Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 24, 2018 1:07 pm

Patriotic Paranoia

- from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

..... I find the view… that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective, but dangerous as a guide to political action.

This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another… country; this routine exaggeration of... military capabilities...: this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and the attitudes of another... people...; ...this reckless application of the double standard to the judgment of…[their] conduct and our own, this failure to recognize, finally, the commonality of many of their problems and ours...: and the corresponding tendency to view all aspects of the relationship in terms of a supposed total and irreconcilable conflict of concerns and of aims; these, I believe, are not the marks of the maturity and discrimination one expects of the diplomacy of a great power...
And we shall not be able to turn these things around as they should be turned, on the plane of military and nuclear rivalry, until we learn to correct these childish distortions... If we insist on demonizing these… leaders -- on viewing them as total and incorrigible enemies, consumed only with their fear and hatred of us and dedicated to nothing other than our destruction -- that, in the end, is the way we shall assuredly have them, if for no other reason than that our view of them allows for nothing else, either for them or just us.
The above, edited-for-clarity quote comes to me courtesy of a thoughtful friend, E. Martin Schotz, and is taken from George Kennan’s 1982 book, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age. Kennan is widely recognized as one of the architects of the Cold War. His post-World War II writing on the supposed Soviet threat spurred the US policy of containment. Some thirty-five years after he helped spark a wasteful arms race that threatened to destroy the world, Kennan had the powerful second thoughts reflected above.
I purposefully excised the references to the Soviet Union in the Kennan quote with the hope that others might see how unerringly Kennan’s words capture US foreign policy today towards our newly contrived “enemies.” Without much imagination, one could credibly substitute the names of countries that have been anointed “incorrigible enemies” of the US in recent years: Cuba, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia, China, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Unfortunately, despite George F. Kennan’s never-too-late regrets, the arrogance of empire remains a deeply embedded disposition of US ruling elites. The frequent and persistent wars of aggression underscore the Marxist-Leninist thesis that a reach for dominance over all rivals or those daring to show independence is an essential, inescapable feature of mature capitalism.
If we take seriously Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, asserting that history repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” then we must believe that we live in times of frightening absurdity. The irresponsible demonizing of Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, or al-Assad has tragically sacrificed well over a million lives to US and NATO aggression, but the painting of Russia, DPRK, and the People's Republic of China (PRC) as absolute evil today reaches previously unimaginable levels of madness and danger.
Russia
Last week’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals and 3 Russian entities only underlines the vacuity of the Mueller investigation. Over nine months of probing, interviewing, and developing evidence has produced (1) an admission of lying to the FBI by General Flynn, an indictment based on his efforts on behalf of Israel (and not Russia), (2) an indictment of Rick Gates, a lobbyist, fundraiser, and political operative accused of working unregistered for a previous Ukrainian government, (3) an indictment of a bigger fish, Paul Manafort, who for four decades represented any and every shady international character with the wherewithal to pay his fees. He, too, was accused of failure to register, laundering money, and making false statements, practices that occupied him for his whole career, (4) a guilty plea by George Papadopoulos, a bit player with an ego far larger than his résumé, who habitually met with any contact that he could impress that he was a “player,” (5) an indictment of and guilty plea of Richard Pinedo, an internet hustler who stole identities (any connection to Russia was “unwitting”), and most recently, (6) the guilty plea of Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, who earned a brief imprisonment by lying to the FBI about the date of his last meeting with Gates, placing it in mid-August instead of September.
For a fishing expedition, the taxpayer-funded Mueller excursion has landed few trophies. Until last week’s indictment, it was hard to find anything importantly connecting Russia, the Russian government, or the highest levels of the Trump administration. No doubt the paucity of connections or evidence of “collusion” spawned the latest indictments.
But even assuming that there is evidence forthcoming to back up the latest Russian indictments (they are, of course, merely formal charges unless prosecuted), it is more than curious that there is no direct claim of linkage either to the Russian government or to the Trump presidency. Instead, we have a charge that a wealthy, well connected caterer has established an organization dedicated to injecting information onto social media and, in a few cases, staging modest political events in the US. This, surely, is a far cry from the primary mission of the Special Counsel: to establish “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.…”
Judging by last Friday’s indictments, one might be inclined to view the machinations of Concord Catering, the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management and Consulting, and their alleged mastermind, should the charges be true, as very much akin to the private operations of the intrusive NGOs funded by billionaires George Soros or Bill Gates in numerous countries. In all cases, wealthy individuals use their resources to change the direction of target countries in ways that conflict with the current leadership.
As weak as the Mueller investigation has been, it continues to stimulate a hungry news media bent upon demonizing Russia. And there are plenty of pundits and opinion-makers ready to accommodate.
One of the most ridiculous “contributors” to the RussiaGate fiasco is Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe. A liberal icon with academic and policy gravitas, Tribe claimed, according to Glenn Greenwald, that Russian President Putin may have been responsible for the death of an important, conspiracy-related person in a recent airliner crash in Russia. Tribe never bothered to verify that said “victim” was on the flight. He wasn’t. But never mind.
Thanks to the RussiaGate hysteria, the FBI and CIA now enjoy more credibility than at any time since the heyday of Joe McCarthy. The Pew poll reports that, for the first time, Democrats now have more confidence in these illiberal institutions than do Republicans.
Both the Washington Post and NPR have found their own FBI expert in the person of a three-year veteran of the agency, Asha Ranappa. Now serving as a lecturer at Yale University, her articulate, confident voice and intoxicating earnestness make one forget that a very brief tour as an agent hardly constitutes expertise on the history and workings of the FBI any more than my three high school years selling shoes in a department store make me an expert on the shoe industry. Nevertheless, the attractive Ranappa is the darling of the networks, even Comedy Central. She’s not above discussing with an interviewer that she was voted “America’s hottest female law school dean.”
In a Washington Post op-ed published earlier this month (and in a more recent NPR interview), Ranappa enthusiastically defends the FBI against the highly publicized Nunes memo. She rests the argument on a tissue of weasel phrases-- “would have,” “could include,” “would probably have,” “suggests that” and so forth-- that amount to a “just-so” story and not a robust defense of the FBI. She emphasizes the fact that FISA warrants are difficult for the FBI to acquire and renew. They are not. Out of 35,529 FISA requests for electronic surveillance from 1979 to 2013 only 12 have been denied! Unless one zealously believes that the FBI never oversteps its bounds, this speaks poorly for the scrutiny of a secret process by a secret court and Ranappa’s faith in the process.
On the thin basis of the Nunes memo, Ranappa stops a “could have” short of accusing Carter Page-- a target of FBI surveillance-- with being a Russian spy: “...the memo suggests that the Trump campaign could have had an active Russian spy working as a foreign policy adviser.” [my italics] No one but Ranappa has gone beyond collusion to lodge such a serious charge. In better times, without new evidence, this would surely be grounds for libel.
These are not better times.
Of course, the trusted FBI, working diligently with Mueller and feeding gossip to the mainstream press, failed abysmally to find and thwart the 19-year-old mass murderer in Parkland, Florida, despite multiple alerts from private citizens and a Facebook threat with the perpetrator identified by name! It never dawns on the pundits in the monopoly corporate media that these devastating, catastrophic errors suggest a more universal incompetence.
This failure did not deter NPR from offering the following inflammatory headline: “As An American Tragedy Unfolds, Russian Agents Sow Discord Online.” The source for NPR’s sensational story accusing “agents” of “sowing discord” over the Parkland shootings is a well-financed website dubbed Hamilton 68. As Julian Assange points out, H68 is less a watchdog over Russian propaganda than itself a source of propaganda. Its leaders and advisors are veteran Cold Warriors and intimates of the US national security apparatus, less-than-independent, less-than-objective monitors. Curiously, the identified ‘Russian agents’ that they monitor are the state-supported news and entertainment agencies that Russia has established internationally. They are only “agents” because the US government has insisted that RT, Sputnik, and others now register as such. Supposedly, the same logic would apply to NPR-- itself a government-supported news and entertainment agency. ‘Agents’ are lurking everywhere!
But the reigning award for Russia-baiting must go to former Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra, who has maintained that two years ago he overheard Vladimir Putin discuss grandiose plans to create a Greater Russia hacked out of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When it was demonstrated that he could not possibly have overheard any such comments, he backed off and claimed that he had overheard a friend who had overheard… The ensuing kerfuffle forced his resignation.
Finian Cunningham reminds us that former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski also claimed that he personally overheard Putin express similar expansionist plans in 2008. He, too, was forced to retract, labeling his claim as a “surreal joke” (Sikorski is the spouse of the rabidly anti-Soviet, anti-Communist Washington Post pundit and Cold Warrior, Anne Applebaum).
And now (2-20-18, Code Red for America), The New York Times resident village idiot, Thomas Friedman, weighs in with a host of hyperbole: Russia presents “the biggest threat to our democracy today,” “...to undermine the very core of our democracy,” “...to poison American politics.” In his servile mind, “Our FBI, CIA, and NSA, working with the special counsel, have done us amazingly proud.”
Is it war that Friedman wants? He asks that “we bring together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Mr. Putin-- the best defense of all.”
Russiaphobia and Putin-fever continue to reach absurd levels.
China and the DPRK
The PRC is also a target for hysterical patriot paranoia. FBI Director Christopher Wray, addressing the Senate Intelligence Committee, explained: "One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us." With this tortured “whole-of-society” explanation, the Director and his staff see danger from Chinese students, visitors, scholars, businesspeople, athletes, and entertainers-- all would-be “collectors.”
Presumably, US students, scholars, businesspeople, athletes, and entertainers (the “whole-of-society”) should be vigilant and active against the Chinese threat. Another step towards a vigilante society.
Predictably, The Washington Post picked up on this bizarre forewarning with an op-ed from the breathless Josh Rogin. Rogin expands the Chinese machinations into a “massive foreign influence campaign” (China is Infiltrating US Colleges, 2-19-18). Quoting the deranged Marco Rubio, Rogin sees a nefarious plot to implant a pro-China bias in innocent, vulnerable students and faculty in the Chinese university-affiliated Confucius Institutes. Established as a language proficiency and cultural link to US higher education, Rogin and his friends see a conspiracy lurking behind this innocuous facade.
Rogin offers a curious and contradictory defense of campus free speech: “Confucius Institutes must… yield full control over curriculum to their American hosts and pledge not to involve themselves in issues of academic freedom for American or Chinese students.”
Protecting “academic freedom” by denying it!
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is no newcomer to demonization. It has long been on the US and EU lists of “evil” actors despite neither owning foreign military bases nor pursuing any overt aggression. More than any other country, DPRK foreign policy revolves around the simple demand that they be left alone. The only official corollary to their isolationism is the goal of Korean unification.
Nonetheless, the US and some of its allies have been picking a fight with DPRK for several decades. As tensions mounted, the DPRK made overtures to the new Moon government of the Republic of Korea, including several highly publicized, well-received gestures surrounding the Winter Olympics.
A promise of peaceful, rational discourse was met with a feverish mania in US ruling circles and with their media servants. The Washington Post called the demure DPRK visitor to the games, Kim Yo-jong, “the Korean Ivanka Trump,” a witless comparison that serious people should find embarrassing.
Justin Peters, writing in Slate, gives the DPRK cheerleaders a proper smart-ass thrashing: “Why did the cheerleaders make the trip? Because North Korea is an oppressive totalitarian state that hopes to use every facet of its involvement in the Pyeongchang Games for propaganda purposes. The objective is to project strength, confidence, and unanimity, in the process extending the influence and stability of the Kim regime.” He offers his explanation for their prowess: “I suppose it is easy to mastermind mosaics on a large scale if participation is compulsory and missing your cue carries a hideous punishment, but, still, impressive stuff...To be clear, the cheerleaders’ enthusiasm is likely compulsory and the cheerleaders themselves are surely being monitored ceaselessly by state minders during their stay in Pyeongchang.”
Not to be outdone, The Guardian gave a slightly different spin: “At the end of each row, older male minders sat still for the entire game, a reminder that despite appearances, these women were also prisoners of one of the most brutal regimes in the world.” (Check out the video supplied by The Guardian and see if you can find the elusive “male minders.”)
But The Independent deviates from this slave/prisoner narrative. The cheerleaders are not intimidated into their cheerful performances, they are “picked for having the right ‘ideology.’ They are closely vetted to ensure that they’ll properly represent North Korea both at home and abroad, according to local reports, through a process that checks whether they’re related to Japanese sympathisers or defectors.”
Clearly, the corporate media do not know what to do with the DPRK cheerleaders-- The New York Post headline exclaimed: Kim impersonator a hit with North Korean cheerleaders, while the infamous Washington Free Beacon headline disagrees: North Korean Cheerleaders Were Not Impressed by Kim Jong Un Impersonator. Skye News thought the cheerleaders were ”appalled” and Reuters saw them as “caught off guard.”
********
Like the media lapdogs who, generations ago, demeaned any spark of humanity exhibited by Soviet citizens, today’s patriotic “journalists” stamp out any hint of human sentiment or empathy towards the “enemies” anointed by the imperialist state.
As the US empire recognizes its decline, it engages in more and more desperate means to shore up the sinking credibility of its institutions. The compliant media, two political parties that can only agree on manufactured enemies, and even a spineless left, join in conjuring evil spirits in need of an exorcist. Unfortunately, we live in a world of destructive, devastating weapons that threaten the very existence of the planet. As George Kennan’s belated apology reminds us, the folly of demonizing, fostering manufactured enemies, fear-mongering, and bear-baiting court disaster. We are well along that destructive path.
One can only hope that wiser heads will emerge and call for a retreat from this course.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 26, 2018 1:58 pm

