When I was a kid in the 1980s, we heard about Soviet government propaganda to its citizens, including via Pravda. We were also taught how great the US is, by contrast, that it doesn't do those things.
Later, I thought I'd learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.
That seems like good guidance, and I'd welcome an honest review that checks whether we're living up to standards that have been an inspiring part of our national character in the past, and leads to any corrective action.
Maybe US collective leadership realizes a way here that we can build upon our ancestors' great ideals, and follow through further, not drop the ball.
I don't really understand why not doing it to US citizens makes it ok. I can imagine one would find it permissible to use such techniques against your enemies, but this is very clearly also about your allies.
To the US, American lives are all that really matter? I mean, there's also the policy that torture is ok but not against Americans and not on US territory, hence the secret CIA torture spaces during the Gulf War and guantonomo bay (simplifying a bit here). Isn't that obviously wrong?
How can one maintain that their country is the greatest with such dubious ethics? I mean specifically using the argument 'doing objectionable things only to non US citizens' as part of the case for America's greatness seems...odd at best. I feel like I'm missing something here. A cultural gap maybe. Or is American superiority deemed so self evident that it legitimates itself in a circular justification?
I don't want to sound combative, though I probably do, but really I want to understand how this works for Americans.
> I don't really understand why not doing it to US citizens makes it ok. I can imagine one would find it permissible to use such techniques against your enemies, but this is very clearly also about your allies.
Because of conflict of interest.
When you're persuading people outside of the US of something you're presumably doing it in (at least nominally) the US' best interest because as a citizen of the US your personal interests are also aligned with those of the nation (at least at the scale these operations work at).
Turned internally there's all sorts of messy conflicts like political parties using the tools to gain power, agencies using the tools to gain funding, etc.
As a democracy we don't want our institutions to be shaping the opinions which are used to elect them. Shaping the opinions of foreigners has no such compunction.
Who are “we”? Government technocrats and many Americans on HN think that it’s absolutely fine that their government mistrusts stupid voters and tells them half-truths: “masks don’t work” and all that.
We (Americans) don’t all feel this way. Personally, I feel the same way you do when I read things like this. I’m puzzled how it’s ok for anyone that wasn’t assigned an American citizenship in the birth lottery.
> How can one maintain that their country is the greatest with such dubious ethics?
Compared to who?
> I mean specifically using the argument 'doing objectionable things only to non US citizens' as part of the case for America's greatness seems...odd at best.
That is a rule of law (for their citizens) better than much of the world.
I think different Americans have different awareness and thinking about those questions.
I'd started to address that in my message, then awkwardly edited it out (see last sentence) before posting.
It's easy to persuade that we should be honorable towards ourselves.
Outside of ourselves are much more complicated and contentious geopolitical questions, I don't know the answers, and I thought negative reactions to raising that would defeat the smaller point.
> Later, I thought I'd learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.
That law was repealed in 2010. Since then its all out propaganda.
Not that that law mattered before it was repealed. Here's a nytimes articles from 2005.
> To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration.
> This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government.
It's bizarre that Armstrong Williams was the only person to pay a price for a massive government manipulation program, but it's typical. Judith Miller got to take responsibility for the entire Iraq war.
There are lots of instances like that. During the 1991 gulf war, they rolled out the “babies thrown out of incubators by the hun^H Iraqis”, I remember a 60 minutes segment after 9/11 talking to the Afghan government in exile, which consisted of a bunch of dudes in cube farm in Virginia.
And Gulf War II was steamrolled with a ton of astroturfing "journalism".
I will never forget the cheerleader role the New York Times played in the Iraq Invasion, from the straight-up swallowing of Colin Powell's false "evidence", egregious saber rattling "articles", it was depressing. "The paper of record" officially killed the fourth estate during that time period, and journalism has never recovered.
I was a dumb 20something, and even I could see the vast conflicts of interests, the military industrial complex frothing at the mouth, the Cheney-fronted petroleum bigwigs cackling, and the callous political calculus of starting a war just to have a more important administration. Or the worst of all: trillions of dollars and a million dead iraqis just so Bush Jr could "show up" Bush Sr.
> That law was repealed in 2010. Since then its all out propaganda.
Cite? I'm aware there was some kind of awkward law that meant to block domestic access to VOA-type stuff (IIRC, because it was feared the VOA or State Department was infiltrated by Communists or something like that) that got repealed, but that's a far cry from "since then its all out propaganda."
I mean, I don't think I've even seen a single VOA article in our local newspaper.
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 opened the door for materials produced by the US Department of State and the Broadcast Board of Governors to be spread within the borders of the US.
> The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 opened the door for materials produced by the US Department of State and the Broadcast Board of Governors to be spread within the borders of the US.
What's been the actual effect of that? It's been 10 years, and I can't recall seeing a VOA story reposted in a local outlet or radio stations switching to a VOA-based format.
It's rather more broad. The text from the bill itself, "The Secretary and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are authorized to use funds appropriated or otherwise made available for public diplomacy information programs to provide for the preparation, dissemination, and use of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers, instructors, and other direct or indirect means of communication."
I don't understand the implications of that, because I don't know the details of the law beforehand. But something that's clear is that it opens the door to some very nasty stuff - especially if there is no obligation for source/identity disclosure.
The "mainstream media" is a collection of thousands of people at hundreds of independent organizations, it doesn't have a single collective opinion about anything..
It's the same six firms. [0] How do you not know this? Oh yeah, plus Amazon Prime Video owns WaPo... that brings in the full range of anonymous-leak TLA opinions.
One example mentioned in the article and visualized on TV shows—teams of software-assisted humans each acting under multiple online personas, e.g. on social media or discussion forums. The more problematic elements often intersect with private contractors and commercial activity, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29838001
VOA has much of the same content as major US news organizations. It's actually a pretty decent news source. I don't know what you mean by VOA-based format.
They privatized it by passing technical propaganda research to universities who modeled it into behavioral economics, marketing, advertising.
Social media is built with such research in mind.
Society will never stop trying to wrap a big fuzzy one size fits all blanket around everyone’s thoughts. We intentionally manipulate biology that religion stumbled upon.
A philosophy of “oh well there is this separation of powers written down on paper” does not stop graft, nepotism. Tribalism is innate to human biology; words on paper don’t just shut our bodies innate traits off. Thinking a law prevents intentional propagandizing is quaint and naive. They just call the same behavior and mechanics “behavioral economics” and viola; it may have all the mechanics of propaganda, but trust us, it’s not propaganda.
I'd like to share a memory as a currently serving US military officer:
At the height of our operations in Iraq, around 2006-2007, the main killer of our troops was of course "roadside bombs." In a candid talk with my class of cadets at that time, I remember a senior officer (a conventional infantry or artillery guy) telling us that the top priority had to be reducing this specific threat, above all the stated goals of our mission. His reasoning was that, although we knew roadside bombs were not going to tactically defeat any unit larger than a platoon, the deaths were eroding the American public's support of our operations and would ultimately force us to withdraw and abandon all of the stated goals.
He was right, but I remember feeling uncomfortable with his thinking. It wasn't outright psychological operations against Americans, and I'm sure he wasn't tasked with that nor thinking of it that way, but it was trying to influence the opinion of American civilians who are supposed to be in control of the military. Of course public affairs stuff and reports to congress, while meant to inform, are also usually crafted to influence. Anyway, this is how it starts, and I'm not sure it's obvious when a line is crossed.
Yes, but it wasn't to save lives for the sake of saving lives, to preserve combat power or because troops' lives are inherently valuable. The senior officer wanted operations to continue and wanted to prevent the American public from turning them off, whereas my perspective was (and still is): let the public weigh deaths vs. the mission, and if they want the mission to end, then so be it. From his perspective, though, the boss gave him a mission to do great things, and it was clear that he couldn't do those things if public opinion turned and operations ended.
