Pentagon Wants To Return Special Ops Propagandists To Ukraine
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An article by The Washington Post titled "Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine" contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future.
"The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials," writes the Post's Wesley Morgan. "If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation."
Much further down in the article we learn the specifics of what those two top-secret programs were. One of them entailed US commandos sending Ukrainian operatives "on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east" to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course The Washington Post does not describe it as such.
“We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as "a person in the Special Operations community."
US special ops forces "employing Ukrainian operatives" to "take apart Russian propaganda" and "tell the true story on blogs" is just US special ops forces administering US propaganda online. Whether or not they actually see themselves as "telling the true story" or "taking apart Russian propaganda" does not change the fact that they are administering US government propaganda. A government circulating media which advances its information interests is precisely the thing that state propaganda is.
The US government is theoretically prohibited from directly administering propaganda to its own population (though even that line has been deliberately eroded in recent years with measures like the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act and US government infiltration of the mass media and Silicon Valley), but there's nothing stopping the funding and directing of foreign bodies to circulate propaganda on the internet, which has no national borders. Back when US propaganda was limited to old media like the CIA's Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia it was possible to claim that the propaganda was solely being targeted at the populations where that media was broadcast, but propaganda circulated online will necessarily trickle over everywhere, including to US audiences.
The Washington Post explains that these secret programs were discontinued ahead of the Russian invasion last year because a stipulation in the 2018 NDAA law which permitted their funding forbids their use during a “traditional armed conflict,” so the Pentagon is working to persuade congress to repeal that condition. Part of its sales pitch to congress to get these secret operations restarted is that they will be "what the U.S. military calls 'non-kinetic' — or nonviolent — missions," which the administering of propaganda would certainly qualify as.
As we discussed recently, it's very silly that there's a major push in the US power alliance to begin administering more government propaganda in order to "counter Russian propaganda" when Russian propaganda has no meaningful influence in the western world. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected "approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content" according o Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found "no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior." A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.
In reality, this push we've been seeing to pour more and more energy into propaganda, censorship, and other forms of narrative control has nothing to do with "taking apart Russian propaganda" and everything to do with suppressing dissent. The US empire has been frantically ramping up propaganda and censorship because the "great power competition" it has been preparing against Russia and China is going to require economic warfare, massive military spending, and nuclear brinkmanship that no one would consent to without lots of manipulation. Nobody's going to consent to being made poorer, colder, and less safe over some global power struggle that doesn't benefit them unless that consent is actively manufactured.
That's why the media have been acting so weird lately, that's why dissident voices are getting harder and harder to find online, that's the purpose of the new "fact-checking" industry and other forms of narrative control, and that's why the Pentagon wants congressional funding for its propaganda operations in Ukraine. The fact that the empire's "great power competition" happens to be occurring at the same time as widespread access to the internet means that drastic measures must be made to ensure its information dominance so it can march the public into playing along with this agenda. The more desperate our rulers grow to secure unipolar planetary domination, the more important controlling the narrative becomes.
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Well, boys, I have very bad news, here in Central Europe, while we were moaning under the Bolshevik yoke, we seriously believed in the good intentions of the USA, and that once we get rid of the Bolsheviks, then we too can be part of the Free World! The awakening took place in the last thirty years, to realize that the Free World only sees us as a labor force to be exploited, and our sons as hopeful cannon fodder! And the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World is an untrustworthy lying robber who, if you don't humbly take his word for it, then, as Hussein Obama said, "we will break his arm". The population of the USA, who is kept in the dark and ignorant by state propaganda, would be shocked at how much the USA's reputation has devalued abroad in Europe! Before you get it wrong, the common people of America are still respected, but we consider their leaders to be common law criminals! Returning to the propaganda mentioned in the above letter. Many of us had to learn the Russian language, writing and reading from elementary school, it is not such a big deal to revive what we have learned until a simple average American cannot even understand Russian letters. So, if I want to, I can read first-hand, e.g. the events on the Ukrainian front from the Russian and Ukrainian sides! Because I don't even believe what the American press is asking! As far as the British press is concerned, it is the subject of public laughter in our country ! I have one more question, if the US press is so sensitive, then why don't I see them speaking up even once that the Hungarian indigenous minority has been persecuted, threatened and banned from using its own mother tongue by the Nazi Ukrainian government for years in the Transcarpathian ? Then I didn't tell you about how Russian children, old people and women in Donbass are being murdered with HIMARS (sound familiar?) missiles ? Don't you want to light a candle or bring teddy bears to the nearly 15,000 killed civilian residents of Donbass, as the hypocritical West used to do when the victim was a Westerner ?
The media sure have been acting weird. Radio silence about the Sy Hersh Nordstream report. As if they can ignore it and it will just go away, down the memory hole. Clearly they are expecting to never have to answer to anyone why they buried a huge story about an act of war on Germany.
Scott Ritter was blindingly clear about the constitutional violation involved in giving the order to blow up the pipeline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXReh55QpU