Whose Streets is an unusual documentary about the riots in Ferguson that followed the death of Mike Brown.
I say unusual because the focus on the surface of what was presented by the activists in the film belies many more interesting areas of exploration. More specifically, while there are clearly many zealots for Black Revolutionary Struggle – no one ever talks about the organization that’s been build or what it does besides protest. Other practical things are ignored as well. We see in the beginning that Brittany quits her job to protest for over 57 days, but how she and her girlfriend-turned-wife-and-partner-in-activism manages to sustain herself and her child are never addressed. As this capacity to financially drop the “real world” at the same time she is complaining about the financial difficulties faced ber her community is unusual and – in my view – merits explanation.
Throughout the film queer black communists give interviews to the camera, yet while we learn their resentful views regarding the police, how burning a building is a “strategic act” that is “revolution – we learn nothing about the organization, guiding mission or the other projects and activities that unites them.
Looking at the website of the Organization for Black Struggle, which has existed since 1980, it seems that they are Pan-Africanist Marxists with connections to CAIR that occasionally engage in electoral politics – but not much else.
Since I studied Marxism with Vivek Chibber, Bertell Ollman, and Slavoj Zizek during my Master’s studies at NYU I kept hoping for something substantive to be raised – however it never was. Instead all I heard were avant-guardist platitudes aimed at justifying their illegalist positions and strained relations with the larger community.
Another example of things that made the tone of the film now sit right with me was when one of the Ferguson participants holds up artifacts left in the street by riot police, such as the shells from rubber bullets, he holds up a spent cannister of tear gas and explains how the police’s use of this to dispurse crowds is illegal. He says, with clear animosity in his voice, that these are only supposed to be used in times of war. This is incorrect, and in fact the opposite of what’s true. Tear gas is considered forbidden in war conditions and legal to use on civilians. are doing in the streets is illegal.
That Tef Poe tweeted something to the same effect, considering his close relationship with TeleSUR, qualifies as Orwellian Irony.
To his credit Tef Poe was a good MC for the riots. Hearing him speak in this context was much more enjoyable than when I’ve made the effort to listen to his music. When I heard him say the phrase “this ain’t yo daddy’s civil rights movement” to a large assemblage of people, I couldn’t help but crack up laughing. I remembered that Layla Brown-Vincent described exactly this scene in her thesisWe Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela , but I never expected to actually see it.
Unrelated to my comments on the film, I just wanted to say that The Boondocks was an incredibly witty and insightful television series and that I didn’t realize that there was also a collected book of newspaper comics by the same person that wrote for the series.
The Frantz Fanon quote and the shot of books is meant to, presumably, depict wokeness – but if you actually pause the film and look at what’s there – it appearent that what’s there is not all that deep. I should know, I’ve read about half of the non-fiction books she shown there.
At the beginning of the “organic protests” following Michael Brown’s death – far left – it’s already appearent that members of the Revolutionary Communist Party‘s Chicago chapter are present. Assata’s Daughter, another revolutionary communist group, frequently appears in the film. Worth mentioning is that the drive time from Chicago to St. Louis is four a half hours and, having reviewed the time lines of other communist activist groups, I know that immediately following the death of Michael Brown other groups from New York and Minneapolis also went there – as well those from other locales. Considering that it’s well documented in the public statements of police officers that the area was swarming with foreign agitators even from the beginning – it’s notable that this fact isn’t included within the film. Instead a number of individual residents are depicted disconnected from riots saying that they live there.
The statements captured on film by Bassem Masri, a Palestinian born St. Louis transplant that those around him characterized as an agressive drug addict and who died of a fentanyl overdose not long after the Ferguson riots, are vastly different in tone from the threatening chants towards the police in the videos he uploaded to YouTube during these events. His characterization of Ferguson as being equivalent to Palestine is, of course, categorically absurd.
I learned through research after watching the film that the name of the organization that Brittany Ferrell founded was Millenial Activists United, which may or may not be an intentional allusion to the Mau Mau.
The scenes wherein she leads a group of protestors to shut down a highway intersections was, well, bizarre.
I clipped the middle image as it’s at the point in which she leads a call and response chant that quotes Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
The last image, is a screen shot of her arrest report. Brittany Ferrell’s incredulous response to reading aloud the officer’s description of the scene which the viewed of the film has just scene is bizarre. We’ve just seen her do everything that’s been described in the report – and yet she claims that’s not what happened at all.
Unsurprisingly, given Danny Glover’s penchant for support for pan-Africanist and revolutionary activists – there is a picture of him with Brittney on her Twitter.
Given all of the above people’s passionate misunderstandings of law, their intentional and unnecessary provocations toward police, and their projection onto “the system” of issues that were better suited to being addressed by a more productive form of communal, collective action I found it difficuly to be sympathetic to the riots are the voices of the unheard rhetoric which closes the film.
The citation of the section of the Declaration of Independance stating that people have a right to overthrow the government when it oppresses them at the close of the film seemed to me to be ham-fisted and incongruent with what Whose Streets? just presented – unless the point was to highlight the absurdity of narcissistic angry black lesbian communists’ claims that street protests conceptualized as some significant step in a revolutionary process was the answer to their grievances – especially considering many of them depicted in the film seemed so trivial.
Lastly, gotta admit that it wasn’t a big surprise given that Pan-Africanist Revolutionaries were the protagonist of the film when I saw that Nicholas Maduro’s favorite interruptionist organization – Code Pink helped fund this film. I wonder how many other Venezuelan connected/sponsored organizations were there at Ferguson…
Long considered a masterpiece account of early American history and one of the founding works of comparative politics, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is one of those few books that truly lives up to it’s hype. Divided into two parts, de Tocqueville uses his experiences travelling and speaking to numerous persons of high and low standing across the newly born United States to investigate the soil in which the North American soul grows.
After providing some geological, political and geopolitical commentary in the beginning of the work – the reader immediately begins on a panoramic journey across the regions of New England. The focus is primarily on political institutions, their procedures, areas of authority, electoral norms and the various players within government be they parties or individuals seeking to ensure their interests are brought to bear. In his frequently comparisons of these aspects of political life to their French counterparts – America reliably is described as the preferable system.
