4 ms·

What is surprising to me is how poorly prepared western society has been to deal with this, considering we’ve been doing it ourselves for so many years through

by moksly 7y ago

What is surprising to me is how poorly prepared western society has been to deal with this, considering we’ve been doing it ourselves for so many years through various NGOs. The EU funds so many pro-democratic programs around the world, many have been especially focused in the Russian influence sphere. How have we been caught so completely off guard when our non-democratic adversaries started doing it to us? /edit I didn't mean to put NGOs trying to spread democracy on par with staterun propaganda, I'm just wondering why noone saw it coming in time for our systems to prepare.

samdung 7y ago
One word - "Arrogance". When you do something well, and have been doing it for a long time, you believe you are the best and no one else can do it better than you.
protomolecule 7y ago
NGOs are nothing compared to American interference in the 1996 presidential elections in Russia. Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
- ryacko 7y ago
  https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anatomy-the-imf-failure https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anat... A 1998 report from the Heritage Foundation about how the IMF was giving billions of dollars to Russia for free. >There are anecdotal reports of judges being on retainer to law offices; of judges setting their bribe amount as a percentage of the claim; of lawyers paying for judges' office supplies because the government would not do so. >The courts, moreover, lack the support structures to enforce their decisions and collect fines. Filling the vacuum left by the state, organized crime has come to play a major role in commercial dispute resolution and the enforcement of court rulings. Again, this was an important cause for the low level of foreign and domestic investment, as well as being a contributing factor in capital flight. https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-punishment https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-p... >The latest money-laundering scandal in New York confirms that the evil of organised crime is woven into Russian life—and that it is starting to infect the rest of the world
zapita 7y ago
Western NGOs are not even remotely comparable to the propaganda operations the US and Europe are dealing with at the moment. This faulty comparison is itself a common talking point of Russian and Chinese propaganda. A better comparison would be US operations against the communist bloc during the Cold War. However... The US intelligence community has spent the last 25 years focusing on the Middle East. The previous generation of spies and counter-spies have mostly retired, and those who are still active haven't worried about the KGB in a long time. Meanwhile, the KGB has never gone away, and has been obsessed with the US the whole time. And now the former head of the KGB/FSB runs Russia... What we are dealing with is the same KGB playbook, with some 21st century upgrade. Russia knows US citizens better than they know themselves, which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our population through domestic assets like Manafort, Barr, Mcconnell and of course the Trumps. It's no surprise that the are running circles around us at the moment. Hopefully our institutional immune system will kick in and we will adapt before the rot sets in too deep.
- protomolecule 7y ago
  Immune system like Joseph McCarthy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
  - zapita 7y ago
    No. Not at all like Joseph McCarthy.
    - protomolecule 7y ago
      Is it? You wrote: "which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our population", do you really think that over 100 million people you disagree with are brainwashed by a foreign power? In Russian political discourse nowadays liberals are all too often accused of being on American embassy's payroll. You want this kind of talk in the US when opponents are labeled as foreign government shills?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Sort of. But because he didn't care about false positives he was the autoimmune disease of America.
Lio 7y ago
That’s not the same at all. Promoting democracy is taking a single issue and clearly sating “this is a good thing for everyone and here’s why”. That is not what Russian “influencers” are doing. They by contrast can be seen arguing fervently on both sides of an argument. Their goal is not to promote any particular idea but to destabilise both sides by encouraging extreme views in both and driving the factions to be more partisan.
- zby 7y ago
  Good faith is important - but how about the communist agents from the past? They did believe in their cause after all. And I think the Chinese also believe that their system is better than the western democracy.
  - Lio 7y ago
    That's a false analogy and doesn't fit here. Leaving aside how naive a statement like "the Chinese believe" is (you're talking about an ethnicity which clearly has multiple opinions on everything, just like any other group of people). In democracies communists are free to say how great it is not having a choice of government and others are free to disagree. The issue is not with the expression of opinion but with the expression of extremist falsehoods delivered on both sides of an argument with the only goal of causing instability. Just like in a sales tabloid newspapers, truth is not important only the reaction. Ever notice how the retraction notices are so much less prominent than the original articles were?
pjc50 7y ago
It's the usual problem of fighting the last war. America spent the 20th century thinking that foreign influence would be Communist propaganda, and built up ideological defenses against that to such an extraordinary degree that all sorts of normal community politics are still denounced as "communist" today. But today's foreign influence isn't ideologically different from America at all. It's largely being done on behalf of a small group of fossil fuel billionaires - Russian oligarchs, the Saudi royal family, etc. And what could be more American than that? It's like being invaded by Standard Oil and the United Fruit Company. Because it's non-ideological it doesn't even have to be consistent propaganda. It's pure wrecking. Sowing conflicting ideas works extremely well for that. And again it's taken advantage of pre-existing faultlines. There's no evidence that Alex Jones was a foreign provocateur - but if he was, would he have done anything differently? Then there's the problem that our own "pro-democratic" propaganda always had a massive flaw in it. Democracy has lots of inter-related elements in it, but we pushed the "free market" ones far before the "rule of law" ones, and the "human rights" ones extremely weakly because human rights ideology hasn't actually been properly established in America either. We pushed democracy into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ended up with gangster capitalism there, and deemed it a success. Now they're re-exporting it.