Edited to add: I don't think most "influence operations" on Facebook and Twitter, as described in the article, are about hiding or distorting the truth either.
propaganda can seem innocent enough at first, but its most insidious trait is that it eventually poisons and undermines even the most essential functions of your government not only during a crisis but through even its most mundane operational capabilities. institutions once intended to act and think critically and challenge orthodoxy in the service of advancement of the nation now become an artifice for furthering a dead ideology or deleterious policy. Whatever good you thought US propaganda could do to bolster things like patriotism or civic duty, it does exponentially more damage by crippling the basic ability to challenge paradigms or uncomfortable situations and decisions that if avoided may very well plunge your state into ruin.
One of my history teachers in high school had a large stack of 'Soviet Life' magazines that he said we could read if we wanted whenever we were done with our work but he warned they were propaganda. I was surprised by what I read because I was expecting it to be stories about the evils of capitalism and the mighty strength of communism but instead it was mostly 'slice of life' stories about average people in the various Soviet republics. Took me a while to figure out that was the propaganda. Part of that was due to my preconceived notions of what propaganda would look like because I had been primed by popular media in the US to expect it to be "you capitalist pigs" rants instead of one that pushed the narrative that the Soviets were peacefully trying to go about their lives without bothering anyone. I often wonder if that's why our teach made them available to us so we'd figure that out on our own.
I remember those. RT US was largely coverage of domestic policy/events and very little about Russia. You could watch the same topic coverage from the BBC, CBC, DW, Al Jazeera English or even Democracy Now and not see much, if any, difference.
But of course everyone who had never actually watched an episode would screech propaganda while embracing other state-funded channels. The Beeb saying “America border policy bad” is ok, but Russia… totally different.
> pushed the narrative that the Soviets were peacefully trying to go about their lives without bothering anyone
To be fair, most Soviet citizens were just trying to go about their lives. Surely you don’t imagine your average Joe Blowkomarov is scheming nasty plans for crushing the evil capitalists. Poor dude was probably stuck in a bread line, wishing his toes were warm.
If there was propaganda involved, it’s probably that the magazines weren’t showing the deprivations. Sunny outlook & all that, hardly unusual for a “Life” type of magazine.
Indeed. Propaganda, just as disinformation, in the long run results in mistrust and cynicism. I guess, this may hamper critical thinking and eventually can polarize the society by overweighting the groups on the extremes of the spectrum and padding the middle with the cynics.
The U.S. doesn't need to engage in those things when the media apparatus is such that it is in this country. You should read Manufacturing Consent if you want to learn about how the U.S. extremely effectively serves propaganda to its citizens using the apparatus of the mass media. Even just reading about the decisionmaking going on out of public eyes during the Vietnam war would be enough. Gulf of Tonkin incident that kick started the war, for example, we know now was a false flag (1).
And they probably do the same thing as 5 eyes[1] to 'stay honest' - have their allies do those things to their citizens and them do it to their allies, then share the intel.
In 2013, Obama signed legislation that changed the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act. The amendment made it possible for some materials created by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the nation’s foreign broadcasting agency, to be disseminated in the U.S.
Media technology has always had an outsized effect.
This is right out of the 1960's. Not exactly the dawn of television, more like about 7:30, 8:00 in the morning when you're finally really waking up:
>Propaganda is a subject of great concern in our society today, perhaps more so than in any other society in history. With the advent of television as a complement to the other communications media now available to us, the opportunities to use propaganda in disseminating information, expounding ideas, and offering opinions have increaseed considerably. And, unfortunately, it is far too often the case that propaganda is used to make us accept questionable points-of-view, to make us vote for men who may be unfit for public office, and to make us buy products which are useless and sometimes even dangerous. Therefore, propaganda, or the method of influencing people to believe certain ideas and to follow certain courses of action, is of special importance to each of us.
Of course back then almost nobody had even seen a color TV yet, and when color eventually became less rare they were really hypnotic like never before.
This actually started as an academic game during the Cold War, by a TV actor who had first-hand knowledge from associates who were blacklisted a decade earlier as suspected communists, in what can only be seen as an exaggerated over-reaction to actual Communist propaganda itself.
The first thing to note is that it's relatively benign in terms of propaganda.
> Assets in the group heavily promoted narratives supportive of the U.S. on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. These posts primarily
focused on U.S. support for Central Asian countries and their people, presenting Washington as a reliable economic partner that would curb the region’s
dependence on Russia. Other posts argued that the U.S. was the main guarantor of Central Asia’s sovereignty against Russia, frequently citing the war in Ukraine as evidence of the Kremlin’s “imperial” ambitions. Interestingly, the assets also promoted U.S. humanitarian efforts, mentioning the United States Agency for International Development 94 times on Twitter and 384 times on Facebook in the respective datasets.
It's funny that they felt the need to do this in a "clandestine" way at all since almost certainly these are messages the US would happily say outloud as official statements.
The second thing to note is how ham-handedly they did this:
> The sham media outlet Intergazeta repeatedly copied news material with and without credit from reputable Western and pro-Western sources in Russian, such as Meduza.io and the BBC Russian Service. ... Typically, these sections were literal “word-to-word” translations into Russian, as opposed to more-advanced semantic translations, resulting in non-native sounding language.
The content of the propaganda isn’t why they’d be inclined to mask their involvement in disseminating it. You’d find similar content, with some value adjustments for the audience, from literally any regime in any political system. The reason they didn’t want to be attributed was because the value of the propaganda effort is making it seem (or become) organic.
There are values expressed in Navy ads I find appealing, but I also recognize those ads are targeting potential recruits. I’m more likely to take expression of those values seriously when they’re expressed by unaffiliated human people. Or even my friend who is a naval officer but isn’t particularly inclined to shill for them. I’m certainly not going to take them seriously from a military-sponsored astroturf campaign.
It’s always minor and no big deal when it’s agreeable, but is disinformation, interference, and Big Brother style propaganda when it presents any kind of challenge, or comes from an official enemy, no matter how trivial in extent.
The fact that such things are done domestically and covertly is the issue. And it’s pure speculation on my part, but there is cause to suspect this is but one facet of a much larger program. https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-u...
> The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.
...
> The newest and fastest growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing "nonattribution" and "misattribution" techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called "publicly accessible information"—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.
I’m not paranoid about such programs being everywhere and doing all things, but do consider them a totally undemocratic roadblock to proper civil society.
> The fact that such things are done domestically and covertly is the issue.
Can you have fake social media accounts to spread propaganda online without doing it covertly? Is any nation transparent about doing that? I'd rather they didn't do it at all, but I expect everyone does and will because it's effective (when it's not obvious at least) and easy.
Having fake accounts purporting to be real people is what’s covert, so I think we agree.
I also agree that states tend towards such action, but there should at least be an antagonistic relationship with the security state apparatus. Instead, both parties (with minor blips over incredibly personal matters) love the FBI, CIA, etc.
It looks like it's limited to the very recent past. Apparently the creation of highly coordinated propaganda efforts by the US government dates back to World War I, and there were similar British and German programs of the same era:
> "Once the United States had entered the war, the U.S. government saw a need formally to enter the propaganda arena. The U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created to both centralize wartime communication and avoid restrictive European-style censorship... the CPI labored to create a homogeneous public opinion that accepted the war as a struggle of good versus evil waged to promote democracy around the world. The list of promotional activities undertaken by the Committee is impressive: a vast system of news handouts for journalists, tens of millions of copies of its pamphlets, wide circulation of war posters, several films, millions of advertisements donated by business organizations, war expositions in several states, "Americanization" Committees for each ethnic minority group, and 75,000 Four Minute Men speakers, who presented short appeals between features at the nation's movie houses. Through the work of the CPI, the official view of a just and idealistic war became ever present."
Source: Propaganda studies in American social science: The rise and fall of the critical paradigm, Sproule (1987)
History's judgement of WWI is varied, but many think it was entirely avoidable, and that the imperial desire by the 'Great Powers' (Britain, France, Germany, Russia) to control as many shipping and rail routes as possible, as well as oil fields and other overseas resources, was the main driving force behind the conflict, and diplomatic talks could have avoided the war.
Trying to sell WWI as a war to prop up the British and French imperial projects, as well as to help keep the Russian czar in power, would not have been so easy.
