by Ollie Richardson for The Saker Blog
In what is a very timely admission taking into account the topic of my last article – 21st century international relations and decision-making, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (Служба внешней разведки Российской Федерации), Sergey Naryshkin, pointed to a low risk method of “hybrid” warfare and named a specific example where it is being implemented. RT reported the following on June 18th (emphasis my own):
“Western secret services are perfecting clandestine tools which are designed to weaken countries like viruses weaken bodies, the Russian foreign intelligence chief has said. This kind of warfare is currently used in Venezuela.
The criticism came from Sergey Naryshkin, who heads Russia’s foreign intelligence agency SVR. He said spies are constantly improving the tool used to dispose of governments that the West does not like.
‘We are talking about creating a universal algorithm for conducting clandestine influence operations in a continuous manner and on a global scale,’ he said. According to the official, this clandestine work ‘never stops and targets not only enemies, but also friends and neutral powers in the times of peace, crisis and war.’
‘It can be compared to the action of a virus; it can spend decades destroying a human organism without symptoms, and once diagnosed, often it’s too late to treat it.’
The methods used to influence and destabilize other nations include creating network-oriented structures that can operate on a premise of public activism, art, science, religion or extremism, the Russian official said. After collecting data on the fault lines in a targeted society, those structures are used to attack those weak points in a synchronized assault, overwhelming the nation’s capability to respond to crises.
Simultaneously the perpetrators push a narrative through local and global media and social networks that claims that the only way to resolve problems is to replace the government of the victim nation with another one, possibly with a direct foreign support.
‘We can observe this scenario being implemented in Venezuela,’ Naryshkin said.
The US is currently trying to replace Venezuela’s elected President Nicolas Maduro with another person, Juan Guaido, whom Washington recognized as the legitimate head of the South American nation.
Among others, the US backs his bid with economic sanctions against Venezuela and a massive diplomatic and media campaign in support of the pretender. Guaido’s attempts to actually seize power in Caracas have been futile, so far.
The Russian intelligence chief was speaking at an international security forum in Ufa, Russia, which is hosted by the Russian National Security Council. The event is meant for officials directly involved in policy making on security issues. Almost 120 nations are participating in this year’s gathering.”
I will start by saying that Naryshkin could reveal a lot more if he wanted to, but for obvious reasons is limited to presenting an abstract thesis – which RT “coincidently” relayed – as a sort of signal to Western intelligence agencies that Russia’s room to manoeuvre in the information space isn’t limited to just publishing “news”.
On the surface it might seem like he is just describing a banal coup d’état, where one state interferes in the internal affairs of another state for the purpose of overthrowing the government and bringing to power a political circle that is friendlier. If one prefers simplistic and digestible takeaways, then one can stop reading here – nothing new under the sun!
However, what the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service is alluding to is a far more complex and dense matter. As history has shown, the traditional coup d’état, akin to what has been seen in the MENA and South America for decades now, is not the same as the coup d’état that was rolled out in, for example, Ukraine in 2014. Why?
The precursor to the “colour revolution”
The main reason is that the West has been working on occupying MENA’s lands and raw materials for decades. If the countries of MENA can be said to be tribalistic in terms of structure and aims (more about daily survival than paying bills at the end of the month), then post-WW2 Europe is at first glance much more “developed” and “civilised”. I put these words in quotation marks because they are the generic phrases that organisations like the UN use when describing how MENA should aspire to become “more democratic” and “progressive” in order to “combat poverty” and become “prosperous”. In other words, MENA in general is not as technologically advanced as modern nation states with liberal “democracies”. This is not an insult to MENA; it is simply an observable fact based on the consequences of colonisation. Thus, the scheme for conquering MENA territory is more straightforward than it would be for conquering, for example, Eastern Europe. There is a leader, there is a small circle of wealthy elites, there is an army (armed loyalists), and there are farmers/manual labour workers. Anglo-Saxon colonisers managed to conquer the lands long before the victim nation is able to climb the ladder of scientific research and thus obtain more and more effective ways of defending themselves.
In the example of the Native Indians, the British already had basic guns, thus the former’s bows and arrows were inferior. In the case of Africa, notorious colonisers (which includes the British) arrived with the same guns and were faced with only spears and other relatively primitive weapons. Hence why almost the entire African continent was subjugated so easily. The difference between just general colonisation and a coup d’état can be seen most visibly after the CIA is formed: overthrowing a “dictator” becomes as simple as literally buying off the army (like how the UK pioneered the use of pirates), which allows the capitalist West to take care of business and use its media resources to report another “peaceful” and “successful” “democratisation” project. As soon as a leader manages to come to power and aims to challenge this subjugation (Gaddafi being the most recent MENA example, but there is also Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara), they experience the same problem – they are simply overpowered by the more technologically advanced coloniser.
When it comes to coup d’états in the post-Soviet space, the game is different. For over 60 years the USSR had succeeded to repel the influence of the “free” (capitalist) Anglo-Saxons – thanks to a focus on scientific research and thus nuclear technologies – and create a tightly knit Union based on common history and culture. In the West the governments told their citizens that “on that side of the curtain they are ‘totalitarian’”, whilst in reality America & Co struggled to influence Soviet society and didn’t want their own citizens to see that in the Soviet system of governance everybody had something, as opposed to some people having everything (capitalism). In other words, the USSR was able to defend itself against the traditional coup d’état method.
Due to the fact that the USSR was a developed territory and had much more complex political structures than those of the average African country, it wasn’t as simple as just sending Thomas Lawrence or Sidney Reilly and duping local kingpins into signing agreements that essentially renounce raw material ownership rights. And it is also important to bear in mind that the Soviet intelligence agencies were doing battle with the CIA long before 1991. The changing of times simply obliged the West to update the coup d’état playbook before the target country progressed along the line of scientific development and establishes a defence mechanism that is technologically 20 years ahead of the US’ subversive tools.
Not being physically able to intimidate the USSR enough into submitting to its will since the latter had nuclear weapons, Uncle Sam realised that it was much more wiser and safer to blow it up from the inside. In this article I don’t want to digress too much from the central topic, thus I will not present a mass of details of how America managed to penetrate the USSR and inject it’s liberal ideas throughout society, but a good brief example I can give is the shipping of American clothes/fashion to Soviet ports, such as Odessa. Today this might be called “soft power”, but at the time in question such things served to convince people that individualism could give a more fruitful life than collectivism.
The 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine utilised an upgraded blueprint that was based on the one used to dismantle the Soviet Union (and spark the 1993 constitutional crisis). When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Ukraine found itself in the position of being the wealthiest inheritor of the Soviet legacy: its infrastructure, medicine, education, military, etc was the best in the region. Things started to go pear-shaped around 2004, when America’s interference started to reach new heights at the time of the “multi-vectoral” Kuchma, but the Ukraine of 2014 under Yanukovych was relatively-speaking above the water and swimming comfortably. In an attempt to oust Putin before Russia comes even closer to China, strengthens, and forms the backbone of the emerging Eurasian bloc, America planned to disrupt the equilibrium in Ukraine and violently tear it away from the Russian nation. But the problem for America was “how to make this process look organic? After all, to simply invade Ukraine with the US Army would result in the liquidation of the United States of America itself.”
I will not use precious article space recounting what happened in 2013/2014 in Ukraine, since I have created an archive dedicated to it, but I think the video below – John Tefft in 2013 preparing the terrain in Donetsk for what was about to happen – encapsulates the essence of it very well: US NGOs brainwashed society into flirting with liberalism and its noxious “democracy”, similar to that virus Sergey Naryshkin spoke about; local Galician militant formations are formed (main example: “Right Sector”) and capture administration buildings in Western Ukraine, before eventually being transported to Kiev for the February “revolution”.