In his descriptions of the American system of northeastern townships, the powers granted to local governments, the general ideas concerning administration and the salutary social and economic benefits of decentralization – de Tocqueville gives an paean to American political innovation with only occasional interspersions of criticism. The New World’s lack of an historical, hereditary Aristocracy provided space for meritocracy to grow. The best representatives of this class? Hard-working Protestant settlers willing to brave the frontiers to establish plantations and the merchants who’d live exceptionally frugally just so that they’d be able to undercut the British by a mere 1% on costs. While not blind to the reality or roles of blacks and indigenous peoples in this new world, he sees little room for their inclusion into the body politic. The latter group defies any attempt at being included within the body politic – understandably so considering the patter of dispossession and war. The former lacks the educational capactities to meaningfully participate. This is not to say that he’s an uncritical supporter of settler colonialism. He states that whites must one day drastically adjust the way they treat slaves, something which will be hard to do as the influence of slavery has penetrated into “the master’s soul and gave a particular turn to his ideas and tastes” (184). And yet he also recognizes that the literacy of Anglo-Saxon culture, along with it’s technological development and drive towards progress as a foundational societal goal are the traits of successful, long-lasting civilizations – meaning that these groups must catch up, not the other way around.
de Tocqueville’s conception of Government is aligned with Aristotlean concepts. The composition of interests by those in it’s institutions are always changing due to external events and this leads Democracies to change into oligarchy, aristocracy, tyranny and extreme democracy – or mob rule. While nationalist figures may want to make the founding covenant of Government sacred, in other words, there are always conflicts which lead to it’s descralization via various forms of corruption.
de Tocqueville frequently invokes the difference between Liberty and Democracy – associated with the new United States – with Absolute Monarchy or Despotism, or pre-Revolutionary France. His thoughts on these matter may lack some of the academic rigor that historians or sociologists of the present would require, there is a dearth of anything approaching something that could be called quantitative analysis – however they are nevertheless insightful as, intuitively, one can see their honesty. Take this, for example:
“Despotism brings men to ruin more by preventing them from producing than by taking away the fruits of their labors, it dries up the fount of wealth while often respecting acquired riches. By liberty engenders a thousandfold more goods than it destroy, and in nations where it is understood, the people’s resources always increase faster than the taxes.” (107).
This tension between liberty understood as Rights to be exercised and tyrrany understood as non-elective obligations to Power pervades de Tocqueiville’s work and is likely what has made him so enjoyed by Americanists.
Elective associations – be it political, economic or religious – that are entered into freely are considered the basis of identity and the means of self-reproduction.
Using taxes as a form of gratifying private needs – such as in the modern context, Medicare for All – is a form of graft that depletes the Virtues required for a democratic system. Democracy requires literacy, education and most of all virtue – for it is by presuming that the people don’t have the capacity to properly manifest their own interests that tyranny by a calculating political class comes to be.
What de Tocqueville means here is the different between equality in opportunity versus equality of outcome.
When resentment is mass-mobilized against prosperity, political stability is lost as the public order turns to an amoral model. If I had more inclination I’d give a number of modern examples as I think his insights into self-interest, virtue and democracy are quite compelling. But instead I’ll say that the active qualities of an individual are lionized as without them they become unable to see how the achieve the welath, power, renown and other rewards of work that they crave.
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Here is a guide for those that wish to read along with the insights of experts.
“What else is communism but the imperialism of the Jews?” – Camil Petrescu, Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet
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A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevismby Paul Hanebrink is considered by Samuel Moyn to be “a new classic in the canon of twentieth century history.” The book examines this particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitic thought that believed Soviet Communism to be a Jewish plot. This notion continues today in a number of ethno-nationalist strains, such as the writings of David Duke, thus as a work of engaged academics – this is a welcome historical work.
In his reconstruction of the transnational European locations in which the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism first developed and describing it’s mutations – Hanebrink provides a truly compelling account of history. Following the Russian revolution of 1917 German, Polish, German, Hungarian, Romanian and British fears of Judeo-Bolshevism were pervasive.
The Bolsheviks themselves were not immune turning their Jewish comrades cultural and religious background against them. In Russia, Czech Republic and elsewhere the Communist Party culled their own or used rumors of Jewishness to destroy careers and reputations. Hanebrink describes several cases wherein Judaism becomes seen as a marker for Cosmopolitanism, which was a code for one that was likely to express disloyalty to the State in thoughts or deeds. The concept used to describe such events are “sovereignty panics” and frequently applied to anyone close to the functions of the government.
Some of the common responses to such conditions were appeals for religious or cultural renewal, the rewriting of laws, as well as the dispossession, expulsion or murder of Jews and a heightened willingness to ally with states – i.e. Germany – that expressed willingness to help combat the Jewish/Communist menace. Hanebrink’s brilliance in this work is by extensive archival research which shows that much of the handwringing over Jews, based as it was an exaggeration of the Jewishness of Communist Party activists, often related to more material interests such as desire for assurances of more territory (Poland) and the illiterate provincial’s resentment of an older, literary culture that considered themselves better equipped to govern a modern state (Hungary). Because of this elasticity and the empirically dubious methodology of identifying Judeo-Bolshevik plots – it functioned as a sort of intellectual contagion…
Immigration, Existential Fears and the Racial Other
Judeo-Bolshevism made Adolph Hitler famous in Germany, while the Nazi party’s weaponization of the idea their success helping to propagate it such that it could fit a variety of contexts helped him internationally. Their literature and the institutions that they sought to spread awareness of this identity and with it a Nationalist hysteria. Old fashioned geopolitics with this identity politics twist became especially dangerous and toxic as the European continent prepared for war.
Once war officially began, nationalist militaries and militias began to turn their hysterical fears into actions they deemed as defensive. Worries over international spy networks, espionage, racial and cultural purity, and fears of wartime food shortages turned this socio-cultural tension into the Holocaust that is well known about, as well as numerous other pogroms and forced exiles. As this was oftentimes done in the peripheral towns, the imperial capitals came to host those forced into exile. “75,000 Jews fled war-torn Galicia for Vienna… Another 25,000 sought shelter in Budapest” and almost all of them – having been forced from their land, homes and occupations with only what they could carry were marked by the bitterest poverty, trauma and desolation (55). The situation created by these reproduced what it was that criticism of this minority feared – a desperate mass of a racially “othered” people that was agitating for significant change.
Personal Reflection on the Book
Over a decade ago my father and I travelled to the village in what is now Ukraine where much of my paternal family were killed in anti-Jewish pogroms before and during World War II. The Synagogue in this small village has stayed in a ruinous state since it was firebombed. The burial grounds adjacent to it has become a path for cows to reach an adjacent pasture. The headstones that populated this once sacred space have all been broken into pieces, and the etchings of names and dates on them are filled with black moss and have largely been eroded away by weathering. As Hanebrink recounts the events which lead to the murderous melees in and around Lvov, it was hard for me not to be profoundly affected by this narrative. It made me understand all the better my now-deceased Grandmother’s combination of deeply felt progressivism views and strong aversion to communism.
It’s because of this that I found the section describing the development of “Judeo-Christian” civilization to be so personally illuminating. and the manner in which many post-WWII intellectual sought to connect Soviet Communism with Germany Nazism. While I’ve read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianismand Domenico Losurdo’s Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism – I admit to not being very informed on many of the debates surrounding the use of the concept.
Criticisms of the Book
There should have been several of these in the text. Paul Hanebrink, should you ever read these, reach out to me and I’ll help you make them.