Lewis Carroll’s White Queen would have a career in the media today

Image
Alice and the White Queen, drawn by John Tenniel
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewi Carroll – Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll invented the White Queen as an absurdist emblem of a refusal to deal. But now that deluded lady would slot right in at the BBC, CNN, Guardian et al. In fact to live in the mainstream western culture of today we need to be able to believe a lot more than six impossible things before breakfast. We need to plug into an entire matrix of the unreal, never happened, never could happen and purely ridiculous.

There is now almost no point of contact between the world described in daily mainstream news and social commentary and the actual veridical experiential world in which real people really live. The most basic “facts” upon which they operate are almost completely false. They produce hours and hours of comment and analysis based on events that never occurred, words that were never said, a history that doesn’t exist. It’s not about explaining reality any more, it’s about making it up.

https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/26/lew ... dia-today/

There's more, but this was the best part. I just like Lewis Carrol references & it is applicable.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 26, 2018 7:36 pm

State Department Troll Farm Receives Huge Cash Infusion
The U.S. State Department will increase its online trolling capabilities and up its support for meddling in other countries. The Hill reports:

The State Department is launching a $40 million initiative to crack down on foreign propaganda and disinformation amid widespread concerns about future Russian efforts to interfere in elections.
The department announced Monday that it signed a deal with the Pentagon to transfer $40 million from the Defense Department’s coffers to bolster the Global Engagement Center, an office set up at State during the Obama years to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.

The professed reason for the new funding is the alleged but unproven "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election campaign. U.S. Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians for what is claimed to be interference but which is likely mere commercial activity.

The announcement by the State Department explains that this new money will not only be used for measures against foreign trolling but to actively meddle in countries abroad:

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein said the transfer of funds announced today reiterates the United States’ commitment to the fight.
“This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight,” said Under Secretary Goldstein. “It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive.”

The mentioning of Silicon Valley is of interest. The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.
In May 2016 the Hillary Clinton campaign even set up her own troll farm:

Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.
In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

The foreign policy advisor of Hillery Clinton's campaign, Laura Rosenberger, initiated the Hamilton68 project which falsey explains any mentioning of issues disliked by its backers as the result of nefarious "Russian meddling".

The State Department can build on that and other experience.

Since at least 2011 the U.S. military is manipulating social media via sock puppets and trolls:

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
...
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".
It was then wisely predicted that other countries would follow up:

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns.

With the new money the State Department will expand its Global Engagement Center (GEC) which is running "public diplomacy", aka propaganda, abroad:

The Fund will be a key part of the GEC’s partnerships with local civil society organizations, NGOs, media providers, and content creators to counter propaganda and disinformation. The Fund will also drive the use of innovative messaging and data science techniques.
Separately, the GEC will initiate a series of pilot projects developed with the Department of Defense that are designed to counter propaganda and disinformation. Those projects will be supported by Department of Defense funding.

This money will be in addition to the large funds the CIA traditionally spends on manipulating foreign media:

“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,” said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
...
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that “insertions” of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.
Part of the new State Department money will be used to provide grants. If online trolling or sock puppetry is your thing, you may want to apply now.

Posted by b on February 26, 2018 at 02:02 PM | Permalink

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/st ... usion.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 16, 2018 2:28 pm

Social Media and UW
By Lieutenant Colonel Brian Petit
Originally published in the April-June 2012 edition of Special Warfare


Unconventional warfare, meet social media. Future mission success could depend on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, or iReporting. Te pervert Leon Trotsky's axiom on war, "You may not be interested in social media, but social media is very interested in you."

Social media — blogs, social-network sites, information aggregators, wikis, livecasting, video sharing — has decisively altered that most extreme of socio-politico acts: revolution. The 2011 Arab Spring revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East were engineered through citizen-centric computer and cellular-phone technologies that streamed web-enabled social exchanges. The Arab Spring has profound implications for the U.S. special-operations mission of unconventional warfare. This article posits that the study, practice and successful execution of future UW must deliberately account for and incorporate social media.

This article first examines the role of social media during the Arab Spring revolutions and uprisings. Next, social media’s profound political effects are woven to the historical and doctrinal practice of UW. Three areas of UW are analyzed: social mobilization, the digital underground and the weapon of the narrative. This article concludes with an appeal for the focused study of the nexus between social media and UW to include the practice of and experimentation with the use of social media enabled by handheld technologies.

The Arab Spring
Labeled alternately the Arab Spring or the Twitter Revolution, the spring of 2011 witnessed uprisings and revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Bahrain, with revolution-inspired, violent demonstrations following in multiple Middle Eastern, North African and European nations. The uprisings were sparked by the Dec. 17, 201, self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, a frustrated Tunisian fruit-and-vegetable street vendor (with a computer science degree).1 Public outrage followed, led by viral social-media postings. Months later, across the Middle East and North Africa, social media achieved another innovative milestone: a decentralized community of web-based activists rapidly coalesced into politically powerful, loosely organized insurgents who produced not just riots, but astonishing revolutionary change.

The uprisings represented a true “starfish”t moment: peer-to-peer relationships generated a collaborative will that sparked defiant acts of resistance spanning two continents. Social media proliferated compelling images and stories that resonated with all classes of citizens, worldwide, inspiring a mix of activism and outrage that ignited revolutionary sentiment.

It is said that revolutions “come, they are not made.”3 Despite the unpredictability of revolutions, the Arab Spring uprisings demonstrated that the medium is as important as — or more important than — the message. Handheld technologies and social media connectivity aggregated small acts of resistance that produced frenzied revolutionary momentum. The lack of a cohesive revolutionary ideology was less significant than the collective thrill of millions of like-minded, networked citizens expressing dissent.

Even if revolution was not the aim, it was the outcome. Social-media collaboration generated accidental revolutionaries. The connected masses forged rapid, digital alliances too dynamic to be ignored and too unpredictable to be countered. In a remarkably short time span, social-media communities viewed their collective action in historical terms, generating the key ingredient required for revolutionary momentum: inevitability.

The pervasive and resilient character of web-based social media enabled rapid social organization that circumvented regimes and inspired bold and effective acts of resistance. Social media demonstrated that it is effective in sparking revolutions. It also showed some proficiency in managing the tactics and flexibility required to sustain spirited, if disorganized, revolutionary momentum. Even the state-sponsored physical violence, media control and comprehensive counterrevolutionary measures could not effectively thwart the uprising.

The inspiring, liberating spirit of the Arab Spring has given way to a long year of discord, civil war and state-on-citizen violence. We are reminded that revolutions are messy, violent affairs, whether delivered by cell phone or pitchfork. Outcomes notwithstanding, the Arab Spring confirms that the digital networks that promulgate social-media content present both an environment and a communication-based weapon system.

UW Background
To place social media within UW, it is helpful to review the definition of UW, address special-operations responsibilities for the conduct of UW and give examples of UW campaigns.

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Going viral: The revolution in Egypt was stimulated by this Facebook page, dedicated to a slain Egyptian businessman. The page continues to serve as a hub for information on events around the world. http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk

Going viral: The revolution in Egypt was stimulated by this Facebook page, dedicated to a slain Egyptian businessman. The page continues to serve as a hub for information on events around the world.
UW is defined as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary and guerrilla force in a denied area.”4 UW is not a mechanism for creating revolutionary conditions — rather, it seizes on and supports existing political, military and social infrastructure to accelerate, stimulate and support decisive action based on calculated political gain and U.S. national interests.