“Colour revolution 2.0”
What I really want to focus on is the coup d’état model that is being deployed by America & Co in 2019. So far we can say that there are 3 versions of the coup d’état technology (I am being deliberately simplistic, and I use provisional names and descriptions, since I am still researching this topic):
- Traditional coup d’état – a simple smash and grab, effective against the so-called “third world” (examples: Laos, Guatemala, Zaire);
- “Colour revolution” – temporarily hijacking “civil society”, effective against more technologically sophisticated states but not superpowers (examples: Egypt, Syria, “independent” Ukraine);
- Algorithmic probing (can be thought of as “colour revolution 2.0”) – seizing control over the nation from the ground-up, effective against allies of nuclear superpowers post-2015, when the Minsk Agreements were signed and Russian jets touched down at Hmeymim airbase in Syria (examples: Venezuela, Hong Kong, Russia, Serbia).
Before starting to elaborate on version No. 3, which concerns the post-Syrian-war (I stress, Russia ended the war in 2015 – everything that happened afterwards is just behind the curtain negotiations concerning the next 50+ years of global order) world, it is necessary to present some of the reasons why version No. 2 no longer works:
- Social media hashtag campaigns like those seen during the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood “revolution” no longer have the same effect due to the exponentially increasing mobilisation of anti-coup (“pro-Russia”/“pro-Assad”/“pro-Maduro”/“pro-Nasrallah”) social media users;
- It became too difficult to keep the aesthetics of the operation consistently clean – the “White Helmets” may do something that discredits their alleged authenticity, the speaker of the Rada may state that “Hitler was a great leader”, a senior Qatari figure may admit live on TV that Qatar funded militant groups in order to remove Assad, Bana might botch a tweet, a video may emerge showing a “FSA” leader reading a script in front of an American producer, etc;
- The popularity of mainstream media is becoming less and less (not to mention the effect of Trump’s “fake news” PR campaign), and the popularity of both non-Western state media (RT, Sputnik, Press TV, Telesur, etc) and independent (or apparently independent) media is exponentially growing;
- Alternative social media websites/apps have since become popular amongst English speakers (VKontakte, Telegram, Instagram, Gab, Snapchat, etc);
- Eurasia was able to study the past behaviour of the both West’s traditional resources and social media users, allowing to refine its existing resources and to even create new, specialised ones;
- The existence of independent and anti-coup journalists who are prepared to travel between different theatres (for example, Syria and Venezuela) and expose the pattern of the West’s “regime change” methods.
- The weakening of the effect of smearing expressions like “anti-Semitism” due to the accumulation effect of reports about Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank;
- The general strengthening of Eurasia and the decline of the liberal West (and the opportunities it has to violate international law as a result), thus the citizens of the former don’t have a reason to believe that the latter is the paradise it pretends it is;
- etc.
In other words, the geopolitical reality we have today is not at all the same as the one that we saw before Russia’s involvement in Syria – the highest stakes chessboard in the grand game. Lessons were learnt from the past and enough time has passed for changes to be calculated and implemented. Today, superpowers are obliged to invest exponentially more resources in technologies (hence why Russia wants to invest heavily in the AI sector), since understanding the enemy’s technologies is the difference between them successfully or unsuccessfully penetrating society. And it’s not a coincidence that Naryshkin starts to use terms like “virus”. But what does he really mean? What are the design differences between a regular “colour revolution” and what we are seeing today in, for example, Venezuela?
Firstly, a “colour revolution” is designed to hijack “civil society” over a period of several months (less than 6 months), obtain the support of the elites, and aims to put the target leader in front of two bad choices – a trap: to quell protests means to be depicted by the West’s NGO’s as a “dictator”, and thus the West doesn’t risk receiving a information blow to its rear (if Western society doesn’t agree with something the government is doing, an adversary can exploit it and disrupt the socio-economic situation of a western country or of many western countries); to not quell the protests means to simply hand over power. This explains what happened to Viktor Yanukovych – he did not give the order to Berkut to disperse Maidan for fear of being permanently stained in the Western media, so Joe Biden and his band of merry putschists, after a bit of sniper theatrics to keep the protests alive, took the Rada. Lose-lose. In this scenario Russia could do nothing since a) Ukrainians and their elites are ultimately to blame for flirting with the West, and b) Yanukovych chose the passive option, and thus the only thing Moscow could do was to quickly forecast the consequences and move several step ahead of the US (hence the supercomputers that know about the Yugoslavia war). The result? The Minsk Agreements and the driving of the US’ “anti-Russia” project into a dead end.
Secondly, a “colour revolution” hijacks momentary social discontent in relation to a particular issue, inflates it, and then unleashes it in a very focused manner. The discontent needs to be fed financially and thus can be left to extinguish if plans change. It should be noted here that the target society must already show signs of fragmentation: the work to gradually tear Ukraine away from the bosom of Russia (since the collapse of the USSR) has been ongoing for decades, and over time Kiev succumbed to the West’s Banderist poison, thus the 2014 coup simply brought to the surface what had been boiling below since the times of the NKVD’s battle with OUN-UPA. Syria is very similar –Wahhabism had been nibbling away at the Levant for decades. Of course, the ties between Hafez/Bashar al-Assad and the Russia/USSR have existed for over 30 years, but it cannot be said that the two countries have had a relationship based more on pragmatism.
Thirdly, a “colour revolution” involves the creation of an informational hologram that proverbially floats above the target territory, creating a parallel timeline (example: the green/black/white French mandate flag as the actual Syrian flag, and the Higher Negotiations Committee as the actual UN recognised government of Syria – both of which are of course frauds but allow NATO members to bomb Syria without any indignation from the Western general public), but starts to fade as soon as the balance of forces in the war on the ground tips in the target’s favour (not even the US media machine can sell the narrative that East Aleppo still hasn’t been recaptured by Assad).
Fourthly, a “colour revolution” does not aim to reprogram all the layers of non-elite society in all regions of the country – it only aims to introduce liberal ideas and maintain the support of both those who are already brainwashed and those who succumb to the inculcation. Those who were anti-liberal before will remain anti-liberal post-coup, and thus pose a threat to the puppet regime. Ukraine here is an excellent example of this, where the profoundness of the historical Novorossiya vs Galicia line of divide could be overcome with a few cookies and $5 billion in NGO money.
Version No. 3 of the coup d’état, which in this article I refer to as “algorithmic probing”, is thus designed to: take place over a longer period of time; be fed at the expense of the target government and link together various sources of social discontent; be able to work in conditions where there is no existing ground-based warfare and the likelihood of there being any in the future is low; reprogram the national consciousness and hook all layers of society as geographically far and as wide as possible; make steps towards success even if the elites remain loyal to the target leader.
In situations where the target’s security apparatus is the same, if not better, than the belligerent’s; where society’s average level of trust in the leader is the same, if not higher than the belligerent’s; and where the target’s defence capabilities match, if not overpower, the belligerent’s offensive capabilities; it becomes far too risky for the belligerent to try the “colour revolution” scheme, since failure can compromise any future coup d’état attempts – the coup leader can be detained and may spill the beans concerning who gave him orders and what they were, as well as any valuable intelligence information. The failed coup in Turkey in 2016 was the warning signal to Washington that the habitual “colour revolution” technology will not work in the “multipolar” Eurasian space (hint: Turkey received coup-thwarting intel from allies).
