by Oui
Sat Apr 22nd, 2023 at 05:36:00 PM EST
….. and losing tens of thousands on the battlefield.
How to convince and manipulate public opinion in the Western world. It has become clear this is NATO's war pushed by western media, a stringent censorship in place to keep everyone on the same page.
How to beat the odds and push for war in a modern tech world. The effect of social media and the crucial role played by Big Tech from California was illustrated in the uprisings and regime change under the Obama administration in 2011. It has remained an effective narrative to this day as it falsified history in the minds and memories of the NATO supportive countries.
Crafting a winning narrative during modern war | Arizona State University - March 25, 2022 |
Center on the Future of War professor says Ukraine has mastered the art of online propaganda and is beating Russia at its own game
Q: Your recent piece in Politico spells out how Ukraine has won the hearts and minds of everyone around the world through an effective social media campaign because "big ideas get out and win wars." Can you expound on that?
A: In modern war and politics, the information space is one of the most crucial parts of the battlefield. This is not about mere propaganda. If your ideas get out and win out, that determines everything from whether soldiers, civilians and onlookers around the world will join your cause ....
Information wars: the fine art of mass manipulation in the digital age (May 1, 2017)
"Globalization begins to consume itself"
A long period of attention on this topic has been covered by me, as most news in the Western world is far from objective. Western "democracies" are following a narrative of war, not peace, and at the same time silencing critical voices.
IMO the military power of the West led by the U.S., is between seven and ten-fold advanced over its nearest competitor. So too. the lead of hybrid warfare is quite similar as the Internet and Big Tech owns most in the digital cyberspace. Accusing other states is part of an aggressive stance, but should be seen with the necessary grains of salt.
Statecraft, Manipulation and Propaganda Is an Art with Actors
Have we forgotten George Bush, Tony Blair and the shortcomings in manipulation and propaganda?
The extent of the vulnerability of an "open society" to manipulation and propaganda seems to have been realised by George Soros only very recently. In the book Suskind says he came to wonder how it was possible for Orwellian propaganda techniques to be successful in a relatively open society without the need for the totalitarian repressive apparatus that Orwell imagined in 1984. [Source: Migeru in 2008]
George Bush, democratization and "reality-based community"
by Oui @BooMan on June 21, 2014 |
As Iraq was unravelling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002. At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with "a senior advisor" to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove). Here's how he described part of their conversation:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors .... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement. The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed "history's actors." They did create "new realities" and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to "study" what they did.
George W. Bush's Crusade and American Fundamentalism
More below the fold ...
Q: You also state in the piece that Ukraine had a "pre-bunk" Russia narrative that helped them win the side of NATO nations. How did they do this?
A: In the past, Russia drove the conversation, initiating operations at the time and storyline of its choosing. Its messaging struck at audiences with no pushback, and its physical operations were often aligned with pre-planned incidents and fake provocations used to justify Russian military action, as well as confuse both local and international observers about what exactly was happening.
In the 2014 attack on Ukraine that presaged this current war, for example, Russia pushed out made-up stories of various atrocities, such as Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a 3-year-old boy. Such viral lies were used both to stoke anger among Russian-speaking citizens and then to justify Russia's intervention to seize Crimea and create the separatist Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.
Fact: OSCE-SMM observers monitored an exponential increase in artillery fire from the Ukrainian forces besieging Donetsk and Luhansk from mid-Februari 2022. The British and American colleagues had abandoned their positions days earlier.
Unprovoked attack?
Ukraine started artillery fire along the complete line of contact from Mariupol, through Donetsk to Luhansk with the intention to reconquer its territory. Had the support from Joe Biden and NATO allies as the preparation and training within the alliance started before and after the February 2014 coup d'état. Only later Western partners in Minsk Agreements admitted that it was a farce. Intended to buy time to build-up NATO Forces on the Eastern Front]
This time, Russia's adversaries didn't just try to debunk its claims after the fact -- which usually doesn't work -- but had a strategy to "pre-bunk" Russia. A multifaceted network built through both deliberate planning and informal coordination -- which included Ukrainian government agencies' and individual leaders' social media accounts; the accounts of agencies and leaders from NATO states, especially the Baltics and the Brits; and a multi-agency effort within the Biden administration, bringing together the Pentagon, State Department and Intelligence Community, and was bolstered by a broad online coalition of democracy activists and OSINT (open-source intelligence) trackers who also weighed in to pre-empt the Russians -- got ahead of Putin's goal to justify his long-planned invasion as an emergency response to supposed Ukrainian offenses and atrocities.
