Psyops & Metaphors: A Meditation on The Invisible War

[semper occultus]

Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors

Peter Pomerantsev
Thursday 9 April 2015 06.00 BST


Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. Has Putin’s Russia developed a new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’ rather than on the battlefield? Or is it all just a giant bluff


http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/ap ... psychology

[Wombaticus Rex]

Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. Has Putin’s Russia developed a new kind of information warfare -- or do I just have no historical context for any of the issues I am about to discuss as if I personally discovered them only hours ago?

The framing drives me more than a little nuts but his exposition on RUS manuals and operations is a welcome addition.

It definitely needs to be stated that the 90's era "cutting edge research" the Russians were doing was simply studying US and UK efforts decades earlier with an eye towards increased exploitation via new media technology. In terms of structure, this essay is remarkably similar to everything written on China and "Unrestricted Warfare" -- when the strategic enemies of Empire adopt the tactics of Empire, it is always radically new, dangerous and exotic.

Disinformation and psychological operations are as old as the Trojan horse. But what distinguished the Kremlin’s approach from that of its western rivals was this new stress on the “psychosphere” as the theatre of conflict.

Holy shit, they used a different word for it? Surely this changes everything!

Maybe it was the jet lag, or the way darkness descends so suddenly over Manhattan in midwinter, but as I walked away from my meeting with Stengel, I couldn’t help contemplating a vision of a future inundated by disinformation, where no argument could ever be won and no view had more authority than any other.

Yeah, that's a dystopian nightmare which bears no resemblance to the past 50 years. Chilling stuff, though.

[elfismiles]

Heh ...

There were even claims, circulated by Russian separatist leaders in Ukraine, that the plane had been filled with corpses before it had taken off – a plotline lifted from the BBC TV series Sherlock.

[http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/01/tv-review-sherlock-holmes-hacks]

Ummm ... yeah, except that plotline was taken from 911 truther mythos about remote controlled planes.

EDIT: and probably predates that.

[divideandconquer]

It's not so much that the concept of creating confusion and chaos, and/or undermining the perception of the masses is new, but thanks to the massive evolution in technology, it's easier than ever to accomplish. I think this new technology also gives the perpetrators more confidence than ever before. They don't even try to hide what they're doing. For instance, on some level they wanted us to know that the towers were not brought down by airplanes. As Dave McGowans says,

"That sort of cloaked revelation seems to be, in many cases, a component of the traumatisation process. What better way, after all, to disempower and demoralize the American people than through an unspoken acknowledgment that the enemy is within, and can act with impunity? What better way, after all, to disempower and demoralize the American people than through an unspoken acknowledgment that the enemy is within, and can act with impunity?

Essentially blaming Russia for these supposedly new tactics of confusion and uncertainty as a strategy of power is disingenuous. And while I find the BBC's Adam Curtis documentaries fascinating, I'm suspicious of his intentions. Or maybe that's the whole point in this bewildering, constantly changing theater that's become our "reality".

[chump]

Aangirfan had a good post on this today:

http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2015/06/no ... sible.html
Tuesday, 9 June 2015
NON-LINEAR WAR - OPPOSITION IS IMPOSSIBLE

Adam Curtis (above) refers to Nonlinear Warfare.

In Nonlinear Warfare, the public is not sure what is real and what is fake.

So the public is not sure what on earth to do.

Curtis attended the Sevenoaks School, which has been linked to the UK security services.


Snowden and Harrison - SPY SCHOOL.

Curtis has made films for the BBC, which is linked to the security services.

Curtis appears to mix fascinating truths with disinformation.

Curtis's films have referred to:

Edward Bernays and the mind-control methods used by politicians control populations.

Neoconservatism's invention of 'mad Moslems' - creating a dangerous enemy to draw people to support the Neoconservatives.

..

In the above video, Curtis says:

So much of the news this year has been hopeless, depressing, and above all, confusing. To which the only response is to say, "oh dear."

What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control.


Surkov

And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time.

Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.

He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.

His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.



Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.

He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.

But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it: "It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused."

A ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is undefinable.



aspoonfulofsuga.wordpress.com..

It is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year.