In Venezuela the US is revising its coup d’état technology in real time. There are signs of the “colour revolution” technology: a puppet opposition leader who calls for protests in the street; the expression “the Maduro regime”; imposition of sanctions to give the illusion that the Venezuelan government is starving its own people; even statements like “all options are on the table”, which is PR-friendly way of saying there are no options. There are also some faint signs of “algorithmic probing”: the transferal of assets in the US belonging to the Venezuelan state to the hands of Juan Guaido; the dragging out of the coup d’état (it’s been going on for much longer than 6 months); there is no civil war in the country and it’s unlikely there will be any in the near future, despite the presence of US NGOs in the country.
However, the initial “colour revolution” attempt failed because Russia and China – nuclear superpowers – helped Caracas to weather the storm and keep society together. Later the Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA moved its assets to Moscow, Russia sent polite green men to calm down the US, and Moscow and China both sent humanitarian aid (as well as “humanitarian aid”) for the sanctioned people of the country, and Juan Guaido was exposed so much so that even his rich boyfriend Richard Branson was obliged to throw him under the bus:
But in this example, like vis-à-vis the Syrian war, Russia doesn’t have to do much informational work in order to justify its involvement, simply because ties between Caracas and Moscow already existed before the Bolton-Pompeo tandem came to power, and Russia would be acting within international law anyway. I.e., the door was slammed shut in the face of the CIA, and in order to re-open it America’s only option is to either remove Russia’s nuclear weapons (and in order to do this the S-400 must be removed from the equation) or to overhaul Venezuelan society at the grass roots level.
The “colour revolution” version of the coup d’état even more so does not work in Putin’s Russia. He has succeeded to build a system that leaves no holes for CIA mice (e.g. successors of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, or other notorious liberal saboteurs) to scurry though. Some might call it “authoritarian”; others might call it coup d’état-resistant.
The CIA-orchestrated Boris Nemtsov assassination served as a test balloon, to learn if the Ukrainian scheme can be repeated (death[s] from gunfire -> protests and clashes with law enforcement -> target president flees). The aim was to gather enough people in Moscow for a “march in memory of Nemtsov” and to replicate what happened on Independent Square in Kiev, but this time outside of the Kremlin (how convenient for propagandist photographers – he was killed on the bridge next to the Kremlin!).
Not enough people came, and the security agencies succeeded to block the path to the Kremlin. Russian senator Evgeny Federov did a fantastic job of explaining this in more detail:
The next experiment was the Navalny card in the run-up to the 2018 presidential election. I recommended to delve into the material found here for more details about this. In brief, the CIA tried to use the image of children being arrested by OMON during unsanctioned protests in order to shake Russian society. The result? Putin outlawed it, and of course, Western propagandists were howling “repression”. Putin won the election anyway, in the presence of international observers too.
Fast forward to the most recent (at the time of writing) provocation – the case of Ivan Golunov, who works for the liberal propagandist agency “Meduza” – and we see familiar things: a fifth-columnist is used as a battering ram designed to shake society and remove the evil “dictator”. An unsanctioned “Golunov is a hero” march took place on June 12th, and analysis of the footage shows that it has nothing to do with journalism and everything about putting Putin in a bad light. The crowd even chants “Russia without Putin”, and one hired clown in particular gave the message a visual aspect.
Evgeny Federov noted that the Golunov club refused the government’s offer to hold a sanctioned rally on June 16th, since the US needs images of “innocent journalists and activists” being detained by “evil” OMON. Federov’s statement in full:
“There is no doubt that it is an attempt to interfere. Both the US State Department and Brussels made official statements on this issue. They have included their forces, and we know them well, many of the participants in the illegal demonstration are well known to us. From the photos in the police vans, you may remember that these forces repeatedly came out before. Personally, I saw them on Pushkin Square, when Navalny took them there.
These are obvious foreign forces, the fifth column on the territory of Russia, they became active on June 12th. For them, they just need a reason, but the reason has already disappeared, Golunov was released, but they don’t care. The team arrived, the money was received, and they need to put it to use. The actions of the protesters are connected to the general system of shaking the situation that is practiced in the West, primarily in the US. It is enough to see how events were prepared in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Moldova, how they were prepared in hundreds of other countries through foreign intervention using the orange technology method.
Everything happens in the same way everywhere. Firstly, a sacred victim is selected, and then proven groups who don’t care about the cause are used. The main thing for them is that the performance is against Russia and in support of foreign handlers. Completely the same scheme works in Russia concerning garbage collection and in Ekaterinburg. No matter what the reason, the most important thing is to continue to shake the situation. And I stress that the Americans managed to do this many times. At the second echelon, they usually involve separatists, and this is also being prepared in Russia.”
Thus, instead of holding a sanctioned march on June 16th, a “support Golunov” event took place. The turnout for this rally was pathetic. As Federov says, Putin neutralised the Golunov bomb by releasing the “journalist” and sacrificing some police generals. Of course, the social media attacks followed the same script as with Navalny’s unsanctioned protests and arrests (there is no indignation vis-à-vis Kirill Vyshinsky’s detention, naturally):
The fifth column media in Russia in unison started to promote the “I/We are Golunov” NGO campaign. UK newspapers presented the situation as Putin “backing down” and claimed that the “independent press is harassed, which in reality means that the FSB doesn’t let the fifth column breathe. There were also attempts (example) to stretch the Golunov template over other “unlawful arrests”. And the cherry on the cake is that it turns out that the clown Navalny was present at the unsanctioned Golunov march:
There are of course other examples of US-instigated agitation in Russian society – ranging from churches in Ekaterinburg to pension reform – but they all show the same traits of a “colour revolution” and encounter the same problem: Putin is one step ahead of them.
Long story short, America’s post-Syrian war application of its “colour revolution” technology is inadequate when it comes to toppling either the leaders of nuclear superpowers or the leaders of their ally countries (and it’s not just Eurasia that is the target of these attacks – Trump also attacks the EU [example and example], the individual states of which qualify, if to use Naryshkin’s expression, as “friends and neutral powers in the times of peace, crisis and war”). And taking into account the activity of both Russia and China in Africa today, this inadequacy can mean that the “third world” countries that previously were bulldozed by the most basic method of capturing state power may start to escape from the net of colonisation and enjoy the protection offered by Russia’s “algorithmic counter-probing”. After all, that’s what Venezuela is basically doing, and it’s the only reason Maduro, like Assad, is still in power.
Why do I use the word “algorithmic”?
If we recall, in my previous article I introduced the idea that the foreign policy decision-making of nuclear superpowers is being assisted by supercomputers, simply because the way in which we communicate and send/receive data is becoming exponentially quicker, and the human brain is not able to process such data at such speed. Because of this rapidity of communication, it has meant that one state can encroach on the sovereignty of another state (both digitally and physically), deal a blow, and withdraw to relative safety before the target has the time to adequately respond. Thus, the deployment of the S-400 allowed Russia to establish certain rules in international relations that a) take pressure off Russia’s nuclear weapons – the deterrent of all deterrents, and b) exert pressure on America in such a way that Washington currently – and probably not for the next 25 years at least – has no way of countering it.
So we understand from the description directly above that, like in any system, there can be latency/lag when it comes to responding. I have mentioned in the past how Russia was caught off balance with the first “White Helmets” false flag (Ghouta in 2013, which was designed by buy the jihadists time), since it used a media technology that has not been seen before. The second false flag – Khan Shaykhun – was much less sucessful since Russia had already deployed its jets, was able to learn from the previous false flag, and thus adjusted its algorithm (see my previous article, especially the section about media disinformation with complex equations) and deploy a counter media campaign. The third false flag – Douma – was even more of a failure.