Off-topic: The featured photograph for the article I believe uses a technique called "tilt and shift effect". It makes the buildings and cars look like miniature toys.
I might be way off here, but here's what I always assumed. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, this is just what I've always guessed, but haven't really thought too hard about it....
I think Tilt Shift photography doesn't make the subject look like a miniature, but rather makes the photo look like a photo of a miniature. When photographing a miniature, the subject is so close that you have a much narrower depth of field and you end up with thin slices of the miniature subject being in focus. I think that this was probably more common in the days of film than digital photography. In other words: the photos of miniatures look like that because of limitations in the photography process, whereas tilt-shift is emulating those limitations at a macro scale.
A tilt–shift lens can make the focus plane no longer parallel to the plane of the film. This can help make a narrower range of focus for a scenes at middle distances than would be possible with a typical lens.
A narrow depth of field is more characteristic of photographs of nearby objects, so people who are used to looking at photographs end up with the impression that the tilt–shift photograph is a picture of a much closer (and thus smaller) scene.
This is not the only use of tilt–shift lenses. They can e.g. also be used to keep more of the scene in focus than would be possible with a typical lens.
The U.S. has been doing this with VOA for almost a century. This is basically the same tactics, but in a new information space. The main point is marketing and propagation of ideology to render it competitive. The vehicles and the methods are incidental, and depend on info consumption preferences, really.
You can report things accurately and still be serving propaganda. Its about what you are choosing to highlight, what language you use to describe something, and what you choose to omit from your narrative.
Where did I say they were only propaganda? I agree that they were factual. But the main purpose was to pump Western culture into the Soviet Bloc. This was my point.
Would it be productive to talk about how much this shows up on HN? There have always been topics that seem to attract sponsored influencers. In the recent past, China seemed to be the biggest one, though Ukraine is now a major competing topic. I've wondered about the best way to respond to such.
HN is made up, was seeded by, a lot of Linux guys who share a Stallmanist view of any data being in the hands of large corporations where you can’t control it. All of the dystopian fears that entails. So this is expected.
China just eclipsed the US government as biggest bad in the recent years as it’s asserted itself as a technological superpower along with the obvious Russia stuff. It’s only natural we see more of those posts as at least we have a way in our government however minor
>“There are some who think we shouldn’t do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.”
I don't think this point is entirely without merit. We shouldn't opt to lose this battle on ideological grounds. Blaming the US govt for conducting psyops is somewhat analogous to blaming Robert Oppenheimer for the strong nuclear force, with the caveat that the laws of physics in this situation are somewhat actively controlled by the companies that host these "social media platforms".
Effective propaganda is one of the US's strongest competitive advantages - extensive and well funded national security apparatus, think tanks with global reach, compliant media publishers with global reach and big tech platforms used throughout the world, which can amplify and dampen messages, based on whether they suit US foreign policy objectives. We should celebrate this full spectrum narrative control, not 'investigate' it.
Not sure why you're being down-voted, because once you see it is very, very hard to un-see it. For example in my case one of the factors for making me "see it" was the fact that almost all of the anti-corruption campaigns from my EU-member country were connected to a US governmental agency one way or another, be it the State Department or some other entities that are most probably the front for something that Langley is doing.
The US ambassador visiting our Justice Ministry [1] a few years ago when almost all of the middle-class electorate was out in the streets protesting against the Government's direct influence on some justice-related stuff was the cherry on cake. I didn't realise it back then, because I was busy protesting against my own government, but in retrospect I started wondering how come it's ok for a foreign entity to control the justice system from my (supposedly sovereign) country.
Manufacturing Consent outlines how this propaganda model works. It was written 40 years ago but honestly nothing has changed, mass media still decides what topics are presented to the public as they've always done. Think of all the wars happening in the world today, and the ones we see a lot of information about versus the one where there is almost no information about what is happening at all.
Influence is not control. I have absolute confidence that Canada's elections are sound. But I have strong suspicions that the USA applies influence to our processes of developing candidates. So do Russia, China, and Europe. How could it be different?
When does it become control? It's become increasingly obvious that with total control of the narrative the people are simply incapable of voting in ways those in control don't want them to, whatever technical soundness of the election process.
There's a corruption problem, and the US will use it as an excuse to target politicians unfriendly to their interests, and divert scrutiny away from those that play ball with Washington.
Plus the few cases when US companies (or they local subsidiaries, more exactly) do get tangled up in a corruption thingie for one reason or another the companies themselves get out of it as nothing had happened.
Here's an article about a former CEO of Oracle Romania [1] recognising that he took 500,000+ euros as bribes, but because he reached a deal with the prosecutors he received a suspended sentence (so no actual prison time).
And, the most famous, the Microsoft scandal [2], which has its own dedicated wikipedia page, but where, again, the company itself got away without anyone working for them actually being prosecuted. I'll give it to the American authorities on this one, though, that scandal was most probably put into motion at the very beginning thanks to the work of the FBI [3] (so, obviously, as the result of domestic US investigations), the FBI which had also found irregularities with MS's work in China and Italy.
>Effective propaganda is one of the US's strongest competitive advantages - extensive and well funded national security apparatus, think tanks with global reach, compliant media publishers with global reach and big tech platforms used throughout the world, which can amplify and dampen messages, based on whether they suit US foreign policy objectives. We should celebrate this full spectrum narrative control, not 'investigate' it.
Government propaganda is anathema to a free and democratic society. Our government is purportedly granted its authority by the consent of the masses. Having this consent influenced (or completely manufactured by government propaganda) nullifies the whole idea of democracy. The absurd contention that propaganda being spread by US military and government operatives on Facebook and social media is only targeted at (much less only influences) "foreigners" is patently absurd. Millions of Americans (myself included) vehemently oppose our currently stated "US foreign policy objectives" devised by the CIA, the Pentagon and the various government-funded "think tanks" that set policy and direct these propaganda efforts. "Full spectrum narrative control" has been the wet dream of every dictator, king and authoritarian government since the dawn of time, and it should be something that every thoughtful, decent person recognizes as toxic and incompatible with a free and open society.
who watchers the watchers though, this is infinitive regress. Besides, who or what is being abused, and what qualifies as such, as also part of the program
> who watchers the watchers though, this is infinitive regress.
Infinite regress is only contemplated when you aim for perfect oversight which is impossible. The best we can hope for is 'as good as possible'. We the People, as well as possible, oversee that the appropriate authorities are, independently as possible, overseeing the use of weapons and interventions. It's obviously imperfect just like any other human endeavor but that's why we as citizens should fight for strong whistleblower protections, regular investigations/audits and reasonable timeframes for declassification etc so that we can do our job.
We all should - one of many arguments for complete transparency. Democracy dies behind closed doors. All the claims about the need for government secrecy, "national security", protecting "methods and sources" are trash when compared against the importance of transparency in a society purportedly governed by elected representatives of the people. The so-called "risks" posed by radical and complete government transparency are far less than the actual and tangible harms caused by the ever-growing secrecy afforded and demanded by those holding the levers of power.
I like the sarcasm but if you read the report that originally started this review (you can find it in the attached link) you'll find the propaganda in this specific case didn't seem particularly effective. Quoting:
> It also reveals a somewhat damning tidbit when talking about the reach and impact of these campaigns; according to the report, “the vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers.” What’s more, the two accounts with the most followers explicitly said they were tied to the US military. I’ll try not to think about how much all this cost when I’m paying my taxes next year.
Had US social media agencies been fully in bed with the feds such a report would have never been produced in the first place. Remember, conspiracists always talk about shadowy organizations or groups of people with near omnipotent power - an idea these agencies themselves would like perpetuated to make it seem resistance is futile.
>an idea these agencies themselves would like perpetuated to make it seem resistance is futile.
Quite the opposite - the conspiratorial reaction is that these agencies want to be mistaken for bumbling bureaucracies, so they let reports of small-level stuff get out. That way we underestimate the real degree of their control and believe that if they ever tried to manipulate us, they would get caught anyway, and besides, they're just making unsuccessful tweets, right?
