Map of Sverdlovsk
The world of anti-disinformation is expanding, becoming more varied, more academic, and more active.
o I don't have a full roster of these and even my "recommended" list to the side here is too short, but I'm reading and finding more and more.
o CEPA's Stratcom program is a good place to read about topics like the Zapad exercises. Here's their self description:
This list of terms for techniques is particularly handy.
o The EUvsDisinfo site has a shiny new revamping.
It describes itself as follows:
This website is part of a campaign to better forecast, address and respond to pro-Kremlin disinformation. The ‘EU versus Disinformation’ campaign is run by the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force. The team was set up after the EU Heads of State and Government stressed the need to challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns. In March 2015, the European Council tasked the High Representative in cooperation with EU institutions and Member States to submit an action plan on strategic communication.
This chart is interesting, as it suggests that Russia spends more time on disinformation in Ukraine and at home to snow its own people and neighbours than it does foreigners:
But it may only be an artifact of what the authors found interesting to cover.
Scroll to the end of this page and you'll see a list of that week's disinformation stories, tagged as such.
There's a lot of duplication among these various anti-disinformation sites now but that doesn't bother me. Duplication is part of diversity and you need a lot of independent centers doing this, as well as governments, to get the job done. This list seems particularly thorough, more than others.
People debate about whether the clinical naming, tagging, categorization, publishing of disinformation only helps spread it, and say there isn't enough debunking. So this sort of thing annoys some who think it isn't pushing back enough. Here's a fake story I missed, although I cover Ukraine closely.
I don't have a problem with a site collecting, naming, categorizing, publishing disinformation itself. By the framework of doing this in a context where it is understood there is a critical attitude, perhaps you take care of the concerns.
But there is a job to be done to take this further into battle as it were, and that's maybe the missing piece. There have to be polemics.
I quite understand that some people find there isn't enough countering of these memes on the spot. And the question is whether you should wear yourself out retorting to all the Kremlin trolls? Or work harder to get pieces in the media that can effective push back on this. A TV story or even print journalism that takes us through the fake meme that "Americans are fighting in Ukraine" or "NATO is bombing in Ukraine" and covers some of the crazy deza stories around that in the past would be useful. Basically, this material needs to be not only identified but placed. And the think tanks may not feel that's their job. But getting media to be as interested about Kremlin debunks as they are about Snopes and Politfakt should be the main goal of anybody with the resources to be in this business.
o The London School of Economics and Political Science Institute of Global Affairs has launched Arena which describes itself as follows:
- Arena is very much a ‘do’-tank, dedicated to finding the practical tools, best practices and methodologies to defeat disinformation. Arena will take advantage of its unique network of academics, opinion-makers and policy-makers interested in this field– from heads of State, the military, and the media, all the way to bedroom activists, academics, computer scientists and NGOs – to move into responsive action.
- Arena works with partners across the world to carry out relevant projects and disseminate results. Once a specific tool has been developed, such as new internet technology that helps activists understand when material online is planted or organic, Arena will distribute it to a large group of stakeholders.
That sounds intriguing; some activists already do this just by searching Twitter for the first appearances of images or memes and seeing the accounts pushing them, so I wonder if the tool will be something like that.
I don't demand that think tanks "do," and "doing" can sometimes mean merely things like having conferences or making tools -- and that's ok.
There will be projects on the efforts of the Kremlin to interfere with the German elections and the problem of falsehoods about migration to Italy (which I gather is not only a Russian disinformation problem) but I found this one particularly intriguing:
Propaganda and the Cold War
Over the summer, Arena’s directors, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev, have worked with Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary, to complete a study of Cold War responses to Russian disinformation. The report highlights a dozen case studies of Soviet propaganda and Western response. The object of the report is to understand the attitudes and tactics that lay behind those responses, and to ask whether any of them can be used in the more complicated online context today. The result will shape the projects that both Google and Arena design in the future.
This is interesting, and the first (or at least a rare) mention I've seen of trying to learn from the Soviet era, which is the obvious place to start looking. This is why I want to get Mrs. Grant's book published.
I can't wait to see what Appelbaum and company come up with and the conclusions they draw as to how this may apply today.
Can Google Counter Disinformation?
