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Conspiracy Theorists, Bloggers Compared To ISIS During Congressional Hearing
Submitted by Paul Joseph Watson via PrisonPlanet.com,
Bloggers, conspiracy theorists and people who challenge establishment narratives on the Internet were all likened to ISIS terrorists during a chilling Congressional hearing which took place yesterday.
The hearing, hosted by the House Foreign Relations Committee, was titled “Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of Information,” and accused Russian state broadcaster RT of weaponizing “conspiracy theories” to spread propaganda.
One of the speakers giving testimony was former RT host Liz Wahl, who made a public spectacle of quitting Russian state media last year in an incident stage-managed by neo-con James Kirchick, himself a former employee of Radio Free Europe – a state media outlet.
Remarking that the Internet provided a platform for “fringe voices and extremists,” Wahl characterized people who challenge establishment narratives as a “cult”.
“They mobilize and they feel they’re part of some enlightened fight against the establishment….they find a platform to voice their deranged views,” said Wahl.
Referring to comments made in January by US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) chief Andrew Lack, who characterized RT as a threat on the same level as ISIS and Boko Haram, Wahl said the comparison was justified.
“By using the Internet to mobilize people that feel displaced, that feel like they’ve been on the outskirts of society, and give them a place where they can find a sense of belonging, and maybe make a difference in their own way, and it’s a problem,” she said.
Wahl went on to bemoan the fact that conspiracy theorists were “shaping the discussion online, on message boards, on Twitter, on social media,” before asserting that the web had become a beacon of “disinformation, false theories, people that are just trying to make a name for themselves, bloggers or whatever, that have absolutely no accountability for the truth, that are able to rile up a mass amount of people online.”
Committee Chairman Ed Royce then proceeded to accuse people on YouTube of using “raw violence” to advance conspiracy theories.
Peter Pomerantsev, of the London-based Legatum Institute, followed up by claiming that conspiracy theories were no longer “fringe” and were now driving the success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, before lamenting the fact that conspiracy theories were challenging the “global order” and threatening to undermine global institutions.
All three individuals that gave testimony are staunch critics of Russia, leading Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to wish “we had at least one other person to balance out this in a way that perhaps could’ve compared our system to the Russian system, to find out where that truth is, just how bad that is.”
Beyond the inflammatory rhetoric, the real story revolves around the fact that Washington was caught off guard by the rapid growth of RT, with Hillary Clinton and others having acknowledged the fact that the U.S. is “losing the information war,” which is why they are now desperately trying to denigrate the Russian broadcaster.
Without a doubt, RT puts out pro-Russian propaganda, but it also broadcasts truths about geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy that Americans will never see on mainstream corporate networks, precisely because those networks are also engaged in propaganda.
There’s no mystery behind why RT has become so big – telling the truth is popular – but because Washington finds it impossible to compete on that basis, it has been forced to resort to ad hominem attacks and ludicrous comparisons to ISIS in a desperate bid to level the playing field.
As linguist Noam Chomsky said, “The idea that there should be a network reaching people, which does not repeat the US propaganda system, is intolerable” to the US establishment.
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I love it when .gov shows their hand.
The Zionist mind control machine can turn a human brain into a peanut. It's really not that hard. "Hi, I am a peanut brained, nitwit...and I am running for Congress..." (applause!)
You fucking bastards, you give me a version of events like "9/11" and the "Boston Marathon Bombing" that actually seem to jibe with reality and maybe then I'll stop being a "conspiracy theorist".
Let's not forget -- as reported here many times to the credit of ZH -- that the very term "conspiracy theorist" was coined by the CIA as a means of undermining anyone who would question the government.
It should also be pointed out that Bernanke is now "a blogger" at the Brookings Institute and one helluva "conspiracy theorist" in his own right...lol.
I guess some nutters are more equal than others ;-)
"bloggers trying to make a name for themselves".... pffft who'd waste their lives doing that?
Websites of Mass Instruction
(are internet sites that can educate and bring significant enlightenment to a large number of humans or cause great damage to the false government-scripted MSM narrative)
Thanks RT for not thoroughly vetting that bitchy douche
Now if we could all go back to CNN like the nice little drones that we are...
(Lauren Lyster ended up at CBS - WTF is with RT hand-picking these opportunists - reminds of ironically of Yuri Bezmenov speaking of hiring jouralists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLqHv0xgOlc - they didn't learn from their own program)
Screw them, screw all of them. I am a blogger, I do my own analysis, and try to figure out what BS they are going to try and pull next based on the information I have available to me. It makes things so clear when they start speaking so hostilely about something you are involved in when you know are doing the right thing by speaking out. She is making it seem like there is some nefarious motive behind what we do. She is the one that is dangerous, not us. She is trying to curtail free speech for god sake.
http://www.debtcrash.report/
The US Propaganda Machine has just jumped the shark
It jumped the shark awhile ago. Like all corrupt governments, the government of the United States accuses others of behavior the US blatantly engages in itself. A few gems regarding our own "online troll army":
http://www.wired.com/2011/07/darpa-wants-social-media-sensor-for-propaga...
http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Social_Media_in_Strategic_Com...
And let's not forget that the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 included a provision to repeal the ban on government propaganda being directed at American citizens:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fisc...
Turns out Uncle Sam is a sociopathic, hypocritical asshole.
EDIT: Incidentally, folks, they always tell you what they're gonna do before they do it. This is a shot across the bow; they will be coming after the internet in one way or another at some point. It's too much of a threat for them to ignore it, and it's only a matter of time.
Ive post previously...but always a good read.
.
'What is a "conspiracy theorist?The pejorative "conspiracy theorist" is meant to demean and ridicule skeptics of official stories.
Most so-called "conspiracy theorists" are really skeptics, by definition. They're skeptical of what the government tells them. They're skeptical of the claim that drug companies are really only interested in helping humankind and have no desire to make money. They're skeptical that food corporations are telling them the truth about what's in their food. And they're also skeptical of anything coming out of Washington D.C., regardless of which party happens to be in power at the time.
People who are not skeptics of "official stories" tend to be dull-minded.
To believe everything these institutions tell you is a sign of mental retardation. To ask questions, on the other hand, is a sign of higher intelligence and wisdom.'
.http://www.naturalnews.com/045172_conspiracy_theories_rational_thought_c...
Time to increase flouride levels in the water supply again...
http://fluoridealert.org/articles/iq-facts/
UPDATE: As of February 2015, there are 43 studies associating fluoride exposure with reduced IQ in children. To see these studies, click here.
It's a Harvard study however and those guys are fucking morons...
It's hilarious watching in the land of the free as they try to find a way around the First Amendment to ban RT.......
So let's get this straight... they believe that Russia is responsibility for ALLLLLLL the "conspiracy theories" on the Internet? LOL! How about the one where the NSA was spying on everyone and it turned out to be true? Is Russia responsible for that one too?
So who are the REAL paranoid, deranged, scared out of their wits about losing power, conspiracy theorists?
I'm not aware of any efforts to do so. Link, por favor.
Here you go:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-16/conspiracy-theorists-bloggers-c...
Your welcome.
Denigrate is not the same as ban.
You didn't say thank you.
According to a dictionary, yes...but they can be closely related in reality and often are.
Just like ignorance and wilful denial, they're not the same per se but the outcome is very similar and both should be despised. The main difference is that the first state is just sad, while the latter is evil.
Which are you?
Like glib acceptance of any flaky old crap that drifts into your transom, you mean?
oh ... that's completely different ...
Right?
Respnding to the above:
1. Link already kindly provided.
2. To repeat what I posted "As they try to find a way around the First Amendment to ban RT". Which I stand by. What the fuck else do you suppose they are doing holding Congressional hearings? Working out how to send a "Thank you" note to Vlad?
Vote up!
4Vote down!
0According to a dictionary, yes...but they can be closely related in reality and often are.