Or even deeper, that these organizations are meant to distract us from much more powerful entities who they don't even realize they are controlled by.
I don't believe any of this, but the conspiracy theorists deserve more credit for creativity that you are giving them!
That's because it's meant to disrupt conversations, not be liked. None of it is liked, you just have to wade through mountains of it to follow a conversation. The content is shitty US propaganda that maybe 5% of people agree with without reservations. None of those people are on the threads where they're asking a woman how much she likes Putin's dick.
The most damaging thing that they do is inflate the like counts and apparent engagement of government thinktank employees and unaware nationalists drunk on the dopamine hits of botted upvotes. I'm absolutely certain that the removal of downvotes from social platforms in general was a long term government project.
edit: does anyone believe that this behavior can't be easily detected algorithmically? I don't know about other platforms, but Twitter is obviously a government partner, not a victim.
Your conception of Public Relations and mass manipulation is shallow: investigating these programs is part and parcel of the overall psychological manipulation program the US employs. Part of our marketing includes this whole "integrity" aspect that's supposed to give us "moral authority" over other nations.
The US has overall amazing projection generally, be it propaganda, military, culture, etc. I find it funny, looking back a couple years ago, that people were outright dismissing American hegemony but it looks alive and well today imo.
The US capitalized on the whole "US has declining global influence" meme* and used it to lay the groundwork for even more global influence. A real "Heads we win; tails you lose" sort of operation.
*This is probably true in some areas but the opposite in others - our influence simply shifted.
Seems to me shifting the narrative to an emerging 'multi-polar' world from the 'uni-polar' US hegemony might solidify alliances more than they otherwise would have been. Kinda like during the cold war you were on one team or another, no trying to play multiple sides.
> Kinda like during the cold war you were on one team or another, no trying to play multiple sides.
Tangential to your comment, but in fact there was another path, spearheaded by, among others, India. It's where we get the term "third world", which became shorthand for "developing" because basically no developed countries joined this "third world" movement ("first world" being the so-called West, "second" being the Soviets).
Shifting to a multi-polar that in essence agrees to the best possible outcome, even as we explore it, seems perfectly within the interests of all. Such an alliance can be more stable and productive while guarding against misuse of the single point of control.
> a multi-polar that in essence agrees to the best possible outcome, even as we explore it, seems perfectly within the interests of all
Multi-polarity is generally code for regional hegemony. That's great if you're the regional hegemon. Not so much if you're the hegemon's neighbor.
America is a maritime power. These (think: Carthage, Venice, Portugal, the Dutch and Britain; counterfactual: Japan) have historically relied on trade, and trading outposts, to project power. As such, they're a natural friend of small countries resisting regional hegemony.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. Multi-polariry always leads to war because there's no hegemon with a monopoly on force. States are in anarchy, after all. In an anarchic situation in the presence of information asymmetries and opposing interests, you always get war. Aside from nukes, unipolarity is the only reason for the unprecedented levels of peace we've seen since 1990. This is realism 101.
World War I and World War II happened because of a multi-polar geopolitical power balance. I’d prefer not to live through World War III, now that nuclear weapons exist.
There is no organization that can prevent one state from going to war with another, I believe a multi-polar world would inevitably lead to a global scale conflict.
Not sure I agree with that in practice, but maybe my understanding of history is flawed.
Was the humanity better off during the Bi-polar era of the Cold War, with continuously escalating nuclear threats and proxy wars vs 1991-2010? What about the multi-polar world of 1919-1938?
While the U.S.'s core strength has always been propaganda (they got Operation Paperclip Nazis to becom American patriots, got the USSR to abolish itself, and the young Russian Federation to destroy itself with its infamous "shock therapy"), China also has quite strong propaganda, especially in Africa. And in Europe, go back 30 years and people still saw Americans as liberators; now, Europeans see it as a corrupt third-world country where people can't afford healthcare.
And while it's true that U.S. cultural "force projection" hasn't weakened; they are being severely squeezed when it comes to trade dominance (https://merchantmachine.co.uk/china-vs-us/) and monetary dominance (see James Rickards' books).
America still has its hegemony, but the notion that it's declining is very much mainstream in academia (https://www.routledge.com/Americas-Allies-and-the-Decline-of...). Worse, its national security institutions have lost credibility among a significant portion of its electorate (MAGA people), and its military hegemony is now opposed by both populist left (pacifists) and populist right (non-interventionists). They're being squeezed both abroad and at home.
All those territories count their people as US citizens (except American Samoa they need to fix that), most have voted to either be part of the US or enjoy popular support of remaining so.
US bases pay rent on land, employ locals, and will instantly shut down if the host country asks them to (after having been invited to enter to begin with). Of course there are cold war era exceptions, but this is the norm:
> The U.S. base at the Bishkek airport had become a regular source of criticism from various Kyrgyz politicians and, with heavy Russian influence, it also closed in 2014.
Hollywood spreads whatever culture they are being paid to spread. I think they are pretty indifferent to whether that is promoting violence, drugs, etc.
I can't tell if you are one of the Chinese agents that seem to be ever present on hackernews nowadays or you are somehow unaware of the very real self-censoring Hollywood does for China
The issue I have is things could be substantially worse than US hegemony - for example there could be a lot more wars/nuclear proliferation if the US failed.
Are you sure? Where do you think the current path of the US is taking its citizens and the rest of the world? Wars are awful and a nuclear war would especially be so, but taking the slow road to an authoritarian state controlled by unknown forces hidden from view has the potential to be much worse. Think of your ideological worldview, now think of those who are the opposite. What happens if that group ends up in control without you even noticing it happening until it becomes a capital offense to point it out?
Wouldn't there be no nuclear proliferation if the U.S. failed? Who designs weapons systems for NATO? The entire nuclear arms race wouldn't have happened if the U.S. didn't use the strategic bombing of citizens as a foreign policy platform 80 years ago.
Because US psy-ops against the domestic populate are illegal! And anyone who says you can draw a bright line between domestic and foreign social media activity is a crook.
Is it? What leads you to believe that democracy is a stable state?
My take: Democracy is not the natural state, therefore requires a lot of psyops to remain in place. It’s not democratic, but well, can you speak up about it? No. Or if you can, will you? Probably not worth it. You’re “happy enough”.
My converging evidence: France’s 1789 democracy was set up by gillotining the very person who would have gotten all the majority votes (He was organizing a referendum and the parliament couldn’t let this happen); The EU wasn’t born as a democracy and we only ask people’s opinions when it’s trending up; etc. there are so many examples that actually-democratic systems are an unstable mess and superficially-democratic systems are the norm.
The idea is that people believe they live in democracy, and psyops the only way to reach this state. True democracy might be a naive dream.
> My converging evidence: France’s 1789 democracy was set up by gillotining the very person who would have gotten all the majority votes (He was organizing a referendum and the parliament couldn’t let this happen); The EU wasn’t born as a democracy and we only ask people’s opinions when it’s trending up; etc. there are so many examples that actually-democratic systems are an unstable mess and superficially-democratic systems are the norm.
The EU is hardly a triumph of stability - indeed I'd argue it supports the opposite idea, it's unstable because it's not accountable enough and people realise that, no matter how strong the propaganda.
If the democracy leads to a tyranny of a majority it does not deserve to be a dream either. To me what has the most value is the recognition and protection of the individual rights.
While the subject is serious, I want to offer a quote from Pratchett:
“Vimes had once discussed the Ephebian idea of ‘democracy’ with Carrot, and had been rather interested in the idea that everyone had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away.”
democratic societies require ideological control. We are seeing today how unfettered communication is leading to polarisation and consequent 'crisis of democracy'. Good job we are reasserting control over information flows - banning Trump etc - in order to reduce confusion, improve indoctrination and promote stability.
I disagree strongly, but I believe this comment should be in full view so that people can appreciate it is not a rare sentiment. I have encountered it within my social circle quite often.