U.S. Army Special Forces are the Department of Defense’s only military unit designed to conduct UW, and are specially trained to operate in politically sensitive, denied areas that characterize UW environments.

UW is inherently an interagency activity, which combines the military component of the U.S. Army Special Forces with the U.S. government agencies that possess the requisite authorities and capabilities to support a UW campaign.

The principle components of an insurgent or resistance movement are the underground, the auxiliary and the guerrilla force. UW pairs Special Forces with resistance groups, insurgents, revolutionaries, tribes or other cohesive indigenous social groups that qualify as a legitimate threat to an existing power. The insurgent forces must be determined to be a suitable partner, both militarily and politically, for the conduct of operations in support of U.S. national interests.

The two major U.S. wars of this decade — Afghanistan and Iraq — were initiated with successful Special Forces-supported UW campaigns.5 Strategically, UW offers a rapid, flexible option where large-scale conventional forces are not suitable or advisable. UW and its nearly polar opposite, foreign internal defense, remain the principal mission for the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based United States Army Special Forces Command (Airborne).

Linking the Arab Spring and UW
To clarify, the Arab Spring revolutions are not case studies of UW. The majority of the Arab Spring uprisings are homespun insurrections in various phases of their revolutionary cycle. In Libya, the anti-Qaddafi regime rebels have received external support from the U.S. and NATO. This support, both direct and indirect, falls short of the full application of UW. As of this writing, NATO support to the Libyan rebels is best classified as indirect support6 or limited intervention.7

Image
The Arab Spring was fueled through social media such as the Twitter hashtag #25jan. http://twitter.com/#!/search/%2325jan

The Arab Spring was fueled through social media such as the Twitter hashtag #25jan.
The value in examining UW against the Arab Spring is twofold. First, the Arab Spring revolutions and uprisings contain the environmental complexities resident in UW environments. Studying these cases offers insight into the way UW environments might take shape in the future. Second, the aim of UW is to coerce, disrupt or overthrow an occupying power or government; precisely the aim of a revolutionary. The successes and failures of the resistance movements and the subsequent actions of the governments provide valuable information for informing future UW theory, doctrine and training principles.

Borderless social mobilization. UW will be affected by the advent of hyper-accelerated social organization. The ability of citizens to instantly connect, communicate and act constitutes an evolution of the military notion of mass. High-volume social-media content forms a relatively innocuous type of mass until they stimulate and assist in illegal acts of resistance or war. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, creators of the concept of netwar8 have synthesized cyber, social and military capabilities into a modern concept of “swarming.” Arquilla and Ronfeldt define swarming as “seemingly amorphous, but it is a deliberately structured, coordinated strategic way to strike from all directions.”9

Swarming in the digital domain can easily span time zones, geography, economic and cultural barriers. The Arab Spring demonstrated how social media can congregate its users digitally, then quickly shift to directing or influencing some form of focused physical mass or swarm.

In Egypt, thousands of social-media exchanges combined the normally benign activity of online social commentary with the unpredictable actions of revolutionaries, disenfranchised individuals and opportunists. The result? A persistent wave of e-mass inspired civil disobedience that toppled a 30-year regime in 18 days with a “narrative and a nudge.”10

Revolution in Egypt was stimulated by Wael Ghonim11, an Egyptian-born, Google regional marketing manager, who created a Facebook page titled, “We are all Khaled Said,” dedicated to a slain Egyptian businessman.12 Ghonim’s Facebook page became a catalyst for the revolution. In a modern example of swarming initiated by digital mass, Ghonim’s Facebook page went viral, igniting the masses against the 25-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

Wael Ghonim’s role in the revolution illustrates how social media has made the creation and mobilization of active revolutionaries in days and weeks — a stunning evolution that impacts the organizational principles of resistance movements.

Image
Social media continues to be a leading source for revolutionary thought. http://www.facebook.com/Syrian.Revolution

Social media continues to be a leading source for revolutionary thought.
Borderless social mobilization, enabled by digital mass, has compelling organizational implications for UW. Initially, borderless social mobilization allows like-minded groups to coalesce digitally with less risk than the traditional early, vulnerable stages of building a resistance movement. Subsequently, borderless social mobilization can be blended with traditional organizational methods, combining established techniques with innovative social-organization technologies. The organizational progression blends a digital front and a physical front, both of which are decentralized. The result is a multi-front, or more aptly, a “multi-sphere” campaign. This is the art and science of interpreting and acting on social-media cues as a principal element of combat-advising indigenous resistance forces. UW practitioners must now consider their organizational capacity to leverage social media in concert with traditional methods of supporting an underground, auxiliary and guerrilla force.

In the initial phases of digital-centric mobilization, U.S.-supported resistance forces can capitalize on the rapidity and relative safety of the decentralized cyber domain. For a regime attempting to defend or attack its internal threats, social media can create a highly decentralized and challenging front. As this decentralized front self-organizes in the cyber domain, a traditionally organized front of armed military capability— the supported guerrilla force — can organize in the physical domain. The threatened occupying power faces a multi-pronged, networked threat that is as difficult to predict as social media itself. This multi-sphere UW campaign methodology combines the chaotic power of borderless social mobilization with the lethality and precision of focused military effort.

This paradigm levels the physical realm of war with the digital realm, recognizing social-media-centric communication as an equal to tactical military actions. Without question, acts of war and violent, tactical military actions will always shape the narrative. Arguably, tactical actions and social narratives can rarely be separated. However, this scenario illustrates the “information order with an operations’ annex” supposition14 that emphasizes the lasting effects of effective information proliferation over the fleeting nature of successful tactical actions. We must recognize that citizen-generated media content will shape public perceptions with credibility and speed. Our meticulously crafted and dogmatically staffed military public-affairs releases will be poor competitors for influence in this environment. Our UW proficiency will depend on revised authorities, uncomfortable risk calculations and social-media aptitudes that are not normally associated with the military action.

Our application of UW information management must understand what sociologist Manuel Costells calls the shift from the age of mass communication to the age of mass self-communication.15 To shape the way people feel, think and behave, UW must consider social media as one would a catastrophic weapon system with no single owner or operator: how is it oriented, what are its targets, who understands its capabilities, how can one influence it, how can I protect myself and how can I leverage it against my adversaries?

Social media has expanded the possibilities for both U.S. and indigenous forces to mobilize, organize, recruit, communicate and network. The traditional resistance organization methods — furtive meetings, clandestine contacts, cellular structures — still have great relevance. However, social media is a proven accelerant, defying historical prognostications for the time required for irregular force information dissemination and organizational action. Previous methodical approaches and linear progressions of UW campaigns can now leverage unthinkably rapid social mediums. Managing this paradigm shift in a UW environment might be less suited for U.S. Cyber Command and better suited for a Special Forces Soldier with a smartphone, a computer and a cadre of a wired, indigenous underground. For SOF, herein lies our challenge: Will the Special Forces leader who recognizes a decisive but fleeting opportunity, have the command authority, legal authority, the connectivity, the situational awareness and the confidence to risk seizing the initiative through social media?

Future UW campaigns must be designed to anticipate, nurture and capitalize on the multi-sphere concept. As a start, current UW education, training and experimentation venues must widely educate and train our force on borderless social mobilization, the phenomena of digital mass, swarming and the impacts of hyper-accelerated social organization.

The Decentralized Underground
Successful insurgencies and resistance groups require leadership. In doctrinal UW, the underground is the nucleus of leadership that provides the direction, organization and stewards the strategy for the resistance force. Historically, the underground is a clandestine, cellular structure with adequate hierarchy to synchronize resistance actions. The proliferation of social media has introduced a new type of underground: a digitally connected, leaderless organization with varying levels of commitment to the cause.

The multiple-nation Arab Spring uprisings contained a similar pattern of electronic and physical mass that pre-existed any true unified leadership. In all affected countries, the resistance leadership formed after the initial revolutionary thrusts. To be sure, pockets of leadership did exist prior to revolutionary actions. However, these leaderless revolutions witnessed aspiring leaders scrambling behind the leading edge of the revolution, reacting and attempting to build organizational cohesion and primacy in the midst of upheaval.

Ori Bronfman and Rod A. Beckstrom describe the emergence of leaderless organizations in The Spider and The Starfish: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.16 The authors explain how decentralized organizations survive, thrive and, often, dominate. The first principle is “when attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized.”17 This principle aptly describes the behavior of nearly all 2011’s North African and Middle Eastern web-inspired insurrections.

Examined against UW doctrine, the leaderless Arab Spring revolutions were initiated by a previously non-existent, highly decentralized digital underground. Remarkably, these self-forming digital undergrounds performed the exact functions of a traditionally organized underground: intelligence, counterintelligence, subversion, propaganda, control of networks and direction of tactical actions. The digital underground has additional characteristics evolving in the media age: redundancy, distributed leadership and the ability to survive by mutation.

As witnessed in 2011, these digital undergrounds can morph into highly visible “overgrounds.” Publicity, transparency and mass communication become their salient features. The revolutionary strength of a decentralized digital underground lies not in secrecy but publicity, signifying a complete reversal of the UW doctrinal template for undergrounds.

U.S. UW practice may have to contend with powerful “leaderless” forces impacting the operational environment. Working with resistance forces is already inherently nuanced and often chaotic. Future UW outcomes will hinge on skillfully channeling the chaos inherent in both the digital and physical domains and rapidly adjusting based on cues from each domain. The advent of spontaneously organized, leaderless resistance movements could be highly advantageous or unpredictability damaging. The challenge may lie less in the application of force, and more in understanding the nature of the resistance and anticipating how and when to sequence digital and physical actions needed to retain the initiative.

Battle tracking or more accurately — social tracking - the sentiment of these social forces and influencing their behaviors, will be a critical function of the U.S. UW headquarters. Future UW campaigns may require sophisticated “social-media operation centers” that track web- and cellphone-posted content, analyzing and potentially influencing the social-media indicators and resulting behavioral outcomes. The social-media common-operating picture will track and display Facebook feeds, Twitter posts, citizen-posted reports, YouTube videos, iReports and critically, their trends in viewership. The doctrinal decision-support matrix might contain actions to be taken when social-media tripwires are sprung. Battle drills might contend with flash mobs (creating or preventing), technology denial or patching detours around state-sponsored Internet censors.18

Political campaigns already use similar tactics — all open source — to engage, in real time, by keeping a Twitter stream open to instantly understand how their candidates’ messages and exchanges are viewed.19 Twitter provides instant feedback on how messages or actions are resonating. Political campaigns are increasingly skilled in enhancing a positive message or deflecting a negative outcome. The interpretations of the Twitter community can be more important than the candidate’s actual words or intent — this interpretation is seldom left to chance in the political arena and arguably it should never be left to chance during an UW action.