Just like ignorance and wilful denial, they're not the same per se but the outcome is very similar and both should be despised. The main difference is that the first state is just sad, while the latter is evil.
Which are you?
- reply
---- Fri, 04/17/2015 - 05:28 | 6002151 Element Vote up!2
Vote down!
-4Like glib acceptance of any flaky old crap that drifts into your transom, you mean?
oh ... that's completely different ...
Right?
--
If people buy into nonsense and BS stories of their own volition, this is hardly going to be changed at the stroke of a pen of a legislative chamber all agreeing on some policy of state action to ban or else accept some aspect of public discourse.
Toutchy toutchy aren't we? My comment was directed to ALL of the above but, in particular, the comment by Tarabel. You should try to take yourself less seriously and increase the cigar quota. I would recommend Cohibas, which would be perhaps the only benefit of lifting the Cuban embargo for Americans? Although, and I buy mine in Barcelona, that will push the prices through the roof for everyone else. But I do have a good stock...
all of the above is different to just the above, right?
What do you expect when you neither quoted nor directed your comments? Are we mind-readers who must divine the meanings of your hip commentary and guess at its deep purposes?
Elemental dear Watson. Follow the thread. And stop being such a pompous prick...
Soon we will find out that Liz Wahl works for the CIA and was specifically planted at RT in order to create the current psyop.
Plus 1 for that observation.
One thing I noticed over the years is that covert plants with a psychopathic agenda have NO sense of humor at all.
One look at Liz’s scowl and I sensed hidden heinous fuckery in the works immediately.
As a side note – I’ll bet the gov list keepers a salivating over this thread. The comments are popping up way faster than I can read them! You know you are getting somewhere when the asswipes are holding a Congressional hearing about what a problem a little online grumbling is!
~ DC
Flouride acts like lithium and keeps the peeps from rioting (or asking too many questions).
Main source of fluoride for most American adults: coffee and tea - moreso than daily tap water consumption.
Main source for fluoride for most American kids: tap water, soda and grape juice.
Apparently you believe that shit. I take it you don't and didn't brush your teeth each day with a fluoride enhanced toothpaste for most of your life?
Provide clear direct evidence that fluoride does any of the sordid wicked things the paranoid wingnuts claim as claims surprisingly don't actually cut it - except for morons.
And contrary to the many similar fluoride myths, I'm yet to encounter an American (or almost anyone in the developed world) who are not rambunctious, assertive, and more-or-less somewhat aggressive, and unlikely to submit or not question orders from on high.
Especially those who drink coffee (made with tap water).
The Kool-Aid tastes grape!
See from 11:28 seconds in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0BAjvXgSZ8
How about a study by Harvard in 2012, published by the NIH, identifying fluoride as a neurotoxin? The study in question examines the consumption of fluoride in drinking water. That "credible" enough for 'ya?
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1104912/
Not sure if you're a troll or just a fucking idiot. Probably the fluoride.
Your link says:
Did you even bother to check that link was dead? Perhaps the fluoride got to it?
Eat enough salt and you'll have a stoke (and many other problems), but does it occur to you that salt is a deadly neurotoxic substance? Do you scream at the fast food proprietors about it?
Study some basic chemistry, it's been known for over a century that excess exposure to many chemicals and minerals creates toxic or counterproductive health effects, even where lower doses are demonstrably and measurably producing health improvements.
Your brain works on the basis of election-exchange mediated by essential electrolytes (salt), as do your muscles and nerves. Without enough salt you wither and die, with too much salt you also wither and die.
But I suppose you'd like to also discount and discard the fact that fluoride strengthens the crystalline structure of teeth, as a small number of fluoride atoms within the structure strengthens the mineral structure of tooth enamel (yes teeth are actually crystalline growths fool, as are your bones) as it's precipitated atom by atom during growth of teeth in children, and teens?
Such toughening of teeth makes them less prone to decay and slows it down, reducing the problems and costs of chronic disease and immune-suppression from tooth and gum rot, and abyss infections, which can actually kill a human being.
Eat enough big macs and you'll drop dead too, but I bet don't you cry and wring your hands like a sniveling little pansy every time you gobble one down.
Get a grip and a sense of proportion you befuddled hypocritical mouth-breather.
Manually copy the link into your browser and it'll work just fine, provided that's not too much work for your fluoride-addled brain. After that, promptly go fuck yourself.
So you can't even manage to post a link, but you want to disband the use of rationality and the sense of proportion and just resort to wacky knee-jerking babble, as you feel you prefer that sort of thing?
Go on ... admit it.
Ahhh.....so as long as the flouride is consumed in 'moderation'....its actually no longer a fucking poison, but now good for your teeth. Got it.
Lemme guess....same goes for mercury, right? I mean, they put it in vaccines and all, so its clearly not a toxic metal, because its such tiny amounts and stuff.
I brushed with flouride toothpaste for the first 38 years of my life 2-3 times a day, and the stuff did not prevent a single cavity. Instead, I ended up with multiple fillings and cracked molars.
Yet, oddly enough, I started brushing with baking soda 5 years ago and have not had a single cavity or tooth-related problem since. Weird.
Your teeth were obviously filled with a gold or silver amalgam.
Cracked molars come from impact transients, like being a smartarse and getting punched out regularly, or falling over, etc. Cavities result from sugar consumed. Like I said, do some basic chemistry and you'll see why you get cavities and stuffed teeth.
Yes, if you use fluoride and get punched or consume too much sugar, you are going to still get cracked teeth and cavities. Look above I said it makes them stronger and slows down the rate of decay that normally occurs. Not a theory, it is lab tested, repeatable and demonstrated to dental students beyond question in their first weeks of study.
But if you want to know how and why fluoride works in the way it does you need to look up the crystallography rules for substitution solid solution, and it'll take you down the path of understanding why a different sized cations (a positive atomic ion) affect the size and geometry of all ionic bonds, in any material's solid crystalline latice structure, and can either weaken or else strengthen a crystal, accordingly.
[obviously I'm not wasting my time writing this for your sake as you're plainly an idiot and will not be interested or benefit to find out about the material properties of matter of which you consist, but others may realize the merit of learning something about why these things are known to work]
Fluoride cations just happen to have an ideal atomic radius for strengthening the crystals teeth grow as, and it was observed in tooth enamel, within early geochemical atomic analysis studies of exhumed bones and teeth, that populations which received a higher natural background fluoride component in their consumed food, which were deposited in their bones and teeth, also produced visibly healthier unearthed skeletons with the most teeth remaining into older age, and the least decay present, and least evidence of chronic diseases in the jaw bone. When atomic analysis of the two populations were compared, fluoride was the observed cause of the difference in tooth decay resistance.
It was then tested and found to be the case in the lab animals and dose levels determined to obtain optimal tooth strength, which turned out to be a terrifically dilute quantity, regularly administered. It turned out it takes a tiny number of fluoride atoms to dramatically increase the strength of the crystals that form our teeth
So fluoride reinforcing of teeth was a natural health advantage of some geographical populations, which led to better health in general and longer life with less pain.
Naturally scientists and doctors and dentists saw this and were very keen to increase the health advantage of western populations, even as sugar consumption was skyrocketing in the west, from the spice-trade of recent centuries, which were observed to be destroying teeth rapidly in regular (affluent) users of sugar.
Hence rapid universal fluoride adoption in the west at very low levels in drinking water.
Alternatively, if you want to remain an ignorant deluded fuckstick, with no clue at all, but think ignorance is for you, then by all means continue as before.
Ah, so you must be a dentist? Cigar smoke is bad for your teeth you know. Also, Dentists have the highest suicide rate, although Bankers are catching up...
Incorrect, a geologist, minerals are crystals and atom solid substitution affects all crystals, so it's pretty much the basis of geochemistry and mineralogy. Fluoride is just one of the clearer examples introductory geochemistry texts discuss.