Those in favor of such a system for some reason are 100% convinced that it will be people like them who get to decide what's acceptable thought and what thoughts deserve punishment. The reality is much more likely that such a beast will take on a mind of its own and all of us, regardless of ideology, will end up suffering greatly under it.
education is indeed where the indoctrination starts. It might be the primary purpose of centralised education systems - they are society building institutions, not individual character building ones
The tools of warfare and colonialism become the tools of suppressing one's own people. Foucault's boomerang.
"These tools are good for us when we use them against our enemies" breaks down very fast when your apparatus starts to find "enemies" within its borders, a line we crossed a very long time ago.
yes, I think actually it is other way round - one must first suppress your own population (via propaganda, ideally), so that they can be recruited to suppress the other.
Celebrate in private, but pretend to investigate and be concerned about values in public like the drone program. Narratives like this is part of the propaganda.
But they are less than the points for playing dirty and not getting caught are. Then you reap both the rewards of the sketchy behavior and the perception of moral behavior.
So the logical thing to do is dump resources into keeping yourself from being caught.
Let me ask you, if you heard that in the next town over they started a dog fighting ring would you start one in your town and take your own dog so that he might learn from such "enlightened" behavior?
I sleep much better knowing my dog isn't taught such behavior is acceptable. I would hate for him to bite the hand that feeds him because he learned such, "enlightened" behavior is acceptable and condoned by his owner.
So you do not have an example of any of our adversaries changing their behavior because we are acting more "enlightened", but you want to do it anyway because you believe it is good
I believe democracies are like caring for an animal. I don’t care if my neighbor beats his dog and ends up getting bit, I’m not a cruel idiot so I’m not going to join him.
corruption is just the terminology the powerful deny to others what they do for themselves. Look at Congressional inside stock trading, look at legalised lobbying, look at campaign donations. All ok under democracy
Meh, defending the use of propaganda by a nation state seems antithetical to the culture of "hackers" ... but agreed, I'll be more thoughtful moving forward.
This is a bit too late. PSYOP campaigns have plagued Twitter & Facebook from the beginning. Twitter cracked down multiple times on fake accounts, but the operators change their modus operandi each time. It's basically whack-a-mole against the troll farm operators. Requiring phone numbers might slow them down, but then they just acquire a bunch of SIMs and continue registering. The only way to stop this is verifying people's passports and their account has to be held in their legal name. Just like a bank. It might be over the top, but it's the only way to drastically reduce the amount of propaganda, spam, astroturfing, disinfo, and artificially inflated metrics of Twitter & Facebook.
Part of the problem is that Twitter and Facebook deliberately traded away effective moderation in the pursuit of scale. They are not just bad at moderation, they explicitly oppose it.
Remember how Twitter gave Trump exemption from their own rules from 2017 thru 2021? They called it the World Leaders Policy, as in, "these world leaders provide so much value to our platform that we are going to give them a pass on our rules in the name of free speech". If I remember correctly, this even extended to DMCA 512 takedowns, which is an absolutely stupid level of risk to take on to protect a handful of users.
The Mudge disclosure also revealed that several Twitter admins - as in, people with control over all the servers and databases - are actually foreign agents of India or China's current governments. This is absolutely ludicrous levels of risk to take on for any company, but social media is so addicted to scale that this was deemed acceptable.
So even if Twitter were to enforce identity verification on everyone, they would still let the trolls through. Because the whole org is compromised and their incentives are to compromise themselves at every step.
Maybe "only talking about the title" is an anti-pattern in social media; and maybe HN even explicitly warns about complaining about titles; but, this wording difference is astounding enough to be interesting in its own right:
Washington Post: "Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations"
New York Times: "Pentagon Orders Review of Its Overseas Social Media Campaigns"
Just how flexible are we with language, exactly, that these two headlines can coexist?
It's not even as if these two papers' editors have particularly different ideologies or mindsets. They just looked at the same story, separately; selected a framing; turned the language intensity up to 11; and this is the absurd result.
Logically it's impossible to have strictly overseas social media campaigns because the material is not bound to a physical region, so there is arguably obvious "collateral damage."
How much collateral damage is within the legal limits of law? At what rate and percentage is it considered acceptable?
Reminds me of the 2019 U.S Army public document on the need to shift tactics towards cyber space, and it being an unknown territory for all militaries world wide because in the past wars were kenetic, and in the future they are psychic. Including the diffilculty of what strategies of identifying friend and foe and whatever an identity/ego is.
It is very much similar to an 'arms race' (in lieu of using technology as a form of narrative control for operational security). Unfortunately game theory optimizes us towards maximum escalation of risk in the hope of equal tension.
Fortunately it has worked so far.
Interestingly it is the first time in history as we know it that an individual or a small collection of individuals could have significant military power enough to affect billions of people with crafted messages. AI and Human-In-The-Loop systems are both incredibly fascinating and frightening.
I must be optimistic though. Growing pains, right? :P
A sweeping review?!?! Americans have been targeted and impacted by government-funded propaganda. They have been caught up in the fake drama and emotionally manipulated in ways that may impact them for the rest of their lives. It is time that they do a truth and reconciliation and start talking about money available to victims.
Psyop became a science just before & during WWII. The techniques and technologies were imported to the west. They have been studied and improved, and put to use for and against the civilian population ever since, ranging from the good (nod at Sesame Street) to evil (a motion indicating ‘most everything else’).
Why would we put much credibility into an organization investigating itself? This review is itself probably centralized narrative control. It goes something like this: Through social media monitoring, the Pentagon sees an uptick in people questioning the narrative and seeing the Pentagon behind pysops campaigns. So they commission a study and review that finds a couple supposedly rogue persons in their ranks which they scapegoat and nominally punish. The main apparatus is preserved in the shadows and more resilient after they have probed and fortified all its weaknesses.
> Why would we put much credibility into an organization investigating itself?
That's kind of a bizarre question, and I think you're misunderstanding what this is. This sounds like it's a story on the organization's internally-focused management, not some kind of external accountability thing meant to convince you of anything.
It is kind of hard to tell what the real goals are after reading different reports of the review. It does seem to be an internal only review and not something that will enlighten the public much. It shouldn't be any surprise that the Pentagon and its branches do what they do to push their narrative, but they screw up when they are too obvious. That seems to be what they are trying to address.
You can ask that question about any org. Ultimately people do lie, but the fact is that the world does these self-investigations all the time and the world hasnt stopped. The dod in particular has very strong boundaries and rules to follow, which people honest to God, believe in; as well as actually independent minders. So if you're fine with Twitter self-reporting bot numbers when it's obviously a conflict of interest to do so, you should be fine with the DoD investigating one of its combatant commands.
That brings to mind Instagram influencers, many who do not explicitly call out they are being paid to influence by certain organizations (in the fashion or luxury market area).
This also brings to mind the movies like ‘the avengers’ which gets lots of military support to drive recruiting.
>One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”
This is my position as well. Going forward in a world where more and more of what we hear and even see can be fake, trust will become more important. Trust is hard to build and easy to break.
I understand the need to reach out to hesitant populations, and the desire to advance our national interests through persuasion and propaganda. However, actual lying, fake accounts, and disinformation that is deployed in a blanket fashion will be a long-term detriment to our government's credibility.
In shorter form: Bias and "targeted messaging" is one thing. Literally fake people and lies are another.
We should act better than our adversaries, because we are better.
US citizen here - I believe that "we" is not possible, due to structural associations, misaligned incentives and tension between social forces. "We" America is not one thing.. the dollar and the vote and Bill of Rights are unifying, but not completely. Meanwhile, there are intelligent actors in every language group, despite no-dollar, no-vote and no-Bill of Rights.
A system of systems has to have flexibility to evolve; calling one team uniform as "better" is just more of the same
> We should act better than our adversaries, because we are better
While I "appreciate the candor", it is ofc "hilarious" that there are still people like you out there
Before you write such blatant naivety, I would recommend you to at least read Killing Hope by Blum, you feelings of candor and emotional need of belonging clearly lack any sort of historical foundation
Just give it 20 or so years until the editors write out their own autobiographical memories, that's how it always works, that's how it worked during the yellow press period of the US-Spanish war and that's how it works today, to be ignorant of history is just pure naivety, but some people like to have their minds be managed, they like to not think, so be it as it may
OTOH Wapo themselves are probably the least credible source on this matter. That being said, just because bezos isn't dictating what is and isn't to be published, that doesn't mean the editorial room isn't biased towards U.S. foreign policy interests (1, further reading on how this model works: 2)
What's a more credible source, people on the internet with theories ? That's all i'm seeing here.
