American companies are funding the Kremlin’s info war against us

An employee at Russia Today’s Moscow office. Iliya Pitalev Sputnik

 

Western advertising has been filling the coffers of Russian propaganda outlets, underwriting a racist, misogynist, anti-American media that keeps Vladimir Putin in place and actively threatens America’s political system. Writing in The Daily Beast, Mitchell Polman states clearly that “without those ad dollars it would be difficult for Russian media to function.”

Congress recently held social media companies’ feet to the fire for accepting Russian political advertising on their platforms during the 2016 presidential election. Facebook and Twitter have been contrite and promised to work harder to vet future advertising and curb foreign political propaganda aimed at undermining America’s political system.

Russia Steps Up Anti-U.S. Military Propaganda

Gorenc told the European command he did not make the statement reported by the Russians.

 

Fake stories target troops, exercises in E. Europe

Russia is increasing disinformation operations aimed at undermining government and public support for American military forces in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. officials.

The stepped-up disinformation includes creating and circulating recent news stories falsely claiming American soldiers were engaged in sexual misconduct in Poland and were exposed to mustard gas in Latvia.

A more recent example involved a Russian broadcaster falsely attributing a statement on Russian electronic warfare to a retired U.S. general.

U.S. Ill-Prepared to Stop Widespread Russian Information Warfare

Was there Russian influence during the 2016 election process? Sure. However, not as people think.

Moscow is engaged in what’s called the “scissor strategy”. In America’s case, both sides of the scissor blades represent the right-wing and left-wing of America. When the blades meet (conflict), America (material being cut) is destroyed. You can plainly see this in today’s media where CNN/MSNBC/ABC et al represent the left-wing of society, whereas (although it’s a false right) Fox News represents the right-wing base.

It’s interesting to note that Fox is a false right in the sense that it may represent the second side of the same coin in an information warfare campaign against the American people. Some of the anchors, hosts and reporters may be genuine, but the owners of Fox News are not. They consistently undermined Trump, the outside and anti-establishment candidate and constantly favored the progressive-socialists (aka RINOs) in the Republican party.

This is where it gets complicated, but for those with discernment, they see right through it.

 

Clint Watts testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee March 30 / Getty Images

 

Experts reveal methods, motivations behind Moscow’s cyber attacks

Russia is engaged in wide-ranging information warfare operations aimed at undermining the United States, and the federal government has few defenses against the attacks, information specialists told a Senate hearing last week.

Moscow’s large-scale operations include the covert attempt to sway the 2016 presidential election and dissemination of false news reports to sow confusion and weaken American democracy, according to testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday.

The committee hearing was called as part of an investigation into the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 election.

How Russian propaganda works in the West

BERLIN – Until recently, the phenomenon of Russian government propaganda was only interesting to a small group of Russia experts, news junkies and counter-propaganda fundraisers. It was mainly seen as a tool for keeping Russians supportive of Vladimir Putin. No longer. Thanks to post-U.S. election blame games, and the upcoming election season in Europe, how the Russian state pushes its messages to Western audiences is a hot political topic. It’s also woefully misunderstood.

As the Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev, who started his own project to debunk Russian government propaganda, puts it: “The fight against fake news has itself turned into fake news. It’s a kind of meta-propaganda.”

DNC leak: Russia better at information war now than during Cold War

If you want to see how Russian propaganda and information warfare works against America today, look no further than the following previous post:

WAR 2020: Russia’s Information Aggression

 

Russia’s hacking and exploitation of emails from the Democratic National Committee has created an unprecedented situation for the US election this year.

The goal of distributing internal DNC emails is not only to create disorder within the party, as has happened after WikiLeaks published embarrassing internal documents that led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The emails and other information can be used to shape broader views of the US political system among American voters and in the wider world, as a form of information war waged by Russia towards the West.

Estonian Report Details Russia’s ‘Hybrid Threat’ to Europe

For a perfect example of how current Russian propaganda works and its effects, please see the following post:

WAR 2020 Russia’s Information Agression

 

Combating Russian propaganda increasingly important front in information war

A new report by the Estonian Internal Security Service emphasizes the danger a resurgent Russia and a weakening European Union poses to stability and democracy in the region, highlighting Russian propaganda efforts in recent years.

The service, known in Estonia as Kaitsepolitseiamet or “Kapo,” produces an Annual Review summarizing trends and internal threats to Estonia. The 2015 Annual Review, released last week, includes sections on cyber security, preventing international terrorism, and fighting corruption, among other issues.

Forgetting Castro’s Crimes

Fidel Castro and Raul Castro in 1959 / AP

 

Review: Rafael Rojas, ‘Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution’

Between the Old Left and the New Left, between the radicalism of the 1930s and the radicalism of the 1970s, there comes the curious figure of Fidel Castro. A celebrated revolutionary thinker. The absolute ruler of Cuba—and, for a time, the man believed to have finally solved the Communist dilemma: finding a way of being Marxist without becoming Stalinist, creating a fully socialist state that would not harden into totalitarianism.

He didn’t, of course. Soon after it seized power in 1959, Castro’s revolutionary government became a socialist dictatorship, barely distinguishable from all the other Communist states of its time. But the surprising lesson of Rafael Rojas’s new book, Fighting Over Fidel, is how brief was the time, how narrow the window, that serious leftists actually believed in Castro’s exceptionalism.