I never suffer from depression, I'm OK with the world and well-adjusted to how it is, and my inconsequential geological instant in it. I'm not resigned to how it is, nor disturbed by it, nor even disappointed by how humans behave. I expect no less from a horde of egocentric anthropomorphically obsessed and hopelessly culturally deluded primates. Sorry if I'm not as neurotic or suicide tending as you might have hoped.
Occasional cigar smoke, as a proportion of degradation imparted to my teeth, runs an almost infinitesimally distant last to the single sugar in my cup of coffee. Nice that you are concerned though.
Awesome scholarly-sounding retort. Hey so where can one get some of this super-healthy "natural background fluoride component in their consumed food"? And color me 'shocked' that first year dental students are taught that flouride is the shizznit when it comes to dental health.
You stick to your belief in the wonders of fluoride as a boon to dental health. When your mouth ends up full of cavities, you keep telling yourself it's 'normal' and probably because you ate too much sugar and stuff, as you scrub the shit outta those choppers with your favorite flavor of Colgate, and then wash it down with good ol' american city tapwater.
Me, I'll stick to baking soda as my preferred anti-cavity tooth health supplement. Funny I didn't see you mention baking soda once in your lengthy post. Oh well, probably too icky to even consider, coming from an idiot deluded fuckstick like myself and all.
Hey, I wonder how much flouride is in the municipal drinking water of the average British citizen? Too much? Not enough? Or is it that they're all wanton sugar-scarfing beasts?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8259/
Medical Microbiology
Chapter 99Microbiology of Dental Decay and Periodontal DiseaseWalter J. Loesche.
Ethanol is a VERY powerful neurotoxin, but I bet you go out for Nightrain or Fireball just about every day.
It's a lot more than that too:
Bottoms up.
+1, cheers, Element!
You're welcome, but I forgot brain atrophy from reduced blood flow to the brain in drinkers and head injuries and brain assaults from falling over and from getting into fights, and car 'accidents'. Plus:
But hey, why worry about the things that can permanently injure or kill you, at near to the normal daily consumption levels, when you can talk mindless drivel about fluoride in tap water!
Want another scotch?
thanks, I'm a smoker and a lover, but not much of a drinker. oh, and my toothpaste is extra-strong in fluoride
If that stuff about fluoride in the tap water would be true, I would be a very, very placid conformist little lamb without any criticism for anything
I'm a coffee fan, drink no booze, don't smoke, but strangely really like a cigar on noteworthy occasions. I brush twice a day with the fluoride reinforced stuff, have all my life. No bizarre aversion to tap water consumption, never get sick, and I can report no tendency to not questioning things, quite the opposite. Nor any passive to inert state of drooling swoon.
Smokin' dope has similar non mutagenic effects.
Guess we're not genetically uniform after all.
Smoking any leaf regularly is very bad for your lungs. If you are going to do that you're much better off chopping it up and drinking it as green tea via adding hot water and letting it sit. It comes on slower (an hour or so) but provides a much stronger and more persistent high when digested, minus the cough and serious respiratory disease hazard of bong or joints. Plus people around you will not smell the smoke in the air or on your cloths, or on your breath. (be sure to thoroughly flouridate your mouth after the tea, and have plenty of sugary snacks on hand)
Si BLOTTO, but listen again...
El Pendejo started talking about "Conspiracies". After la Puta, "Deranged" say her shit, Sr Chairman... he say "conspiracy theorist", but then Peter Pecker, He start talking bullshit about "Conspiracies"... He NEVER even say "theorist", only say "Conspiracy"... over and over... But he too Fucking Stupid! El dice, "Que es conspiracy?".
Yo creo que they are Conspiriing to to STEAL OUR LIBERTAD! VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!!
US propagandists are locked in a monologue mode, speaking to themselves and of themselves all the time. The Russians are simply a canvas on which US propagandists paint a projected picture of their inner selves.
This is the US world order, wallowing in the denial of the most basic reality. Who could come with the fantasy that the US supports freedom of speech?
Sorry, US citizens, your propaganda techniques are too old by now. Most people know them. Especially the Russians:
http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/04/chronicles-of-collapse-info-battles...
The translator of this Russian article notes that America throwing more resources into the info war is a sign of Russia's victories and America's agony in this theater of operations.
Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors
Peter Pomerantsev
Thursday 9 April 2015 15.00 AEST Last modified on Saturday 11 April 2015 01.53 AEST
Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. Has Putin’s Russia developed a new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’ rather than on the battlefield? Or is it all just a giant bluff
The thing that Margo Gontar found easiest to deal with were the dead children. They were all over her computer screens – on news sites and social media – next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by Nato. It was early 2014, Crimea had just been taken over by soldiers who seemed Russian and sounded Russian but who were wearing no national insignia, and who Vladimir Putin, with a little grin, had just told the whole world were not Russian at all. Now eastern Ukraine was being taken over by separatists. Gontar was trying to fight back.
She could usually locate the original images of the dead with a simple Google search. Some of the photographs were actually from other, older wars; some were from crime scenes that had nothing to with Ukraine; some even came from movies. Gontar posted her research on a myth-busting website called StopFake, which had been started in March by volunteers like her at the journalism school of Mohyla University in Kiev. It felt good being able to sort truth from lies, to feel some kind of certainty amid so much confusion.
But sometimes things could get more complicated. Russian state-television news began to fill up with plump, weeping women and elderly men who told tales of Ukrainian nationalists beating up Russian-speakers. These witnesses seemed genuine enough. But soon Gontar would see the same plump women and the same injured men appearing in different newscasts, identified as different people. In one report, a woman would be an “Odessa resident”, then next she would be a “soldier’s mother”, then a “Kharkiv resident” and then an “anti-Maidan activist”.
In July, after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Gontar surveyed the internet, picking up shards of pro-Russian conspiracy theories. She came across the Twitter feed of an air-traffic controller who had spotted Ukrainian army jets following the plane, although she could find no evidence that the air-traffic controller actually existed. She found dozens of sites in Russian and English which, almost as one, suddenly argued that the US had shot down MH17 in a botched attempt to target Putin’s personal jet. There were even claims, circulated by Russian separatist leaders in Ukraine, that the plane had been filled with corpses before it had taken off – a plotline lifted from the BBC TV series Sherlock. The stories were glaringly sloppy, as if their creators did not care about being caught and just wanted to distract from the evidence that Russian-backed militias had shot down the plane. Gontar began to wonder whether she was falling into the Kremlin’s trap by spending so much time trying to debunk its obviously fake stories.
Before long, she found herself, and StopFake, becoming part of the story. Russian media had begun to cite StopFake in their own reports – but would make it look like Gontar was presenting the falsified story as truth, rather than debunking it. It was like seeing herself reflected in a mirror upside down. She felt dizzy.
At times like this, she had always reached out to western media for a sense of something solid, but this was starting to slip too. Whenever somewhere like the BBC or Tagesspiegel published a story, they felt obliged to present the Kremlin’s version of events – fascists, western conspiracy, etc – as the other side, for balance. Gontar began to wonder whether her search for certainty was futile: if the truth was constantly shifting before her eyes, and there was always another side to every story, was there anything solid left to hold on to?
After months working at StopFake, she began to doubt everything. Who was to say that “original” photo of a dead child she found was genuine? Maybe that, too, had been placed there? Reality felt malleable, spongy. Whatever the Russians were doing, it was not simply propaganda, which is intended to persuade and susceptible to debunking. This was something else entirely: not only could it not be disproven, it seemed to vaporise the very idea of proof.
* * *
Late last year, I came across a Russian manual called Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopedia and Reference Guide (The 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al, and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, can be purchased online at the sale price of 348 roubles). The book is designed for “students, political technologists, state security services and civil servants” – a kind of user’s manual for junior information warriors. The deployment of information weapons, it suggests, “acts like an invisible radiation” upon its targets: “The population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon. So the state doesn’t switch on its self-defence mechanisms.” If regular war is about actual guns and missiles, the encyclopedia continues, “information war is supple, you can never predict the angle or instruments of an attack”.