by moksly 7y ago

samdung 7y ago

One word - "Arrogance". When you do something well, and have been doing it for a long time, you believe you are the best and no one else can do it better than you.

protomolecule 7y ago

NGOs are nothing compared to American interference in the 1996 presidential elections in Russia. Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

ryacko 7y ago
https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anatomy-the-imf-failure https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anat... A 1998 report from the Heritage Foundation about how the IMF was giving billions of dollars to Russia for free. >There are anecdotal reports of judges being on retainer to law offices; of judges setting their bribe amount as a percentage of the claim; of lawyers paying for judges' office supplies because the government would not do so. >The courts, moreover, lack the support structures to enforce their decisions and collect fines. Filling the vacuum left by the state, organized crime has come to play a major role in commercial dispute resolution and the enforcement of court rulings. Again, this was an important cause for the low level of foreign and domestic investment, as well as being a contributing factor in capital flight. https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-punishment https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-p... >The latest money-laundering scandal in New York confirms that the evil of organised crime is woven into Russian life—and that it is starting to infect the rest of the world

zapita 7y ago

Western NGOs are not even remotely comparable to the propaganda operations the US and Europe are dealing with at the moment. This faulty comparison is itself a common talking point of Russian and Chinese propaganda. A better comparison would be US operations against the communist bloc during the Cold War. However... The US intelligence community has spent the last 25 years focusing on the Middle East. The previous generation of spies and counter-spies have mostly retired, and those who are still active haven't worried about the KGB in a long time. Meanwhile, the KGB has never gone away, and has been obsessed with the US the whole time. And now the former head of the KGB/FSB runs Russia... What we are dealing with is the same KGB playbook, with some 21st century upgrade. Russia knows US citizens better than they know themselves, which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our population through domestic assets like Manafort, Barr, Mcconnell and of course the Trumps. It's no surprise that the are running circles around us at the moment. Hopefully our institutional immune system will kick in and we will adapt before the rot sets in too deep.

protomolecule 7y ago
Immune system like Joseph McCarthy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
- zapita 7y ago
  No. Not at all like Joseph McCarthy.
  - protomolecule 7y ago
    Is it? You wrote: "which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our population", do you really think that over 100 million people you disagree with are brainwashed by a foreign power? In Russian political discourse nowadays liberals are all too often accused of being on American embassy's payroll. You want this kind of talk in the US when opponents are labeled as foreign government shills?
- pjc50 7y ago
  Sort of. But because he didn't care about false positives he was the autoimmune disease of America.

Lio 7y ago

That’s not the same at all. Promoting democracy is taking a single issue and clearly sating “this is a good thing for everyone and here’s why”. That is not what Russian “influencers” are doing. They by contrast can be seen arguing fervently on both sides of an argument. Their goal is not to promote any particular idea but to destabilise both sides by encouraging extreme views in both and driving the factions to be more partisan.

zby 7y ago
Good faith is important - but how about the communist agents from the past? They did believe in their cause after all. And I think the Chinese also believe that their system is better than the western democracy.
- Lio 7y ago
  That's a false analogy and doesn't fit here. Leaving aside how naive a statement like "the Chinese believe" is (you're talking about an ethnicity which clearly has multiple opinions on everything, just like any other group of people). In democracies communists are free to say how great it is not having a choice of government and others are free to disagree. The issue is not with the expression of opinion but with the expression of extremist falsehoods delivered on both sides of an argument with the only goal of causing instability. Just like in a sales tabloid newspapers, truth is not important only the reaction. Ever notice how the retraction notices are so much less prominent than the original articles were?

pjc50 7y ago

It's the usual problem of fighting the last war. America spent the 20th century thinking that foreign influence would be Communist propaganda, and built up ideological defenses against that to such an extraordinary degree that all sorts of normal community politics are still denounced as "communist" today. But today's foreign influence isn't ideologically different from America at all. It's largely being done on behalf of a small group of fossil fuel billionaires - Russian oligarchs, the Saudi royal family, etc. And what could be more American than that? It's like being invaded by Standard Oil and the United Fruit Company. Because it's non-ideological it doesn't even have to be consistent propaganda. It's pure wrecking. Sowing conflicting ideas works extremely well for that. And again it's taken advantage of pre-existing faultlines. There's no evidence that Alex Jones was a foreign provocateur - but if he was, would he have done anything differently? Then there's the problem that our own "pro-democratic" propaganda always had a massive flaw in it. Democracy has lots of inter-related elements in it, but we pushed the "free market" ones far before the "rule of law" ones, and the "human rights" ones extremely weakly because human rights ideology hasn't actually been properly established in America either. We pushed democracy into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ended up with gangster capitalism there, and deemed it a success. Now they're re-exporting it.