The aim of the adversary is to outmanoeuvre the rival in the global information space via a coordinated media and ground campaign (coined by some as “fourth generation warfare”). The “White Helmets” have to film the false flag, and the agencies have to spread the fake footage in parallel, coordinating it with the general daily topics in such a way that the consumer feels that their regular “trustworthy” news service is the same as it’s always been – because of course, the last thing a neoliberal government wants is its subjects starting to entertain the idea that one’s government is sponsoring Al Qaeda. In other words, the higher the geopolitical stakes, the more technologically sophisticated the methods used in the information space.
In this affair it’s not just about the speed of a “hybrid” attack, but also about its composition. One can have the most rapid “input->process->output” informational algorithm, but it is useless if it cannot provide multiple angles of attack.
Here is a very abstract (rushed) diagram I made just to illustrate this point. The black circle represents a designated point in time, when all media resources will parrot “Assad gassed his own people” in sync. The objective of America is to coordinate as many “chemical attack reports” as possible, thus making it look “credible”. The red arrows represent Russia’s counter attack, which will prevent the black circle from growing (the West employing more media resources/NGOs to disseminate the disinformation) or moving forward (the West using the same amount of resources, but reporting “updates” later along the timeline). This is how the attempt to execute a fourth false flag was negated – see here, here, here, and here for examples. As I mentioned in another article, this same preventative tactic was used in Donbass a lot to stop the US’ aggressive exertion of pressure. Of course, the map is not the territory, and the diagram below is not supposed to literally depict how the Russian Ministry of Defence’s supercomputer works.
The reader may be thinking “You said that Syria was an example of a ‘colour revolution’, not of ‘algorithmic probing’, so why use it as an example?” The answer is: Syria is not a nuclear superpower, and thus “colour revolution” technology (albeit incrementally improved over the many years of the war) worked. In the case of Russia, “colour revolution” technology doesn’t work, period. So the US’ only option is to try to inject this “virus”, as Naryshkin calls it. Thus, America’s aim is to encroach on the Russian information space without the Russian authorities having the time to repel attacks. When viewed from a gestalt perspective, America would thus have a permanent presence in the Russian information space, since by the time Russia has plugged one hole, another blow will have been landed from another angle.
Navalny, Golunov, the Yeltsin Center, RBK, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta, Meduza, Roizman, Kasparov, Kasyanov, Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn – America sure has a lot of assets at its disposal, but they all suffer from the same problem: they are designed to make Western people hate the Russian world (I doubt Russians care what rats like Jeremy Hunt thinks), but they do not noticeably shake the internal situation in Russia. And after all, it is the Russian people themselves who determine the legitimacy of the Russian government, not Joe Blogs in Coventry. As a result, America’s only hope in relation to paralyzing Putin’s legacy is to create a phantom Russian identity that can spark a civil war. This is a topic for another article, but the Russia-friendly reader mustn’t immediately start losing sleep, since I am talking about processes that need 10-20 more years before we can start to judge whether or not America’s coup d’état technology has adapted to the CIA’s needs.
One thing is for sure: as long as the Russian state is viable and self-sufficient, social unrest will remain for Washington only a wet dream, not a reality. And it’s not excluded that the socio-economic situation inside America and/or the EU will buckle before any Yankee algorithms start to poison the roots of the Russian state. After all, America has a rear, Russia also has information-disseminating resources, and the S-400 isn’t going anywhere. And what sort of technology does China have? Imagine if Russian and Chinese supercomputers are interconnected? Actually don’t, because I don’t want to give the reader a headache!
Very nice work Ollie. Thank you. I must confess that in order to hold the totality of what you report in balance within myself, I feel obliged to refrain from thinking of the perpetrators of such evil as nations or specific human organizations, such as America is doing this, or capitalism is doing this. This is undoubtedly a necessary surface reading but for me it does not address the totality of what you are so well describing.
Hence I feel obliged to expand the consideration of what is being encountered into a more traditional spiritual and cosmological dimension by referring to the activities of what religions have often traditionally referred to as the Satan force.
For me this is the only concept that holds a sufficient paradigmatic depth to be able to comprehend the depth and totality of what you describe. I sincerely believe this is the global force that we are encountering here. It seems a matter of bringing the original religious understanding of this energy into modern language.
This is the only way I can hold all of this in my understanding. Traditional political categories work, but not to an inadequate degree I feel. I am reminded of what the Iranian mind calls The Great Satan is established inside American capitalism. They at least I feel have a sufficient theoretical grasp of their antagonist. I have very little sense of the American people in general having any great investment in this. Hence I feel I have room to hold them somewhat aside from judgments regarding active complicity. In general that is.
The good aspect of this perspective of having your tale depicted as the work of the Satan force is this opens the way to seeing that the presence of Satan is a powerful clue to the even greater presence of counterbalancing benign spiritual forces. Evidence for that presence now abounds. I like the idea that some float that Putin and the Chinese leadership currently offer good evidence of the proof that God is also in this game. This global drama is so much more than just a world political struggle. It is clearly a global spiritual struggle of the highest magnitude.
This is the only way I can assimilate this data and make macro sense of all that is implied. Accordingly, your reporting for me has something of the quality of the heroic about it. I hope this complement sits well with you.
It’s ‘political ponerology’ that is required to understand the Empire of Evil. The study of moral and spiritual Evil. No other parameter makes any sense whatsoever.
‘Ponerology’ – nice use of the Greek Mulga
Nice point Mulga; How precisely does one culturally contextualize such a study, in your opinion?
Well, Lobaczewski, who wrote the book, was speaking of Polish Communists. I don’t doubt that some Polish Government officials were not nice people, but in comparison to the creatures who rule in the West these days, even the worst were veritable saints.
As for moral Evil in politics in the West, in my opinion it has many obvious roots. I look at the politics here in Austfailia, and at the current ruling regime and the currents on display are pretty plain. First of all is devotion to capitalism, ie to parasitism, inequality, the hatred of others and contempt for, even hatred of, Life on Earth. There psychopathy is pretty plain. Insatiable greed is on display in myriad forms, manifest most nakedly in the deliberate killing of hundreds of millions by the tobacco industry, the junk food industry, the fossil fuel industry, the asbestos industry etc, all of which KNEW that their products kill, but kept peddling them and lying about their harms nonetheless. Boundless egomania-need one say anything. Hatred of others comes with the class structure and the psychology of the lower middle-class ‘would be if they could bes’ like the genocidal war criminal John Winston Howard, a naked racist and class haters if ever there was one.
In other words capitalism requires a pathocracy of loyal stooges to work according to neoliberal theory, where, as Thatcher declared, society ie other people, does not exist. The hatred of others was never so succinctly expressed. Under neoliberalism every other person is, at best, competition, but nearly always the enemy. No degree of poverty or humiliation or suffering is so great that it will evoke a scintilla of pity or fellow feeling in the Free Marketeer. Obviously such virtues are faked, with varying degrees of success (May very poor, Obama a genius)because the proles dare not be woken to the truth that their Masters are Evil through and through. They get a life-long brainwashing into their Masters’ habits of greed, hatred of others, contempt for Life etc, and it shows more and more in the nature of society and individuals.