There are several points wherein Hanebrink makes numerical claims that beg further explanation but that aren’t developed. I understand that this may have to do with the fact that principles of data science haven’t made their way into the discipline of history writing, but if they were it would have made this book significantly better. I say this as despite making several claims that the number of Jewish people within the Communist Party by those on the Nationalist Right was vastly inflated, there’s only a few instances where he cites actual numbers. I do not believe that he is misrepresenting reality here, sources are always referenced to back up his claims, but I do feel like the inclusion of some infographics and chart that visualize the data to which he is referring would be a far superior means of making his case. If in one image, for instance, he was to organize geographic claims made on the Jewish components of the party alongside their actual numbers based on the now-publicly-available data on party membership i.e. “In Romania it was claimed that Jews were “almost all” of the party while their records indicate that they were only “20-40%” that’s a more effective means of making the point. In another point, related to this criticism, he talks about the reality effect and viral spread of Jews conceptualized as “parochial anxieties about the nation and it’s enemies (32). A timeline chart showing publication dates of the sources he’d uncovered which supported this rational claim would have effectively supported this position.
Another criticism that I had of the book, which is unfortunately typical of a lot of academic writings, is the variated repetition of important ideas. I didn’t count the number of times I read a variation of “The concept of Judeo-Bolshevism was a concept used by Religious and Nationalist communities by which to understand their current political crisis,” but if I had to guess it’d be somewhere around 50. This is admittedly a petty criticism, but I found myself getting annoyed when every few pages I read a different iteration of an already established summation.
Lastly, I was hoping that the author would draw some minor connections from the history around Judeo-Bolshevism to that around Cultural Marxism – the narrative centered around Jewish Marxists from the Frankfurt School setting up shop at New York’s New School for Social Research. But then again that would really require another book to cover…
That said, these negative assessments are minor and the book is truly a great work of history. My hardback copy is highly annotated, and the prose was crisp and insightful. I imagine I’ll come back to it again in a few years.
“The war on drugs has not failed: it has never existed. There has been no war on drugs in the United States.”
– Joseph D Douglass, Jr.
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The extent of money spent by the United States Federal Government on drug enforcement and interdiction nationally and internationally would make the above quote from Joseph D Douglass, Jr.’s book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America seem intuitively false. And yet in this highly documented tome the author shows how it is that numerous government agencies have prioritized working relations with Communist governments such as China, Russia and Cuba over open conflict with them over facilitation of drug trafficking as a form of irregular warfare. Given the gravity of the claims made within the text I found myself constantly looking up references, and sure enough a geopolitical world-view that I was not at all familiar with started to emerge.
I don’t normally provide background on the authors I read, but given the topic it seems important to do so here…
Dr. Joseph Douglass is a national security analyst and author with expertise in defence policy, threat assessment, deception, intelligence and political warfare, nuclear strategy, terrorism, advanced chemical and biological warfare agents and applications, and international narcotics trafficking. Since the mid-1980s, his primary focus has been research into various dimensions of cultural warfare and notably into the illegal drugs plague, with emphasis on its origins, support structures, and marketing.
Narcotics Trafficking as Irregular Warfare
The case that is laid out in Red Cocaine is that China and the Soviet Union were involved at the state level in the faciltation of trafficking narcotics to the United States. Citing a variety of data points, including several high-ranking Communist Party members, Douglass shows how destroying American youth through drugs and corruption was covert Communist policy. Potential traffickers were identified for training and marketing of drugs and then various government agents – from those monitoring inports/exports to those involved with policing – were encouraged to support their comrades by turning a blind eye or, if they were sufficiently compromised, by themselves actively facilitating such activities.
The case study stemming from the Vietnamese war and Chinese heroin being distributed to the American military was particularly insightful in demonstrating the manner in which the claim that large scale drug-production is just done by individuals is particularly compelling. The war became a sort of social science experiment – with the military being the subjects. Far-below market-value drugs were offered in order to test how this would affect military readiness and morale.
Cuba and Bulgaria are singled out specifically as entrepots for these activities, the former for cocaine and the latter for opium. Fidel Castro’s role in helping the Andean region industrialize cocaine-producers operations is shown to be extensive.
The book also examines issues of strategy. For instance the reason why it is that so many radical leftist groups within Colombia and Venezuela were formed with the encouragement of Fidel. Their development – to whit – created multiple service suppliers should there ever be political periods akin to those of the FARC-EP peace accords. While one snakes head, the FARC, avows not to continue such activity another, the ELN, can take their place.
Narcotics and Corruption as a Vector for Societal Disruption
This By Any Means Necessary approach to political change allowed for foreign intelligence operatives to track and manage Americans that could be used, wittingly or not, to disrupt the country’s economy and political system. Furthermore, it became a means by which to raise funds in order to support these and other military intelligence operations. While the Chinese, Soviets and the Cubans sought to avoid their role in such activities from becoming overtly known, the Americans had an incentive not to look too deeply lest the relationships between the country’s denegrate further.
Black and Hispanic people are specifically targeted by Fidel Castro to be the manner by which drugs are disseminated in the United States. By focusing the building of connections with drug distributors of such demographics, it helped allow the Drug War to be cast as racist and thus facilitate the increase of political polarization. Given that some members of the black community laud Fidel Castro and demonize Ronald Regean, this is an example of a rich Orwellian Irony.
There’s a lot of other detailed accounts that are worth going into in detail, but I’ll close instead by saying if drugs, communism, or geopolitics interests you – definitely give this book a read.
Snow Storm in the Jungle
Quotes from Red Cocaine
Brief Excerpt about Drug Revenue’s Impact
‘In 1996, annual revenues derived from global criminalist activities were estimated by the World Bank’s experts at $1.2 trillion, of which $500 billion were thought to represent profits. These were and remain highly conservative estimates. The narcotics trade alone is in the $500 billion or more range. A more realistic estimate today would probably be of the order of $2 trillion per year – with $1 trillion, more or less, by way of straight profit; and some experts would raise these estimates further, towards $3.0 trillion annually in turnover. That is to say, governments, banks and the global criminalists are arranging the transfer of at least $1.0 trillion every year of national and private wealth into the bank accounts of the global criminal fraternity – a massive transfer of wealth for which there has been no historical parallel. This scandalous state of affairs has been continuing for several decades on an ever expanding scale, and the power conferred as a consequence threatens to destroy governments, democracy and the international banking system itself. Drug money also weakens and corrodes competition by favouring some economic agents at the expense of others’.
‘Two trillion+ dollars a year (a conservative figure, as noted) over the past two decades, excluding interest, would imply that more than $40 trillion will have been added to the wealth of the global criminal classes, including the managers and representatives of Lenin’s continuing world socialist revolution. Most of this money has been invested in property, bonds and stocks, and each year a further trillion or more dollars is added to the pool. Given that these data are believed by some experts to understate the position, the probable value of accrued drug money lodged in the international financial system now exceeds this $40 trillion estimate by a considerable margin. The associated corruption among financial institutions, investment advisory services (including stock brokerage houses and mutual funds), prestigious law firms, and among the political classes, has by now long since reached epidemic proportions. And this transformation has been accompanied by minimal publicity, with the exception of extensively publicised, but intermittent, ‘drug busts’…’.