Instead, this coalition meticulously documented and ensured awareness of Russia's actual months long build-up of forces. They did so in both formal ways, such as placing into public view satellite photos of huge Russian military deployments, as well as in personal ways, such as up-close snapshots of literal trainloads of Russian tanks [Source: Joseph Trevithick] amassing near the border. Both were eye-grabbing in their own manner, showing the scale and the detail of the Russian plans.
Tensions have been increasing between Moscow and the West over the past several months, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has bristled at fresh talk of Ukraine and Georgia possibly joining NATO, and as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited both countries in October.
While in Kyiv, Austin was asked about Ukraine's bid to join NATO. He stopped short of an endorsement, but said Ukraine "has a right to decide its own future foreign policy," and the U.S. will "continue to do everything we can to support Ukraine's efforts to develop the capability to defend itself," he added.
Q: How effective is using heroism in the face of Russia's evil intentions in terms of winning over the media?
A: Through stories like the #GhostOfKiev, Ukraine was able to push forward a messaging of its Davids standing up to the Russian Goliath. This is important in not just galvanizing their own population and soldiers, to emulate those heroes, but also in its messaging to the outside world, to induce them to pick a side -- and people line up behind David, not Goliath -- and then join in to support.
Q: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to have done an excellent job in terms of creating an iconic image of himself as a leader willing to fight in the streets with his soldiers, giving him a Winston Churchill-like status. How would you rate him in terms in getting his message across?
A: Masterful. A new model that, just like Churchill, other leaders will be seeking to emulate for years to come. The former performer has done so with acts of personal bravery and deft use of messaging. A key has been how he has played simultaneously to multiple audiences. One is the Ukrainian people and soldiers, with Zelenskyy providing the all too rare example of a leader who is right there with them, sharing the very same risks, literally, in the streets and trenches.
The selfies of the youthful Zelenskyy in the field also stand in stark messaging contrast to the elderly Putin in his cold palace, literally distanced from even his own advisers by absurdly long tables. Yet, Zelenskyy's "man of the people" messaging is also important to Ukraine's essential strategic need to influence the audience of the West and its leaders. When he responded with pithy, meme-able remarks like "I need ammunition, not a ride" to American offers to evacuate him from Kyiv at the start of the war, or clapped back on Twitter at Italian leaders, he was hitting both emotive and political needs. Again, every act in a #LikeWar is about connecting the online show to a real-world goal.
Zelenskyy demonstrating that that he was personally in the fight was the best way for him to accelerate the aid that Ukraine needed to stay in the fight.
MofA article on OSCE facts
Work in progress ...
Just a few weeks earlier, abusive tone set by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and new German Green party FM Annalena Baerbock ... renouncing any steps into a form of diplomacy or talks.
US-UK Pulling out of Ukraine
Whiff of Munich In the Air
by Oui Sun Feb 13th, 2022
Damn irresponsible fools at the controls of war and devastation ... freedom of Europe at stake. Do not expect any rational leadership out of Washington DC. Mainland Europe should take a long lead what has happened to American democracy after the 9/11 attacks.
Where are the mass protests?
“In the coming hours, President Volodymyr Zelensky will discuss the security situation and current diplomatic efforts to de-escalate with US President Joe Biden,” the Ukrainian leader’s press secretary Sergiy Nikiforov says on Facebook.
A flurry of telephone conversations erupted …
Briefing by Aide to the President, Yury Ushakov, following a telephone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Joseph Biden | Feb. 12, 2022 |
UK minister likens Russia-Ukraine to WWII appeasement: ’Whiff of Munich in the air' | TOI – Feb.11, 2022 |
British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has compared Western diplomatic efforts to head off a Russian invasion of Ukraine to the appeasement of Nazi Germany ahead of World War II.
Wallace told The Sunday Times that Russian President Vladimir Putin could send his massed troops into Ukraine "at any time."
And he suggested unnamed Western countries were not being tough enough with Moscow.