Austfailia also suffers from its genocidal colonial history, which is not past by any means, with hatred of the Indigenous a sure vote-getter for the Right, and the Indigenous one of the most abused and downtrodden minorities anywhere on Earth. Racism is also getting a new revival in the form of virulent Sinophobia, which raged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is definitely back, on orders from our Yankee Masters. Also in a recent development of great significance, is the rise to power and social influence of religious fascists and haters of the Pentecostal and other types. Our PM is one, like Bolsonaro, a so-called ‘Christian’ who boasts of his achievements in looking refugee children up indefinitely, until they go mad, self-harm or attempt suicide, and of his savage cuts to welfare payments and tax cuts for the rich as Treasurer. A real follower of Jesus, there. Many others in the regime are of similar type, riven by homophobia and hard Right, sub-fascist aggression, not a few ex-military, another ghastly development.
Furthermore the intellectual and spiritual life of the country is moribund. In numerous debates and controversies, such as concerning our vassalage to the USA, our hatred of China, Russia, Iran etc and the parasitic and destructive nature of our economic system, NO significant dissent whatsoever is allowed to reach the public. All media discussions are utterly one-sided with groups of ideologues and dullards all spewing the same lies and nonsense, and no-one allowed to appear to argue the other side. Much news easily accessed on the web, such as Mahatir’s repeated declarations that Malaysia does not support the MH17 witch-hunt’s findings, and that it was set up from the beginning to find Russia guilty and that Malaysia has STILL not been allowed access to the black box recordings, is simply NOT reported. That is the Free Press, populated by arrogant, lying, stupid scum. If I had to nominate a Ground Zero for moral Evil in the West in general, I would put it in the media, because falsifying history and reality is a very great moral and spiritual Evil indeed.
Excellent analysis on methods of ‘externally controlled political change’.
Colour Revolution version 2 was successfully deployed (probably for the 1st time) in USSR from 1970s end to 1993 by the Zionist Capitalists. While the same version 2 didn’t get desired result in China during same time period but shorter duration 1975 to 1990.
Russian and Chinese leadership are simply too wise to allow version 3 or any further revision to be successful in their country or allied country.
But the Hegemonic Devil won’t stop – they have targeted Belarus, Kazakhstan, Iran, Hong Kong, South Korea for immediate change (even Venezuela has not been struck off from the list) ! Eurasian Resistance camp needs to step up their coordination.
Right, “Colour Revolution 2.0” brought down and was the only way to bring down the (successful, solid) Soviet Union (and therefore East Germany, and so forth as well).
I think East German intellectuals (such as https://sascha313.wordpress.com ) know best about the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, and how it was brought down in/since 1953 by CIA/NWO infiltration, subversion, sabotage, and in essence 4 coup d’états.
(Because East Germany under the Communists Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker wasn’t told/taught the pack of lies the people of the West as well as the people of Soviet Union under and since the anti-Communist Khrushchev were told/taught)
The first two were in 1953 (take-over of the leadership), and because of the third in 1956 the Soviet Union ceased to be Communist (i.e. Marxist-Leninist). The last one was under Gorbachev.
(Like you say the “Revision” in China was seemingly on Chinese terms and on a win-win base and therefore not exactly with the desired result)
The best thing would be (for the government of Russia with a mandate from the Russian people) to nationalize or at least take a controlling interest in the businesses (owned by robber barons), resources, and institutions of Russia, so that they work on behalf of the Russian people. That would be the best way to eliminate the problem.
The very first thing to do is to kick out every Western NGO. Then investigate every Western financed, compradore and Quisling ‘Russian’ NGO. If innocent, let them find Russian, or preferably receive Russian State, financing. If guilty of conspiring with Western forces to spread socially divisive ideology, or even to overthrow the State and impose a Yeltsin regime-to Siberia to count trees.
Then the US and other Western Embassies must be restricted to Moscow, and all their Russian ‘guests’ carefully vetted. On the other hand, open the country up to friendly foreign tourists, but if any engage in subversion, like Pentecostal lunatics proselytising their Evil cult-off to the pokey. Let them be martyrs to their hideous, anti-human, cults. In other words, get tough. No amount of trying to appease the West will ever bring anything but more aggression, subversion and hate propaganda. Practise autarky, and trade only with trusted friends, and just wait for the USA and the West to collapse from their own moral, intellectual and spiritual rottenness, no more better illustrated than in the filthy and sordid farce of the MH17 witch-hunt and sham.
True. The entire story (upto 95%) of NGO is nothing but facade of subversion in other countries (enemy or friend). Countries like Russia, China. Iran, India need to be very careful about this – (in reality, all these Eurasian countries have varying degree of tolerance about NGO). You gave example of Pentecostal – I would proceed a step further and say that almost all categories of NGO (religious, cultural, environmental, socio-economic) are to carry out long-term subversion of host country by ‘trozan horses’. There are interesting cases where NGOs catering to seemingly opposite views and agenda, are actually different forms of the same devil!
About Embassy, it is more problematic because the foreign powers (particularly Zionist Capitalist 5-Eyes + Israel) use this ‘legitimate’ outpost to the hilt ! To control their activities (propaganda & subversion) the host country needs to be very smart & technically sophisticated. China managed this problem, during this decade, quite well.
I read an article just today on Russian supercomputers being way behind the US and Chinese machines in speed of function.
An expert comment in the article remarked that the need for speed is dictated by the need for algorithms that require speed of the level of the top machines. First come the algorithms, then build the speed you need.
Russia apparently has not needed dominating speed to serve their algorithms which are defeating the US operations attacking the government of Putin.
Of course, this is directly related to the topic you write about today.
What the Russians do need is AI inventions and for that Big Data and computing speed.
Their data base is one third of the US (using population as the basis for the Big Data) and one tenth of China’s.
This might stymie the AI approach of Russia.
Putin has ordered their top math, computer science and technologists to win the race for AI.
I have always thought that the Big Data that one needs to build defenses and offensive weapons must be your enemies’ Big Data. And who has had the most massive Big Data breeches over and over? The US. I don’t wonder who has engineered those breeches.
While the CIA, Cyber Command and NSA and Mossad and Mi6 busy themselves trying to destabilize Russia and China, the Russians and Chinese have been capturing Big Data by the petabyte from the US networks.
Now that Xi and Putin have agreed on the New Era Coordination of their Strategic Comprehensive Partnership, it is clear that the two nations will be doing more than putting computer power together. They will be coordinating that Big Data and producing algorithms for AI that preserves each nation and their Eurasian Integration projects.
Excellent comment my friend :)
Sounds iffy to say they don’t need speed, while being under attack. If you are in a reactionary state, you would have more variations to respond to, which is why they say a best Defense is a good Offense. Limiting your computing to one’s own population is foolish. Why do you think the Utah Data Center was built? I don’t think a true asset to National security is publicized unless it is a classed deterrent.
Maybe somebody remembers that Russia was developing new computer chips that used light instead of electric signals. So the Motherboard would have all chips connected with fiber optics not soldered chips like current chips. The speeds of such a system would easily dwarf all current tech. This news just blew by with no fan fair.
In short, I don’t think one can know for sure where computing power truly lies. We judge by what we have information on. Saying Russia’s computer is slow, but just doesn’t need it because of a smaller population is just balsam.
One would think that two can play at this game especially since the neocons are busy destroying civil society in Looneylandia all on their own and so there is no need to go there. However, let us hope that the Iranians are more grateful than the Turks for this bit of help from abroad.
https://www.urdupoint.com/en/world/iranian-intelligence-busts-cia-controlled-cyb-647074.html
In a somewhat related vein, Paul Craig Roberts talks about how multimedia technology has developed to such an extant that programmers can now fabricate what are called Deep Fakes that can “create audio and video of anyone, saying absolutely anything.”
This is a very disturbing trend in that the technology to expose these fakes seriously lags behind the ability to create them.
Needless to say, America will inevitably be deploying these fakes to mold public opinion to support its wars of aggression.
