"NATO"
can be a rather elusive concept: Libya was a NATO operation, even though Germany kept out of it. Somalia was not a NATO operation
even though Germany was in it. Canada, a founding NATO member, was
in Afghanistan but not
in Iraq. Some interventions
are NATO, others aren't. But it doesn't really mean much because
NATO is only a box of spare parts out of which Washington assembles "coalitions of the willing". So it's
easier for me to write "NATO" than "Washington plus/minus these
or those minions".
We are told –
incessantly – that Putin is "Winning the Information War", "We have no counterattack to
Russia’s information warfare". Nonsense. The real information
war is being conducted by the British Army's "77th Brigade",
the soldiers of Fort Bragg, NATO's Centre
of Excellence in Tallinn. Or by the BBC, RFE/RL, Deutsch Welle, AFP
et al; each of whose budgets is many multiples of RT's. They manipulate; they
dominate; they predate; Moscow is a minor newcomer.
I am not a
psychiatrist, psychologist or any other kind of psychist, but I cannot fail to
notice the projection and gaslighting practised
by Washington and its minions. They accuse Russia of doing things that they
actually do – projection – and they manipulate our perception of reality –
gaslighting. I will discuss gaslighting in the next essay.
Wikipedia defines projection as
Psychological projection
is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own
unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their
existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person
who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being
intolerant. It incorporates blame shifting.
Psychological projection
involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather
than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.
Interference:
Russia! Russia! But NATO actually does it
Russia, we
are told, interfered in the US presidential
election. And Brexit, and France, and Germany, Hungary, Greece, populism, and and and.
The American story has metamorphosed from its initial version which was
supposed to have been an attempt to elect Trump into
an attempt to sow division in US
society. The NYT attempts to explain how both
stories fit together. The absurdity of the charge was shown when the
3500 or so Facebook ads paid for by the so-called Internet Research
Agency were revealed: they were
all over the place. Even more amusingly, Mueller, who no doubt thought he was
safe to indict a Russian company, is trying to get out of having to
prove it now that the company's lawyers have shown up. If the
matter ever does come to trial it will likely show that the whole operation was a scam designed to
create interest groups to sell advertising to. (Which would explain why the
majority of the ads appeared after the election: the election was the bait
to create the groups.)
This is
projection at its most obvious: the USA is by far the world champion at
interfering in other people's elections. No less an Establishment outlet than
the Washington Post (one of the principals in sustaining Putindunnit hysteria)
listed many in: "The long history of the U.S.
interfering with elections elsewhere"; but piously insisted
"the days of its worst behavior are long behind it".
A quick
diversion from the sordid reality of the rigged Democratic Party nomination –
"don't blame us for doing it, blame Russia for revealing it!" –
attributed to Russia what it denied in itself. The actual interference, we now
learn, was not by Russia on the outside but by, among others, FBI officials on
the inside.
A textbook
illustration of blame shifting, isn't it?
The
Russian threat NATO created
NATO
expansion is all projection: NATO expands to meet the threat its expansion
creates. NATO justifies itself by pretending
to solve the problems it creates: Canada/Libya leads
to Libya/Mali leads
to Canada/Mali. When the documents about the broken
expansion promise were published, we saw that NATO's own "false memory syndrome"
had been projected onto Moscow.
This NYT
headline from last year perfectly shifts the blame: "Russia’s Military Drills Near NATO
Border Raise Fears of Aggression".
NATO
blames Russia when its fake news fails
Does anyone
remember Gay Girl in Damascus tweeting about the horrors of life in Syria under
Assad? Not gay, not girl, not Damascus.
How about Sarah Abdallah, who, the BBC tells us is "a mysterious and possibly
fictitious social media celebrity [who] tweets constant pro-Russia and
pro-Assad messages". But she actually exists. But
the champion of champions is surely Bana from Aleppo whose English abilities declined so dramatically when she got
out (and few wondered how, in a destroyed city, her Internet
service could be so good). Aleppo has mostly disappeared from the West's news
outlets but here is AFP's coverage a year later (a less NATOcentric view here). Even with the
obligatory propaganda twists – "pro-regime residents back on the
streets" – it's obviously a better place after the "Assad
regime" reclaimed it than it was when Bana wanted to start World War III.
Believing Gay Girl, believing Bana, denigrating Sara is projection: because
projectors live in a world of falsehood, they assume that everything they do
not fake themselves must be faked by someone else.
And we're
still waiting for Kerry’s “we observed it”, a
coherent Skripal story (here's one but it's
not the authorities'), actual evidence of the Russian "invasion" and
many other things that we were told were anything but "fake news".
Believing NATO's stories requires crimestop: if you doubt 76 missiles
hit this site (here's just one), then you must
be a Russian troll or a
victim of Russian fake news.
Don't look
here, look there: our fakery is real, their reality is fake.
Russia
challenges the ideas NATO puts in your head
Russian bots
everywhere influencing, dividing, affecting. But the real bots are NATO's:
from Operation Mockingbird in the 1950s,
through Udo Ulfkotte's Bought
Journalists to today:
The
1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what
its officers call 'truthful messages' to support the United States government's
objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided
and their American sponsorship is hidden. (New Yorker, December 2005).
