Ukraine 17: I really wanted to use the "Where's Putin" subtitle, dang it.

[Shryke]

I am talking about Zimbabwean irrigation efforts, obviously.

Sorry, I was too busy laughing at someone defending Russia accusing someone else of rewriting history. The juxtaposition is really amusing.

[Alarich]

Please.

Context. It matters. I was obviously not condoning this principle as something how states should act vs their citizens, but trying to explain some basic military strategy.

Nice try, though.

[Horza]

special mega linkdump:

inside the Kremlin's hall of mirrors

interview with the leader of the Russian-backed 'Kharkov Partisans' terrorist group

Sean Guillory does good Russia/Eurasia podcasting, this week's episode on post-Maidan Ukraine and Belarusian nationalism is no exception

war and deprivation take their toll on Western Ukraine

it bears repeating: this conflict is in large measure about how people interpret and identify themselves through history...

...which is why measures like the Rada's new law on Ukrainian history and Soviet symbols are bad news

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time with bikers."

[ElizabethB.]

Context. It matters. I was obviously not condoning this principle as something how states should act vs their citizens, but trying to explain some basic military strategy.

Nice try, though.

Oh, you were explaining to me how the states should act vs the citizens of other countries, that's when might makes it right.

And, I try nothing. Are you trying something?

[Biglose]

Arakan,

So, Russia cozying up to neo-fascist/neo-nazi's outside of Ukraine while using neo-fascist/neo-nazi's inside Ukraine to justify their actions isn't contradictory policy?

It always depends on who you call a fashist/neo-nazi.

I mean given some definitions you can't act otherwise. If nearly everybody is a nazi, nazis fight nazis.

I mean just look at the last 15 years of the west fighting islamist extremism while allied with the most extreme islamic regimes.

So yeah, they are contradictonry politicies and there is a word for it "international politics".

[ElizabethB.]

It appears that mr Ilves, Estonia's president, doesn't know how to shut the buffer-zoned hole in his face

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/estonia/11530064/Sitting-near-a-nuclear-tripwire-Estonias-president-urges-Nato-to-send-troops-to-defend-his-country.html

...and to be clear, I don't think he should

[ElizabethB.]

special mega linkdump:

inside the Kremlin's hall of mirrors

w

That was so creepy I have goosebumps.

[maarsen]

In the end you have to rely on the innate good sense of most people. That and the fact that being caught in a blatant parade of lies ruins your credibility for a long time.

[Altherion]

That was so creepy I have goosebumps.

It's even creepier when you realize that every country is playing the same game. In fact, the Russians are at least a decade behind the times.

In the end you have to rely on the innate good sense of most people. That and the fact that being caught in a blatant parade of lies ruins your credibility for a long time.

If the innate good sense of most people was worth much, we wouldn't be having most of these situations in the first place. As to the second statement, you'd think so, but people have studied this and the credibility is only ruined for people who distrusted and disliked the liars beforehand.

[Shryke]

It's even creepier when you realize that every country is playing the same game. In fact, the Russians are at least a decade behind the times.

Wait, so every country has a twitter-bot army to spread propaganda? Really?

[Altherion]

Wait, so every country has a twitter-bot army to spread propaganda? Really?

Every country conducting significant propaganda operations as well as large corporations. In the parlance of American politics, this is just one aspect of astroturfing. The Chinese certainly do it and so does the USA. Here's a US government solicitation from 2010:

Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.

Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.

[Horza]

The article isn't about bot armies, or PR campaigns, it's arguing Russia treats information warfare as a primary component of conflict and has developed effective techniques to which the West is only just getting to grips with.

[maarsen]

Maybe I am just an old fart but when did lying and propaganda become a new thing? Seems to me there was this guy named Goebbels who was doing this before I was born and the West is only now catching on?

[Horza]

Did you read the article?

[Altherion]

The article isn't about bot armies, or PR campaigns, it's arguing Russia treats information warfare as a primary component of conflict and has developed effective techniques to which the West is only just getting to grips with.

I read the article, but I'm not sure what specifically they are doing that we have not seen before. Every trick that is mentioned is something that has been exploited for years. I suppose the emphasis on propaganda is somewhat notable, but it doesn't make any more difficult to deal with.

[Horza]

I read the article, but I'm not sure what specifically they are doing that we have not seen before. Every trick that is mentioned is something that has been exploited for years. I suppose the emphasis on propaganda is somewhat notable, but it doesn't make any more difficult to deal with.

Methods don't have to be totally new to be effective, and the article doesn't allege that the difficulty comes from the novelty of the techniques. Information warfare might be as old as humanity, but the present media environment and the social and political conditions that go along with it aren't.