It's interesting to me that in connection with the Arena project Google is mentioned, which must be Jared Cohen who is a Democratic operative who used to be at the State Department (the one who while still at State, famously asked Twitter if they could hold their weekly maintenance day while the Iranian revolution was going on and students and their supporters needed Twitter). Maybe it's not related to him, but usually Google doesn't do a lot of freedom-fighting stuff but prefers "study". When you study a thing, you can almost look like you're doing something about it!
Google's intellectual culture, as I've often said, because of Russian-born Sergei Brin's own influences, is like a cross between the Soviet Knowledge Society and Gorky's (and HG Wells') vision of a World Encyclopedia for the Masses. The figures that are in the Google Doodle at the top of the page are usually scientists, technicians, politically-correct writers and other liberal public figures -- there isn't a Sharansky or a Sakharov, let's say or even a mother of the Plaza del Mayo.
Google likes bland, political correctness but without controversy if they can manage it -- and SCIENCE. And MATH. So it's interesting that they have anything in relationship to Disinformation, but I see this as utterly self-interested at one level. They've seen as Facebook has taken a beating over fake groups and fake news that they could be next or even are already under the microscope. They realize that algorithms have gotten out too far ahead of us and are too weaponized by bad guys now.
So they want to do civic things and show they've spent funds deflecting some of this. If Google actually went and funded some of these struggling disinformation publications in places like Ukraine or Czech Republic they'd have more credibility in my view. But it's a start that they're related to this Arena project.
I lived through the latter part of this era and of course was knee-deep in all those Soviet propaganda stories and the past REALLY DOES need to be heeded and analyzed instead of being dismissed as a Cold War exaggeration, McCarthyism, evil rapacious capitalism, etc. which is all part of the deza itself.
So...There was the claim that the CIA spread AIDs in Africa, referenced to this day by African leaders and ordinary people. There was the claim that in the West, ambulances drove around kidnapping people and then murdering them and selling their body parts, such rapacious capitalists they were.
The Sverdlovsk Biological Weapons Explosion as a Casebook Disinformation Case Abetted by Westerners
Alevtina Nekrasova vists the grave of her father, Vasily Ivanov , who was one of the first victims of the 1979 anthrax outbreak in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk.
But then there were things like the claim that the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk in 1979 was only a naturally-occurring outbreak of bovine anthrax -- when in fact it was an explosion at the Sverdlovsk chemical and biological weapons factory that spread weaponized anthrax into the environment and sickened and killed at least 66 people along with animals
If we're going to look at how "the West" dealt with these, there's much that in fact can be drawn from this story at all levels.
I don't think even the pro-Moscow left believed the ambulance organ-vendors story, and while the AIDS story had more traction, it was more intended to discredit the West among Soviet people than to undermine the West at home although it did a bit of that, too.
But something more sophisticated like what happened with the anthrax cover-up had highly effective help from people whom you couldn't accuse of being fellow travelers or Communist dupes let alone "agents" but who simply thought the Soviets should be treated at face value as "people like us," especially their scientists and leaders who were felt to have legitimacy (although they didn't) and that we should "give the benefit of the doubt" or "approach in good faith" every story like this in the Soviet Union (even though legions of samizdat reports, had they been heeded, would prove the opposite).
So you got things that Wikipedia doesn't tell you in the entry about the disaster, but does tell you at least partially about Matthew Meselson, the scientist who deliberately delayed the proper US and Western response to the Sverdlovsk anthrax disaster.
Matthew Meselson, a respected geneticist and molecular biologist still at Harvard University and now 87 years old, back then convinced President Richard Nixon to renounce biological weapons and suspend chemical weapons in a 1972 treaty involving the Soviets. There was no reason to do it in 1972 given Soviet secrecy and mendacity; there was no reason to keep it going in 1979. In fact, the 1972 treaty helped enable Sverdlovsk to happen by giving the Soviets cover.
This is a liberal morality tale that given the knee-jerk hatred of Nixon works especially effectively. Meselson was so bent on achieving the idealistic goal of the treaty that he refused to consider that the potential for Sverdlovsk disaster -- due to secrecy and mendacity -- is why one should NOT have been signed. And in fact it wasn't that "war-mongering West" that broke the treaty, but a Soviet biological warfare factory that did.