The 495-page encyclopedia contained an introduction to information-psychological war, a glossary of key terms and detailed flowcharts describing the methods and strategies of defensive and offensive operations, including “operational deception” (maskirovka), “programmatical-mathematical influence”, “disinformation”, “imitation”, and “TV and radio broadcasting”. In “normal war” the encyclopedia explains, “victory is a case of yes or no; in information war it can be partial. Several rivals can fight over certain themes within a person’s consciousness.”
I had always imagined the phrase “information war” to refer to some sort of geopolitical debate, with Russian propagandists on one side and western propagandists on the other, both trying to convince everyone in the middle that their side was right. But the encyclopedia suggested something more expansive: information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations” and “control over the sources of strategic reserves”. Invisible weapons acting like radiation to override biological responses and seize strategic reserves? The text seemed more like garbled science fiction than a guide for students and civil servants.
Information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations”
But when I began to pore over recent Russian military theory – in history books and journals – the strange language of the encyclopedia began to make more sense. Since the end of the cold war, Russia had been preoccupied with the need to match the capabilities of the US and its allies. In 1999, Marshal Igor Sergeev, then minister of defence, admitted that Russia could not compete militarily with the west. Instead, he suggested, it needed to search for “revolutionary paths” and “asymmetrical directions”. Over the course of the previous decade, Russian military and intelligence theorists began to elaborate more substantial ideas for non-physical warfare – claiming that Russia was already under attack, along similar lines, by western NGOs and media.
In 2013 the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Valery Gerasimov, claimed that it was now possible to defeat enemies through a “combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns”. This was part of a vision of war which lay not in the realm of physical contact but in what Russian theorists described as the “psychosphere”. These wars of the future would be fought not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.
Disinformation and psychological operations are as old as the Trojan horse. But what distinguished the Kremlin’s approach from that of its western rivals was this new stress on the “psychosphere” as the theatre of conflict. The information operation was no longer auxiliary to some physical struggle or military invasion: now it had become an end in itself. Indeed, as the Russian encyclopedia for its practitioners concluded: “Information war … is in many places replacing standard war.”
The idea was clear enough. But what could “invisible radiation” really achieve? Was it simply an attempt to put a hard edge on what the Americans call “soft power”, conducted through cultural outreach and public diplomacy? Or was it really some new form of war – one that could outfox Russia’s enemies without firing a shot?
* * *
Towards the end of last year, I flew to Estonia, the tiny Baltic country – population 1.3 million – that sits 150km west of St Petersburg. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014, there had been much talk that Estonia could be next in line. (“Today Crimea: Tomorrow Estonia?”, as a headline in the Spectator put it.) A few months before my visit, President Barack Obama had jetted to the capital Tallinn to make a public pledge of America’s commitment to the country’s security. “The defence of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defence of Berlin and Paris and London,” Obama said. “So if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, who’ll come to help, you’ll know the answer: the Nato alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America, right here, present, now.”
As Toomas Ilves, the president of Estonia, walked me down a long corridor in his Tallinn residence, he pointed out portraits of the men who led the country during the country’s first period of independence – between the fall of the Russian empire in 1917 and its occupation by the Soviets during the second world war. They had not met happy fates: “This one was shot, this one was disappeared – apparently killed – this one was deported,” Ilves said as we passed each picture.
Ilves was dressed in his trademark tweeds and bow tie, a counterpoint to his mission to make Estonia the most digitally progressive country in Europe. The government has declared internet access a human right; citizens can vote, get medical prescriptions, deal with taxes and bank electronically and pay for parking with a mobile phone. A new school programme requires all pupils to learn to code from the age of seven. Ilves, who probably tweets more than any other head of state, peppers his conversations and speeches with references to the latest technology.
This “e-Stonia” project is practical – a search for an economic niche – but also symbolic. It is a way to tear away the country from its Soviet stereotype as Moscow’s backward province. That break with the past seemed final when Estonia joined Nato in 2004 – a moment that was meant to mark the emergence of a new digital Estonia on the international stage, free forever from Russian coercion.
Since Soviet times, every year on 9 May, which is known as Victory in World War Two Day, Russian nationalists and war veterans living in Estonia had long gathered to celebrate in the centre of Tallinn, at a statue known as the Bronze Soldier – a large Aryan-looking hunk who commemorated Soviet victory over the Nazis. Around a third of Estonians are Russian, or at least primarily Russophone; the vast majority of these are descendents of Russians who were relocated from the Soviet Union after the second world war, while thousands of Estonians were being deported to the gulag and scattered across the USSR. Between 1945 and 1991, the number of Russians in Estonia rose from 23,000 to 475,000. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, new citizenship laws required Russians who had arrived after 1945, and their descendents born in Soviet Estonia, to pass Estonian language tests to gain citizenship. Tensions began to grow. Many of the Russians do not see themselves, or their parents, as colonisers: according to the official Kremlin line, Estonia “voluntarily” renounced its independence in 1941. Some felt like second class citizens in the new Estonia: why weren’t prescriptions available in Russian? Why couldn’t Russophone towns have street signs in Russian?
When Russian nationalists would gather at the Bronze Soldier to sing Soviet songs and drape the statue with flags, Estonian nationalists began to organise counter-marches at the same spot. In 2006, one Estonian nationalist writer threatened to blow the statue up. In March 2007, the Estonian parliament voted to move the statue to a military cemetery – officially, for reasons of keeping the peace. But Russian politicians and media responded furiously. “Estonian leaders collaborate with fascism!’’ said the mayor of Moscow; “The situation is despicable,” said the foreign minister. The Russian media nicknamed the country “eSStonia”. A vigilante group calling itself the Night Watch camped around the Bronze Soldier to protect it from removal.
Pomerantsev 2
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On the night of 26 April, as the statue was about to be removed, Russian crowds started throwing bricks and bottles at Estonian police. Riots broke out. There was mass looting. One man died. Russian media, which are popular in Estonia, reported that he was killed by police (he was not), that Russians had been beaten to death at the ferry port (they had not), that Russians were tortured and fed psychotropic substances during interrogation (they were not).
The next day, employees of the Estonian government, newspapers and banks arrived at work to find their computer systems down, crippled by one of the largest cyber attacks to date. E-stonia had been taken offline.
Today, many in Estonia are convinced the whole affair was coordinated from Moscow. Yet nothing can be proven. After the cyber-attack, a nationalist Russian MP and spin doctor, Sergey Markov, told the media his assistant had coordinated the attack with the help of “patriotic hackers” – but said that he was working independently of the Kremlin. The Estonian security services claimed to have observed meetings between the Night Watch vigilantes and the staff at the Russian embassy. But proving the unrest had been coordinated by the Kremlin was a different matter. All that could be said for sure was that someone wanted the Estonian government to know it was not as safe as it thought. But safe against what? “Sometimes we wonder whether the point of the attacks is only to make us sound paranoid and unreliable to our Nato allies,” Ilves suggested. “And thus undermine trust in the alliance.”
A guiding tactical concept in the Russian information war is the idea of “reflexive control”. According to Timothy L Thomas, an analyst at the US army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, and an expert in recent Russian military history and theory, reflexive control involves “conveying to an opponent specially prepared information to incline him voluntarily to make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action”. In other words, to know your adversary’s behaviour patterns so well you can provoke him into doing what you want.
One well-known example during the cold war would take place at the annual Red Square army parades, when the USSR would show off its nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets to the world. The Soviets knew this was one of the very few moments western analysts would be able to see their arsenal, and they would plant fake nuclear weapons with exceptionally big warheads meant to send the west into a panic about the power and innovation of Soviet weaponry. “The aim,” writes Thomas, “was to prompt foreign scientists, who desired to copy the advanced technology, down a dead-end street, thereby wasting precious time and money.”