‘It is critical for the survival of Western civilisation, and in order to slow down its rapid descent into pervasive, corrosive globalised criminality and corruption, which is the grim outlook for the 21st century, that Western countries begin, even at this late hour, to understand the true nature of the illegal drug crisis – which means correctly analysing its sources, especially its political origins, its enabling mechanisms, and its related criminal dimensions. Unless the nature and provenance of the challenge is finally understood, the appropriate strategy and tactics to address it will never be formulated. The drugs scourge continues to escalate because the measures so far developed to counter it do not take account of the geopolitical dimension – that is to say, of the malevolent, revolutionary intent which drives it’.
‘As a consequence, the measures taken, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, to address the scourge, have remained essentially irrelevant and ineffective…. The plague continues to spread because the West is the victim of a deliberate, sustained and relentless offensive planned and directed by enemy intelligence which Western policymakers appear not to begin, or care, to understand. Some Western leaders even share the ideological objectives of the perpetrators of the drugs offensive. To make matters much worse, the values of many policymakers have been fatally eroded; and if one has no real values, one is not emboldened to defend anything at all, let alone with conviction and vigour. Policymakers too often stand for nothing and fall for everything – for every false assessment, for every piece of fashionable disinformation and for every diversionary tactic which is intended to add to the confusion and which clouds the truth: namely, that the West has been targeted as an act of war, and is the victim of a sustained offensive’.
‘Obviously, the longer this perversity and blindness continue, the more powerful and insuperable will the forces which help to perpetuate this blanket offensive, become. Soon, they will wield almost total power in some Western countries. The European Union’s collectivist structures, with their pork-barrel traditions and inclinations, are conspicuously vulnerable to drug-related corruption…’.
In The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World by Dominique Moisi the author claims that he’s chosen to write this work in opposition to the optimism of Francis Fukuyama and the pessimism of Samuel Huntington. While geopolitics has traditionally been defined in relation to geography, Moisi uses a number of examples to highlight the need to include an “emotional geography” of those that populate a region within geopolitical investigations. Moisi believes that the three most powerful emotions to assess in order to create a psycho-analytic profile of a national spirit are Hope, Humiliation and Fear. Using this as a framework, Moisi assesses a number of the controversial issues prevalent in modern politics. Worth noting in this introduction is that when looking for other reviews of this work, there are few written by those in the field of geopolitics and far more written by those in performance studies, literary analysis, gender studies, psychology and sociology.
Defining Hope, Humiliation and Fear
Moisi’s choice to focus on geopolitics from the standpoint of emotions stems from his assessment that collective sentiments towards past events, their relation to the present and what is possible in the future all have a strong connections to confidence.
Hope, Humiliation and Fear are all linked to the notion of confidence – a defining factor in the manner in which national bodies address other national bodies, international bodies and their own people.
Fear is the absence of confidence, hope is an expression of confidence and humiliation is injured confidence. Moisi provides a formula for quickly summarizing them:
Hope is “I want to do it, I can do it, and I will do it”
Humiliation is “I can never do it”, which may lead to “I might try as well to destroy you since I cannot join you. ”
Fear: “Oh my god, the world has becomes such a dangerous place; how can I be protected from it?”
One of the anecdotes that I found compelling in showing how it is that emotional valences get consideration within the diplomatic-cores of nations was the government of China’s decision to change their description of themselves from “rising” to “developing” as the former implicates that there will be conflict between them and established power while the latter does not.
From these definitions, Moisi then proceeds to analyze Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and America according to this rubric. Those that are hopeful are those that have accommodated themselves to this system, those that feel humiliated it are those that have yet to maximize their domestic capacities to do so while those that fear it seem to take an anti-globalization stance which is strongly related to a sense of national or ethnic pride.
Methodological Criticism
While there is certainly value in a number of Moisi’s insights, from a methodological standpoint there is a lot lacking. Even if the claims he makes are intuitively sensible, he provides no real method for determining which indicators are valuable and which are not, no comprehensive process for correctly discerning the emotional valences of a nation and no steps for qualifying intra-national emotional variances (i.e. defining the Opposition/different interpretations of historical/current events).
True, he states in the opening of the text that confidence indicator can be mapped by things such as level of investment, spending patterns and surveys – he neither provides any comprehensive manner for weighing these or other factors nor describes a model other than his own subjective views on issues. This is in sharp contrast to business confidence – an indicator charted by numerous organizations (OECD; the NFIB Business Optimism Index; RMB/BER Business Confidence Index (BCI), etc.) that emerge from scientifically-based survey and analysis.
Globalization, Identity and Emotions
Despite this epistemological weakness, Moisi’s positions ought not to be automatically invalidated. He provides enough case studies wherein emotions are exploited by politicians, diplomats and businessmen are able to mobilize emotions towards the execution of specific activities. One can also look to the words that politicians and geopolitical strategies themselves say – be it Hugo Chavez or Alexander Dugin – and see that frequently it is their emotional appeals that get the support in the forms of votes or a reading audience.
One of the primary anxieties affecting confidence via the emotions is the relationship of national economic structures to the New World Order created following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition to a bi-polar world and the transformation of the United States into the global hegemon. It’s following these changes on the world stages that Moisi focuses upon.
The World in 2025
Published in 2009, the last chapter of the book is spent speculating on describing how he sees the emotional developments that Moisi describes as manifesting in the world. A few pages in, it immediately becomes apparent just how problematic the lack of a clear methodology for emotional vigilance and future-planning are – the views provided are so far from what has happened that at multiple times during the chapter I considered skipping it. Moisi forecast a rapid decline of the European union following sub-national revolts (i.e. Calatonia) and national revolts (U.K.) in the early 2010’s followed by its rapid reawakening and expansion (Serbia, Kosovo, etc.) in 2016. Not only has this not happened – Serbia, Turkey, and other still have not transitioned – but at least at the moment is seems as if the European Union project is in a state of decline stemming from lack of national support and existential anxieties on how to define itself in relation to Russian political manipulations and a massive influx of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.
Moisi also believed that China would invade Taiwan in the early 2010’s and that the United States would be “mature” enough to take a hands off approach. While few projected Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election – it’s worth noting that in a number of U.S. poles one of the reasons that he gained such popular support was that there were wide swathes of the American public that even without all of the evidence ready to martial were aware that China had been gaming the financial and manufacturing rules to cause damage to the American economy via every manner possible, be it industrial espionage, dumping or non-enforcement of labor laws. Thus we see here that though China may have historicized their “century of humiliation” and be classified according to Moisi under the banner of “optimism” – which is justifiable considering how many of the country’s population have seen their standards of living increase, a sense of fear a humiliation still guides their actions. And this here is the problem of his account – lacking a specific means by which to determine specific classes of people as having specific emotional attitudes towards things, an “emotional” accounting of geopolitics for guiding policy-making is highly prone to error.
Michael Hardt Speaking about Communism at the European Graduate School, 2009.
