispute even the existence — even the possibility — of integrity in information.
In the world’s “Totalitarian Information Spaces (TIS)”, 🙂 , all expression — all thought — is political, malleable, and manipulative.
All of a sudden, RT inverts Browder’s claims regarding his friend and motivation for the Magnitsky Act, and assigns the murder to Browder himself.
Russian accountant Sergey Magnitsky may have been poisoned and his former employer, financier Bill Browder, was possibly behind the murder, prosecutors have found. Now, Moscow will place Browder on the international wanted list.
UK businessman Browder had much interest in the death of Sergey Magnitsky after receiving what he wanted from the accountant, an adviser to the Russian prosecutor general told the briefing.
“Based on the documents that were shown, an obvious conclusion can be made that, having received a false statement from Magnitsky that was used for provocation, Browder was interested in Sergey Magnitsky’s death more than anyone else in order to avoid exposure,” Nikolai Atmonyev said.
Given enough time and manpower, Moscow may turn night into day — and day and light into night and darkness.
Mission accomplished.
In President Vladimir Putin’s Soviet / post-Soviet way, that which best serves the dictator’s political ambitions and ends becomes “pravda” — “truth”.
British officials expect Alexander Prokopchuk, a former major-general at the Russian Interior Ministry, to be elected as Interpol president as soon as Wednesday, The Times reported, without saying where it got the information.
Earlier this morning, BackChannels updated a compilation of references associated with Romanian KGB defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, which activity recalled in part how difficult the battle for empiricism, integrity (most of all), and reason may be before a veritable disinformation army devoted to the preservation of despotism and tyranny on behalf of the limitless needs (for “narcissistic supply”) of a single damaged, ruthless, sadistic, and vacant soul.
After his murder, the Russian authorities covered up the crime, exonerated and promoted the people involved, and put Magnitsky on trial three years after he died, in the first trial of a dead man in Russian history.
#SergeiMagnitsky died following his work exposing corruption in Russia. After his death, the U.S. enacted human rights laws bearing his name. To date 49 people sanctioned under #RussiaMagnitsky Act and 101 for corruption or human rights abuse under #GlobalMagnitsky Act.
Moscow’s manipulation of “Information Space” beyond its boundaries is serious stuff, and the American public and other western democratic constituencies need to know it down to and through their grassroots.
Good examples of Russian manipulation can be seen in the Catalonian independence referendum and Brexit. Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis announced that his government had confirmed that a propaganda campaign intended to destabilize Spain came from Russia and Venezuela. They used Twitter, Facebook, and other internet sites to publicize the separatist cause and swing public opinion to support it.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) that attempted to influence British politics. Russian hackers also spread anti-Islamic sentiments in Great Britain after the recent terrorist attacks. According to The Guardian, hundreds of paid bloggers work around the clock at IRA “to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications—sowing disinformation, praising the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the west.” On Monday Theresa May addressed the issue in a speech, saying that Russia’s actions were “threatening the international order on which we all depend.”
Reliable, verifiable, and trusted news — “clear, accurate, and complete” — forms the very foundation of public impression and related decisionmaking, and to smear the entire industry bids only for absolute and tyrannical power. Around the world, however, what governments may withhold as secret from the press may not be known, or easily known, and from that comes a contest in democracies between governments and Real Press for general constituent and voter confidence in their elected government.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ – a backgrounder in the form of a bibliography listing the most accessible and enjoyable volumes on Cold War history and related political mafia and disinformation (and much else). Highly recommended: Disinformation by Pacepa and Rychlak and the Agnia Grigas work on Crimea.
Call BackChannels the work of an obsessive curiosity by the most accidental tourist in political science and political psychology. I’d say the editor would be a senior in high school, perhaps a junior in college, at this point . . . perhaps a little more sophisticated for breadth of awareness of related elements across regions (“culture, conflict, language, and psychology”) and ability to get the connections just about right.
For the once-Soviet inspired, manipulated (and paid) Hard Political Left whose most privileged of the Party would regard the same with contempt for being pliable and useful idiots:
Before Donald J. Trump does anything else, he’s going to have to articulate and navigate a position with Putin and a re-medievalized Russian security state.
One day, BackChannels will collect the books around the place and write a 3×5 card for each and by category — there are more volumes in “The Russian Section” than appear online. Nonetheless, and especially online for readers who arrive, much like the editor, with more curiosity than formal background in foreign affairs, international studies, and political science, there may be greater value in a short list — a short hallways with half a dozen doors — than in a comprehensive one.
In the online environment, such posts are stepping stones — no need to dwell: click on a selection and move on!
“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”
It plays this way (excerpted from the above cited article by Higgins):
Mr. Backman, who also represents the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway state set up with Russian support in eastern Ukraine, denied targeting Ms. Aro as part of any “information war.” Rather, he insisted that Russia was itself the victim of a campaign of disinformation and distortion conducted by the West.
Also in The New York Times (published two days ago):
STOCKHOLM — With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.
The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.
This report analyses Russian propaganda and disinformation – here collectively called strategic deception – concerning the conflict in Ukraine. The strategic deception is not exclusively a Russian term, but it does capture what we think is an essential feature of the current Russian foreign and security policy. It is driven by attempts to put the adversary into a defensive posture and off balance, and thus, to create conditions for surprise.
The methods utilized in contemporary Russian strategic deception are partly the same that were already used in Soviet propaganda. But where Soviet propaganda was anchored in ideological truth claims, the contemporary Russian variant can be compared to a kaleidoscope: a light piercing through it is instantly transformed into multiple versions of reality.