There is plenty of precedent for Chinese or Russian state editorial interference in media, or the Murdoch's dictating Fox news talking points, I still see no evidence (that thing you are supposed to base your beliefs on) for Bezos interfering with WaPo. I do see a lot of conspiracies by people that don't like what WaPo publishes (Trump among them).
I just think its a little naive to assume that there would not be any influence until some academic comes in with a meta analysis that suggest that there is a statistically significant degree of influence. It's best to believe that there could be influence one way or another with anything you read in media, because influence is massively profitable.
> I’m with Greenwald on this: all mass media in the US, including social media, is staffed by and ran entirely for the benefit of the IC/DoD. This is just Deep State Kabuki
Do you have any evidence for that? That's an extraordinarily strong claim, and would need evidence much stronger than "here's a cherry-picked set of articles I'm interpreting like tea leaves."
One implication of "do your own research" is the forced assumption that, once the research has been completed, the person will inevitably arrive at the same conclusion you did.
What would you think if someone did "do their research", but based on that investigation concluded something fundamentally different from you?
When people say they "did their own research", they are referring to a process of self-indoctrination based on a strong confirmation bias to "find" evidence in what they already believe to be true.
>> Do you have any evidence for that? That's an extraordinarily strong claim, and would need evidence much stronger than "here's a cherry-picked set of articles I'm interpreting like tea leaves."
> Given your near 10,000 comments in the time since you signed up literally on the day Russia invaded the Ukraine, I suspect you have the time to do your own homework.
Making a extraordinarily strong claim, then expecting others to prove it for you, is a pretty strong indication you do not have evidence for it.
I won't mention the other glaring errors in your one-sentence comment, since they've already been called out.
>Significantly, they found that the pretend personas — employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China — did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
Because America is fundamentally not peddling the same kind of narrative that Russia or China does.
What America wants is freedom[0]. Russia is run by ethnofascists and China is run by near-textbook tankies. These ideologies are pariahs, and honest propaganda of this bent cannot survive contact with the background radiation of politics. In other words, when America is overt, people complain that we aren't living up to our own standards. When Russia or China is overt, people laugh at them and ignore them.
So, instead, they have to co-opt other concerns and lie about what their ideological opponents are doing. Hence shit like "the CDC created COVID" or "NATO is creating supersoldiers in Ukranian labs[1]". The job is not to prove that China or Russia is right, but to distract from what they are doing. The more they can piss off Americans against their own government, the better.
Americans do not need to do this, because... who is their target audience, here? Hardline Iranian theocrats or the Taliban aren't going to be distracted by covert propaganda. Neither will Russians who think Ukraine is run by the corpse of Adolf Hitler or Chinese who think America created COVID in a lab. People who aren't shitheaded will either respond well to American overt propaganda, or at least point out how America falls short of their own ideals. You don't need to lie to them.
Since America's interests are not furthered by covert propaganda, we should abandon it, since the only interest such propaganda could serve would be fifth-columning the country.
[0] As defined through a liberal lens; i.e. we accept and embrace private capital accumulation and business ownership. Other non-shitheaded definitions of freedom are free to reject this.
[1] Which is literally just the premise of Captain America with extra steps. Every time someone claims this we should reply, "Is this the new MCU movie"?
Regarding the "ethno" part, do you see evidence of this? Russia is quite diverse in terms of ethnic/cultural groups. The richest woman there is ethnically Korean, for just one example. And other groups like Jewish, Armenian, Tartar, Chechen etc play important roles in government, biz and cultural life there.
Russia is fascist by assimilation (in contrast to the Third Reich which was fascist by exclusion). As in, you either call yourself russian or get marginalized. It's so pervasive that people stopped noticing it. There are 200 ethnicities, yet all the federal websites are only in russian and maybe english.
This is why Putin has this fetish for "Ukraine is not a country / we are the same people" narrative.
So at which percentage of the population should you start to respect the culture of minorities?
I'll make it even easier. Go to any LOCAL government website in Russia where there is a concentration of these ethnic minorities and find me a version in their language.
Good examples of treatment of minorities are Finland with their treatment of the Swedish minorities there.
That's quite a leap from questioning why the federal government websites aren't translated into local languages. Care to share examples of such disrespect?
"Good examples of treatment of minorities are Finland with their treatment of the Swedish minorities there"
How would you rate pre-war treatment of language minorities in the Ukraine?
"In April 2019, the Ukrainian parliament voted a new law, the Law of Ukraine "to ensure the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the State language". On 16 June 2019, the law entered into force. The law made the use of Ukrainian compulsory (totally or within certain quotas) in the work of some public authorities, in the electoral procedures and political campaigning, in pre-school, school and university education, in scientific, cultural and sporting activities, in book publishing and book distribution, in printed mass media, television and radio broadcasting, in economic and social life (commercial advertising, public events), in hospitals and nursing homes, and in the activities of political parties and other legal entities (e.g. non-governmental organizations) registered in Ukraine." [0]
That's the same level of laws that you get in Western countries, including Finland. Ukrainian is a state language and public servants must be able to speak it at a minimum.
Of course not. Finland has both Swedish and Finnish as state languages and the study of Swedish is mandatory for all citizens [2].
Compare it yourself.
Ukraine: "Under the bill, all schools and universities will be required to teach in Ukrainian. All schools and universities are required to teach in Ukrainian, although special exemptions apply to certain ethnic minority languages, to English and to other official languages of the European Union.
Contrary to the minority languages which are EU official languages, Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish are granted no exemption for the purposes of the law." [0]
Finland: "All teaching from children’s pedagogy to university studies is available in Swedish in Finland." [1]
"IS AVAILABLE". Teaching in Russian is also available in Ukraine. The problem that law is solving is that Ukrainian isn't available everywhere(!). It's not about optional courses, it's minimal standards. Nobody is preventing schools from teaching russian (as a subject). But Ukrainian is the state language. Are you saying that minimal standards in Ukraine should be education in russian at the cost of ukrainian?
"Teaching in Russian is also available in Ukraine."
Not according to the law. It simply had 3 years of grace period, starting from 2019. [1]
"members of national minorities who do not speak an official EU language — Byelorussians, Gagauzes, Jews, and, significantly, Russians — will only be able to study at the secondary school level their language as a subject." [0]
"But Ukrainian is the state language."
And Finland has two state languages. [2]
"Are you saying that minimal standards in Ukraine should be education in russian"
No, it's what you are saying when you state that Ukraine has "the same level of laws that you get in Western countries, including Finland".
> Classes taught in ethnic minority languages will be allowed at Ukrainian-language schools, and some subjects at Ukrainian-language universities can be taught in English or one of the official languages of the European Union.
And yes, maybe the Ukrainian language that has been repressed by russia since 19th century at the latest needs a bit of an affirmative action.
Again, you say 'literally' and then leave out essential part of the quote: "Contrary to the minority languages which are EU official languages, Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish are granted no exemption for the purposes of the law."
That's dishonest.
"maybe the Ukrainian language that ... needs a bit of an affirmative action"
Maybe, but then discrimination of minority languages doesn't allow you to claim that the Ukrainian policy is on the same level as in Western countries.
Plenty of languages that have fewer percentage of speakers than Russian in the Ukraine are official languages in the EU. And I'm not aware of any civilized country deliberately targeting particular minority languages for discrimination like the Ukraine did in regard to Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish.
And you do know why there are few Yiddish speakers in the Europe now, right? Yiddish might have been an official language somewhere in the EU if not for mass extermination of Jews. In which Ukrainian heroes took part [0].