WAR 2020: Russia’s Information Aggression

This is how the Russian propaganda machine really works, and how Vladimir Putin got ordinary Americans to cheer for him like fools. Russian propaganda has been given the keys to America and the disinformation/manipulation has been deeply rooted for decades now. The hour and forty-five minute video is well worth your time.

 

Russia Spreads Propaganda in Crimea During Blackout

Moscow seeks to discredit west in news reports as it abuses the rights of minorities in Ukraine

Russia is said to be tightening its grip on news sources in Crimea during a power blackout on the peninsula, according to reports, as the Kremlin continues to wage information warfare in Eastern Europe and abroad.

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Reuters reported that Crimeans, including a large percentage of Russian speakers and consumers of Russian TV networks, have blamed Ukraine rather than Moscow for the crisis. Earlier this year, Russia cut off the last independent Tatar TV station and expanded the reach of its own outlets. Those networks feature a heavy dose of anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda.

Permanent Civil War

BERLIN (Own report) – Techniques of anti-Soviet propaganda that had been developed by Nazi officers, could serve today as a model for western anti-Russia psychological warfare operations, according to a semi-official publication from the entourage of the Bundeswehr. The current conflict between Russia and NATO has a “highly pronounced ideological dimension,” analogue to the Cold War, explains the author Uwe Hartmann, a colonel in the German armed forces. According to Hartmann, the Russian side is using the “freedoms of Western open societies” to “influence” public opinion with the aim of “relativizing the value of rights and freedoms,” “sowing discord” and “insecurity within the population.” To counter this strategy, attributed to Russia, Hartmann recommends reversion to the methods of the so-called ‘internal leadership’ concept elaborated by Wolf Graf von Baudissin, who had been on Hitler’s General Staff. This concept calls for preparing the armed forces as well as the society at large for a “permanent civil war” and for the leadership elite to convince Germans of the “worthiness of defending their country,” while immunizing them against all “ideological temptations” and “propaganda attacks.”

Think That News Story Online Is a Hoax? It May Be Written By Russian Propagandists

Did you ever hear the one about the Colombian Chemicals factory in Centerville, Ala., blown up by ISIS terrorists on Sept. 11? Possibly not–because it did not happen.

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The Colombian Chemicals fake is an example of the Russian government’s determination to get into the heads of Americans through the deployment of an army of hundreds so-called “trolls,” who prowl the Internet to spread disinformation and attack those who are deemed enemies of the Kremlin. Creating the hoax involved setting up fake Twitter accounts, commentary in Arabic claiming ISIS involvement, and fake Louisiana TV images on YouTube. For a few moments it had local people severely rattled.

Russia under Vladimir Putin ‘like Nazi Germany or Rwanda’, warns daughter of Boris Nemtsov

The daughter of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has compared the Russian state under Vladimir Putin to “Nazi Germany or Rwanda” and announced she has left the country for the West.

Zhanna Nemtsova, a TV journalist with a Moscow news station, said she had quit her job to go into exile after the fatal shooting of her father outside the walls of the Kremlin in February.

Russia’s “Weaponization” of Information

Testimony Presented to the House Foreign Affairs Committee

April 15, 2015

Helle C. Dale

My name is Helle Dale. I am Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

Audiences within reach of Russia’s growing media empire are increasingly subjected to manipulation and rampant anti-Americanism.[1] This trend has intensified since the Russian annexation of Crimea and its invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Through its global network, Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin broadcasts globally in five major languages, including on cable TV stations in the United States. Free Western media has no comparable presence in Russia.

Russian propaganda is corrosive to the image of the United States and to our values. Or as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland described it before this committee on March 4, “the Kremlin’s pervasive propaganda campaign, where is truth is no obstacle.” And Russian propaganda is being spread aggressively around the world as we have not seen it since Soviet days. This is not just in Central Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe, but even here in the West. The daily content and commentary from RT and others is often polished and slickly produced. And it’s not like old-fashioned propaganda, aimed solely at making Putin and Russia look good. It’s a new kind of propaganda, aimed at sowing doubt about anything having to do with the U.S. and the West, and in a number of countries, unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.

Vladimir Putin says Russia was preparing to use nuclear weapons ‘if necessary’ and blames US for Ukraine crisis in Crimea documentary

While this ‘news’ hits the press one has to question the timing. He’s been gone since March 5th and the Kremlin needs some Russian propaganda to remind people he (or someone/something) is still in control.

 

Vladimir Putin has said Russia was so fearful of attack at the height of the Ukraine crisis that it was preparing to arm its nuclear weapons, in extraordinary claims aired on state TV on Sunday night.

Amid ongoing Russian media speculation that the President was watching the Crimea documentary from his sickbed, Mr Putin’s full interview with Rossiya One provided new insight into his country’s involvement in the annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

On War Preparations and Secret Structures

A recent piece in The European  depicts the EU sanctions against Russia as fundamentally misconceived. “The sanction policy is in no way, shape or form working,” says the article. The sanctions have failed because Putin “controls the perceptions” of the Russian population. Meanwhile, anti-war sentiment is gaining ground in Germany and all over Europe. Russian propaganda is gradually getting the upper hand. What this reveals, of course, is that the West has no strategy while Russia is all about strategy.