White Helmets’ atrocity porn or the BBC’s _Saving Syria’s Children_ “documentary” (critiqued in the link below) will be amateurish propaganda in comparison.
Robert Stuart vs the BBC: No integrity left in the Western media establishment.
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/05/28/robert-stuart-vs-the-bbc-no-integrity-left-in-the-western-media-establishment/
Forget about Fake News. We are now entering the world of Fake Reality itself in which the very idea of truth will be jeopardized.
This is the world of the American Matrix….
The Advent of Truth-Destroying Technology
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/06/18/the-advent-of-truth-destroying-technology/
Still the one thing they cant do is engineer the sophistication of communication, climbing the ladder of intelligence one step at a time, this disables the MSM intellectually and reduces their ability’s to simple control of the masses at their own expense and reputation, ones that are getting more expensive and crucial the closer to the top of the ladder one gets.
This is why their is no respect of the media at the White House but a need to do congress’s bidding pubicly.
In a world where nearly everyone will have a smartphone capable of taking pictures and movies, the Deep Fake will have little traction. The ubiquitous phones will show what really happened.
Integrity died in the Western media establishment long, long, long ago.
Indeed “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”
All these attacks and provocations ( including NATO ) will make Russia more resilient.
That doesn’t work out for everybody so nicely, but I am sure that for Russia it will.
Bulldozer Revolution (in 2000) in Serbia, was one of the 1st. color revolutions, if not the 1st. one.
Now after total U.S. & Western color “treatment” Serbia is zombified country.
U.S. did so well their lobotomisation job, that they can’t do any more color revolutions in Serbia again, even if they want to (if they ever want to remove their unsubordinate puppet from power)
Serbia the way I see it is dead. We are only in God’s hands now.
It is up to Him to decide to rise us from the dead, or to let us go.
P.S.
Nice read. Good articel and some good comments.
The first Colour Revolution was in Beijing in 1989. The Chinese State being strong, put it down, with much bloodshed, the Plan B for Colour Revolutions. If you can’t overthrow, discredit.
OK
thanks for the info.
There seemed to be “some” strengthening of relationships with Serbia..Belorussia….Moldova seems a little more stable for the moment….are they vulnerable….? How do they fit into the picture?
Heh, a lot of words to say what amounts to “Duh!”. Anyone who didn’t know this is how the West is operating these days must not have been paying attention for the last twenty years.
“the foreign policy decision-making of nuclear superpowers is being assisted by supercomputers.”
Uhm, no, as I said before. It doesn’t take a supercomputer to analyze world events with some degree of accuracy. It does take some intelligence – in both senses of the word. This is why we have 17 intelligence agencies and other countries have large intelligence apparatus. You put analysts to work on every little sector of your opponent and then you feed that into higher level analysts – not supercomputers. The supercomputers only are relevant to things like organizing and analyzing raw intel from SIGINT and the like, which is what the NSA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and other more technological agencies do.
No one asks a supercomputer what it means when Russian advisers go into Ukraine, or Russia enters Syria in fall, 2015. That is done by humans still and will continue to be done by humans for the next couple decades.
Supercomputers have no cognitive capacity and there is no such thing as real “AI” yet, because no one has solved the problem of representing concepts in the same manner as the human brain does. “AI” gets touted every couple decades as the be-all and end-all, but then reality surfaces and government and companies realize that there are still major limitations, even if the technology has improved significantly. Most of the improvement in AI comes from improved speed in processors which enables more “brute force” approaches. This is where “supercomputers” come in but as they remain expensive their application is limited. Those approaches can not solve the problems, however. Only a close representation of how the human brain organizes concepts can achieve this – and AFAIK that problem is still decades away from being solved. It is likely that only when nanotechnology can be applied to direct real time analysis of brain function is that likely to be solved.
“Close representation of how a human brain ….” — but everybody doing so-called AI is totally and shockingly lacking in self-knowledge. Even though they are always “so full of themselves”! Seems like an unsolvable problem :)
Thank you, Ollie, not only for a very interesting and informative essay but also for the links. The interview with Evgeny Fedorov was an eye-opener for me. I never understood until now what President Putin meant in his annual press conference in December 2018 when he said
Ollie Richardson, excellent article.
Thanks
Solzhenitsyn was an “American asset” to induce Western people “to hate the Russian world”? He taught me to love the Russian world–at least the traditional, Christian, Orthodox Russian world. Your characterization of this speaker of truth and inclusion of him with Kasparov and Gorbachev makes me question your vision and judgment. I’ve profited from your analysis, but now I will scrutinize it more closely to perceive your presuppositions and ideological commitments more clearly.
I second that completly.
I also do not understand what Solzhenitsyn (as an Orthodox Chxrisitan and Russian patriot) has to do with people like Kasparov, Gorbachev and the others?!
And since when was Solzhenitsyn against Russia and Russians?!?
It is well known fact that he was opposite of what this article claims.
I think that this must be corrected in the article or at least explaind…
Solzhenitsyn is one of the most important personalities of modern Russian history and smears like this (deliberate or not) are not acceptable.
Aleksandr Zinovyev – a former Soviet dissident who was more anti-Soviet than Solzhenitsyn – later admitted that the Gulag topic had been blown out of all proportion. And I quote from an interview:
Source: https://www.jugashvili.com/blog/zinoviev
There are lots of resources that outline how Solzhenitsyn was a western lapdog, and frankly speaking it’s enough to go to the Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg and see how they fawn over him.
So Solzhenitsyn was anti-Russian through his severe judgment of comrade Stalin and USSR ?!?
Is that what are you saying?
And even if true, what all that has to do with words that are written in article?
The only question was how Solzhenitsyn is demonising Russia & Russians (not the Soviet Union)?
Unless you claim that USSR and Russia are the same thing which is nonsensical.
How all that you are saying now, is explaining the labeling of Solzhenitsyn as “American asset” that is instrumentalised to catalise “hate” to the “the Russian world” ?
I’m sorry I still do not see it.
That is extermly havey accusation and based on what exactly?
On judgment of one person?
So it takes judgment of one witness regarding USSR and Stalin and Solzhenitsyn has immediatly become facilitator of the hate against “the Russian world”?
How so?
And recations from the pro-Western stooges from “Yeltsin Center” are enough to label Solzhenitsyn as “American asset” and “lap dog”?
Like anything they say positive about anybody must always make willan out of that person.
They support him because Solzhenitsyn was important modern hystoric personalty related to creation of new Russia and he was not communist.
So why wouldn’t they mention him and support him?
At list politically, in theory, he was one of them.
It is debatable if Solzhenitsyn was involved into the “falsification of history”.
And even if he was wrong in his assesment, it is even more debatable how does that makes one “American asset” in service of the “hate” of the “Russian world”?
P.S.
I don’t want to end up this comment in negative feeling…
You have written very complex and very nice article far above and beyond my competence.
And on top you seam to be nice person that people here like.
So I refuse to belive that your intention in article was to hurt other-peoples feelings.
Yet I am kind of touchy on bashing of everything Orthodox.
I have seen it too many times.
Honestly speaking, I don’t think you understand my article. You have reacted emotionally to one sole thing, forgotten all context, and imposed a white/red dichotomic way of thinking. My article refers to the USSR-USA intelligence battles, and remains inside that framework. I don’t trash the Romanovs, and I don’t lick Stalin’s ass either. My opinion about Solzhenitsyn didn’t come from YouTube or what some Westerner has said. Russian society itself is not unanimous vis-a-vis him, and as I said – go YOURSELF to the Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg and speak to my good friend Ilya Belous – a governmental advisor on the topic of the US’ coup d’etat technology, whose family passed through the Stalin period and fought in the Great Patriotic War.