In future UW campaigns, we will have to recognize all forms of leadership, especially those that challenge our preconceived notions. Our prevailing mental images of insurgent leaders are the muddy-boots field leaders like Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the Bolivian jungles or the intrepid Afghan horsemen of the Northern Alliance. Our view of insurgent leadership must expand to the “digital commuter,” starfish-style leaders of the Egyptian revolution who stayed awake for days on end — sitting on their couches — feverishly texting and tweeting until the Mubarak regime capitulated.20

Both the military-style field leaders and the digital catalysts constitute insurgent leadership. While both play a factor, it is people who topple regimes, not cellular phones. SF should be prepared to effectively support both the decentralized digital insurgents and our traditional partners, the armed guerrilla leader. Success in future UW campaigns will likely blend the understanding of social networking with the application of SF advisers and U.S. joint firepower in support of a resistance movement or insurgency.

We must understand the nature of leaderless organizations and calculate how distributed leadership can support and not cripple, the U.S.-sponsored resistance group. Social media has radically changed the mechanics of how communication affects social organization. We must educate and train ourselves to recognize and interact with these nontraditional forms of leadership and power.

Weapon of the Narrative
Social media, wireless Internet, cellular phones and associated liberation technologies21 are increasingly the predominant methods of transmitting compelling narratives. The Arab Spring, the London riots,22 the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit23 episode and most famously, the Occupy movements are examples of the emergence of a visually-oriented, ideologically impulsive Internet culture with the means to rapidly and collectively plan and act.

Image
Human connections have moved beyond the traditional face-to-face and social media must be leveraged in UW operations in order to keep pace with the environment. Graphic by Jodi Breckenridge Petit.

Human connections have moved beyond the traditional face-to-face and social media must be leveraged in UW operations in order to keep pace with the environment. Graphic by Jodi Breckenridge Petit.
Electronic narratives are so pervasive that they generate actions before ideologies are considered. Nearly all the Arab Spring insurrections lack ideological cohesion for governing; what they have in common is powerful narratives for dismantling. Social media enabled the proliferation of these powerful narratives, amplifying what cultural anthropologists already know: narratives in the form of stories, rumors, biographies and pictures drive our behaviors and shape our convictions.

Future UW considerations must ascertain how to compete in a fickle psychological arena in the era of the electronic narrative. Historically, insurgent ideological indoctrinations were slow-boiling, methodical processes in which narratives were used for the “hook,” and ideological indoctrination followed. The methods of Mao Zedong and other communist insurgent methodologies employed compelling, emotive narratives to recruit supporters. Only after these narratives mobilized recruits would the communist political indoctrination be introduced. Following the political indoctrination, one could then be trained as a true guerrilla.

With greater emphasis on building a narrative and less on ideology, social media offers an alternative to the historical, linear progression of developing a resistance storyline. This shift is incidental and accidental; a byproduct of our digitized world. Social-media content — personal, citizen-centric, picture-rich, story-filled — promotes personal narratives in greater volume and frequency, resulting in the increasing centricity of personal chronicles that demote the importance of ideologies.

Social media proliferates information so quickly and broadly that the narratives replace ideology, at least temporarily. Whether it is narratives or ideologies that generate momentum, the psychological aspects of UW in the digital age require reviewing the agility of our methods of supporting insurgents, surrogates or resistance groups.

At its essence, UW is a method of psychological warfare. The merger of social media and UW is a natural progression. The U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School was originally named the Psychological Warfare Center because of the inherent nature of special-operations forces and their emphasis on indirect, nonstandard methods.

Importantly, UW is a method for coercing and disrupting not just overthrowing. Coercion and disruption are psychological-influence methods used against our adversaries, where the objective is not to overthrow a regime but to achieve a more limited goal: creating a second front, supporting a deception operation, pressuring for peace or discrediting a regime’s ability to provide security.

Within UW, social media could prove to be a tool for persuading neutral populations to support an embryonic effort. A polarizing video, post or message could create favorable conditions for a UW campaign. Conversely, a detrimental posting could go viral, spreading negative perceptions that could erect unforeseen obstacles or foil well-sequenced actions. Future UW endeavors — even those in remote areas with little connectivity — remain subject to the perceptions created by citizen-generated information.

A UW campaign could be sequenced with psychological and social lines of effort as the principle “means” of delivery. Tactical actions would be planned and executed based on anticipating, shaping and exploiting social and psychological conditions. For example, the digital lines of operation could be monitoring (understanding), posting (shaping), denying (blocking), spreading (pushing coverage), swarming (mass) and messaging (tactical or digital actions designed for psychological effect). In the digital domain, tactical actions would be evaluated as those having the most effect, derived from indicators quickly surfacing in social-media venues.

Experimentation is underway in current SF UW exercises to incorporate social media and handheld technologies into campaign planning and tactical execution. For technical analysis and application of social media in today’s operational environment, the Department of Defense Analysis Common Operational Research Lab is conducting real-time analysis on the effects of social media by integrating geospatial, cultural, relational and temporal data tracked, open source, from cellular phone technologies.24

As the Arab Spring results and the CORE Lab studies on Egypt25 have proven, social media is powerful tool for producing the psychological effects necessary for a skilled application of UW. The tradecraft options are unlimited and well beyond the scope of this article. The challenge is maintaining the psychological initiative where everyone — citizens, states, provocateurs, refugees, media, militaries, hackers — has equal access to information and therefore, influence.

Across our education and training domains, the SOF community must recognize that social media and its rapid and effective proliferation of narrative have expanded the boundaries of the UW battleground.

Conclusion
The future study, practice and successful execution of future UW must deliberately incorporate and account for the highly public sphere of social media. For U.S. SOF engaging in UW, the effective use of social media and the use of handheld technologies is perhaps less about technology training and more about mindset shifts in how we view the boundaries of UW.

To provide the widest range of options to our leaders, SOF must be prepared, rehearsed and comfortable in combining low-technology practices within a high-technology, commercially driven, social-media rich environment.

The classic UW image is of the underground resistance-cell leaders meeting with U.S. advisers, clustered in a dark basement around a crumpled map, secretly organizing and planning their next tactical move. This image, and its low-tech nature, is not passé — it is more valid than ever. UW remains a business of trust, respect and the human connection that is the hallmark of language-trained, regionally-oriented, combat-experienced SF Soldiers. But the traditional image of UW is now incomplete. It has a counterpart image that is equally important: a scattered network of digerati, males and females, urban and rural, local and global, all texting, tweeting, posting and hacking from thousands of locations. Publicity is as paramount to the success of the digerati as is secrecy vital to the success of the traditional underground resistance cell. We must be prepared to operate in the secret and the public domains, simultaneously.

UW campaigns are bold and decisive acts of military and political will. Future campaigns will contend with mature and powerful social-media environments. The Arab Spring merits further analysis of borderless social mobilization, digital undergrounds and the weapon of the narrative. Refreshing the theories, education, training, authorities and experimentation of UW will serve us well when our nation calls and our best option is — once again — UW.


Lt. Col. (P) Brian Petit is the Director of the Special Operations Forces Leader Development and Education at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Social networking and unconventional warfare are analyzed in the Advanced Unconventional Warfare Elective, A576, required for all SOF officers attending theIntermediate Level Education. Lt. Col. (P) Petit has commanded Special Forces units at the detachment, Ccompany and battalion level. He is a veteran of Operation Joint Forge (Bosnia), Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines and Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan.


Notes
1. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/101313/ ... unisia.htm.

2. Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Spider and the Starfish: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, (Penguin Books, 2006).

3. American abolitionist Wendell Phillips (1811-1884). This quote was taken from Theda Skocpol, “Social Revolutions in the Modern World,” (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 241.

4. Department of the Army Training Circular No. 18-01, Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, (Washington D.C.; US Government Printing Office, 28 January 2011; distribution restriction), 1-1.

5. Operation Enduring Freedom – Afghanistan was initiated with a doctrinal unconventional-warfare campaign, partnering the 5th Special Forces Group and their interagency partners with the Northern Alliance resistance forces. The northern front of Operation Iraqi Freedom was also a doctrinal unconventional-warfare operation, pairing the 10th Special Forces Group with the Iraqi Kurdish Forces.

6. Support to Libya has components of indirect support and direct support, less ground combat roles. The acknowledged use of US and NATO airpower is direct support to a resistance force and could well be considered doctrinal combat support.

7. “Limited intervention” is a US Army doctrinal term (not a joint term). US Army Doctrine, Field Manual 3.0 Operations (Washington D.C., US Government Printing). Limited intervention is not included in the new Army Doctrinal Publication (ADP) 3-0, 2011.

8. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt have well-developed theories on swarming dating back to In Athena’s Camp (1997), Networks and Netwars (2001).

9. Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (RAND, Santa Monica, CA, December 2, 2010). This excellent study examines the possibilities of adopting swarming as a doctrinal technique for US Forces.

10. CBS News, February 12, 2011, posted on http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/ ... 1662.shtml.

11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2 ... ogle-video

12. http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk

13. Traditional organizational methods include clandestine organization methods used by undergrounds to establish leaders, organizational goals and tactical actions.

14. Remarks made by Admiral Eric Olson, commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, January 2009 at the NDIA-SOLIC conference, Washington, D.C. The author of this article was present for this speech.

15. Manuel Costells, Communication Power, (Oxford University Press, New York, 2009).

16. Brafman and Beckstrom.

17. Ibid, 21.

18. James Glantz and John Markoff, “U.S. underwrites internet detour around censors,” The New York Times, June 12, 2011, 1.

19. Ashley Parker, “In Nonstop Whirlwind of G.O.P. Campaigns, Twitter is a Critical Tool,” The New York Times, January 29, 2012, 15.

20. For Egypt, the story of the #25Jan hashtag illustrates the power of a 22-year old female in disseminating information rapidly.

21. Glantz and Markoff, 1. The term “liberation technology” broadly refers to communication networks and supporting technologies that provide regional and global connectivity that bypass state-sponsored restrictions or enable technologically underdeveloped regions.

22. The London riots occurred between August 6 and 10, 2011, following a public protest organized around the fatal shooting of a British citizen by law-enforcement officers. Outside of traditional media outlets, much of the reporting occurred on social media outlets, both informing the public and shaping the events themselves.

23. The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) incident in August 2011 included local officials shutting down cellular phone service to thwart protesters from organizing via handheld technologies. The incident provoked wide public discussion on the role of law enforcement in limiting access to technologies that could cause potentially be used to cause harm to the public or damage property.