As Pomerantsev notes:

The mindset that the Kremlin’s information warfare seems intended to encourage is well-suited to European citizens at this particular moment. In a recent paper called “The Conspiratorial Mindset in an Age of Transition”, which looked at the proliferation of conspiracy theories in France, Hungary and Slovakia, a team of researchers from European thinktanks concluded that the “current period of transition in Europe has resulted in increased uncertainty about collective identities and a perceived loss of control. These are in turn the ideal conditions for the proliferation of conspiracy.” Conspiratorial inclinations are especially rife among supporters of rightwing nationalist and populist parties, such as the Front National in France or Jobbik in Hungary – which support, and are supported by, Moscow. (Marine Le Pen admitted in November that the FN had taken a €9m loan from a Moscow bank owned by a pro-Kremlin businessman; she insists that the deal had nothing to do with her support of Putin’s annexation of Crimea.) Some 20% of the members of the European parliament now belong to parties – largely on the far right – sympathetic to Moscow.

The significance of these parties has grown in tandem with the decline of trust in national governments. At moments of financial and geopolitical uncertainty, people turn to outlandish theories to explain crises. Was this the “invisible radiation” that the Russian information-psychological war encyclopedia had referred to? Once the idea of rational discourse has been undermined, spectacle is all that remains. The side that tells better stories, and does so more aggressively – unencumbered by scrupulousness about their verifiability – will edge out someone trying to methodically “prove” a fact.

He argues the decline in trust in Western media sources (self-inflicted) makes it a lot easier for RT and the bots to do their work:

The mantra of Margarita Simonyan, who heads RT, is: “There is no such thing as objective reporting.” This may be true, but RT’s mission is to push the truism to its breaking point. At a time when many in the west have lost faith in the integrity and authority of mainstream media organisations, RT seems dedicated to the proposition that after the notion of objectivity has evaporated, all stories are equally true. In America, where polls show that trust in the media has never recovered to levels seen before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, RT’s posters showed George W Bush celebrating “Mission Accomplished” – with the tag line: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion.” It was hard not to nod in agreement with the message.

The posters, however, do not offer any argument for trusting Putin’s TV network; their main message is that you cannot trust the western media. It is all too easy to show that RT’s coverage is rife with conspiracy theories and risible fabrications: one programme showed fake documents intended to prove that the US was guiding the Ukrainian government to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers from western Ukraine. Another RT report investigated whether the CIA had invented Ebola to use as a weapon against developing nations. Presenters rarely challenge the views of “experts” during discussions of subjects such as the Syria conflict – where Moscow has backed President Bashar al-Assad. One regular guest has suggested that the Syrian civil war was “planned in 1997 by Paul Wolfowitz”, while another has described the death toll as “a joint production of CIA, MI6, Mossad”.

The foibles of RT have been well-documented, not least by StopFake, but journalistic credibility does not seem to be what the network is striving for. If a commitment to the impossibility of objective reporting means that any position, however bizarre, is no better or worse than any other, the ultimate effect, which may be the intended one, is to suggest that all media organisations are equally untrustworthy – and to elevate any journalistic errors by the BBC or New York Times into indisputable signs they are lackeys of their own governments.

[Shryke]

Every country conducting significant propaganda operations as well as large corporations. In the parlance of American politics, this is just one aspect of astroturfing. The Chinese certainly do it and so does the USA. Here's a US government solicitation from 2010:

Where's the proof the US is doing it? Where's the US state media showing blatantly false information as part of an organized propaganda campaign? You've got groups (say, Fox News) at this game but they are not run by the state.

As Hozra notes, the article is in part about how Russia is using these various techniques in fundamentally different ways from other nations.

Hell, as far as I've ever seen you don't even get US-based DDOS attacks on other groups based on a patriotic agenda. I think in large part because the politics of the relevant groups in these different countries is completely different.

In general I think the assertion that "both sides are the same" here is not supported by any evidence. The US does not seem as interested or active in this kind of propaganda/misinformation campaign.

Interestingly this whole "everyone does it/both sides are the same" thing seems to be just a continuation of the exact thing the quote Hozra uses above is pointing out. And you can see it bear fruit in many posters in these threads over the course of their existence.

[Gorn]

Where's the proof the US is doing it? Where's the US state media showing blatantly false information as part of an organized propaganda campaign? You've got groups (say, Fox News) at this game but they are not run by the state.

As Hozra notes, the article is in part about how Russia is using these various techniques in fundamentally different ways from other nations.

Hell, as far as I've ever seen you don't even get US-based DDOS attacks on other groups based on a patriotic agenda. I think in large part because the politics of the relevant groups in these different countries is completely different.

In general I think the assertion that "both sides are the same" here is not supported by any evidence. The US does not seem as interested or active in this kind of propaganda/misinformation campaign.

Interestingly this whole "everyone does it/both sides are the same" thing seems to be just a continuation of the exact thing the quote Hozra uses above is pointing out. And you can see it bear fruit in many posters in these threads over the course of their existence.

