1/ A NEW KIND OF WAR: The handbook, primarily based on Russian sources, was published by @NATO_DefCollege and brilliantly written by @KeirGiles who is adept at relaying complex matter simply, succinctly and comprehensively.
Below is his intro to “warfighting.”
2/ CHEAP TRICKS: Aside from the usual tyrannical blather about intellectual superiority, the bottom line: information warfare is cheap.
3/ WAR AND PEACE: The information warfare is waged during peacetime and is ongoing.
4/ ALL OF THE ABOVE: This “hybrid war” is all encompassing and traditional war lines blurred.
Psyops relayed by any memes necessary: smartphones, media, celebs, trolls, bots, leaders(!)...psych pressure, destruction of enemy computers...global networks.
5/ LACK OF CONSENSUS: While Western nations are still trying to define cyber warfare, the Russians are going all in.
6/ MIND AND MATTER: Russian information warfare is aimed at altering the minds of its target victims as well as the technical systems of entire countries... using any means available, during peacetime and war.
7/ FUNDAMENTALS OF DEMOCRACY: “Our doctrines do not allow us to do a lot of this stuff till the fighting basically starts.”
But Russia considers itself to be in a state of war... lies and denial embedded into warfighting to erode the spirit of the target nation’s population.
8/ IW: Like a tarantula hawk wasp paralyzing its prey, Russia uses information warfare to “incapacitate a state as much as possible before that state even knows a conflict has started.”
New tech based on 100-year-old thinking.
And like the spider, citizens lose consciousness.
9/ WAKE UP AMERICA: “...a massive dedicated impact on the consciousness of citizens...within a matter of days... deprived of actual sovereignty without the state’s territory being seized.”
IW’s aim: regime change... “through destroying the organs of govt.”
Well done TrumPutin.
10/ PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT: The Russian military mind works backwards from the selected objective... IW (information warfare) is used to direct the people of the victim country to support the aggressor acting against their own interests... choosing actions advantageous to Russia.
11/ AGITATION AS WARFARE: What if our decision-making is being agitated toward a specific outcome... what if.
12/ POLLUTED INFORMATION: Lying is the message.
Parroting falsehoods lends authority to complete and utter bullsh*t, which is a boon for the aggressor in warfighting.
Everything we’ve ever stood for is at stake, and yet, MSM parrots away.
13/ SUBVERSION AND DESTABILIZATION: “Trusted media sources” spread propaganda—wittingly or unwittingly—validating Russian narratives.
History is revised and propagandized as part of foreign policy, an undermining of truth and democratic principles, while IW victim-nations assist
14/ ACTIVE MEASURES:
* Influencing policies of another govt
* Undermiming confidence in its leaders and institutions
* Disrupting relations between other nations
* Discrediting and weakening governmental and nongovernmental opponents
Sound familiar.
15/ DISMISS, DISTORT, DISTRACT, DISMAY: Our freedom of expression and human rights are being targeted by surgical disinformation attacks and resulting in a demoralized public.
16/ UNPREPARED FOR ACTIVE DEFENSE: As mass media stirs up chaos, IW front groups go unchecked...the infiltration both foreign and domestic. Author Giles, when citing Russian sources, notes they refer to Western aggression. Clearly, in post-modern times the mirror is double-sided.
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It never made any sense, how the most religious people I knew in 2016 became the most virulently anti-Hillary Clinton. More shocking was how they became ardent Trumpists. Church on Sunday, and MAGA-hatted all week.
2/
We’ve told the story of how the Christian right embraced an amoral man many times on these pages, but we’ve never told the story of redemption.
3/
IF WE CALLED IT TERRORISM—Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs @GLandsbergis annihilates the weak words we’ve been using to refer to Russia’s terrorism on the West
We are in a war — it has always been a war, because it has always been terrorism.
Lives have been lost — hundreds of thousands in the United States alone — and we have done nothing, because we’ve used weak words.
2/
We have let billionaires who act as arms of Russian intelligence tell us that if we were to do something, we would be censoring free speech. That is a lie.
3/
“We’ve recently seen that RT is currently funding bloggers and other YouTube personalities of the right, such as Jordan Peterson, other names that are well known, Tucker Carlson as well, to amplify messages that are destabilizing democracies.”—Justin Trudeau, October 16, 2024
2/
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused pro-Kremlin Canadian psychologist and author, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and pro-Kremlin propagandist, Tucker Carlson, of being funded by RT, which the US State Department said is an arm of Russian military intelligence.
3/
As with Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, it is taking me months to get through The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic by historians Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs.
2/
Both books are so rich with original source material that I pause to read the books and first-hand reporting referenced, before getting back to each historic work.
3/
“There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, ‘It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,’ and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.”—Arthur Machen, The Bowmen, 1914, London Evening News
2/
I’ve seen angels in the sky and an abundance of feathers in my path.
3/
One of the world’s richest and most powerful men told pro-Kremlin mouthpiece, Tucker Carlson, that he’s “fucked” if Trump loses. In an interview with Carlson earlier this week, he brought up the assassination of Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, again, having tweeted about it two weeks ago, and then he questioned how long his prison sentence might be if Trump loses.
Frankly, he should be worried.
2/
We used to have more patience for quirky captains of industry, but over time, we’ve grown wiser. Men like Henry Ford and Charles Lindburgh, who did great things in their lifetime, tarnished their own legacies with their anti-semitism and ties to Adolf Hitler.
3/