24. The CORE Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School “was established in 2007 with the mission to support U.S. and International field operatives in the analytical craft of integrating geospatial, cultural, relational and temporal data in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the Irregular Warfare environment.” COL Greg Wilson and Dr. Sean Everton are the co-directors of the CORE Lab. In addition to real time analysis, the CORE Lab instructs NPS students on how to apply advanced analytical methods for current conflicts. Reference CORE Lab pamphlet and author’s visit to NPS in September 2011.

25. The CORE Lab conducted an analysis of the hashtag referenced in footnote 18 (#25Jan hashtag) using open source data. This type of analysis provides invaluable information in mapping networks, network nodes, deception attempts, and social data relevant to understanding and visualizing a rapidly changing environment.

http://www.soc.mil/swcs/swmag/archive/S ... AndUW.html

Do ya remember one individual who was beside herself when 'Arab Spring' broke out, waxing poetic on the use of tech? A person with ties to Army Intel and Silicon Valley? I do.

We do what we can( Hey Kid, where's that opus?)) but this medium is enemy territory, difficult to contest. About all we can do with the big platforms is oppose the opportunists. It might do some good. But I cannot see any organizing happening in this environment, personal contact and evaluation is absolutely necessary.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 20, 2018 5:13 pm

Cambridge Analytica And The Manipulation Of People
by Debs is Dead

MoA-ites correctly distrust every word emanating from the mealy mouthed Guardian because it has been used in a vicious campaign to advance the interests of Zionists to the point where the well being of Guardian readers has been relegated below the interests of apartheid Israel.

Nevertheless having a bit of a shufti at the loudly trumpeted Facebook-Cambridge Analytica expose is an essential act for anyone who wants to try to get a grip on how populations are being deliberately manipulated.

There is a relatively easy to digest video here where Christopher Wyllie, a computer scientist, outlines the birth of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, the CEO and the method used to sell the development of the corporation to Steve Bannon, CA's first customer and Robert Mercer, the Wall Street financier who underwrote the cost of setting up the corporation.

I recommend spending the 13 minutes required to watch the video because Wyllie's summation of what they did and why is horrifying. Lines such as "If you want to change the way a person votes you have to change the culture the person lives within." and "to change a culture, first you have to smash the existing one then grab the pieces and mold it into the shape you want the culture to be".

A computer scientist at Cambridge University, Aleksandr Kogan had been given privileged access by Facebook to conduct 'academic research' he had access to the entire range of any Facebook user's account and that of all their Facebook friends. America was targeted first as that was what both Bannon and Mercer wanted - all set for the '16 beauty contest' aka 'the presidential election'. Over a period of three months back in 2014 CA conned around 200,000 Facebook users into installing their app, 200,000 provided enough connection through Facebook friends to gather the profiles including private messages, of more than 50 million American Facebook users.

Nix went into the British parliament and told the puppets that CA have no Facebook data. This is the angle of attack the silly Grauniard is using and one which they will come unstuck on because CA have moved far beyond that initial scrape in 2014 where they gathered everything about every Facebook user. That was the 'foundation' and it has been built upon by nudging users down hand crafted rabbit holes for the last 4 years. The data has been re-categorised and reshaped, so that finding any traces of Facebook in it will probably be impossible.

CA has teams of psychologists, web site builders and videographers tasked with creating content which the users whose profiles have been mined will find 'interesting'. Websites, Youtube videos and blogs were built to cater to each particular category of human the psychologists had identified.

Facebook doesn't even really matter any more as the 'clay' has been shifted into their own special grouping and CA propagandists are whispering in each mug's ear telling him/her exactly what will cause them to slightly alter their point of view about a product service, TV show or politician. Gently edging people onto a conveyor belt of predetermined values, encouraging them to only interact with other humans who share that outlook, the aim is to split social cohesion leaving the mug's reliant on their category's self reinforcing groupthink as the absolute truth. Iphone 57 users will only hang with people who agree Iphone 57 is the best.

Thomas Cook travel agency customers will plan their holidays with other Thomas Cook customers and supporters of the dem or rethug branch of the American empire party will no longer be discomfited by hearing alternative points of view.

That happened to 50 million American voters in 2016 and everyone is worrying about a couple of hundred grand spent long before the primaries on a handful of badly worded urges to buy some now defunct product which was responded to by only a handful of Americans?

---
Added: Channel 4 collaborated with the Guardian/Observer on the Cambridge Analytica story. Their report, ‘Data, Democracy and Dirty Tricks’ includes undercover video of Cambridge Analytica's sales pitch:

Part 1: Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles
Part 2: Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks
Part 3: On the company’s work in the United States, will be broadcast at 7pm tomorrow (Tuesday, 20 March 2018).
---
Added:

b here: In my opinion, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL do nothing else than the powers-that-be have done for ages. They only privatize and commercialize the tools that have been used all along. During the Cold War (and likely continuing today) the CIA ran up to 400 journalists and editors in "western" media. It promoted abstract art and 'progressive' counter culture, financed the publishing of George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' and so on. The Pentagon rewrites movie scripts and helps financing many Hollywood blockbusters and TV series. They did not need Facebook to 'sell' the war on Iraq.

Yasha Levine's new book Surveillance Valley describes how the Internet grew out of the Pentagon's Vietnam War era counterinsurgency projects as a tool for surveillance and manipulation. It was privatized but all the big Internet companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook etc, are now Pentagon and CIA contractors who help to expand the original project. SCL and Cambridge Analytica are part of this.

But the real question is how well these new projects work. Yes, advertising can sell a product. 'News' can change opinions. But they can only do so to a certain degree or for a limited time. Eskimos do not need refrigerators. Counterinsurgency campaigns usually fail. The Internet companies claim that advertising on their channels works extraordinary well because they can categorize the 'eyeballs' they attract by the data their users 'voluntarily' supply. Cambridge Analytica claims it can efficiently manipulate whole nations on a similar base. These companies sell snake-oil. Their claims are made out of self-interest. I for one doubt them.

Posted by b on March 20, 2018 at 05:01 AM | Permalin

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/ca ... eople.html
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 22, 2018 12:32 pm

NHS Doctor: "No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury"
There have been some interesting developments in the alleged poisoning case of the British-Russian double-agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

The British governments standing on the issue is getting worse as more inconsistencies and doubts on its statements come to light. The international support for its claims is weakening.

On March 4 the Skripals collapsed on a public bench in Salisbury in England after they had visited a pub and a restaurant. They were brought to the local hospital. A local policemen was probably also affected. (See our previous posts, liked at the end, for many additional details.) A week later, on March 12, the British government said that a nerve agent was the cause of the incident and accused Russia of being responsible for the act:

Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok—a military-grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability, combined with Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations—including against former intelligence officers whom it regards as legitimate targets—the UK Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and despicable act.
Novichok is not a nerve agent but supposedly a group of chemical substances investigated in the Soviet Union for their nerve agent potential. Only recently have some of these substances been synthesized.

Former ambassador Craig Murray reported that the formulation "... a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, ..." was a compromise negotiated between the British government and its chemical weapon specialists in its Porton Down laboratory. Note that the statement does not implicate at all that Russia is involved in the current case.

The British government demanded a Russian response within 24 hours without presenting any evidence of Russian involvement. Russia rightly pointed out that such a demand is in breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) procedures as supervised by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and rejected it.

The U.S, Britain, France and Germany issued a common supporting statement which repeated the British formulation:

This use of a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.
...
We share the United Kingdom’s assessment that there is no plausible alternative explanation, and note that Russia’s failure to address the legitimate request by the government of the United Kingdom further underlines Russia’s responsibility. We call on Russia to address all questions related to the attack in Salisbury.
Since then many questions and doubts about the British government's Noviochok drama have been raised. Bit by bit the case is falling apart.

Consider for example this picture which shows Mr. Skripal and his daughter Yulia presumably in the pub or the restaurant they visited before they collapsed. Who is the third person, visible in the mirror between them, who took the picture?

Image
Via Maxim A. Suchkov and Дмитрий Стешин - bigger

Is this third person the MI6 agent Pablo Miller who in 1995 recruited Skripal as British double agent. Miller who was also involved in handling the MI6 assets Boris Berezovski and Alexander Litvinenko. Pablo Miller who lives close to Sergej Skripal in Salisbury and is considered to be his friend? The same Pablo Miller who worked with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence which created the 'dirty dossier' about Donald Trump? How deep were the Skripals involved in making up the fake stories in the anti-Trump dossier for which the Clinton campaign paid more than $168,000 dollars. Did the Skripals threaten to talk about the issue? Is that why the incident happened?
So far no information about the third person which took the above picture has come to light.

On March 16 the British government was still pleased with the success of the drama it constructed from a movie script (video) around the Skripal incident.

The headline and intro of the BBC story are telling: Russian spy: UK government response going to plan so far

Among senior ministers and officials, there's quiet satisfaction that the Russia crisis seems to be going according to plan. Maybe even better.
According to one senior government source, "it's gone at least as well as we'd hoped".

That may end soon.

The London Times reported on March 14th that 40 people in Salisbury needed treatment because of poisoning. A reader's letter to the paper written by "Steven Davies - Consultant in emergency medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust" disputes that report. (The NHS database lists Davies, GMC membership number 4122151, as specialist in accident and emergency services at the Salisbury District Hospital.) The letter seems to say that none of the hospital's patients were effected by "nerve agents" at all:

Sir, Further to your report "Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", Mar 14), may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only been ever been three patients with significant poisoning.

Image

The wording of the letter is not 100% clear. Does the "no patients" refer to only the 40 the Times mentioned or to all patents including the Skripals? Are the three patients with "significant poisoning" the Skripals and the affected policeman? Commentator Noirette had suggested here that the Skripal case was about food poisoning or a food allergy, not nerve agents. The Skripals had visited a fish restaurant one hour before they were found. The letter points into a similar direction. Food poisoning would also explain why a doctor who gave emergency help to the unconscious Yulia Skripal for over 30 minutes was not effected at all.

I have yet to see a follow up on the letter by any media. Why is there no interview with the doctor? All medical personal involved are astonishingly silent. Since day one there has been no medical update on the health status of the Skripals. Has the government issued a gag order in from of a DA-Notice which prohibits reporting? Why? By writing the above letter Steven Davies, the Salisbury emergency consultant, probably circumvented it. (Several British media ignored a 2017 DA-notice prohibiting the reporting of Christopher Steele's name.)