“The primary forces that have guided the history of modern resistance struggles and liberation movements, along with the most productive resis tance movements of today, we will argue, are driven at base not only by the struggle against misery and poverty but also by a profound desire for democracy-a real democracy of the rule of all by all based on relation ships of equality and freedom. This democracy is a dream created in the great revolutions of modernity but never yet realized. Today, the new characteristics of the multitude and its biopolitical productivity give powerful new avenues for pursuing that dream. This striving for democracy permeates the entire cycle of protests and demonstrations around the issues of globalization, from the dramatic events at the WTO in Seattle in 1999 to the meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil…”
Recognizing the characteristics of the multitude will allow us to invert our perspective on the world. After the Darstellung, or exposition, of our current state of war, our Forschung, or research, into the nature and condi tions of the multitude, will allow us to reach a new standpoint where we can recognize the real, creative forces that are emerging with the potential to creare a new world. The great production of subjectivity of the multitude, its biopolitical capacities, its struggle against poverty, its constant striving for democracy, all coincide here with the genealogy of these resistances stretching from the early modern era to our own.
In the following sections, therefore, we will followthe genealogy of liberation struggles, from the formation of people’s armies in the great modern revolutions to guerrilla warfare and finally to contemporary forms of nerwork struggle. When we put the genealogy in morion, in faer, the changing forms of resistance will reveal three guiding principles – principles that are really embedded in history and determine its movement. The first principle that guides the genealogy will refer to the historical occasion, that is, the form of resistance that is most effective in combating a specific form of power. The second principle will pose a correspondence berween changing forms of resistance and the transformations of economic and social production: in each era, in other words, the model of resistance that proves to be most effective turns out to have the same form as the dominant models of economic and social production. The third principle that will emerge refers simply to democracy and freedom: each new form of resistance is aimed at addressing the undemocratic qualities of previous forms, creating a chain of ever more democratic movements. This genealogy of wars of liberation and resistance movements, finally, will lead us to see the most adequate form of organization for resistance and liberation struggles in the contemporary material and political situation.”
Alexander Dugin, standing, at the National Bolshevik Bunker in 1996. On his left, is Eduard Limonov.
“Negri and Hardt call the global capitalistic system ‘Empire’ and identify it with globalism and American world government. In their opinion, globalism creates the conditions for a universal, planetary revolution of the masses, who, using the common character of globalism and its possibilities for communication and the wide, open spread of knowledge, create a network of world sabotage, for the shift from humanity (standing out as the subject and object of oppression, hierarchical relations, exploitation and disciplinarian strategies) to post-humanity (mutants, cyborgs, clones, and virtuality), and the free selection of gender, appearance and individual rationality according to one’s arbitrary rule and for any space of time. Negri and Hardt think that this will lead to the freeing up of the creative potential of the masses and at the same time to the destruction of the global power of ‘Empire’…
“The anti-globalisation movement in whole is oriented precisely to such a project of the future. And such actions as ‘the Conference in São Paulo’, where anti-globalists first tried to aim at a common strategy, attest that the New Leftist project is discovering forms of concrete political realisation. Many concrete actions — gay parades, anti-globalisation protests, Occupy Wall Street, the disturbances in immigrant suburbs of European cities, the rebellions of ‘autonomous ones’ in defence of squatters’ rights, broad social protests of new labour unions (all reminding one of a carnival), the movement for the legalisation of drugs, ecological actions and protests and so on — are included in this orientation.”
“…every trend has, as the postmodernists say, trend-setters: those who establish a determinate trend for a specific goal.”
Several years ago Occupy Wall Street and Russia Today darling Chris Hedges – who is now an author at TruthDig – wrote the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. After seeing a quote of his in my feed from one of the sock-puppet operated groups I follow, I decided to give it a look into.
I found a free copy available online, downloaded it, read it and uuuf!
I admit to not being versed with his work as a whole, but after having read this I have a better understanding of why a lot of mainstream outlets no longer publish him, thus leaving him to taken up helping WSWS engage in fundraising fraud.
Based on Chris Hedges’ co-sign of what defines fascism, it’s appearent that Chris Hedges think Nicolas Maduro and the PSUV are a fascist political organization that ought to be stopped, by violence if necessary. What follows below is a graphic organizer which demonstrates how Nicolas Maduro and the PSUV fit the definition of a fascist organization, and then commentary.
Nicolas Maduro is a Fascist
Feature of Fascism
Example from PSUV
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
The Fascism of Nicolas Maduro and Orwellian Irony
Meeting of the first ever “Antifa International” in Caracas, Venezuela
While I’m not now sure of the connections between of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation in Portland, whose members recently displayed Antifa flags at a soccer game, to the numerous new Antifa-themed soccer clubs in Latin America – but it does seem to indicate some sort of working relationship between the groups.
This is one of a number of Antifa football groups that have recently announced their existence in Latin America . Worth noting is that these are all in locations that do not historically have fascist movements there.
Given the hundreds of millions of dollars that the government of Hugo Chavez Frias provided to anyone and everyone outside of his country that he thought he could influence and the large number of Venezuelans that have migrated out of the country – it’s no logical leap to suspect a connection given the timing.
On this point it’s also worth noting that some of the main defenders of Antifa activity in the United States are the Socialist and Communist parties whose members frequently visit and defend Cuba, Venezuela and the FARC in their press organs.
Nicholas Maduro: The Would-Be Hitler of Latin America?
Left: Maduro, yet again, claims that President Donald Trump ia a Nazi. Right: According to Aporrea, this is Nicolas Maduro’s favorite book on rhetoric. (JK)
While the above graphic organizer makes abundantly evident that the PSUV is a fascist organization – according to the categories created by Umberto Eco and then repeated by Chris Hedges – these are not the only examples of it.
There’s also his project of colonization, which is couched in an appeal to create a “greater Latin America” via a constitutent political body, which of course, would be lead by Cuba and Venezuela and achieved via force, corruption and blackmail.
Any serious comparison between Nicolas Maduro and Adolph Hitler is, of course, absurd. But given the PSUV’s control over the population via CLAP, the extent of pro-government corruption and the millions of people that have emigrated out of the country since the rise of the PSUV – we could say that they have engaged in a sort of politically-based genocide (genocide being understood as forced migration, UNHRC), or political cleansing. This interpretation is furthered when one considers the massive government-sponsored influx of the Cubans to work in the military and in health centers.
To understand where Maduro’s fascism comes from, one need only look to his biography…
Nicolas Maduro, Graduate of Fidel Castro’s School of Political Education
Here Nicolas Maduro is shown taking the “bus” to the School of Political Education in Havana, Cuba that was founded by Fidel Castro.
It’s well documented that Nicolas Maduro “graduated” from Fidel Castro’s School of Political Education. I read in one online forum that he was also a counselor-in-training at an Sleepaway Indoctrination Camp a few miles outside of Cienfuegos, but I believe that was just a joke.
What’s not a joke is the clear committment that Nicolas Maduro has to sell out Venezuela’s potential to be a prosperous, democratic country in order to fulfil the future-dreams of a now-dead dictator.
While marketing himself as a humble unionist and bus-driver to his people in Venezuela, by looking at a wider, comparative picture it’s clear that he’s just an autocrat that aspires to be a world-historical figure.
* : Chris Hedges has never actually said what is in the title of this post, I merely use the conceptual framework he provides in his books American Fascist to show that he should.