So, a guide through all the relevant administrative documents you might need. Let's click the "TAT" button to switch to the Tartar language... Oh wait, what's this? It doesn't exist? Imagine that. Another Potemkin website. The most ironic thing is that the "Report of the Tatarstan Foundation for Citizen's Right Protection" (PDF) is russian only.
Regarding your pre-edit statement about seething in anti-russian hate: if russians don't like it, they can stop invading, stealing and killing. Maybe that'll help?
Any German person I spoke to has a deep feeling of responsibility for WW2. Even today, even younger generations. Believe it or not it makes the society stronger. Russia is far away from that.
Being liked is a privilege you have to earn. Thinking you are owed nuanced, friendly treatment is a bit naive after what russia has done.
Because it's a slippery slope to collective punishment.
"This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about ‘the Armenians’ as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now." [0]
Collective responsibility seems to have worked for post-WW2 Germany though. And made the society as a whole stronger.
Denying visas is not "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". It is denying a privilege that the russian government has messed up for their own citizens. EU or USA don't owe you anything. The russian government does.
Personally, I have zero interest in letting someone into my country for them later to claim that learning my language is "nazism".
You asked what's wrong with 'collective guilt' and I answered that using this justification is the slippery slope towards "collective punishment" that includes "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". I never said that denying visas is "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants".
But I can give you an example: I've seen many times the calls to stop the export of medicaments to Russia thus killing or disabling most vulnerable civilians [0].
> Denying visas is not "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". It is denying a privilege that the russian government has messed up for their own citizens. EU or USA don't owe you anything. The russian government does.
I'm not interested in talking about collective guilt until you acknowledge how it impacted Germany. Everything else is just you whining about loosing your privilege.
I'll ask again, my country (USA) has killed millions of innocent people since 1991. If we're keeping tally, that's a whole lot more than the modern Russian state in the same time period.
Should Americans (including me) collectively be punished for this (of those of us like me who were actively against it)?
Is the EU at war with Russia? Maybe you should stop buying Russian oil and gas right now? Trading with the enemy, you know. Financing Putin's government.
Don't the russians claim they are at war with whole of NATO? And by the way, thank you for this push, now we'll finally ween Germany of its russian gas dependency.
Go to any LOCAL government website in France where there is a concentration of indigenous ethnic minorities and find me a version in their language (Breton, Corsican, Basque, etc.)
I agree that Finland is a good example, but you claim somehow that its existence makes Russia "fascist by assimilation". So what about other countries that don't meet Finland's standard for treatment of minority languages? Are they "fascist by assimilation" too or "it's different, you don't understand"?
That's not what I claim. I claim that there is a history of fascism in russia that has been so common place that people stopped noticing it. This can be exemplified by a number of things:
- Treatment of minority cultures (Finland as a counter example, which I give)
- Popular media (movies -i.e. Brat 2-, and especially now the outright genocidal state media)
- Popular culture (a cursory scroll through VK on the topic of Ukrainians should be enough)
- I don't even mention the systemic antisemitism during the soviet times.
If you are russian, you have a choice. You can nitpick and misinterpret my arguments, which -personally- I don't care about. Or you can think about how your own society has failed to uphold humanist values both towards your neighbours and your own compatriots. You can point fingers at the USA, but it won't make your country better and honestly, I bet the majority of people would feel safer having USA on their side, rather than russia. Armenia is a case in point. Nobody says the Americans or EU are holy, but russia is worse, china is worse, iran is worse.
At this point, it is safer for the rest of the world to not engage with russia and contain it until, at the very least, it starts upholding the international treaties and agreements it signed.
"Treatment of minority cultures (Finland as a counter example, which I give)"
If you use the comparison with Finland as indication of Russia being 'fascist', then whole lot of countries including Ukraine are 'fascist' too. Which devoids the word 'fascist' of its meaning.
"Popular media (movies -i.e. Brat 2-)"
And what is fascist about it? Main hero is negative about fascism. [0]
"the systemic antisemitism during the soviet times"
Which is not the case in today's Russia.
As for the past, Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which are treated as heroes in modern Ukraine, was quite busy butchering Jews [1] and Poles [2].
"you can think about how your own society has failed to uphold humanist values"
I don't think that vast majority of Russians believed that Putin was going to start the war.
Look, I get it. My daughter has Ukrainian blood pulsing through her veins (Zhitomir). But Russian blood (higher percentage), too. American blood (hello chattel slavery and native people genocide). And even some Nazi blood from another grandfather.
Is my 9 month old little girl collectively guilty?
For similar reasons that people in the US no longer speak German, Dutch or various British Isle dialects (and the reason after a couple generations, Spanish speaking immigrants are more fluent in English than Spanish).
There are parts of the US that still have German-language newspapers. Detroit had a Dutch newspaper until 2018. Whether it closed because it was Dutch or because newspapers as a product are on the decline is academic; the point is that people in the US do speak German, Dutch, and various British Isle dialects, and furthermore there are third-, fourth- and more-generation Spanish-speaking people throughout the south and west. It's a big country, and a lot happens outside your neighborhood.
Yeah, but a lot of it has (unfortunately) dissapeared. Especially during the anti-German episode related to WWII. Assimilation happens by various means.
Did the US grew peacefully? I mean all the territory of the United States was taken from Native Americans. Do you get as agitated about this as you are about Russia?
But Native Americans weren't Dutch, were they? Immigrants CHOSE to come to the USA and CHOSE to adapt. A bit different in case of most russian minorities.
If you consider what the Americans did to the natives bad (which you should) you should be as concerned for russian minorities. This "if Americans are bad, we should be allowed to be bad as well" take is tiresome.
Disappearing small languages? I am, but what about it is specific to Russia?
"This "if Americans are bad, we should be allowed to be bad as well" take is tiresome."
Of course it is tiresome. Especially after you say 'American history is good, Russian history is bad' and get reminded about Native Americans. So tiresome!
the world is not that different in some ways than five hundred years ago.. there are literate people and illiterate people, on a large scale. The rise and fall of literate languages is not the same story as the number of people that speak a language, or what colors are on the local police car. It is not popular to speak of this in the USA since there is a "unifying myth" of equality. What the USA did do brilliantly is use markets and local jurisdictions to let warring people settle nearby each other, and thrive. Over time the old ways show up however. Evolution is not practiced uniformly.
What I've seen look like war crimes, what is the argument for qualifying them as genocide?
Stalin's (and bolshevik's in general) crimes are horrible, but ethnic Russians weren't safe from them either. Have you seen breakdown of their victims by ethnicity?
The point is that Russia is the largest country by land area, composed of a great many regions and ethnicities, and yet all the language-speakers have vanished.
This didn't happen by accident. It is the result of a program of systematic, violent, erasure.
> you either call yourself russian or get marginalized. It's so pervasive that people stopped noticing it.
There is massive racism in Russian society, the various awareness movements that happened in the West never happened in Russia. One could compare the way USA has treated native people, and many issues would be similar.
Additionally, some of the ehnicities have beef with each-other that sometimes sparks into armed conflict.
Isn't Putin saying that parts of Ukraine which voted in a referendum that they'd like to join Russia should stop being bullied by Azov neo-nazies[1][2], and that's one of the reasons why this whole kerfuffle in Ukraine started (the other two being Ukraine's new interest in NATO, and claims of research US military facilities near the Ukraine-Russia border, or plans for one[2]).
Also, if someone's genuinely interested in my "sources" I'm willing to put in the work and post them, but didn't want to waste time in case people can't be bothered to be critical and click the links, and I also don't have a horse in this race, but the whole "America best, everyone bad" mentality literally reeks of indoctrination and lack of critical thinking that indoctrination and gaslighting cause, and it's worrying that it's happening in America of all places (which I admired for human rights and freedom of expression and thought, at least until recently). For reference, some were older BBC and CNN articles, a few YouTube videos, and a Quora thread which duplicates some of these.
[1]: Which the US military is supplying weapons to, apparently
[2] Maybe I fell victim to not appropriately fact checking some propaganda though, but I'm also not sure how to fact check something like this, and... The truth of the matter is that the US has done much worse in the past.