Wikipedia gives a muted version of this story, which I know from Soviet-era scientists and dissidents was a far more grave matter:
In April 1980 Meselson served as a resident consultant to the CIA investigating a major outbreak of anthrax among people in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. He concluded that on the basis of available evidence the official Soviet explanation that the outbreak was caused by consumption of meat from infected cattle was plausible but that there should be an independent on-site investigation
He was wrong. But that's not how to understand what happened here. It's not just about being wrong in a scientific judgement concerning the case itself. There's the political misjudgement that comes from ideological dictation.
First, Meselson convinced the CIA and Nixon not to complain or confront the Soviets, using his scientific credentials. There was no valid reason to sign a treaty with the Soviets that could not be verified, and when there were credible news stories that it had been seriously breached in 1979 and should have been suspended, Meselson preferred to make the facts bend to his desire for "peace" and "science" rather than justice.
He did the same thing in Laos, claiming that the "yellow rain" said to be a Soviet toxin was only bee pollen.
There is the belief is that "science" prevailed but again, I think this was more about "political science" than science, and the matter is still disputed.
Dead Wrong About Sverdlovsk
The "yellow rain" story is still debated and I remember the gleefulness of the pro-Moscow left at proving it wrong -- supposedly.
But Meselson was dead wrong about Sverdlovsk, and his willingness to go there years later, and then reverse himself (which was played more as a "more accurate report now that there was a site visit") does not undo that.
What's annoying about this PBS account is that it simply fails to cover what happened for 13 long years before Meselson went to the Soviet Union -- refusal to acknowledge independent reports coming from Russia and later an important and highly relevant defector; delay, obstruction, even due to what was seen as the overarching "detente" need of signing the treaty. There were people inside and outside of the Soviet Union clamoring to have this disaster be seen for what it really was -- a biological warfare mishap killing people and threatening the world -- but they were shushed because of a prominent liberal scientist in America.
The role of the liberal media in these incidents of obfuscation and distraction regarding the true nature of Kremlin deeds can be seen in the New York Times glowing profile of Meselson years later. I have to say Soviet dissident scientists of the era didn't view him with that halo, as their own people were killed and lies were covered up.
Given everything I have seen about the anthrax story, frankly, I will never buy the version the Times and others give here of the yellow rain story, and wonder if these accounts have more merit,
People forget that at the time scientists themselves debated this, the "bee pollen" concept was denounced as "childish" by *other scientists* and the US government had intelligence to back up their claims of Soviet abuses:
The Government's case is based on a broad array of circumstantial and scientific evidence, according to the two senior officials interviewed last week. It includes, for example, classified intelligence interceptions of radio communications indicating that lethal chemicals were being used, classified photographs of villages dusted with chemical powder, reports from refugees and defectors who say they witnessed chemical warfare, statements from doctors and relief workers who believe the symptoms of many purported victims suggest they were hit with chemical agents and intelligence reports suggesting that the Soviet Union has been interested in toxin warfare for many years.
These reports are buttressed by laboratory analyses of environmental samples from alleged attack sites and of blood, urine and tissues from purported victims which show the presence of one particular class of chemical agent - the trichothecene mycotoxins. Although these poisons are produced naturally by funguses found throughout the world, the Government and many academic experts say the amounts and combinations almost surely indicate man-made weapons rather than natural processes.
Two prominent academics who were briefed on the Government's evidence in their capacity as military advisers said in telephone interviews last week that they found the case persuasive though not scientifically unimpeachable.
Yes, I totally grasp that the "bee pollen" version won out in the end -- like "yellow cake" derision did. I read about it all thoroughly at the time. But I doubt. And I doubt because of how I saw the Sverdlovsk story unfold.
The Times says coyly, "In the Sverdlovsk case, the truth was not so clear cut and Meselson not so right."
But the Times is simply wrong in the Sverdlovsk case. The truth was clear and Meselson was very wrong. A nurse I personally spoke to at the time in Moscow gave the truth about people who sickened without coming anywhere near cows, and scores more in the region told the truth, and it was covered in samizdat and ultimately revealed by Boris Yeltsin after the coup -- that's what it took. And conceding that "Meselson was not so right" doesn't give the full force of what it meant for 13 long years to give the Soviets comfort, keep a treaty with them they broke, and betray victims of Soviet biological warfare preparation. The Times applauds Meselson for being willing to revise his conclusions -- but that's only when he has overwhelming data from the site, a reformed Russian government, and his peers among ultimately emancipated Russian scientists. And it shouldn't take that!