Our vision is
to be the main source of expertise in the field of cooperative cyber defence by
accumulating, creating, and disseminating knowledge in related matters within
NATO, NATO nations and partners. (NATO, October 2008)
Three years
later the accusations have not been substantiated, but they have served their
purpose nonetheless: NATO dispatched cyber warfare experts to Estonia shortly
after the events of 2007 and on May 14, 2008 the military bloc established what
it calls the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE) in the
nation’s capital of Tallin. (2010)
The British
army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological
operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the
information age. (Guardian, January 2015)
Members of
the Military Information Support Task Force-Central influence and persuade
targets or intended audiences within the U.S. Central Command area of
responsibility to reject those enemy narratives and violent extremist
ideologies in order to establish conditions for long-term regional stability. (CENTCOM, April 2017).
The Army announced on
Wednesday (Nov. 29) that a team of its researchers would work alongside
scientists from Ukraine and Bulgaria to 'understand and ultimately combat
disinformation attacks in cyberspace. (November,
2017)
Clearly NATO
is projecting what it is actually doing onto Russia.
"Hybrid
war" was invented by the Russian who's reacting to it
In 2014 NATO worried about "hybrid
war", apparently something Russia practised. This writer tells us it is
sometimes called the “Gerasimov doctrine” after an article
written in 2013 (note the date) by the Chief of the Russian General Staff.
According to
Gerasimov, the lessons of the Arab Spring are that if the ‘rules of war’ have
changed, the consequences have not – the results of the ‘colored revolutions’
are that a ‘thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be
transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign
intervention and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe and civil
war.’
In short the
theoretical foundation of this supposedly amazing, tricky, sinister and almost
invisible Russian way of waging war originates in a paper written about
Western-inspired “colour revolutions”. Like the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia
(ten years before Gerasimov's paper), the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine
(nine), the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (eight). Once upon a time to
get rid of a ruler you didn’t like, you invaded his country and, months later,
fished him out of a hole and hanged him. But it's much cheaper to invest money
($5 billion in Ukraine we
are told) to organise protests and overthrow him. And, as we have seen in
Ukraine, sometimes it becomes a real shooting war, with real dead bodies and
entrails. Sometimes the one thing, sometimes the other; but it’s all conflict,
and it’s all “hybrid”. It’s “hybrid” because it uses many methods to bring
about the desired regime change: propaganda, manipulation, protest and,
occasionally, a little judicious bombing or sniping.
So how ironic
– how “hybrid” – to accuse Gerasimov of inventing something that
began years earlier. His so-called textbook of Russian “hybrid war” is actually
a response to the real “hybrid war” that Washington practises.
Projection:
accusing Russia of doing what you are actually doing.
Putin and
Assad mercilessly bombed Aleppo – we heard about it for months. "Carpet bombing". "War crimes". The boy in the ambulance.
Humanitarian convoys intentionally hit (although Bellingcat has become sloppy
with his faked evidence). The
implication was that Russia just threw lots of bombs around while NATO was
precise, surgical.
We heard
rather less about Mosul or Raqqa. Although that may
change: even the managed Western media/human rights apparat has noticed the
stunning, indiscriminate destruction.
In
Raqqa: 20,000 bombs, 30,000
artillery rounds, altogether, about one per five pre-war occupants! Amnesty
International condemned the NATO bombing of Raqqa: "we
witnessed a level of destruction comparable to anything we’ve seen".
But, as
"The Persistent Myth of US Precision
Bombing" shows, the US military has always pretended
"surgical precision" while scattering prodigious numbers of bombs.
"America has no idea how many
innocent people it's killing in the Middle East" said the
Independent in 2017. Even the Establishment-friendly NYT concluded that the US
military greatly understated the number of civilians
it kills – reporting maybe as few as 4%! At least eight wedding parties.
But the quantity of bombs dropped makes a mockery of "precision":
by its own count 114,000 weapons since
2013 on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Who can believe there are a
hundred thousand pinpoint targets in those countries? "The detonation of the bombs as they
hit the ground appears to be pretty huge." In Afghanistan the
USAF is now bombing to "shape the terrain" – geological bombing.
To say
nothing of the sustained destruction of a clearly marked and identified
hospital in Afghanistan. (A mistake, for which no
one was punished.)
Projection
again: don't look here, look over there.
Russian
Federation is not the USSR
The USSR did
lots of things in its time – influencing, fiddling elections, regime changes,
fake news, projection and so on. But the Communist Party was the "leading and guiding force"
in those days; today it's the opposition; the
Comintern is gone but Mockingbird is not. Things have changed in Moscow, but
NATO rolls on.
Which, when
you think of it, is the problem.
If
NATO accuses Russia of something, NATO is actually doing it
I leave you
with this simple rule of thumb:
Every time
NATO accuses Russia of doing something
you know
it's doing it itself.
And reflect
on this: NATO and its propaganda minions are so unimaginative that they cannot
imagine Russia doing anything but what they are doing. That's why they are
surprised all the time.