Aside: This whole "everything is a propaganda machine" is so frustrating, and I hate that there's literally nothing you can trust these days. I honestly can't even tell if I'm "paranoid" to think so. It just so very saddening, and despite some people's best efforts, it seems human nature is truly disappointing everywhere we turn.
You can fact check it by going to the website of the people you are calling neonazis (Azov) and find a neonazi agenda.
It was never really about NATO [1] for the russians, but as Putin said in his initial speech at the beginning of the invasion to "find a final solution to the Ukrainian question).
If you want to see the origin of russian ethno-fascism, try to find an early 2000s russian action film called "Brother 2" (Брат 2). It was immensely popular in russia at the time and is the most racist thing I've ever seen.
> You can fact check it by going to the website of the people you are calling neonazis (Azov) and find a neonazi agenda.
Why would one be that willfully superficial to look only at a recently crafted public image, instead of... I dunno... The recent history of the organisation?
At the very least being lazy as we are, we could just take a quick look at their recent logo from a few years ago, according to Wikipedia featuring "...a combination of a mirrored Wolfsangel and Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS, over a small Tryzub".
Somehow I doubt that this was all a total accident made up by evil Russians. I also remember internet openly talking about the rise of nazism in Ukraine before it became a taboo topic. And you could too, by simply telling your search engine to look for documents before 2022, when everyone went full post-truth.
> russian ethno-fascism
Ukrainians and Russians are mostly ethnically slavs, ugh.
> If you want to see the origin of russian ethno-fascism, try to find an early 2000s russian action film called "Brother 2" (Брат 2)
Oh please, it's like claiming that Duke Nukem is a represantative origin of women's rights in the US.
Since it's a political organization with stated political goals, it might make sense to look at those goals. Not to mention that even with those goals they didn't manage to break into parliament, i.e. reach 2% of the votes (if we are talking about "the rise of nazism in Ukraine", btw). Right now you're going "symbol scary!". By that logic German AfD, the French Front Nationale, or UKIP are totally above board in that respect...
> Ukrainians and Russians are mostly ethnically slavs, ugh.
Thanks for your racial theories...
> Oh please, it's like claiming that Duke Nukem is a represantative origin of women's rights in the US.
It was indicative of the culture though. This is why today you won't see a popular game with such rhetoric as Duke Nukem anymore. But Russians still don't realize Brat 2 is racist.
> Since it's a political organization with stated political goals
Who cares about it's recent political pivoting? Why are you trying to stir the discussion away from the fact that Azov first and foremost in its recent origin is a military organisation born of banal street-level neonazi skinhead sorts? It's not your typical US Republican or German AfD talks-kinda-maybe-like-nazi-apologist, it's an actual physical organizied force.
And the scandal of integrating it into Ukraine's National Guard back when it was openly waving the Third Reich's symbolics tells us quite a lot of its role in post-revolution Ukraine power structure.
> Right now you're going "symbol scary!". By that logic German AfD, the French Front Nationale, or UKIP are totally above board in that respect...
Are any of these also military organizations at their core? And specifically, what symbols so commonly associated with the Thrid Reich are they using?
> Thanks for your racial theories...
Beg your pardon? You were the one to bring up the topic of ethnicity, not me.
> It was indicative of the culture though. This is why today you won't see a popular game with such rhetoric as Duke Nukem anymore.
Duke Nukem had a reboot and an aniversary edition a few years ago...
And the abundance of wierd rape fanasy porn games on Steam doesn't really add up.
> But Russians still don't realize Brat 2 is racist.
Is this a verifiable claim? Cuz you're referring to a 20 smth y.o. lowlife trashy criminal drama, not some "Brat N+1". Is it any different from a movie like La Haine (1995)?
You have zero evidence that the regiment follows a neonazi agenda. Neither does the National Guard, the Army, nor the government. Not to mention that Azov itself is multiethnic.
Russians on the other hand have filtration camps and TV hosts on government channels call for nuclear war, ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Ukrainian national identity. Thank god they have nice logos though, otherwise they'd seem like Nazis! /s
> Beg your pardon? You were the one to bring up the topic of ethnicity, not me.
I didn't make any ethnic assertions. You started the "brothers slavs" trope.
> And specifically, what symbols so commonly associated...
Again, "symbol scary". Azov has no stated political goals against any minority / groups of population. AfD has. FN has. UKIP has.
> Duke Nukem had a reboot and an aniversary edition a few years ago...
And we've already discussed the symbolics that you were so fast to dismiss. I'm sorry, but if it's recruiting neonazis, dresses as neonazis and operates like neonazis, it's neonazis. I'm not sure what argument could be made here.
The government is a whole another matter. Sure, Israel is not happy with some of its politics, and the Odessa fires incident (specifically the investigation of it) doesn't inspire confidence, but it's hard to clearly distinct policy of one from the network effect of turing a militant skinheads brigade into glorified policie.
> I didn't make any ethnic assertions. You started the "brothers slavs" trope.
Trope? Slavic people were historicaly kinda disjointed, I am not sure where you had inferred all that "brother" stuff from.
> Again, "symbol scary". Azov has no stated political goals against any minority / groups of population. AfD has. FN has. UKIP has.
So you cherry pick facts from the time when they weren't even a formal group or cleaned up by the National Guard, you disingenuously then equate Azov battalion with a random ultra-right march from 2019 and refuse to acknowledge or educate yourself about the literal ethnofascist policies of russia. Well done.
I'm aware of their failed legitimate attempts to establish a presence in the government. I'm not trying to saying Ukraine is turning to nazism or fascism (I also don't know that much about their politics). But I imagine that 2% of military-minded, [semi-]trained and armed people is enough to wreck havoc on civilian regions.
> Since America's interests are not furthered by covert propaganda, we should abandon it, since the only interest such propaganda could serve would be fifth-columning the country
This conclusion should be self-evident for any democratic society, so any reasonable value of free and democratic.
I have various bones to pick with the rest of the post, chiefly viewing all of politics as being about abstract notion of freedom instead of realpolitik
America wants freedom for America above everything else. It's why they engage in subversive and potentially destabilising operations abroad (in order to "protect" their own freedom).
Internally, the situation is not much different (at least from an outsiders perspective). The elite and wealthy effectively using their resources to further the gap between themselves and the lower rungs in the name of profit.
Externally, the propaganda is aimed at distracting from how disruptive they are in other countries affairs (most notable in recent history being the Middle East). Internally, it seems like it's indoctrination into the belief of the inherent superiority of capitalism, and the construction of strawmen to distract from real issues.
That started with 9/11 with "what is at stake is not just America's freedom", "this struggle for freedom and security for the American people" and so on [0].
Good old times when Putin was first to call Bush and offer all the possible help [1].
But hasn't the American government constantly meddled in other countries' affairs and justified it using freedom/democracy to its own people?
I don't want to be insensitive, but the whole 9/11 thing is such hypocrisy. They call it a terrorist attack, but America has been and is the terrorists to a substantial portion of the world. Claiming otherwise is just ignorant
Russia has "filtration camps" right now. China commits genocide against the Uyghurs. I'd say _that's_ a baseline for calling someone a terrorist. USA is marginally better.
China dubiously rounded up an enormous number of Muslims often on extremely tenuous or nonsensical suspicion of being separatists, and released the vast majority of them, of not all of them, two or three years ago.
The US killed six million Muslims in the war on terror.
edit: so for perspective, only 13.5 million Uighurs exist in the world, and the vast majority survived the hardship and imposition China unleashed on them in a fairly brutal Sinoization campaign meant to stop a separatist movement that was using terrorism. The US killed 6 million Muslims to respond to 9/11, and virtually none of them were of the nationality or related to the people who hijacked the planes, who came from a close ally of the US. Instead, we killed Iraqis.
Later, I thought I'd learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.
That seems like good guidance, and I'd welcome an honest review that checks whether we're living up to standards that have been an inspiring part of our national character in the past, and leads to any corrective action.
Maybe US collective leadership realizes a way here that we can build upon our ancestors' great ideals, and follow through further, not drop the ball.