In Soviet times, “reflexive control” had been the subject of extensive academic study, pioneered by VA Lefebvre, a mathematical psychologist who, according to Thomas, “described reflexive control within the context and logic of a reflexive game”. In the early 2000s, a biannual magazine dedicated to the subject was published by the Russian Institute of Psychology, with articles about the “algebra of conscience” and “reflexive games between people and robots”.
Applied to the landscape of information warfare, “reflexive control” means that the Estonians are kept guessing about the Kremlin’s intentions, and paralysed by inability to formulate a response to provocations whose origins and aims are impossible to determine – whose aims, in fact, may simply be to induce an overreaction. “When Russian politicians make threats about being able to conquer Estonia, does that mean they would actually invade?” asked Iivi Masso, Ilve’s security adviser when she joined us at the president’s residence. “Are they just trying to demoralise us? Or do they want western journalists to quote them, which will send a signal to the markets that we’re unsafe, and thus send our investment climate plummeting?”
* * *
A few months after my visit to Estonia, I attended a Nato policy seminar in Kiev that was intended to address these new challenges. The seminar was held in what looked like the ballroom of a grand hotel, with stucco columns and mirrored ceilings. At the head of the room was a small Cornishman, rocking backwards and forwards in front of a PowerPoint presentation. This was Mark Laity, a former BBC defence correspondent who is now the head of strategic communications for Nato.
Projected on a large screen behind Laity was a flowchart that explained the building blocks of a narrative: how conflict leads to the desire for resolution, which is played out through “actions, participants and events”. It was the kind of thing students are taught in the first year of film school, or in undergraduate courses on literary theory. The presentation stressed that the world should be seen as a “system of stories” inside a “narrative landscape”. For the attendants, mainly military men and civil servants, this was a new way of looking at the world. They took notes studiously.
Nato remains undefeated on the battlefield, but Laity wanted to make clear that the “narrative landscape” represented a new and unfamiliar battleground – one in which Nato no longer appeared to hold a clear advantage. This realisation has dawned more clearly over the past year, as the Kremlin appears to be trying to test the limits of the cold war alliance, in sometimes subtle, sometimes overt ways. The semantic lock that seals the North Atlantic treaty is Article 5, which states that a military attack on one Nato nation is an attack on all. Obama cited Article 5 in his Tallinn speech, describing it as “crystal clear”. But what if you could undermine this principle without firing a single bullet? Would a cyber-attack on Bulgaria by unknown actors sympathetic to Russia invoke Article 5? What about a tiny insurrection in a Baltic border town, organised by locals with suspicious ties to Russian security services? Would all the countries in Nato go to war to keep Estonian electronic banking online?
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Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, the Kremlin seems to have sought to tease and provoke its western neighbours by more conventional means as well. (Russia, of course, insists the reverse is true.) In 2010, one Russian warship was spotted in Latvian waters; in 2014, the total was 40. Latvian aeroplanes were scrambled five times in 2010; in 2014 that figure was over a hundred, as Russian planes swooped into Baltic airspace. Meanwhile, in February, Russian bombers were spotted off the coast of Cornwall.
All these manoeuvres put Nato in a double bind. Not reacting would show the organisation to be pointless. Thus the necessity of Obama’s trip to Tallinn, or of British defence secretary Philip Hammond’s tough words, in March, that “Russia has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security”. But, on the other hand, the Kremlin knew perfectly well that Nato had to respond. What if it does not take more than that to make Nato look impotent?
If the battle shifts to the “psychosphere”, Nato’s military supremacy is irrelevant – indeed it becomes an achilles heel as the alliance’s very might makes it more unwieldy and more dramatic to subvert. Last winter, I met with Rick Stengel, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, and one of those responsible for formulating the American response to Russia’s ambiguous information operations. Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine, works out of the Washington office from which George Marshall once designed the reconstruction of Europe after the second world war. On weekends he commutes home to New York City, where I met him at his local coffee shop on the Upper West Side.
“At Time, my motto was, ‘We explain the world to America, and America to the world,’” Stengel told me. He sees his new job as the application of this philosophy to a larger stage, one where patient storytelling, based on identifiable facts, can still win the day. Since the annexation of Crimea, Stengel’s team have compiled lists of facts, which it circulates on social media, in an attempt to contradict Kremlin disinformation – like an official US government version of the Ukrainian StopFake website. Stengel calls it “a reality check to the Kremlin line”.
His attentions are not confined to Russia: the State Department has also launched a Twitter campaign against the Islamic State, called “Think Again Turn Away”, which aims to deliver “some truths about terrorism” in order to discourage recruits from joining Isis. (Given Isis’s high recruitment rate, it is not entirely clear that this is meeting with much success.) It is an approach steeped in the premises of liberal journalism: if Stengel presents better arguments and stronger evidence, he believes he should win the debate.
* * *
At the time that I met Stengel in November, posters for RT – Russia’s state-run international news channel – were plastered all over Manhattan. RT America, which began broadcasting in 2010, had launched an advertising campaign promising an alternative view to the American mainstream media. “Before I was sworn in, I had never watched RT,” Stengel told me. The channel is funded by the Kremlin, with an estimated budget of $230m per year, and services in English, German, Spanish and Arabic. RT claims to have a “global reach” of 700 million people, and says its video clips have received over 2bn views online, making it “YouTube’s leading news provider”.
The mantra of Margarita Simonyan, who heads RT, is: “There is no such thing as objective reporting.” This may be true, but RT’s mission is to push the truism to its breaking point. At a time when many in the west have lost faith in the integrity and authority of mainstream media organisations, RT seems dedicated to the proposition that after the notion of objectivity has evaporated, all stories are equally true. In America, where polls show that trust in the media has never recovered to levels seen before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, RT’s posters showed George W Bush celebrating “Mission Accomplished” – with the tag line: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion.” It was hard not to nod in agreement with the message.
The posters, however, do not offer any argument for trusting Putin’s TV network; their main message is that you cannot trust the western media. It is all too easy to show that RT’s coverage is rife with conspiracy theories and risible fabrications: one programme showed fake documents intended to prove that the US was guiding the Ukrainian government to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers from western Ukraine. Another RT report investigated whether the CIA had invented Ebola to use as a weapon against developing nations. Presenters rarely challenge the views of “experts” during discussions of subjects such as the Syria conflict – where Moscow has backed President Bashar al-Assad. One regular guest has suggested that the Syrian civil war was “planned in 1997 by Paul Wolfowitz”, while another has described the death toll as “a joint production of CIA, MI6, Mossad”.
The foibles of RT have been well-documented, not least by StopFake, but journalistic credibility does not seem to be what the network is striving for. If a commitment to the impossibility of objective reporting means that any position, however bizarre, is no better or worse than any other, the ultimate effect, which may be the intended one, is to suggest that all media organisations are equally untrustworthy – and to elevate any journalistic errors by the BBC or New York Times into indisputable signs they are lackeys of their own governments.
The conspiratorial flights of fancy that fill up RT’s airtime are reminiscent of “active measures”, the old-school KGB psy?ops tactics that the Soviet defector Oleg Kalugin described as “the heart and soul of the intelligence services”. Departments dedicated to active measures did not seek to collect intelligence. Their aim, said Kalugin, was “subversion: to drive wedges in the western community, particularly Nato, and weaken the United States”. A favourite tactic was to place fake stories, “dezinformatsiya”, in international news outlets. One story from the early 1980s presented painstakingly concocted medical proof that the CIA invented Aids to kill off the African-American population.