For the record, one factor that I take into account is the fact that my colleague has family members who were sent to Stalin’s “evil” gulags and experienced the denunciation period in the 30’s. But that’s only ONE factor. There are many. I will give you ONE more – the highly-respected Ukrainian researcher, author, and friend of both my colleague and I Miroslava Berdnik, who confirms that the denunciations were used by many in society to settle petty conflicts. In other words, Stalin’s mechanism was abused.
Not to mention that Solzhenitsyn called to bomb the USSR, even though the english-language side of the Internet tries to pretend he didn’t.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeUV2u1LHes
Great article.
And thanks for the link to the Federov interview.
It would be interesting to arrange a debate, or round table, or just conversation around the samovar, of Stephen Cohen and Federov, about the future of Russia-USA relations and the Threat World.
And: regime change—why bother??
American citizens need to spend some time thinking about and answering that question. Cui bono from regime change and a new arms race?
Wastage of billions of $$ on “security” and on expensive “killer” toys for the MIC boys is strangling the domestic USA of desperately needed medical, educational, infrastructure, housing etc. investment.
Of course, this arms race and threat worldimpacts Russian citizens, too, but far less so, because the percentage of the coutry’s resources spent on military hardware is less.
Katherine
What cannot be ignored is what is stated in this essay regarding the ability of counterrevolutionary forces to remain within a nation whose despot was just overthrown–the entire swamp wasn’t drained; only the top Croc was removed. Such is certainly the case with Venezuela and all former colonial nations but a select few, like Cuba and Iran. Will need to take more time to digest this lengthy article as it does make good points.
Good article. I like the diagram showing how Russia stops the Western propaganda (black circle) from expanding and metastasizing, and then a strong counterattack follows. This is like the Russian victory in World War II, and China’s strategy against the Japanese Imperial Army in the same war. So both countries have much experience.
Great work, Ollie.
So Jeremy Hunt is concerned at the fate of a Russian “journalist”.
Tell us Jeremy, can you spare the same concern for a true truth-revealing journalist- Julian Assange?
Hmmmm?
Thank you , Ollie Richardson.
Particularly enjoyed the video of Evgeny Fedorov.
The largest western Buddhist organization is called Shambhala International. If you google Shambhala Ukraine maidan you will discover an article titled “The Drala of Maidan” . Drala is a Tibetan term that can be described as positive spirits of a magical quality. This article attempts to paint maidan in a joyous light. Two of the local Ukraine Shambhala members received training at Shambhala Vermont instritution. Shambhala members are referred to as warriors in the tradition of the ‘peaceful warrior’ as in the one who overcomes aggression. Shambhala has a military arm referred to as Kasung and one Kasung Rupon leader teaching in 4th generation warfare is Amanda Hester in an study titled ‘Beyond an Enemy: Exploring the need for mindfulness training in a new generation of warfare.’ This approx. 130 page document was presented to the Royal United Services Institute of Nova Scotia and article ‘ The Cult of Trungpa’s Shambhala Integrating into Canadian Military?’ by Christine A . Chandler at ‘extibetanbuddhist.com’ is a good source for more info.
I consider Shambhala International in the same light as the Gulenist Organization.
Amanda Hester – Fighting For Peace ;13 November 2017
” …..It has developed a new kind of warfare, one that embodies the co-emergent nature of war and peace, whereby western soldiers on foreign soil rush in as medics to try and save the life of men they just gunned down…… ”
Doesn’t that sound like the ‘white helmet’.
Very interesting. The Nazis saw Tibet as the home of some sort of proto-Aryan civilization and sent expeditions there before the war. One SS officer, Harrer, was stuck in Tibet during the war, and his Seven Years in Tibet, is a good read. He tutored the present Dalai as a youth, no doubt indoctrinating him in fascist ideology, which rather fits well with Tibetan theocratic rule, serfdom and the hideous punishments inflicted on the serfs by the cuddly lamas.
The Dalai has been a CIA asset since the 50s, and Tibetans who trained as guerillas in Colorado no doubt ran into CIA assets from Germany and Eastern Europe who went over to the US and the Five Eyes (if they weren’t hiding out in Spain and Latin America)after the war. The alliance between Tibetan Buddhist fascists (and certain ‘Buddhists’ in places like Sri Lanka and Myanmar are getting more and more aggressive and violent)and Ukrainian neo-Nazis and fascists is a marriage Made in Hell, and where better to consummate it than Canada, where the de facto PM, Freedland, is an hereditary Ukrainian fascist and fanatic Russophobe. The new Fascist International, Godfathered by the USA, Israel and the Five Eyes, is a far greater threat to humanity than the Axis powers of the 30s and 40s.
Maybe its somehow related:
The “nooscope” of Putins new man – Anton Vaino:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37109169
Is this just hype or there is something more tangible in the Russian-speaking media?
The link to the Ukraine archive does not work. :-)
Good spot. It should redirect to Stalkerzone.org
The ‘Yeltsin Centre’? That’s like having a ‘Quisling Centre’ in Norway.
The only solution for Russia will be to find a way to keep Putin in power, or at least at the top of the power structure.
Putin is the key, being one of the best leaders the World as a whole has ever seen.
Excellent Ollie – hard work you put into this one and it is appreciated.
In terms of modelling I would propose a pre-phase, or staging – this is the phase where information is gathered and the type or the strategy or technology of the destabilization is decided upon. I have the loose theory that one can see it in advance, based on the linguistics used. We see a range of words now being employed by organizations such as NED.
I wrote some a while ago on this in the forums on https://saker.community/topic/word-washing-sneaky-tricks/ which was intended to be more humorous and not as serious as what you presented here.
The term Regime Change has been washed and laundered.
It is now called Regime Choice.
“Those that are involved in ‘providing regime choice’ are full of joy and glee. Color revolutions are now old hat, old fashioned technology, yesterday’s news. We now have new technology, and these guys from NED and they, wait for it … “only provide tools for regime choice”. “We’re not asking people to do anything that they don’t want to do,” Gershman said. “We’re supporting their own aspirations and giving them some of the tools to realize those aspirations.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/06/ned-pursues-regime-change-by-playing-the-long-game/
So, we’ve seen these various technologies being used in color revolutions and they are mostly based on exploiting any kind of existing schism or split in the body politic of the country primed for destabilization. But what they are doing now in their pre-staging, is actually creating that schism or split in the body politic. I don’t know too much about the detail, but I think the schism in the Orthodox Church may have been one such creation of a schism – a recognition that the underlying variables exist right in that moment, to kick off and create the destabilization.
I somewhat disagree with you on the computing power. Of course all countries have some or other modelling tool, some more sophisticated than others and these provide speed of analysis and should be continually developed further. These modelling and analysis tools may even be built using AI principles. But they remain only tools and somewhere along the line, an experienced human being needs to confirm the results of the model or analysis. For us, without such tools, we can only watch the language or linguistics. And of course, analysis such as this one from you makes us smarter in recognition.
It is devastating soft power technology, with deep toolsets and long term presence trying to find or manufacture the pretext.
The only way for the resistance axis to resist, is to absolutely work on any split in their own body politic (I’m thinking of the Russian retirement age issue) and pull the presence of destabilizing organizations out by the roots. I marvel at the resistance of Venezuela and the non-aggression in their pro-Maduro marches. This is the kind of knowledge that needs to be developed in the body politic of all resistance countries.
Thanks Ollie, I really enjoyed this reading.