Grandin’s primary subject is the political coalition in the United States from the New Deal of FDR to the New Right of Regan and their relation to the foreign policy apparatus and political and economic unrest then occurring in Central America. Covering the transition from “soft power” of the Good Neighbor Policy to the overt support of anti-communist military rulers in Latin American Grandin holds that Central America in the 1980s became “…the crucible that brought together missionary Christianity, free-market capitalism, and American hard power (155).” Though his focus is on this particular period of history, the whole work itself is framed as a contribution to the claim that the strategy described by him to mobilize popular American sentiment in the support of war was employed in the build-up to the Iraq War via those participating in the Project for a New American Century.
The Protestant Ethic, Liberation Theology and Communism
At a time when global supply chains were fully recovered from the second world war, Latin America found itself in a precarious position and a battle of ideas began to take shape. A post-World War II reality gap between Latin American’s expectations and their current conditions of relative deprivation was a powerful driver for revolutionary subjectivity – especially in as land increasingly became consolidated amongst fewer hands.
Predominantly an exporter from the extractive industries and non-value-added primary goods, Latin America simply was not producing the kind of advanced engineering and technologically breakthroughs leading to large increases in productivity and quality that were occurring in the US, Europe and Japan.
In the manufacturing sectors – the growth of the number of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation and social welfare provisions to protect domestic workers from the pressures of foreign capital multiplied and created a downward spiral of state-control of the economy and inhibited competitiveness and innovation. While these protections ensured for a time a buffer from the economic effects of these outside market development, it was a drag on the capacity for domestic capitalists to adapt. Communists and Liberation Theologists rested their laurels on such programs, ironically enough, were seen as red flags by those within the IMF. State-owned industries were correctly identified as being oriented along political rather than economic lines, meaning massive duplications of effort and inefficiencies. Even Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrinedescribes these as, basically, massive public jobs programs that for the present helped with employment but in the long term inhibited GDP growth. One example of this effects of such behavior is found in contemporary Venezuela, who has seen the number of oil workers employed by PDVSA rise at the same time that it’s production has fallen.
This collectivist approach to politics by the Hard Left and the Catholic Left was viewed by those involved with determining what to invest in as bad business. Liberation Theologists who, as a class, were totally ignorant of principles of capital management or the rules and pressures of the international marketplace denounced the North as Evil and frequently allied themselves with Communists. Theologians connected with the American Enterprise Institute and the Insitute on Religion and Democracy elaborated a number of explanations as to how Latin America’s inheritance of cultural factors such as indigenous values and legal codes that originated from the Spanish Crown’s 17thcentury counterreformation made adoption to the new international dynamics a point of friction.
While Grandin’s subsequent quotation of a number of these commentators is clearly designed to make this Protestant line of thought to seem vile – having listened to numerous engineers and high-level business-people in Latin America, they all agree with such criticisms. Which brings me to a quick side note related to this point based on discussions that I’ve had since attending a Catholic University…
While many American free-market radicals frequently point to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as fundamental to the evolution of their thought, they ought to familiarize themselves with Christian depictions of free enterprise – such as Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil or Confucian depictions of free enterprise – such as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. According to numerous Catholic’s that I’ve spoken with in Medellin, people that are wealthy are further from God. While there are certainly instances where this seems to me to be the case – primitive accumulation of capital by dispossession or narco-trafficking being two such examples – such a generalized cultural taboo inhibits the cultural changes required to get out of the poverty mindset and take greater accountability for one’s economic situation.
Adversary Culture, Media Politics and Public Relations Strategy
In chapter four, titled Bringing it All Back Home, Grandin recounts the media strategy of the Regan administration to influence the domestic press to ensure positive coverage of the ongoing U.S. military actions in El Salvador and Nicaragua. With the memory of the domestic unrest that the Vietnam war had within American still fresh in the minds of many culture leaders, universities, churches, newspaper were at first adversarial to the notion of another “war against communism”.
Grandin describes this as a “psychological operation” which was being pushed on three fronts.
1) A centralized public-diplomacy that directly confronts the press through sophisticated techniques drawn from the intelligence community and the PR world
2) The loosening of restrictions regarding surveillance operations against political dissidents
3) The construction of a “countervailing grassroots support to counter what seemed a permanently entrenched anti-imperialist opposition, mobilizing militants and evangelicals on behalf of a hard-line foreign policy,”
While Grandin views this all as a maliciously designed means of duping the population, I think it’s more appropriate to view it as a creative solution to the problem of data governance and distribution in a society with numerous media and culture outlets.
Recognizing the myriad limits of journalistic investigation, the government became proactive in responding to and anticipating the claims of political activists connected to informational networks such as CISPES – whose narratives and political activities sought to degrade and otherwise demoralize the population such that they would actively oppose military conflict. Though the FBI wasn’t never able to prove a direct agency relationship between the organization and El Salvador or of any monetary aid – it’s clear that this sort of activity was a reaction to such intelligence operations rather than an effort at misinforming the public.
The Return of Latin America’s Left and Closing Thoughts
The Latin American New Left has used the World Social Forum as a means for spreading their ideology.
Towards the end of Empire’s Workshop Grandin briefly takes as his subject the Global Justice Movement and their claim that since the Capitalist Revolutionaries failed to bring Peace or Prosperity through their exchange of wealth and management that this means that they have no right to continue to try to influence or direct them anymore. Given the numerous breaches of contracts and agreements that were precursors to such loans and assistance programs – in the opening chapter of the book Grandin describes Brazilian farmers not following the directives given by their American management team, thus leading to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars – such claims are often connected to half told tales.
Indeed, Andres Oppenheimer sees the narratives typical of the New Latin American Left as part of the reason that Latin America has not been able to grow at the same rate as other developing countries. Rather than focusing on the domestic economy’s connection to capital flows, politicians seek take on the economic agency of those that they represent and – in a way – manage them. The problem with this, as it evident is that generations of wealth accumulated within a family unit can be undone in a few years – or indeed a few days – by a dissolute or corrupt member and new competitors can quickly emerge and take over the market of a leader that has stopped trying to maximize added value and innovation.
Empire’s Workshop is part of a series of published by Metropolitan Books called The American Empire Project, which features other authors praised by Hugo Chavez such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. While the only other book that I’ve read in the series is Hegemony or Survival, if they are like at all akin to these two then thematically they have a number of the same problems in how they present their historical accounts.
Omission or minimalization of endogenous factors informing the conflicts under discussion.
When providing an overview of USAID and DEA policy in Bolivia in the late 1990s, for instance, – as if those populations didn’t actually want assistance in the prevention of their government from becoming a state dominated by the narcotics production and trafficking sector.
Another iteration of this is removing agency from those currently engaged in illegal behavior on prior events only tangentially related. Using an example outside of Grandin’s work – to show this theme – is the placing of full or partial blame for the rise of MS-13 at the feet of the United States government. The United States government does not condone or assist with their drug-trafficking, kidnapping, extortion or any other of these illegal activities.