Once the KGB would have spent months planting well-made forgeries. The new disinformation is cheap, crass and quick
Where once the KGB would have spent months, or years, carefully planting well-made forgeries through covert agents in the west, the new dezinformatsiya is cheap, crass and quick: created in a few seconds and thrown online. The aim seems less to establish alternative truths than to spread confusion about the status of truth. In a similar vein, the aim of the professional pro-Putin online trolls who haunt website comment sections is to make any constructive conversation impossible. As Shaun Walker recently reported in this newspaper, at one “troll factory” in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories – for instance, that Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan were fed tea laced with drugs, which led them to overthrow the (pro-Moscow) government.
Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic sabotage of the infrastructure of reason: if the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to listen.
* * *
The mindset that the Kremlin’s information warfare seems intended to encourage is well-suited to European citizens at this particular moment. In a recent paper called “The Conspiratorial Mindset in an Age of Transition”, which looked at the proliferation of conspiracy theories in France, Hungary and Slovakia, a team of researchers from European thinktanks concluded that the “current period of transition in Europe has resulted in increased uncertainty about collective identities and a perceived loss of control. These are in turn the ideal conditions for the proliferation of conspiracy.” Conspiratorial inclinations are especially rife among supporters of rightwing nationalist and populist parties, such as the Front National in France or Jobbik in Hungary – which support, and are supported by, Moscow. (Marine Le Pen admitted in November that the FN had taken a €9m loan from a Moscow bank owned by a pro-Kremlin businessman; she insists that the deal had nothing to do with her support of Putin’s annexation of Crimea.) Some 20% of the members of the European parliament now belong to parties – largely on the far right – sympathetic to Moscow.
The significance of these parties has grown in tandem with the decline of trust in national governments. At moments of financial and geopolitical uncertainty, people turn to outlandish theories to explain crises. Was this the “invisible radiation” that the Russian information-psychological war encyclopedia had referred to? Once the idea of rational discourse has been undermined, spectacle is all that remains. The side that tells better stories, and does so more aggressively – unencumbered by scrupulousness about their verifiability – will edge out someone trying to methodically “prove” a fact.
Whatever else might be said of the Kremlin’s information strategy, it is undoubtedly in tune with the zeitgeist: one that is also visible in America and Britain, where what Stephen Colbert memorably called “truthiness” can run roughshod over fact-based discourse.
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“There are two possible approaches to information war,” the encyclopedia states. The first approach “recognises the primacy of objects in the real world” and attempts to spin them in a favourable or unfavourable direction. The “more strategic” approach, it continues, “puts information before objects”. In other words, the encyclopedia seems to be saying that reality can be reinvented.
Russia is hardly alone in its exploration of these methods. In Asia, China has deployed a potent mix of psychological and legal warfare to strengthen its claims to hegemony over the South China Sea. A 2013 report called “China: The Three Warfares”, prepared for the Pentagon by a group of scholars led by Cambridge University’s Stefan Halper, describes the Chinese response to a standoff with the Philippines over a disputed shoal claimed by both countries, which involved economic sanctions, psychological intimidation (in the form of military ships sailing into Filipino waters) and a media campaign depicting Manila’s behaviour as dangerously “radical”. “Twenty-first-century warfare is guided by a new and vital dimension,” writes Halper, “namely the belief that whose story wins may be more important than whose army wins.”
“Journalists are taught to report both sides,” Stengel told me with frustration. “When the Kremlin says there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea they have to repeat it. How do you combat someone who just makes stuff up?”
Maybe it was the jet lag, or the way darkness descends so suddenly over Manhattan in midwinter, but as I walked away from my meeting with Stengel, I couldn’t help contemplating a vision of a future inundated by disinformation, where no argument could ever be won and no view had more authority than any other. But almost immediately, I caught myself: what if fears like mine were part of the game? In information-psychological war there are no clear victories, no flags to be planted and borders to be redrawn, only endless mind games in the “psychosphere”, where victory might be the opposite of what you initially supposed. Is the purpose of RT, for example, to spread news, conspiracies and opinions? Or is its purpose to project an impression of Russian strength and confidence – which means that talking constantly about its brazen attitude only augments that perception?
I began to wonder whether the very idea of information-psychological war – with its suggestion that Russia had discovered a shadowy weapon for which the west has no answer – was itself a species of information warfare. Perhaps the encyclopedia, and talk of “invisible radiation” that could override “biological defences”, was simply one more bluff – like the fake nuclear weapons that were paraded through Red Square in order to lead overeager western analysts down a hall of mirrors. And if this was simply a 21st-century update of that classic example of “reflexive control”, inducing your enemy to do what you want him to – then, I wondered, was this essay, the one you are reading, part of the plan?
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
Peter Pomerantsev is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
• This article was amended on 9 April 2015 to fix a typo: the earlier version referred to 1915 where 1917 was meant.
• This article was amended on 10 April 2015 to clarify that RT America launched in 2010 and to correct an error: RT does not broadcast in Serbian.
Pomaren also went to US where he gave a presentation in usa funded institutions how to organize color rwvolutions in Russia .
For propaganda to be effective, it should be short and to the point.
He gets paid by the word. I am waiting for him to change his avatar to the JIDF or NCS.
Element brings arguments and quotes facts. If this is the hallmark of a paid shill, then please let's have more of them, instead of the lavatory graffiti artists
Just note the concern level about the truthiness of the 4thstooge link above ... as in nil ... as the russian sacred-(mad)-cows must remain inviolate ...
Element, I have to admit that I like 4thstooge. Yes, he does look like part of a team. But if so, then they use that account for the best part of the team effort
sometimes I just have to admire a good effort! but I also have a few barbs in store for him, next time he shows up
I like him too, but his fascination with the russian govt mystique is beyond the pale for me, I question where the hell his head's at (as did his Sino roadside bum-anarchy banter buddy).
Criticizing other's fascination with the russian govt mystique but thne bringing this
Rick Stengel, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy [...]
“Journalists are taught to report both sides,” Stengel told me with frustration. “When the Kremlin says there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea they have to repeat it. How do you combat someone who just makes stuff up?”
The last line of defense: If you have nothing to argue in favor of your position, simply accuse the opponent of what you're doing! Also known as "The Big Lie" diversionary tactic.
Thanks for the good laugh!
"Yes, he does look like part of a team."
You would know.
what happened to you?
as in ?
other also state facts its you who dont want to listen to them . The argument he quoted about Pomanrev is factual for you but did he also stated the same guy went to usa funded event to present how color revolutions can be carried out in Russia . The same guy has no major support from locals but you cming from usa satellite nations show more belief . Thats why you can never actually understand the situation . Quoting 5th columns and their writings is the hallmark ? If we had such moles in australia and england going to other nations explaining how color revolutions can be carried out would be a great fun . Empire apologists that aint intelligent criticism .
oh, Max Steel. the gentleman that recently called me a "EU & ECB apologist on roll", and which I suspect holds a grudge because I talked about half a million Maidan protesters (I meant in total, btw)
just one question: do Ukrainians have the right to ask for the existence of an Ukrainian Nation or are they misguided nationalists which should cease to do so?
So good that the EU is so concerned about Ukraine and that the Dutch investigation of MH017 is so quick and transparent. Should your premise also apply to Palestine and International law regarding "conservatorship" over occupied territories, or are you only in favour of US propogandised positions?
philipat, I prefer my positions to anything else
in regard to Palestine, I applaud Sweden for it's recognition. in regard to that thing currently called "Internationa Law"... I'm not that fond of it. imo it's not even working as designed
Yes, International law can be quite inconvenient when it comes to issues such as Iraq or Palestine can't it? The priciple of self-determination under International law is proving quite inconvenient also. Of course, some self-proclaimed exceptional countires have never seen any need to recognise International law, so I assume the EU is following the same logic?
And there are those countries in Europe, for which you have a distaste, that also believe that EU law is an unacceptable transgression of national sovereignty which is, of course, entirely consistent with the larger EU Agenda.
I must assume that you are not a lawyer by the inconsistency of your arguements although your skill at obfuscation perhaps suggests otherwise?