The UK has since folded on its unilateral demand outside of the OPCW procedures. It has now, as Russia demanded, involved the OPCW and OPCW specialist are expected to visit the British chemical weapon laboratory in Porton Down, which is near Salisbury, to investigate the case.

But the British Foreign office also raised a new accusation against Russia:

The Foreign Secretary revealed this morning that we have information indicating that within the last decade, Russia has investigated ways of delivering nerve agents likely for assassination. And part of this programme has involved producing and stockpiling quantities of Novichok. This is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson used a less hedged wording:

"We actually have evidence within the last 10 years that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination, but has also been creating and stockpiling Novichok," Johnson told the BBC.

Image
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson

Craig Murray took the Johnson statement apart. If the UK really had or has such information why did it not, as the CWC demands, inform the OPCW of Russia's potential breach of its obligations? Why is this coming out only now?

The British allies seem to be unimpressed by Boris Johnson's show.

Today the German Foreign Minister tracked back from the common position issued last week:

Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, has described Russia as a "difficult partner", but said the UK poisoning was a "bilateral" issue, indicating that Britain can count on little support from the EU.
Maas spoke ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday (19 March)

A common statement after the EU foreign ministers meeting did not blame Russia. It repeated the carefully negotiated wording of the original British accusation but did not endorse the British position:

The European Union takes extremely seriously the UK Government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible.
The European Union is shocked at the offensive use of any military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, for the first time on European soil in over 70 years.
...
The EU welcomes the commitment of the UK to work closely with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in supporting the investigation into the attack.

The statement is false in that nerve agents have actually been used on European soil over the last 70 years. During the Cold War Britain tested various types of chemical and biological weapons, including nerve agents, on its own population as well as in its colonies and in other countries. Why should we exclude an even more recent use?

The Skripal poisoning case stinks. The British government is obviously not telling the truth about it. It uses the script of a recent spy drama to allege a 'Novichok' attack to implicate Russia and to raise anti-Russian sentiment. Information about the case is evidently held back. The media is mostly complicit.

Foreign countries have noticed that the story stinks and are tracking back on their support.

The people and the British opposition should urgently demand more and better answer from May's failing government.

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

March 8 - Poisioned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign
March 12 - Theresa May's "45 Minutes" Moment
March 14 - Are 'Novichok' Poisons Real? - May's Claims Fall Apart
March 16 - The British Government's 'Novichok' Drama Was Written By Whom?
Posted by b on March 19, 2018 at 04:11 PM | Permalink

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 27, 2018 2:07 pm

Running Amok
by worker
from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Periods of generalized fear and mass hysteria are not new to the United States. In the aftermath of both World Wars, a virulent Red Scare spread near and far. Thousands were caught in an official dragnet aimed at capturing Communists and other dissenters. At the same time, the government and powerful interests terrorized the rest of the population with fear of incrimination and stoked hatred toward those with ‘dangerous’ ideas. Threats were manufactured.

The suddenly shrunken ranks of principled civil libertarians, those yet to be cowed by the hysteria, saw parallels with witch hunts and inquisitions for good reason. They saw fear spawning outrageous claims and ridiculous charges. The fear of nuclear annihilation contributed to the madness of the 1950s, along with the cultural vulgarity of zombies and vampires. Flying saucers, alien invaders, rock and rollers, fluoride, motorcycle gangs, juvenile delinquents, and defiant atheists added to the terror of that time.

Some saw this as sheer insanity, but behind the orgy of fear was a calculated purging of domestic dissent and a stoking of foreign aggression and intervention, both essential for the crafting of a post-war political and foreign policy consensus. The calculation came easy to wealthy and powerful elements who had absorbed the lessons of the post-Civil War South, an era that nurtured outrageously contrived threats attributed to former slaves. The demonization of African Americans in the South during Reconstruction and after served well as the basis for the virulent racism that protected the privileges of the white upper classes. Fear sustained a terroristic, racist ruling class

Therefore, US elites readily recognize the value of fear-mongering as an instrument of persuasion, as an arm-twister, as a lever of consent. They foresee and secure the eager complicity of the corporate media in amplifying these fears.

True to form, the lapdog capitalist media accept their mission of uncritically following the lead of US policy makers in manufacturing conflict in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, Northern Africa, and, most diligently, the Middle East. Media bought and sold the contrived excuses for invading Iraq without a whimper of dissent. The current Western consensus on Syria is grounded from “reporting” bylined Beirut or Ankara, where US embassy press releases are readily and safely available, or from the claims of a London-based “observatory” that incredibly touts reliable sources from afar in every oppositional town or village in Syria.

The foundation for this perversion of objectivity is fear, fear of ill-defined “terrorism,” fear of Islam, fear of brown people. As a result of this madness, the Middle East is fractured.

The historic success of fear-mongering has emboldened US rulers to offer a further set of demons, another source of great evil-- Russia. At a moment of slack political credibility, at a time of lost confidence in the US electoral process, Russia-bashing is serving as a useful distraction. It’s difficult to discern an evil-inspired motive for Russia to want to destroy our rotting political system when its system resembles our own money-driven, elite-dominated, craven media “pseudo-democracy.” Maybe they hope to retaliate for the US intervention in securing political changes throughout Eastern Europe, especially on multiple occasions in Ukraine. Doesn’t anyone remember US diplomat Victoria Nuland crudely selecting the leaders for a US-friendly Ukraine?

Despite no evidence-- credible or otherwise-- that any real damage has been accomplished by Russian perfidy, the millionaire TV news readers and the screeching commentariat have succeeded in turning public opinion around in a short span. Gallup reports that in the winter of 2010, most US respondents (47%) had a “favorable” opinion of Russia. By a small margin, most people had put aside the Cold War craziness. But by the spring of 2017, 70% of the respondents now had an “unfavorable” view of Russia. A remarkable turnaround based on little more than fear-mongering and innuendo.

Russia-bashing has long since moved beyond the charge of political influence that energized it. Like previous US infections of political hysteria, Russia now causes everything from tooth decay to impotence. One could see it only too clearly in a series of copycat headlines that appeared a week or so ago. BBC, Time, CNN, Reuters, The Times, ABC, and a host of other prominent media outlets featured a close variation of the headline Putin Ordered a Passenger Plane to be Shot Down. Some headlines were more shrill than others, some added that he called off the hit, but the lasting impression was that the callous Putin was about to order a commercial passenger plane to be blown up with the death of many innocent people before backing off. For those who bothered to read on, the plane was believed to be directed by a terrorist and heading for the Sochi Olympic games. Action was called off when the threat proved bogus.

Given that the emergency procedure would be and is a commonplace with any competent security service, it is difficult to understand why so many news services chose to highlight such an insignificant Putin anecdote, except to exploit the existing anti-Putin mindset.

No opportunity is missed to further expand the fears of a Russian plan to destroy the US, though no one has exposed a credible motive.

Nearly all previous fright orchestrations have parlayed fear of a foreign “enemy” into a domestic crackdown-- threats from Reds abroad mean threats from Reds at home, for example.

So far, the RussiaGate fanatics have seemingly sought few domestic leftist foes to boil in oil.

That may be changing.

An unlikely witch hunter, the iconic liberal Southern Poverty Law Center, served up a pot-boiler conspiracy theory linking the “Brown” with the “Red”-- the so-called “alt-right” and the anti-imperialist movement. The multipolar spin: how fascists operationalize left wing resentment, authored by Alexander Reid Ross, a geography graduate student at Portland State University, pretends to expose a kind of united front between left and right knitted together by dark forces involving Putin, Rasputin-like Russians, and Russian “soft-power networks.”

Ross expresses his debt to an intellectual godfather, an anonymous self-styled anarchist blogger, “Vagabond,” who devoted 46,000 words in January to a meandering, unhinged attack on the US left for its “crypto-fascism.” Oddly, the acid-tongued Vagabond even castigates his sycophant, Ross, for posting on Counterpunch-- the “red-brown cesspool.”

A sample of Vagabond’s writing captures its ominous, conspiratorial tone:

Now, why should the Stalinoid/Marcyite WWP and the PSL be shunned, apart from their obvious history of genocide denial and support for atrocities, lies in their alliance with fascists. The difference with Ross and the Marcyite parties is that Ross, while unfortunately published by CounterPunch, does not himself collaborate with fascists while the Marcyite parties are active collaborators of Lyndon LaRouche and Duginists.

The supreme irony of this innuendo-laced diatribe is that it is so reminiscent of the language of the attacks in the late 1960s on the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Marxist left by the National Caucus of Labor Committees and its guru Lyn Marcus-- the aforementioned Lyndon Larouche. Like Larouche, Vagabond equates sharing a position on a public issue, any and even the most casual associations, or even attending a meeting or conference with the sin of “active collaboration.” This ‘gotcha’ politics was once solely the posture of the McCarthyite right, but has now become a signature feature with phony ‘antifascists’ like Vagabond and Ross.

Sadly, this charge of “red-brown” alliance seems to have gained traction in some anarchist and ‘antifa’ circles. In contrast to Vagabond’s shrill rants, Ross chooses a slightly more measured tone, referring to the imagined left-fascist connection as “syncretic”-- “syncretic networks,” “syncretic news sites,” “syncretic figures,” “syncretic hub,” etc. Despite the attempt at academic-sounding cosmetics, both authors share the goals of guilt by association, of slandering the left.

Unshorn of the dubious web of ‘associations,’ the argument at the center of the attack-- if it can be dignified by calling it an argument-- is quite simply and transparently invalid:

The ‘fascists’ or ‘alt-right’ supports a multi-polar world

The Russians support a multi-polar world

The left supports a multi-polar world

Ergo, The ‘fascists/alt-right,’ the Russians, and the left are in alliance or, in a “syncretic” relationship.

Repeatedly, Ross (and others) build their case around the allegation that support for a multi-polar world-- a world without one solely dominant power-- is the tell in demonstrating underlying alliances, common networks, or sympathies. It must never occur to those seeing conspiracy that people could support the same end-- a multi-polar world-- for vastly different reasons. It must never occur to Ross, Vagabond, and their ilk (or the Southern Poverty Law Center) that the rational alternative today to a multi-polar world is a unipolar world like the one envisioned by the ruling class of the US. US elites brashly claimed that world for themselves after the demise of the Soviet Union, costing those standing in the way millions of lives.

But it is futile to reason with pathologies.

To add the illusion of seriousness, Ross supplies the reader with a pretentious network ‘map’ that obfuscates more than it clarifies, a Venn diagram that is not a Venn diagram, and a “conceptual model” that is a Venn diagram. The point of this exercise is only to present the Far Right and the Hard Left visually as overlapping or interlinked, just in case the narrative proved too convoluted and tenuous to suggest such a conclusion.