The only ‘choice’ one gets from Zionazis like Gershman is of an economy (no such thing as ‘society’ remember)run on neoliberal capitalist lines and in thrall to the USA and with its Embassy in Jerusalem. The neoliberal ‘Free Market’ brings huge and ever growing inequality and poverty, great penetration of the economy, particularly finance, by the global elite, and rule by local compradores. Elections are rigged with increasing efficiency, the mass media highly oligopolised, biased and entirely elite owned, and everything, even basic utilities like water, is privatised and commodified. It is a recipe for a complete global totalitarian capitalist tyranny. And it is growing deeper and deeper by the day.
The inevitable consequence of a ‘universal algorithm’ will be world war. Eventually a power that can exert such influence globally will meet with an adversary (or adversaries) that ultimately leads to defeat for us all. Whether we can move back from brink of the abyss is questionable – history has the answer.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
excellent reading, Gene Sharp’s book needed some updates
Excellent article. The subversion and conquest of the USSR was due to the enormous failure / betrayal of its security “Komitet” and “Upravlenye” with its political side. It is to be hoped that those of the new Russia have learned from that tragic experience. But the question is what kind of “intelligence defense” has Russia now after two decades of Yeltsin and post Yeltsin government with liberalist, pro western reforms and cultural colonization?
I can’t agree more !
Actually, if post-WW II socio-political situation of USSR is scrutinized thoroughly it is noted that there were 2 ‘robust’ attempts to derail the anti-capitalist anti-zionist standing of the Communist Party:
(1) murder of Stalin to start of Breznev era – in my opinion, this episode was mostly driven by the Zionist revisionist gang led by Khruschev. Support by Zionist camp was there, but that was not instrumental
(2) deployment of Soviet Army in Afghanistan to 1993 coup by Yeltsin – attempt during this period of 13 – 14 years was fully engineered and deployed by Zionist Capitalist camp by advancing the Zionists in the Politburo of Communist Party. The economic dip (which is obvious if a country mobilize military in another country) was fully ‘utilized’ to spread discontent & lure the Soviet citizens to the false God of consumerism (which is a subset of capitalism). As Ollie described here, version 2 was comprehensively deployed in USSR.
I will modify your point a bit – it was not Gorbachev who started the attempt#2, it was in all probability, Andropov who brought the bunch of traitors in Politburo !
Coming to your point, what needs to be done going forward, in my opinion, Russian leadership has to take THE STEP, may be by 2020 end – A step to solidify the gains of two decades, a step to invite the new era of hope, a step to declare that exploitation of people and nature must stop (yes, in spite of all promising work done by the current leadership, Russia is now the heaven of inequality).
Where are now the forces that destroyed, conquered and looted USSR from inside? I suspect that they haven’t disappeared into the nowhere…
Re ” it was in all probability, Andropov who brought the bunch of traitors in Politburo !”
It certainly was Andropov who maneuvered Gorbachev into position to ascend to the Politiburo. Gorb was Andropov’s protege. The role of latter in the fate of the USSR has been underrated. He and Chernenko both are viewed as “place holders” who had little lasting influence. Concerning Andropov that could not be further from the truth.
Katherine
The proclamation of the Virgin Group takes understatement to the point of caricature:
”In the last few hours, officials of the administration of the government of Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó have.been involved in corruption schemes for which we are not responsible or have any connection.”
Since accepting ”remunerations” from abroad to sell out your country and its citizenry supposedly doesn’t count as corruption, the corollary question here becomes why the Virgin Group irrefutably trashes Mr. Guano by pretending the coup against Maduro actually succeeded ? There is no buggered ”Government of Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó”, unless there is another country with the same name somewhere else. With morons such as the Virgin Group at Western imperialism’s disposal, the rot and decay of the West’s entire ”Intelligence Community” can only escape the most faithful of Western bootlckers.
With regard to politics, Artificial Intelligence becomes literally artificial, not to say extremely superficial. Should work fairly well with zombified garbage having already lost all interest whatsoever in understanding anything sensible, but it has zero traction with people believing their own senses.
As usual, Western sci-fi reeks of fascist megalomania in general and sense of invincibility in particular.
Thanks Ollie for your exposition of the next generation warfare aka algorithm and / or hybrid warfare.
I wonder if this “algorithm” you mention is by any chance the application of non-linear programming which is the Computer Assisted successor of Operations Research’s linear programming.
Constraints are codified in the form of linear (or non linear) equations that when combined facilitate the definition and resolution of Maximum or Minimum (risks, profits, yields, etc). n-dimension Numerical Constraints can also be placed in a Matrice and it can indeed be resolved by Computers.
Alternatively, you might be referring to neural networks and data mining operations which may use elements of AI to predict outcomes.
Ever heard of the phrase, “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”?
That idea should be applied in this case and give the Americans a taste of their own medicine.
Color Revolutions, Regime change ops, Pro-Democracy destabilization campaigns, Support of Independence movements inside the USA.
All of America’s “regime change” tools can and should be applied to itself.
Of course, the Americans will wet their XXL panties at even the idea of being on the receiving end of these operations. (See how pathetically the USA has chewed the rug over the mythical RussiaGate allegations.)
Too bad.
The Americans must learn the hard way that what goes around, comes around–with interest.
For those nations on the receiving end of American Empire’s “democracy” (sic) promotion efforts, the best defense is a good offense.
That is a critical stratagem to neutralize the America threat.
Color Revolutions and Geopolitics
http://colorrevolutionsandgeopolitics.blogspot.com/
Russia appears to have an effective plan. By reducing its defence spending by 20%, Moscow is investing in the long game. All aspects of defence, including retaining public support and military parity, rest on whether the current highly ambitious economic expansion program can be seen through.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/return-to-major-power-status-why-russia-s-sharp-military-spending-cuts-should-be-cause-for-concern-not-reassurance-in-the-western-bloc
Interesting:—I tried to post a commentary following up on the idea of “the Satan force” mentioned in Snow Leopard’s comment, but expanding the concept to point out that the whole world system, both humans, and including nature, even the animals, operates so as to generate the maximum rage energies and fear energies as the end in itself, so that warfare is endlessly churning, no one ever really wins, just more and more warfare, more and more rage energies and fear energies for the ultimate benefit of what or whom? Well, Lord Jesus defines Satan in the Gospel of John as massively murderous and fundamentally deceptive, a great murderer and great liar.—And yet this commentary has not been posted.—Therefore just interesting…
Also, the practical antidote to this system of endless warfare, endless lies, maximal rage and fear energies is to recognize this as a kind of “emotional organism” both within and among humans and also throughout nature, and then from the human standpoint,—try to defuse these noxious poisonous emotional currents by using flexible analytical intellect through strong will-power.—But this method is not encouraged nowadays.
3.0 just sounds like garden variety social engineering. The same technique has been used for a century plus in the USA by the oligarchy and has resulted in the total demobilization, miseducation, and impoverishment of nearly the entire population of the US. The result of a century of this tactic has resulted in the fattest, stupidest, most gender confused population in the history of Western Civilization. The result for the oligarchy has been the realization of a neo-feudal situation in which the serfs aren’t even aware of the asset stripping and enslavement they’ve submitted to. I’m American so I’m certainly not thrilled with this outcome as it causes me great distress to be surrounded by these globo-tranny suckers every day but I’m very much familiar with what “success” looks like under this model and it’s a nightmare.
This technique is simply being exported and all the same tactics are being executed writ large. Again, this has been going on for quite some time though. I’m very much interested to learn more about how AI is being utilized to these ends though. Thank you for broaching that topic. That should be explored more.