The rise of Novorossya is the most significant political development since the collapse of the USSR. It is a new politics, one that combines nationalism and socialism into a Christian, humane and just political order that has not been seen before. That it rises on the ashes of “independent Ukraine” and on Orthodox territory is no accident.
Posted to YouTube by DailyMilitary.News, Feb. 16, 2016.
Addenda
The characteristics of Russian propaganda are: generating very strong emotions, aggression, and a dramatic departure from reality. Russian television stations, with very few exceptions, create a more and more complicated and unpredictable reality, ‘generate fears, bringing people to the brink of chaos and panic’. Once created, the huge stress damages the mechanism of rational thinking, people are herded into a crowd, where archaic instincts take over, triggered by the simplest of emotions’.[1]
In Russia, whoever is not with the Kremlin, whoever criticizes Putin, or even doubts the righteousness of his policies, is considered a traitor and an enemy. Against the very few who dare express minimal reservations towards official policy, a movement formed recently, with the blessing of power, the Anti-Maidan movement, with the express objective to combat any position, to wipe out the smallest trace of doubt towards Putin’s wisdom. Anti-Maidan fights against the ‘5th column’, the enemy within.[2]
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.
Hamas – Muslim Brotherhood (way out of step with Wasatia Moderation and Reconciliation) – and wealthy: Haniyeh and Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires.
The “camps” of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt: Arab-created and managed.
For partial isolation in geopolitical space, the refugees of 1948 may become an ethnolinguistic cohort — a “People” — by (x) beliefs x calendar x customs x language (!) x rituals — but in clinical overview, the same have been abused by Arab powers and by Moscow.
In the efforts of the Soviet to establish and sustain power in the middle east, endemic Russian anti-Semitism became a message promoted by the same to encourage an Arab bond.
The Soviet Union self-dissolved almost 25 years ago, but the character of its political existence did not leave Russia, and continued disinformation plus promotion or tolerance for terrorism (Moscow has in recent years hosted PFLP and refuses to this day to designate Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations) have remained a part of Putin’s “neo-imperial” Russia.
The common bond and cause for a still reckless mythology — Jew hate and discomfort in general with “the west” — the generally higher-integrity, democratic, humanist, and open societies.
Fatah and Hamas have their “track records” as governments. Why they serve as the interlocutors of the Palestinians – now isolated and subject to the same post-Soviet and Muslim Brotherhood forces — should be a difficult question to answer in retrospect.
The twin basis for the middle east conflict: the “Zionists” stole their property from “The Palestinians” and Israel “occupies” the land.
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 “brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers”.[8] Many of the fellahin did not understand the importance of the registers and therefore the wealthy families took advantage of this. Jewish buyers who were looking for large tracts of land found it favorable to purchase from the wealthy owners. As well many small farmers became in debt to rich families which led to the transfer of land to the new owners and then eventually to the Jewish buyers.
In 1918, after the British conquest of Palestine, the military administration closed the Land Register and prohibited all sale of land. The Register was reopened in 1920, but to prevent speculation and insure a livelihood for the fellahin, an edict was issued forbidding the sale of more than 300 dunams of land or the sale of land valued at more than 3000 Palestine pounds without the approval of the High Commissioner.[9]
There’s more to the stories of indigenous Jewry in Palestine, the capitalization of agriculture in Palestine, and the purchasing – not stealing – from Arab leaseholders of serious tracts of property in Palestine. To overlook that part of history, one must lie about how capital and labor developed on the land and peacefully and productively changed its demographics, both Jewish and Arab.
As regards “The Occupation”, the comment tells the truth about the KGB, Arafat, and the PLO; about the role played by the famously anti-Semitic Soviet in the “winning” of the Arab world (for a short while); and about Hamas and its most famous billionaires.
When it comes to Arab intransigence over the “middle east conflict” (never mind what’s going on in Syria and Iraq – the term obsessively refers to the conflict forced on Israel), one must suppose some fathers would rather lie to their children — and have their children lie as well — than disappoint them.
Addendum – Principal or Transactional Regard? – Choose Principal – Regard Will Come of That
Although the awesome conversation on the middle east conflict strives for “balance” Israeli and Palestinian interest, the actions of the old KGB and its approach to the manipulation of information plus, perhaps, the Arab leadership’s own language behavior across time have left the Arab world and the Palestinians arguing through the invention of multiple alternative narratives, all of which devolve to the delegitimizing of the presence of the Hebrews in the Land of the Hebrews. Basically, if one does not recognize the “Palestinian People”, why should the same recognize the “Jewish People”? The question begs for the “I’m okay – you’re okay” hug that it cannot and must not receive, the difference between the effects of “magical thinking” and empiricism and reason being what it is: one leads “the masses” in an abyss; the other keeps individuals en masse from it.
Also from the awesome conversation —
None contest links to the land by Arabs resident on it at the time of Israel’s chartering.
None contest the status of the same as refugees of war caught between armies, as none contest the role of the Arab armies as intending the annihilation of the Jews on the land, and thereby placing Jewish militia in the historic defensive position.
None contest the Jews as having for all functional intents militarily and politically secured _their_ state in 1948.
What happened to the proposed Arab state for the areas that are today “contested” — but not so much: Gaza, I’ve heard, has been “Judenrein” since 2005.
A “People” can be many things these days. After all, who are the “American People”? 🙂
Still, one might ask: how do the Palestinian People differ from the Arab People?
BackChannels 