It is a curious picture, displaying a bizarre caricature of the left and singling out only those elements of the left that challenge the current US foreign policy line: active measures against Russia, Assad’s Syria, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Eastern Ukraine, Venezuela, and others. From Black Agenda Reports’ Margaret Kimberley to ANSWER’s Brian Becker, outspoken anti-imperialists are labeled as part of a “red-brown” network. Workers World Party, Party of Liberation and Socialism, and even the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, are allies of the fascists in this demented picture. The leading anti-imperialist organizations, the ANSWER Coalition and the United National Antiwar Coalition are similarly charged with ‘brown’ affiliation.

Of course the glue that binds these individuals and organizations to the hard right, in the estimation of Ross and friends, is Russia, its foreign policy, and especially its media arms-- RT and Sputnik. An appearance on either medium guarantees the “red-brown” disgrace.

For those in power, for those who crafted the imperialist policies that brought death, destruction, and chaos to the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and a host of other countries troubled by US intervention, an attack on the small, but dedicated “red” US left could not be more welcome.

History has shown that the vaunted liberal US values of fair play, due process, measured judgement, presumption of innocence, etc. are only credible when they are exercised under duress. Civil liberties are of greatest use precisely when they are most unpopular.

History also shows that in the most challenging times, in times of witch hunts and inquisitions, few liberals will step away from their comforts in defense of their values. Liberal fidelity runs thin.

With the endorsement of Ross’s baseless slander of the anti-imperialist and Marxist left, the Southern Poverty Law Center adds another chapter to that liberal history of disappointment, hypocrisy, and spinelessness.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has, on March 14, taken down the Ross posting. It is no longer accessible. In place of it, an “Explanation and Apology” has been posted that is neither an adequate explanation nor a sincere apology for the contemptible views originally posted. As SPLC sees it, “the article did not make the “point as clearly as it could or should have”, an explanation worthy of an adolescent caught in a fib. Further, the apology is extended to “those who believe they have been falsely described in it…”. There is no concession here that they have been falsely described. In my view, this weaselly “correction” only underscores the treason of the liberals in these dangerous times.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 06, 2018 1:30 pm

Novi-Fog™ In Fleet Street - Truth Cut Off
Having been caught lying and covering up its lies about the Salisbury incident, Theresa May's government peddles new unbelievable stories to the press. This may divert the immediate attention but time is not on her side. The story will further unravel. What else can she do?

The British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson decide to attack opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn:

Image

A pity endeavor. It were the lies of Theresa May and Boris Johnson which convinced the other countries, not any factual evidence:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Britain needs to show proof that Russia was behind last month’s poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in England, the German government’s coordinator for Russia said on Thursday.
Gernot Erler said pressure was rising on Prime Minister Theresa May’s government after Britain’s military research centre, at Porton Down, said on Tuesday it could not say yet whether the nerve agent used in the attack had been produced in Russia.

“That contradicts what we had previously heard from British politicians and will certainly raise the pressure on Britain to show further proof that the traces plausibly point to Moscow,” Erler told German broadcaster ARD.

Armin Laschet, head of Germany's most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia and an ally of Merkel, also questioned (German) the British behavior (my translation):

If you force almost all NATO allies to solidarity, should you not have assured evidence? You can stand towards Russia however you like, but in my the studies of international law I learned of other ways of dealing with states.
Myth has it that a British paper once printed the headline "Fog in Channel - Continent cut off". That British view put the self-importance of the island above anything else. Throwing Novi-Fog™ at the Skripal affair will indeed cut off the continent. It will leave the British government isolated from any support.

The international loss of trust for the British claims is serious. Unless the UK government comes up with a very plausible story with some real evidence behind it no serious European official will lend it any further support.

Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who's skepticism convinced 165 countries to not fall for Boris Johnson's lies, says that Johnson has to answer "serious questions".

The spin-masters of the May government throw more Novi-Fog™ into Fleet Street to prevent that.

Operation 'Save Boris' feeds new sensational but implausible stories to the papers. It claims that top secret intelligence, which can not even be shown to the opposition leader, proves that Russia tested how to smear nerve agents onto doorknobs:

Police said last week they believed Russian ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned at home in Salisbury via their front door.
Now agents have confirmed that Putin's scientists carried out experiments looking at its effectiveness on door handles before the March 3[sic!] attack.

A security source told the Daily Mail: "We have intelligence that goes beyond Russia made Novichok and stockpiled it.

"We have evidence that they also explored using it as an assassination weapon including on areas such as door handles and everyday objects."

"Putin's scientists" experimented and found that

two persons leaving a home will both touch the exterior doorknob and
reliably infect themselves with a
rain-resistant, sticky "military grade" nerve agent which
several hours later has
a similar sudden effect on a 33 year old healthy women and a 66 year old man with serious diabetes.
That indeed sounds quite plausible to me (not).

More Novi-Fog™:

Image

The Times was told that the spies found the source of the nerve agent. But the front-page piece is extremely vague and makes little sense:

Image

There are two different sources in the above: 1. "Security services" which say they know the source but neither name it, nor pin its location to Russia and 2. a Whitehall spin-master who points to Russia.

Some photo editor made sense of what the "security services" said and introduced the Times piece with a picture of a likely source:

Image
via D'Aramitz -

Behind the wall of Novi-Fog™ the outrageous claims the government earlier made about the case get pushed down the memory hole.

Meanwhile Victoria Skripal, a cousin of Yulia Skripal, claims to have been called by Yulia and told that everything is fine. In response(?) the Metropolitan Police claims to have a statement from Yulia in which she also says that everything is fine. Neither claim is verifiable and both might well be false.

Theresa May's government is in serious trouble. It tries to spin its way out of its lies. But the time is working against it. The fog will rise:

The OPCW investigation, to which Russia was denied access, will not help May to make a case against Russia. In the best case for May it will come up with a similar result as Porton Down. It might say that some nerve agent was used on the Skripals but that it is impossible to pin it to a source. It might say that it can not identify the nerve agent at all. It may find nothing.
Yulia Skripal will have to be released from hospital and is likely to fly home to Russia. She will talk. She is unlikely to know anything that could help May, but might well say something that lets the whole story fall apart. She will have to watch her back.
Britain's allies are miffed. They have been lied to and damaged their relations with Russia for no good reason. The Brexit negotiations will become more difficult as Brussels has lost trust in any British claim or commitment.
Russia will continue to attack May while she has lost the protection from her allies.
The upcoming local elections could well go against the Tories. In 2004 the Spanish Prime Minister Aznar blamed the Basque ETA for the Madrid train bombing. When that was exposed as a lie he lost his lead in the polls, the election and his job. When the Skripal case broke and was pinned to Russia the Tories rose in the polls. But the fall after the exposure of the lies will probably be of equal size.
What will the British government do to get out of this dilemma?

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

March 8 - Poisioned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign
March 12 - Theresa May's "45 Minutes" Moment
March 14 - Are 'Novichok' Poisons Real? - May's Claims Fall Apart
March 16 - The British Government's 'Novichok' Drama Was Written By Whom?
March 18 - NHS Doctor: "No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury"
March 21 - Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' - High Time For Britain To Come Clean (Updated)
March 29 - Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed - "The Skripals' Resurrection"
March 31 - Hillary Clinton Ordered Diplomats To Suppress 'Novichok' Discussions
April 3 - Operation Hades Blamed Russia - A Model For The 'Novichok' Claims?
April 4 - It's The Cover-Up" - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies

Image
via @Propagandaschau - bigger

Posted by b on April 5, 2018 at 03:41 PM | Permalink

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 08, 2018 4:24 pm

Victoria Skripal: "I'm a communist, voted for Grudinin." How can the Kremlin use me if I'm an opponent of the Kremlin? "
Alexey Ivanov

Image

On the eve of the UK decided not to let Victoria Skripal, the niece of the British spy Sergei Skripal and cousin Julia Skripal.

Refusal to grant a visa London vaguely motivated "errors in the application". Today, the British authorities condescended to more detailed explanations. Victoria was not allowed to enter the island, as the consul "embarrassed" the purpose and details of the visit. There is no evidence that she has already visited Sergei and Julia Skripal in the UK; A senior violinist can not receive guests (although, according to Sky News, he left the coma, spoke, his condition quickly improves - note); there is no certainty that Skripal, the youngest, wants this visit (although she herself called her relative in Russia - Prim.); there is no evidence that Victoria Scripal has funds for travel expenses and stay in the UK (although the Russian Embassy officially announced its readiness to provide her with all-round assistance, including travel and money for daily expenses,

The BBC's diplomatic observer, James Landale, quoted an anonymous source from the British government: "Apparently, Russia uses Victoria as a pawn." If she is influenced by the Kremlin or the Kremlin forces her to something, she too became a victim. "

"The British have launched at least three versions of the situation with the British visa requested by Victoria Skripal: 1. The government source of the Air Force in London:" Victoria Skripal was denied a British visa, since the Kremlin is behind her. "2. The representative of the UK Ministry of the Interior according to Sky News: Victoria Skripal's statement does not correspond to migration legislation. "3. British Embassy in Moscow:" The Embassy never comments on individual visa applications and decisions on them, "wrote a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs F Maria Zakharov. The Russian Foreign Ministry rightly assessed the situation as "complete absurdity."

Victoria Skripal in an interview with Business FM quite violently reacted to the accusation that she was allegedly a "pawn of the Kremlin." "Have you seen me meet with someone from the Kremlin? I'm an ardent Communist, yes, I voted for Grudinin in the elections." How can the Kremlin use me if I'm an opponent of the Kremlin? "

"Well, forgive me, you have the note that all the expenses are borne by our Russian mission in the UK, our embassy." There is an official document they have, which I did not have? All channels, including foreign ones, all Russian - all of them offered me to pay for my entire trip, "she commented on London's idiotic argument about the funds for travel expenses and stay in the country.

"Once again I tell you that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and to the services, I have nothing to do If they say, let them prove the BBC I'll have to prove what they say so..", - said Victoria Skripal.

A little earlier she said: "I was sure that it would be so, of course, I understood that they would not give me a visa, they must have something to hide."

http://zavtra.ru/events/viktoriya_skrip ... nt_kremlya

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 10, 2018 11:17 am

Western Media Descends into Fundamentalism and Moral Degeneracy
APRIL 10, 2018 BY 21WIRE 0 COMMENTS

Syrian Arab Army soldier standing guard in Jobar after liberation from western-backed terrorist factions. April 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Andre Vltchek
New Eastern Outlook

There is nothing sadder and more pathetic, than a notorious liar shouting, spitting saliva, insulting normal people left and right, while terrorizing those who are telling the truth.