In typical fashion, as the war began, Surkov published a short story about something he called non-linear war. A war where you never know what the enemy are really up to, or even who they are.

The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.



But maybe, we have something similar emerging here in Britain. Everything we're told by journalists and politicians is confusing and contradictory.

Of course, there is no Mr. Surkov in charge, but it is an odd, non-linear world that plays into the hands of those in power.

British troops have come home from Afghanistan, but nobody seems to know whether it was a victory or whether it was a defeat.

..

Aging disk jockeys are prosecuted for crimes they committed decades ago, while practically no one in the City of London is prosecuted for the endless financial crimes that have been revealed there.

In Syria, we are told that President Assad is the evil enemy, but then his enemies turn out to be even more evil than him, so we bomb them, and by doing that, we help keep Assad in power.

But the real epicenter of this non-linear world is the economy, and the closest we have to our own shape-shifting post-modern politician is [U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer] George Osborne.

He tells us proudly that the economy is growing, but at the same time, wages are going down.

He says he is reducing the deficit, but then it is revealed that the deficit is going up.

But the dark heart of this shape-shifting world is Quantitative Easing.



The government is insisting on taking billions of Pounds out of the economy through its austerity program, yet at the very same time it is pumping billion of Pounds into the economy through Quantitative Easing, the equivalent of 24,000 Pounds for every family in Britain.

But it gets even more confusing, because the Bank of England has admitted that those billions of Pounds are not going where they are supposed to.

A vast majority of that money has actually found its way into the hands of the wealthiest five percent in Britain.

It has been described as the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in recent documented history.

It could be a huge scandal, comparable to the greedy oligarchs in Russia. A ruthless elite, siphoning off billions in public money. But nobody seems to know.



It sums up the strange mood of our time, where nothing really makes any coherent sense.

We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can't counter it with any coherent narrative of their own.

And it means that we as individuals become ever more powerless, unable to challenge anything, because we live a state of confusion and uncertainty.

To which the response is: Oh dear. But that is what they want you to say.



Revelation of the Method and the Murder of Spirit. A Page from the Cryptocracy's Psychological Warfare Manual by Michael A. Hoffman II:

"It is risky to reveal to the people what has been done to them by the gangster class that lords it over them.

"Patently, in the wake of the revelation, the risk is one of reprisal, retribution and rage by the people.

"But where there is little or none of that, then the Cryptocracy has tripled its hold on the minds and hearts of Americans: it has strongly hinted about the mass murder it committed on Sept. 11 and yet, there are few significant repercussions.

"This non-reaction tends to demonstrate that the people of the US accept, at the subliminal level of their consciousness, that their own leaders are mass murderers of their fellow citizens, and mostly what they do in return is shake it off and head to the mall...."

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Reply
Anonymous9 June 2015 at 15:07

Revelation of the Method & Trauma programming quotes

Excerpts:

Killing of the King

Some of them knew too much, maybe others just for the sensationalism and the trauma it inflicts on the American people....I believe that as the main motivation for taking out Kennedy...his death was hugely traumatic to the American people..Interview with Dave McGowan about Laurel Canyon
...
It is certainly possible that, on a subconscious level at least, the perpetrators wanted the public to know that the towers were not brought down by airplane crashes. That sort of cloaked revelation seems to be, in many cases, a component of the traumatisation process. What better way, after all, to disempower and demoralize the American people than through an unspoken acknowledgment that the enemy is within, and can act with impunity? http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr69d.html

http://www.whale.to/b/revelation_method_q.html ...

[Spiro C. Thiery]

I'm so over Adam Curtis. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. But so is Curtis' tedious way of making the simple into another one of his "if you wanna know how it's done, you gotta meet this guy" narratives. So, yeah, one of power's goto tools in the kit for control is demoralization. You don't say?

[chump]

https://youtu.be/58Lc5cnnpxE
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https://youtu.be/Vqhi16iikxk
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Internet Censorship War - If Americans Knew

An exposé on Israel's detailed projects – some public, some covert – to influence what people see on the Internet, and what they don't. From the article, "How Israel and its partisans work to censor the Internet"

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