Absolute cynicism on the part of the author towards foreign actors.
A typical trope of the counter- and alter- globalization movement that I’ve noticed is to frame all efforts at economic development as secret debt traps – a charge that has been recently leveled against China and those countries accepting aid it’s aid. A similar trend is evident in Grandin’s writings – all intentions on the part of foreigners involved in economic development – be it those in the IMF-technicians or U.S. diplomats – are depicted as malign and deceptive. Non-liberation theology priests are all propagandists, economic advisors are vultures setting up traps, government assistance to fight narco-trafficking is just a pretext for neo-colonial domination. Thus, though Grandin presents a number of related facts that do fit together, because of his ideological bent he presents a Manichean world. This probably why Hugo Chavez loved the book.
Avoidance of or selective analysis of international law and legal cases.
The international and domestic legal order by which nations operate provides a set of guidelines that form the framework within which allows for internal and international cooperation and development to occur.
All history writing will have elements of subjectivity within it based upon the author’s choices of evidence and mobilization of it – but even though I’m not a subject area specialist I’ve read enough of Latin American political science to know a warped narrative when I see one.
For example, whereas Grandin points to the FBI’s loosening of regulations on surveillance of domestic actors as evidence of the United States being an Evil Empire, he doesn’t at all engage with the fact that spy and espionage networks are real.
This is not to say that there is no cause for reflection on what occurred in the past, just that any sort of commentary should include the full legal context.
Authorial pretense of having all available data
While FOIA requests, reviews of the Congressional records and interviews with known participants certainly create a simulacrum of reality – there is always a gap.
Two major reasons for this are that the U.S. military has a commitment to protecting individuals, ongoing operations, tradecraft and national security.
Another is that those which identify with the FMLN, Bolivarian, Guevarist, Marxist, etc. movements are committed militants who abide by their own version of military doctrine – which includes deceiving those that aren’t on the inside.
I say this not to make the argument that authentic history can only be written and read by those that are a member of such organizations – but to highlight the need for unreliability to be a component of authorship. Sandinistas, for example, claimed that their activities were completely of their own, however later revelations showed they were assisted by the Cubans – who have their own geopolitical goals.
Disinformation, Bolivarian Propaganda, Cold War Media Studies, PSUV, Communist Infiltration, Social Media and Democracy
Abstract:
This article reviews the historical practices used by the intelligence services of Russia described in the New York Times and then links this to examples of disinformation campaigns that are operated by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
On the Science of Disinformation with Russian and Venezuelan Case Studies
Operation InfeKtion is a 47-minute long documentary produced by the New York Times which uses archival footage and interviews. Hosted on YouTube, it presents examples of the information warfare military strategies used by the Soviet Union’s KGB in operations against the United States.
Read any book published over the last several years in the digital marketing field – such as Growther Hacker Marketing, Content Inc., or Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator – and you’ll learn how economic pressures cause by changes caused by the growth of the internet that have lead to the decline professional and ethical standards in publishing and the general public’s increasing.
As disinformation campaigns seeks to mobilize the emotions of their audience by distorting reality for political ends, this means that it’s now easier than ever for false information to be inserted into public discourse.
Because the Constitution and the U.S. legal system so highly values freedom of expression, there is no singular Federal Law nor widely-adopted industry-standards for honesty or integrity in journalism and publishing, nor is there any enforcement organization in the United States outside of the courts.
This lack of accountability is why technology companies that host or link to news content have recently been targeted for regulation by the government.
Rule #1: Find the Cracks
Finding the crack isn’t merely about coming up with controversial content, it’s about finding an audience and tailoring their consumption in such a way that it (Rule #7) fits long term goals.
There’s a lot of ways to manipulate people into believing disinformation, and disinformation campaigns make knowing as much as possible about their target audience a key component of any good information warfare project.
Intersectional chart depicting social hierarchies able to be exploited by foreign-state sponsored propandandists.
Audiences that have witnessed or experienced trauma, that identify with groups whose identities relate in some way to a sense of collective trauma, or that are neurologically divergent are especially vulnerable to disinformation. Lack of subject area knowledge, deference to alternative-authority figures and interpersonal social pressures to conform makes youths particularly vulnerable to this sort of messaging as well.
Rule #2: The Big Lie
While once big lies – such as the claim that the United States invented AIDs to depopulate undesireable demographics – were the main focus of disinformation campaigns, in the contemporary attention economy a large number of smaller false claims. Here are some examples.
A young black child has a plastic bag put over his head following his arrest, leading to headlines that “many people are outraged“. However if you watch the actual video you’ll see that this was because he was repeatedly spitting on police officers, that he was at no risk of suffocating and, most importantly, the child seemed to be encouraged to engage in this behavior by the person filming it in order to create this “outgrageous” scene.
Another recent example which featured President Donald Trump is found in coverage of a joke he made (linked here to C-Span as the HuffPost’s version has edited out of their linked-to video the larger context of the comment ). Some media outlets – such as CNN – covered this as him implying that he was the Messiah, while others did not mention it at all. What’s clear from the full context of the speech act is that Trump is comparing himself to other politicians that would not be as firm with China in economic negotiations and making a joke – as recognized by Fox News.
Rule #3: A Kernel of Truth
It’s this small kernal of truth that makes the big lie possible. By relying on the audience to not fact check, it’s creates the conditions for misleading headlines and outrage.
The article is written by “Matt Agorist”, the pen name of the director of the Free Thought Project whose government name is unknown. Interesting to note is that others have seen fit to investigate him and when confronted with the fact that so much of the content associated with his writings and website are classified as misinformation and disinformation, he’s used the Alex Jones Defense – claiming he wants to “inspire conversation and a free flow of alternative views.”
Like the example of Donald Trump provided above, the article’s headline and content are vastly at odds with reality.
Reviewing the primary material from which the article is based on – it’s clear that the Chief Rabbi in question was answering a question which contrasts the norms described in certain Biblical passages to that which are now abided by by the IDF.
In other words, nothing in the headline is true – even though the article provides the evidence which shows that it isn’t true!
Rule #4: Conceal Your Hand
Disinformation does not always emerge from an official party outlet, such as Pravda, RT or TeleSUR English.
In fact, because of that direct connection to the government it can be far more effective for it to emerge from other sources.
Other outlets – in Venezuela’s case The Real News Network and Venezuela Analysis (both are operated by ex-Bolivarian Republic of Venezuelan Officials, and likely funded in part with their assistance as well), Orinocco Tribune, Ghion Journal, or a number of pan-Africanist “news services” – can equally serve that State’s interest.
This is accomplished by creating distance between the actors involved in a disinformation campaign. Furthermore it provides for a powerful “victim narrative” if their are any ramifications.
Being called out for poor reporting, bad fact-checking or unreported interests in coverage – as Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek and Anna Parampul have in relation to their coverage of the war in Syria – can be spun into a “vast conspiracy” to keep the truth from being told and whatever professional ramifications that come from this can lead one to becoming a cause celebre.
Once the uncertainty of conflicting narratives is cemented, there will always be come people that are gullibile enough to believe it.