Along the way -- just as we have today! -- there appears an "American professor living in Sverdlovsk at the time who didn't see anything". So those evil capitalists must be lying, right?
That Americans wouldn't necessarily see anything happening in this highly closed and atomized society even living right on top of it is an actuality of the Soviet Union that some wouldn't accept then -- or now.
It took a defector -- we have less and less of them nowadays -- to promote an inside, truthful version of Sverdlovsk that had to challenge not only Soviet mendacity, but the Meselson-driven detentnik unwillingness to look at Soviet mendacity.
He was the Deputy Director of the Soviet biological warfare operation Biopreparat, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, now known as Ken Alibek.
It seems it takes the Canadian CBC to run an excellent fact-filled historical show in 2004 called "Red Lies: Biological Warfare and the Soviet Union" that were it to air here, would have only gotten bashed as "McCarthyism" in the US.
The moral of this story shouldn't be -- as it was for the Times -- that one scientist can challenge a government's "mendacity" and win with "truth" because the Reagan Administration was quite frankly right about the real nature of the anthrax story from the get-go, and had every reason to believe the stories of the "yellow rain" given the nature of this secret, totalitarian society.
The moral of the story should be: liberals and the left (easier for the former than the latter) need to apply the skepticism and demand for facts they naturally apply on their own governments to Russia's government as well, and not only apply their skepticism and distrust to their own government, leaving the Kremlin untouched or even celebrated, and then we will all do better.
Dealing with the Detentniks Among You Is Always the Hardest
I mention this old story because it shows that in every major disinformation drama, the hardest part is always dealing with your own people who will not get on board with suspecting the Kremlin and doing the necessary diligence to follow through on that valid, long-tested, amply-proven suspicion, but who insist on being detentniks, peace-makers, and contrarians and delaying or canceling confrontation.
If they did that and you could still have a fair fight with a kind of Team A and Team B approach it would be one thing, but the peaceniks always delegitimize those cynical about the warmongering of the Kremlin as "hawks" and warmongers themselves, and "neocons" -- Jews! -- who are bent on making war. This repeats itself over and over again as it has done with this latest Plame flap.
1) First of all, calm down. Re-tweets don't imply endorsement. Yes, very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish. https://t.co/m5oGgKPo2a
— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017
Sigh...
Weapons of Mass Obfuscation
I sometimes think that if Assad ever falls, and the truth comes out -- let's say -- that the reason Saddam Hussein appeared not to have any weapons of mass destruction is because the Soviets smuggled them out to Syria so they wouldn't be found -- there will be legions of people who will go on blaming America first and never accept any other version.
The left has a very hard death grip not only on the Vietnam experience but the Iraq war experience. Saddam didn't have mass weapons, perhaps, but he still filled mass graves, as terrorists -- not American soldiers -- do in Iraq today. It turns out the Sverdlovsk story wasn't "ambiguous" or "nuanced" or involved "American error" or anything of the sort. The Soviets killed their own people in due to negligence in a weapons factory they shouldn't have had if they were sincere about a bio and chem warfare treaty they had signed, they lied about it, they covered it up, and we didn't do enough to keep faith with the truth and the victims.
So to conclude, compare The New York Times versus the CBC in how this historical disinformation plot was handled, and hopefully you'll accept my point -- it's almost never the issue regarding the finding of facts about X or Y bad deed of the Kremlin. History has been mangled here and none is more guilty than the Ars Technica "techie" site that can now tell the truth about Sverdlovsk, but have no curiosity about their fellow scientist they claim "uncovered the truth in 1992" -- and never ask why he didn't accept the facts in 1979. Those of us in the human rights movement in those years with ties to the dissident Soviet scientists like Yury Orlov or Andrei Sakharov learned about the truth -- their scientific counterparts in the West should have been less gullible.
It's almost always about arguments over whether they are facts, or what should be done with them, with your own people. There is no substitute for this political process in a free society. But it has to be a free and untramelled process that the left can't abort or deflect with cries of "McCarthyism" or what have you. These lessons of the past -- where the leftists and liberals were so wrong -- have to be mined, documented, debated and understood.
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