You may recall this tragic event from last year, when 48 people died, 32 of which were pro-Russian protesters who died in a burned building surrounded by pro-Ukrainian protesters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_May_2014_Odessa_clashes

This was largely ignored by the US media, since it did not fit the intended narrative. Those that did report on it did so in an intentionally misleading manner, as in the link below:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/05/02/odessa_fire_31_die_in_western_ukraine.html

Quote from that link (emphasis mine):

That 31 people died in fire in a government building in the Ukraine today—it apparently caught or was set on fire after being stormed by pro-Russia protestors/militants—is bad enough.

While technically correct, it is written is such a way to make the reader think that it was pro-Russia militants who set the building on fire, while they were actually the ones who were killed.

Also, Horza's FT link further upthread describes Bandera in the following terms:

“He was with the Banderites,” says Kostetskaya, using a dismissive Russian term for followers of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist who died in 1959. Bandera’s attempts to establish an independent Ukrainian state have made him hugely controversial in Russia. In the current crisis, Moscow has demonised him as a fascist.

Again, while technically correct, it is intentionally misleading the readers who know nothing about who Bandera was. It would be similar to describing Stalin as "former leader of USSR who died in 1953 and whose efforts in establishing USSR as a world power made him hugely controversial in the West."

You can find plenty of such examples if you are sensitive to propaganda, I just picked two off the top of my head.

[Shryke]

You may recall this tragic event from last year, when 48 people died, 32 of which were pro-Russian protesters who died in a burned building surrounded by pro-Ukrainian protesters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_May_2014_Odessa_clashes

This was largely ignored by the US media, since it did not fit the intended narrative. Those that did report on it did so in an intentionally misleading manner, as in the link below:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/05/02/odessa_fire_31_die_in_western_ukraine.html

Quote from that link (emphasis mine):

While technically correct, it is written is such a way to make the reader think that it was pro-Russia militants who set the building on fire, while they were actually the ones who were killed.

Also, Horza's FT link further upthread describes Bandera in the following terms:

Again, while technically correct, it is intentionally misleading the readers who know nothing about who Bandera was. It would be similar to describing Stalin as "former leader of USSR who died in 1953 and whose efforts in establishing USSR as a world power made him hugely controversial in the West."

You can find plenty of such examples if you are sensitive to propaganda, I just picked two off the top of my head.

This doesn't actually respond to anything I said. What links are there between Salon or The Guardian and the US or British or whatever government?

[Altherion]

Where's the proof the US is doing it? Where's the US state media showing blatantly false information as part of an organized propaganda campaign? You've got groups (say, Fox News) at this game but they are not run by the state.

As Hozra notes, the article is in part about how Russia is using these various techniques in fundamentally different ways from other nations.

As I've said, Russia is at least a decade behind the state-of-the-art. It is true that what they're doing is different, but the difference is almost entirely to their disadvantage. Usage of state media to carry out propaganda is clumsy and ham-handed: it clearly identifies the entity behind the message even to the most casual observer and it makes filtering easy (in these very threads, people have immediately disbelieved a claim simply because it was linked to RT, even when the most cursory search would reveal that many other sources have reported the same thing).

The US doesn't even have state media. Instead, we carefully feed stories to both domestic and international private media. This introduces some noise to the message we intend to convey, but it largely negates the two disadvantages from above. Even when the primary source in a story is the US State Department and is clearly identified as such, people will view the story as coming from the BBC or New York Times or whatever outlet is doing the reporting. A few people will track down all of the claims to the source, but most will simply see that many seemingly independent outlets are all reporting the same story and assume that there must be something to it.

Take a look at the WMD-in-Iraq propaganda campaign. It is in many ways a masterpiece of this genre: not only were several countries persuaded to go to war on the basis of non-existent weapons, but many people continued to believe the lies even after it became obvious that the WMD were never there. As a bonus, the US & Co. successfully executed a rhetorical pivot away from the lie once it was revealed to be false. And we did all of this 12 years ago.

Hell, as far as I've ever seen you don't even get US-based DDOS attacks on other groups based on a patriotic agenda. I think in large part because the politics of the relevant groups in these different countries is completely different.

DDoS attacks are rather primitive tools. They are at most a nuisance and they're illegal in many countries. We have significantly more sophisticated tools and methods to attack people we don't like. That said, when nothing better is at hand, certain groups (who, I might add, do a much better job of remaining anonymous than those kids who attacked Estonia) have been known to launch such attacks against groups that have displeased the US.

In general I think the assertion that "both sides are the same" here is not supported by any evidence. The US does not seem as interested or active in this kind of propaganda/misinformation campaign.

I am not asserting that they are the same. The basic thing they're all trying to do (convince people to see the world in a way that benefits the propagandist) is the same and the methods are somewhat similar, but the US is significantly better at it and I don't think the articles fear of Russia's propaganda machine is justified. For example, this:

But soon Gontar would see the same plump women and the same injured men appearing in different newscasts, identified as different people. In one report, a woman would be an “Odessa resident”, then next she would be a “soldier’s mother”, then a “Kharkiv resident” and then an “anti-Maidan activist”

does not exactly inspire confidence. They couldn't even be bothered to use different actresses? What is this, amateur hour?