Lately, the West has gone clearly berserk. The more it is scared of losing control over the brains of billions of people in all corners of the world, the more aggressively it is screaming, kicking and making a fool of itself.

It doesn’t even hide its intentions, anymore. The intentions are clear: to destroy all of its opponents, be they in Russia, China, Iran or in any other patriotic and independent-minded state. To silence all the media outlets that are speaking the truth; not the truth as it is defined in London, Washington, Paris or Berlin, but the truth as it is perceived in Moscow, Beijing, Caracas or Teheran; the truth that simply serves the people, not the fake, pseudo-truth fabricated in order to uphold the supremacy of the Western Empire.

Huge funds are now being allocated for the mortal propaganda onslaught, originating predominantly in both London and Washington. Millions of pounds and dollars have been allocated and spent, officially and openly, in order to ‘counter’ the voices of Russian, Chinese, Arab, Iranian and Latin American people; voices that are finally reaching ‘the Others’ – the desolate inhabitants of the ‘global south’, the dwellers of the colonies and neo-colonies; the modern-day slaves living in the ‘client’ states.

The mask is falling down and the gangrenous face of Western propaganda is being exposed. It is awful, frightening, but at least it is what it is, for everyone to see. No more suspense, no surprises. It is all suddenly out in the open. It is frightening but honest. This is our world. This is how low our humanity has sunk. This is the so-called world order, or more precisely, neo-colonialism.

The West knows how to slaughter millions, and it knows how to manipulate masses. Its propaganda has always been tough (and repeated a thousand times, not unlike corporate advertisements or the WWII fascist indoctrination campaigns) when it originates in the United States, or brilliantly Machiavellian and lethally effective when coming from the United Kingdom. Let us never forget: the U.K. has been murdering and enslaving hundreds of millions of innocent and much more advanced human beings, for many long centuries and all over the world. Due to its talent in brainwashing and manipulating the masses, Great Britain has been getting away with countless genocides, robberies and even managing to convince the world that it should be respected and allowed to retain both a moral mandate and the seat at the U.N. Security Council.

The Western regime knows how to lie, shamelessly but professionally, and above all, perpetually. There are thousands of lies piling up on top of each other, delivered with perfect upper-class ‘educated’ accents: lies about Salisbury, about Communism, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, South Africa, Libya, refugees. There are lies about the past, present and even about the future.

Nobody is laughing, seeing such imperialist thugs like the U.K. and France preaching, all over the world and with straight face, about both freedom and human rights. Not laughing, yet. But many are slowly getting outraged.

People in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America are beginning to realize that they have been fooled, cheated, lied to; that the so called ‘education’ and ‘information’ coming from the West have been nothing else other than shameless indoctrination campaigns. For years I worked on all continents, compiling stories and testimonies about the crimes of imperialism, and about the awakening of the world, ‘summarized’ in my 840-page book: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”.

Millions can now see, for the first time, that media outlets such as BBC, DW, CNN, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, have been encoding them mercilessly and thoroughly, for years and decades. Reuters, AP, AFP and several other Western press agencies, have managed to create a uniformed narrative for the entire planet, with local newspapers everywhere in the world now publishing identical fabrications that originate from Washington, London, Paris and other Western capitals. Totally false pictures about such important subjects as the Soviet Union, Communism, China, but also freedom and democracy, have been engraved into billions of human brains.

The main reason for the opening of the eyes of people of the world which is still oppressed by Western imperialism, is, the relentless work of media outlets such as the Russian-based New Eastern Outlook (NEO), RT and Sputnik, as China-based CGTN, China Radio International and China Daily, Venezuela-based TeleSur, Lebanese Al-Mayadeen, and Iranian Press TV. Of course, there are many other proud and determined anti-imperialist media outlets in various parts of the world, but the above-mentioned ones are the most important vehicles of the counter-propaganda coming from the countries that fought for their freedom and simply refused to be conquered, colonized, prostituted and brainwashed by the West.

One mighty anti-imperialist coalition of truly independent states has been forming and solidifying. It is now inspiring billions of oppressed human beings everywhere on Earth, giving them hope, promising a better, optimistic and just future. Standing at the vanguard of many positive changes and expectations is the ‘new media’.

And the West is watching, horrified, desperate and increasingly vitriolic. It is willing to destroy, to kill and to crush, just in order to stop this wave of ‘dangerous optimism’ and strive for true independence and freedom.

There are now constant attacks against the new media of the free world. In the West, RT is being threatened with expulsion, brilliant and increasingly popular New Eastern Outlook (NEO) came just recently under vicious cyber-attack from, most likely, professional Western hackers. TeleSur is periodically crippled by sanctions shamefully unleashed against Venezuela, and the same banditry is targeting Iranian Press TV.

You see, the West may be responsible for billions of ruined lives everywhere in the world, but it is still faces no sanctions, no punitive actions. While countries like Russia, Iran, China, Cuba, DPRK or Venezuela have to ‘face consequences’ mainly in the form of embargos, sanctions, propaganda, direct intimidation, even military bullying, simply for refusing to accept the insane Western global dictatorship, and for choosing their own form of the government and political as well as economic system.

The West simply doesn’t seem to be able to tolerate dissent. It requires full and unconditional obedience, an absolute submission. It acts as both religious fundamentalist and a global thug. And to make things worse, its citizens appear to be so programmed or so indifferent or both, that they are not capable of comprehending what their countries and their ‘culture’ are doing to the rest of the world.

When being interviewed, I am often asked: “is the world facing real danger of WWIII?”

I always reply “yes”. It is because it appears that both North America and Europe are unable to stop forcing the world into obedience and to virtual slavery. They appear to be unwilling to accept any rational and democratic arrangement on our Planet. Would they sacrifice one, tens or hundreds of millions of human beings, just in order to retain control over the universe? Definitely they would! They already have, on several occasions, without thinking twice, with no regret and no mercy.

The gamble of the Western fundamentalists is that the rest of the world is so much more decent and much less brutal, that it could not stomach yet another war, another carnage, another bloodbath; that it rather surrenders, rather gives up all its dreams for a much better future, instead of fighting and defending itself against what increasingly appears to be an inevitable Western military attack.

Such calculations and ‘hopes’ of the Western fanatics are false. Countries that are now being confronted and intimidated are well aware what to expect if they give up and surrender to Western insanity and imperialist designs.

People know, they remember what it is like to be enslaved.

Russia under Yeltsin, collapsed, being plundered by Western corporations, being spat at, in the face, by the European and North American governments; its life expectancy dropped to sub-Saharan African levels.

China survived unimaginable agony of “humiliation period’, being ransacked, plundered and divided by French, British and the U.S. invaders.

Iran robbed of its legitimate and socialist government, having to live under a sadistic maniac, the Western puppet, the Shah.

The entire ‘Latin’ America, with its open veins, with ruined culture, with Western religion forced down its throat; with literally all democratically-elected socialist and Communist governments and leaders either overthrown, or directly murdered, or at least manipulated out of power by Washington and its lackeys.

North Korea, survivor of a beastly genocide against its civilians, committed by the U.S. and its allies in the so-called Korean War.

Vietnam and Laos, raped and humiliated by the French, and then bombed to the stone ages by the U.S. and its allies.

South Africa… East Timor… Cambodia…

There are living carcasses, decomposing horrid wrecks, left after the Western deadly ‘liberating’ embraces: Libya and Iraq, Afghanistan and Honduras, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name just a few. These are serving as warnings to those who still have some illusions left about the Western ‘good will’ and spirit of justice!


Liberated Jobar after SAA and allies have driven out NATO-member-state-sanctioned terrorist groups. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Syria… Oh Syria! Just look what the West has done to a proud and beautiful country which refused to fall on its knees and lick Washington’s and London’s feet. But also, look how strong, how determined those who truly love their country can be. Against all odds, Syria stood up, it fought foreign-backed terrorists, and it won, surrounded and supported by the great internationalist coalition! The West thought it was triggering yet another Libyan scenario, but instead, it encountered an iron fist, nerves of steel, another Stalingrad. Fascism was identified, confronted and stopped. At an enormous cost, but stopped!

The entire Middle East is watching.

The entire world is watching.

People now see and they remember. They are beginning to remember clearly what happened to them. They are starting to understand. They are emboldened. They clearly comprehend that slavery is not the only way to live their lives.

The Anti-Western or more precisely, anti-imperialist coalition is now solid like steel. Because it is one great coalition of victims, of people who know what rape is and what plunder is, and what thorough destruction is. They know precisely what is administered by the self-proclaimed champions of freedom and democracy – by the Western cultural and economic fundamentalism.

This coalition of independent and proud nations is here to protect itself, to protect each other, as well as the rest of the world.

It will never surrender, never back up. Because the people have spoken and they are sending clear messages to their leaders: “Never again! Do not capitulate. Do not yield to the Western intimidations. We will fight if attacked. And we will stand, proudly, on our own feet, no matter what, no matter what brutal force we have to face. Never on our knees, comrades! We will never again fall to our knees in front of those who are spreading terror!”

And the media in these wonderful countries that are resisting Western imperialism and terror is spreading countless optimistic and brave messages.

And the Western establishing is watching and shaking and soiling its pants.

It knows the end of its brutal rule over the world is approaching. It knows those days of impunity are ending. It knows the world will soon judge the West, for the centuries of crimes it has been committing against humanity.

It knows that the media war will be won by ‘us’, not by ‘them’.

The battlefield is being defined. With some bright exceptions, the Westerners and their media outlets are closing ranks, sticking to their masters. Like several other writers, I had been unceremoniously kicked out from Counterpunch, one of the increasingly anti-Communist, anti-Russian, anti-Syrian and anti-Chinese U.S.-based publications. From their point of view, I was writing for several ‘wrong’ publications. I am actually proud that they stopped publishing me. I am fine where I am: facing them, as I am facing other mass-circulation media outlets of the West.

The extent of Western ideological control of the world is degenerate, truly perverse. Its media and ‘educational’ outlets are fully at the service of the regime.

But the world is waking up and confronting this deadly cultural and political fundamentalism.

A great ideological battle is on. These are exciting, bright times. Nothing could be worse than slavery. Chains are being broken. From now on, there will be no impunity for those who have been torturing the world for centuries.

Their lies, as well as their armor, will be confronted and stopped!

No great fan of Vitchek and highly suspicious of 21st Cen Wire...it is a sign of the times that such a writer gotta go to such an outlet. The propaganda game has become a full court press.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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