@Elemental
It is a common coutesy to post a link instead of hogging the thread with a 2 mile long commentary, especially when not original content. Just FYI.....
Given the post's topic and title, and the comment which I replied to, I see nothing at all wrong with placing it online in that way as erudite counter to the usual warped russian fanboy-ism.
Brace yourself, there's a fair possibility of a repeat, at a later date, as reality-check on the Russian propensity for gratuitous adhoc reality reconstructions.
Just remember, this is why everyone pays taxes so these out of touch low life scumbag elitists can debate about whose propaganda is more believable, your hard earned tax dollars at work. USA,USA.
The elite scumbags fear what Jesus Christ foretold:"Therefore do not fear them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. "What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light; and what you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops." Matthew 10:26.27
Shining the light on these cockroaches is one of the things they fear most.
So true Seek-Truth
I see this as sociological change worldwide.
As the crisis reaches its apex, great change comes.
A few examples:
http://www.firstpersonpolitics.com/boom-goes-the-government/
"pragmatic Gen X leaders on the left and center will be forced to reckon with a Republican Party eager to take America to the brink of catastrophe — and beyond."
http://www.firstpersonpolitics.com/why-millennials-wont-fix-washington-a...
We will be looking back, unlike O, when our time comes Xrs.
The criminals create their own destiny, not us.
Truth stands on its own and needs only to be revealed, lies need to be constantly fed and maintenanced. The State spends billions on feed and mechanics.
It's a war on goyim/gentiles. BTW, that "left gatekeeper" Chomsky has been mumbling about the "US Propaganda Machine" for all his life long and managed not to mention ZOG a single time: http://www.911conspiracy.tv/Noam_Chomsky_vs_Barrie_Zwicker.html
I wouldn't have believed the Jewish Internet Defense Force actually existed until a couple scripts barfed up their remote clipboards for everyone to read. Same goes for the National Clandestine Services (CIA). These dirtbags are real, but not so fabulous. It actually gets easier to identify them when you are able to identify their goals and tactics.
Fucking democrats, remember freedom?
Freedom is just one of those inspirational notions that is dared not actually ever practiced due to the danger it represents in reality. Like the free market is is often referred to as an ideal, but NEVER actually pursued.
We will only see freedom in small doses, more as a garnishment on the plate of putrid offerings, not meant to be eaten, only admired for it appearances.
Freedom, that loved and hated word, represents the opportunity for individuals to realize that they really don't need their overlords, that they are capable of feeding and defending themselves.
And that my friends, is the single greatest subversive threat in existence. It WILL NOT be tolerated. So the closer we get to the truth and the more plainly spoken it becomes, the more danger will live in, for our every breath is a threat...that must be crushed....and that can only happen with the full complicity of the press.
Nice.
Freedom is wax fruit and glass flowers.
No snark intended, it is good to work towards ideals.
Much better than working towards sewage
http://hmnh.harvard.edu/glass-flowers
Fucking democrats, remember freedom?
Chairman Royce is a Republican from (wait for it) "Fuck you up" Fullerton, CA... former home of Kelly Thomas. USA! USA! USA!
The ditto heads instantly forget anything that questions their own personal identity politics. An uncanny ability shared by the far left and feminists. Way more ditto here at ZH than leftists
Thank you to sites like ZH, Henry Makow, JimStone, Jon Rappoport,
FellowshipoftheMind, Veterans Today, Vigilant Citizen and others that fellow ZHeds follow and have favourites of...
Smoking Mirrors is one of the top in my opinion.
Capt Obvious:
Well; yea. They are. What'd you expect?
too funny.....watta bunch of scum
Deranged is as deranged does
No wonder our Congress has such miserable approval rates...
We all know that CONgress are the real criminals! Failing to do the people's bidding by selling themselves to the highest corporate bidders.
A hearty FUCK YOU to them! Throw them all out!! Start fresh.
A hearty FUCK YOU to them! Hang them all on a tree!! Start fresh.
FIFY
Half of them work for the Israeli Government. No wonder they come out with this nonsense.
Apparently, CONgress believes their low approval ratings are caused by Russian propaganda.
"[...] people that are just trying to make a name for themselves [...] that have absolutely no accountability for the truth, that are able to rile up a mass amount of people [...]"
Job description for a politician.
Lately it seems we're so far down the rabbit hole...hell, I can't even think of a good analogy.
You mean like it depends what the definition of is is?
Punchline to an old, long Russian joke about always having two choices: When the devil eats you there's only one way out.
They are NOT deranged; they know EXACTLY what they are doing, and are being paid remarkably generously to "do as they are told".
Their plan is to survive whatever is coming, and survive very comfortably. As to whether this plan will eventuate, no-one knows for certain (not even them).
Most bloggers are anonymous.
On blogging: There certainly isn't any money in it. If I could wake up a dozen people from zombie slumber that would be a real crowning achievement. I do it because I still have a soul.
"...They can take our lives, but they can never take our tinfoil..."
lol
Remarking that the Internet provided a platform for “fringe voices and extremists,” Wahl characterized people who challenge establishment narratives as a “cult”.
Gotta’ love it.
Classic Fascist M.O.
I will give up my conspiracy theories when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers!
"Whatever, FEMA detainee. Now please... step into the oven. Stop struggling, fucker! You are disobeying an order by a federal law enforcement officer. I WILL taze you if you do not comply with my lawful order. Obey NOW and STEP INTO THE OVEN! "
Sad how many did just that without the forceful admonition. Those who don't learn from history end up as hamburger.
Miffed
I'm finding myself thinking, these days, that it is those who do "learn" from "history" like this that will end up in the ovens Miffed.
did I forget to mention
fuck the NSA
Just keep this in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiQoq-wqZxg
We love our domesticated animals....and usually eat them. We lament at their Inhumane treatment as we set down to a tasty burger or a plate of pulled pork.
Yet we fail to see ourselves as domesticated, castrated to ensure we consume amply and manage to get along, placated with piped in porn to ease our troubled minds. We remain largely peaceful, to maintain our ever so important "harmony" that makes us easy to manage and predictable to "utilize".
Who is better off, the free range bird, or the chicken in the pen? We know which one tastes better...
I often wonder if Pharrell's tune 'Happy' or Macklemore's 'Same Love' were not sponsored by some government mind controllers. 'Happy' is 4/4 time, 160 bpm. A good study might confirm this is the best way to mind-worm a message . . . if one soporifically repeats a few words like 'Because I'm happy.'
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2015/04/14/man-volunteers-for-world-first-...
There was a program about this dude on RT.
Point taken and I find myself sadly agreeing. What's worse is we have the majority in numbers as was true in the concentration camps. There were uprisings but they were quickly quelled and all killed. Is this our fate? It's hard to draw conclusions but there are a lot of pliant people today and I can't imagine too many brave heroic acts coming from that front.
Miffed
It is heartbreaking when I attempt to broach some of the critical topics oft discussed on ZH with some of my closest friends and I get a glass eyed stare. No one really cares until it hits home and is too late.
Same here. I have a 'friend' on fb that posts anti abortion pictures every week, yet glorifies the military every chance she takes. Can't figure it out.
You guys need to get some new friends.
oh yeah here we go with the old "Evil Nazi" ovens meme , de-bunked long ago, disappointed in you Miffed , thought you were smarter than to buy into that ancient victors lie to cover their own attrocities and blatent war-mongering on behalf of their chosen banker owners
Actually, I was only posting in reference to authority and the oppression of the masses in terms of psychological and physical intimidations. The "Oven" was a metaphorical device in this instance, not to be inferred as my personal opinion as to who committed atrocities on certain persons in history. Please take it as such. One must always look at the bigger picture and not just the evidence presented on a platter.
Miffed
"...The "Oven" was a metaphorical device in this instance..."
And fully intended as such in my post. Thank you, Miffed.