Rule #5: The Useful Idiot
“Useful idiots” is a derogatory term for people perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals, and who is cynically used by the cause’s leaders. During the research for my Master’s Thesis at NYU I read a lot about useful idiots. It’s interesting to note that often times it’s not until the collapse of a government, as happened with the Soviet Union, that the full extent of these networks becomes apparent.
One of my favorite TV series, The Americans, depicts a variety of useful idiots – from those that have been cultivated so as to engage in espionage, treason, sedition, incitement and other illegal activities. Useful idiots typically work in media, education, political activism, public relations. Opertion InfeKtion depicts scientists that publish and defend fake findings as well as political commentators that grossly misrepresent history.
Following the opening of the Soviet Archives extensive troves of evidence was found detailing how US Communists Aided the USSR. Amongst the many examples of the Soviet Union’s success in infilration was helping manage the publication of Rampage – a radical left journal. Given what some commentators have called the “rapid rise” of socialism it seems sensible to investigate the relation of the oil rich nation on our border identifying as socialist, no?
As there is no centralized authority responible for judging questionable content and it’s origins, there are some simple ways to avoid accountability when questioned.
Deny existance of topic at hand.
Deflect to another topic.
Defend claims made as being part of performance art.
Defend claims made as being the product of a mental imbalance.
Refuse to respond to any and all professional and ethical related questions.
Because honesty and integrity in the public sphere falls open those with a sense of civic duty, private companies that wish to monetize their research or contests related to Fake News.
I’ve asked a lot of people at TeleSUR questions related to the Social Media and Democracy project – and almost all have refused to respond and blocked me. This link goes to an updated list of executives in charge of various aspects of operations that have done this.
Rule #7: The Long Game
As Operation InfeKtion illustrates, it sometimes takes years for the fruits of counterintelligence work to be born.
The Long Game also means orienting the development of information related towards those already engaged in intergenerational struggles.
People’s political orientations can become increasingly radicalized through encuentros, a tactic frequently used by individuals and organizations connected in some way to the PSUV. Because these interactions and economic, cultural, political or other types of exchanges are often not recorded for public consumption – and as they can quickly be deleted from servers if they are exposed – they make for the best type of recruitment for irregular warfare disinformation campaigns.
Operation InfeKtion is an excellent documentary, however it unfortunately does not cover Russia’s connection to Venezuela’s state media apparatus.
Technology Transfer: From Russia to Venezuela
Nicholas Maduro, President of the the PSUV, and Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB Agent
“Although a lack of transparency makes precise accounting nearly impossible, in recent years Venezuela’s government has purchased Russia’s state-of-the-art S-300 anti-aircraft missiles; imported hundreds of thousands of Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition; and acquired 5,000 Igla-S MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems). And this is just what has been on public display in Venezuela’s military parades or outlined in leaked military contracts. There are no doubt many more small arms and equipment in the Venezuelan military’s possession.”
Given the above comments, italics added by me, we see an example of military technology transfer occuring. While irregular warfare isn’t mentioned therein, it’s been an interest of Hugo Chavez Frias and Nicolas Maduro Moros since the founding of TeleSUR.
One such personality that has perfectly illustrates my speculation as to Russian-Venezuelan information warfare technology transfer is Abby Martin – who stated at RT and then, like many other of their employees, transferred to TeleSUR. More about her in a minute.
Thus with Russian know how; the religious and political solidarity networks already developed by the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) and the race-based outreach made possible by PSUV cultural ministers and militants – we can come to recognize Venezuela as an organizing and supporting force of a complex state intelligence appratus designed to cultivate, coordinate and control small political groups that have the capacity to converge for large, violent political events. This not only allows for the depleting of local, state, government and federal budgets and an unofficial political tax on private enterprises near those areas – it also allows for the fodder of disinformation narratives.
Gillars v. United States [182 F.2d 962 (D.C. Cir. 1950)] sealed the fate of Sally Gillars, aka Axis Sally, as a traitor. She hasn’t been the only one in American history. Foreign state-sponsored propagandist Robert Henry Best was also tried and convicted of Treason for his speech acts.
They were tried because the First United States Congress, in 1790, provided this statute:
“…if any person or persons, owing allegiance to the United States of America, shall levy war against them, or shall adhere to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, and shall be thereof convicted, on confession in open court, or on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act of the treason whereof he or they shall stand indicted, such person or persons shall be adjudged guilty of treason against the United States, .” 1 Stat. 112 (1790).
Another words disinformation produced in coordination with a foreign government during wartime equals Treason.
Venezuela’s Media Workers: The Future Target of Law Enforcement?
This previous case history rasises some intersting questions given the current political relations between the United States and Venezuela.
While bullets were not now flying between armed military combatants – any honest review of the language, iconography and policies presided over by Nicholas Maduro’s reveals pronouncements which frequently express the sentiment that he and the whole country is under seige, meaning categorically that one is engaged in a protracted war. Also worth noting is that according to the words of TeleSUR’s founders and their executives their state media apparatus was explicitly founded for ideological combat. Does this and the fact thatVenezuela has long been considered an irregular threat to the United States – mean that those who are or have been contracted by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela could be tried for treason?
Given Nicolas Maduro’s role as executive director of TeleSUR and the thrust of their “news” coverage and related activities, it seems like this may be so.
Hands off Venezuela, one of the myriad political action cells that the PSUV sponsors internationally.
But then again, I’m not a lawyer.
Still – to me it does raise several interesting questions, such as:
How does the definition of treason change in periods of irregular warfare?
How do the principles underlying the foundations of prior judgements relate to the evidence at hand?
If Abby Martin is ever prosecuted and found guilty of Treason for the misinformation she has produced while employed by the Russian and Venezuelan Intelligence Services – what’s the best nickname that can be given her – #AnybodyAgainstAmericaAbby, #MultipolarMartin or, my personal favorite, #BocamierdaMartin?
Also, what of the platforms and accounts that spread and host such content?
In a situation such as Venezuela is now facing, I’ve emailed the Venezuela Affairs Office and shared some of my own research as well as my belief that they should seek to exproprirate TeleSUR’s accounts and websites.
Disinformation, Democracy, and Social Media
Fake News is really real and is really dangerous, especially so when there are intelligence
Its purveyors prey on traumas, ignorance, bias and aspirations in hopes that it will lead to political gain. While clearly distinct from terrorist violence, the overlapping goals between the two are readily appearant.
While professional organizations, private companies and state laws used to be sufficient to counteract the rapid spread of such social contagion – the capabilities created by new information and communication technologies over the past two decades has outstripped their capacities.
As the federal system of the United States differs vastly from that of the United States, we have yet to address the new capabilities wrought by technology in law. It’s likely that in the near future, there will complex work done to address this.
Given all of the above people’s passionate misunderstandings of law, their intentional and unnecessary provocations toward police, and their projection onto “the system” of issues that were better suited to being addressed by a more productive form of communal, collective action I found it difficuly to be sympathetic to the riots are the voices of the unheard rhetoric which closes the film.