I took that as such. ;-)
Sometimes I find it frustrating that this form of communication can lead to misunderstanding so easily. I have mischaracterized people here myself and this has taught me to hesitate before an impulsive thoughtless response.
I wish I had learned this earlier in my life. I may not have lost so many jobs.
Miffed;-)
You too?? ;-))
"Stick with the masses and you'll be all right" - unfortunately not always the case, and we have all found that "Society abhors the Free-Thinker" (just like Nature abhors a vacuum!)
Problematically with that, the alternate or radical alleged 'thinker' (i.e. apathetic followers) and knowers-of-the-truth cohort (people who actually have no clue at all), are for the most part 99.999% gullible paranoid feckless fools sprouting deranged completely fabricated drivel and who could not assess evidence (let alone understand what evidence even is) to think clearly long enough to save themselves from their own feeble mental backwardation.
Either way you turn, online or offline, you're facing a swamp of shit-gargling fools (inclusive of all mirrors).
Impedance matching, Miffed - people tend to have a fixed resistance. As a variable resistor, you must match the value on the other side.
Also, you can always lead someone to an answer. It's up to them to add two and two. People learn best when coming to [correct] conclusions themselves.
"Sometimes I find it frustrating that this form of communication can lead to misunderstanding so easily."
That's what focusing on the content does to you.
In relation to the formal effects, the content of the internet is relatively meaningless. The confusion you experience is a symptom of your failure to understand the formal effects.
This is best understood in terms of the previous medium, Television. Television alters the way the brain perceives information and makes us more open to suggestion. That's one effect. Another is that it limits our movement in time and space. You have to be sitting in your living room to watch it, which enforces a state of inertia. It's fairly obvious that television has a highly dedicated audience that will keep on watching, no matter what content is being shown. The general result is a state of complacent gullibility, punctuated by momentary bizarre effects that reflect the mental damage being done.
Now extend that kind of analysis to the internet and ask yourself, what are its effects? What is it doing to us, not how can we use it to acquire new knowledge, further our objectives, or enhance our self-image. All that stuff is irrelvant now.
We don't think about the air we're breathing - we're not even conscious of breathing unless we specifically focus on it, as in meditation. It's like that. You don't see the formal effects until you go looking for them.
For example:
Is the world hurtling towards imminent doom, or does it just seem that way since we now have a constant barrage of pre-filtered information that leads to that (self-reinforcing) belief? In short, are we unconsciously brainwashing ourselves?
As Mr. Krabs once said to Sponge Bob,
Questions are a danger to you and a burden to others.
But we don't advance unless we ask them.
No other choice.
Or is there?
Sorry, Miffed. I think you're wonderful but you might want to dig a little deeper into the conventional narrative. Or, given that this post i another shot over the bow to bloggers, perhaps not.
Nobody stepped into an oven, corpses were burned.
Who, what, why, how many, where? The victor pretty much writes the history and deatroys incriminating evidence.
It's nothing new, it's the human nature of guilty avoiding sunlight.
As of late, I find that mostly I prefer the company of my own bacteria to human contact.
The fact that this is coming on the heels of Net Neutrality is just a coincidence. Move along now.
Holy crap bro...I thought you got captured! Good to see ya!
Thanks, chunga. I was just experiencing doom fatigue...but I couldn't stay away.
Sometimes we all need a little break to refresh oursleves.
I'm glad you're back.
We need to throw everything everything we've got at 'em.
Pies, meat, rocks, used cat litter, flaming goodyear radials, impovised devices made with cans of bug-spray and WD-40: any goddamned thing we can grab that will do damage...
-Preferably permanant irreperable damage.
Hammer on!
I've been thinking a lot about pulling the plug on internet. Something about gazing into the abyss long enough and it gazes into you.
Something's coming I just have a feeling...
I unplugged everything - talk-radio, blogs, social media - everything...for a few months and cleared my head. I highly recommend the occassional mental purging.
But, I agree with you chunga, my boy...something is coming and I'm glad I rested up.
These fine technocratic "public servants" would never use the power of the state against us!
Now would they? ;-)
I think " Public servant" should be taken in the " To Serve Man" context here.
It's in the small details and subtle nuance where the truth lives. Then at some point when the corral door closes, they no longer make an effort.
Miffed
It's all in the sauce...
Idgy, that you?
"We must kill this Gutenberg guy."
"It's too late for that, Your Majesty."
I love all the derogatory terms the media likes to throw on people too like "birther" and "truther." You know what the opposite of a truther is? A liar.
But will the Liberal media go "birther" against Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz?
Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
Some say no, because Libs don't wish to recall Obama's Unconstitutional
birth and cover-up.
Or maybe the NWO wishes to continue to destroy the Constitution
and US sovereignty.
For the last 7 months, people calling for ethics reform in media under the twitter hashtag #GamerGate have been vilified, called rapists/murderers/racists/sexists AND terrorists for daring to suggest that reporters declare conflicts of interest such as living with the subject of your news article.
CNN/BBC/CBS/CBC have all run reports taking the corrupt journalist's side, pushing a false narrative that demands for ethics are actually a sexist conspiracy.
Its so hard to believe that they would protect their own.
Its what people do, and until we can recognize and accept that as an eternal reality, we will continue to empower people over us who will continue to fuck us in the ass, in front of a mirror so we can all watch, because they can...and because we let them.
Think about that. People oppress us because we willingly empower them to do so. As with every abused wife, none were captured, lured into a dark room and locked in. They willingly and typically gradually allowed themselves to be dominated and ultimately abused. The kicker is how many actually believe they deserve the abuse. It is a psychology that is not isolated to spouses.
+1000 for GamerGaters. I'm not one - just a curious delighted onlooker mesmerized by the sight of another little patch of critical thinking human beings that sprang up like mushrooms. There is a rather refreshing torrent of arguments - some fairly profound - that have taken place about the issue absolutely excoriating MSM reporters, bias, conflict-of-interests and political correctness.
The bits of the debate I manage to read about give me solid hope that humanity isn't entirely doomed. I don't care if GamerGaters understand when or why the Reichstag was burned to the ground or what it meant for humanity - they fundamentally understand what is happening today and seem to be rather passionate about the issues. Otherwise, this:
BBC would,nt like to have to declare which children they are fucking and sharing with politicians. That would conflict with their unbiased reporting like "oh look building 7 has fallen down .....er , well it will do soon we,re sure , er ..I wonder how that happened ?, ...er ..a burning desk ! yes thats it , someones desk caught fire !"
She is looking for a job at CNN. Where they don't put out propaganda just plain disinformation.
fuck it, it is a cult
and we worship a strange and foreign god
called the truth
The government has the advantage that it can change definitions to suit its own needs to further its agenda. Essentially just to further its scope of power and control of others. In science, there is more respect for standards and definitions unless empirical evidence deems it proper for adjustment. It must be so freeing to be so uninhibited.
Miffed
indeed
it now doubly depends on the definition of IS IS.
"Let's not forget -- as reported here many times to the credit of ZH -- that the very term "conspiracy theorist" was coined by the CIA as a means of undermining anyone who would question the government."
Lance Dehaven-Smith calls it "The 'Conspiracy Theory' Conspiracy"
Well documented in his recommended book: Conspiracy Theory in America
It was indeed 'coined' by the CIA originally to discredit ANY investigations into the JFK assassination in the 60s; and subsequent 'accidental' death occurences of witnesses that occurred afterwards. It has stuck ever since and is a popular tool to blanket label people simply asking questions.
Soon all history books will be rewritten to cross out 'conspiracy.' Julius Caesar stabbed himself; it wasn't a conspiracy at all! I jest; but the way I see it - a conspiracy is something 2 or more people get away with. A crime is when they get caught. And only hundreds or thousands of years later do people learn the truth of the 2 or more that got away with it.
Excellent as always Rand! Many +'s!