Re: <nettime> Almost zero

On Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 2:37 AM Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:

An interesting perspective but as a strategy against disinformation it failed and it will have failed: everyone already knows Putin uses this model of hybrid warfare. The obsession with “information “ is precisely what allowed this to happen. If you know the tanks are moving in and you tell everyone, that doesn’t stop the tanks. I told you don’t doesn’t count for much once a country has been invaded. The element of surprise is over-rated, it’s the element of uncertainty that created the space for Western self-deception that economic saber rattling wd have an effect. The Swift weapon has not been used because Europe needs Russian gas and needs a way to pay for it and for Russian sovereign debt to be repaid.

Hybrid warfare is not only epistemogical. As that cynical bastard Mao said, show me your tanks. He shd have added drones to the list.

A more effective weapon wd be an aggressive seizure of all wealth owned by offshore entities in Europe and North America. Then, let God sort em out, as the Green Berets used to say. Let people come forward from behind their façades of shell companies to reclaim it. That wd take years in the courts and the onus wd be on the wealthy and powerful to prove their rightful ownership, which of course wd defeat the purpose of coming forward as anonymity wd be lost. Well, it’s a thought experiment anyway, rather than a plan of action. It probably wdn’t ever happen because Russian wealth was only 1% of what the Panama paper uncovered. And the people in power everywhere wd find themselves “exposed.”

They shd have stopped Putin’s yacht from leaving German waters. That wd have sent a very direct message. But they didn’t because European business entities have too much “exposure“ in Russia, BP among them.

Biden’s sanctions against Putin are toothless unless they can uncover and seize his hidden wealth, or burn down his palace, the one Navalny referred to. That wd be more interesting in its effects.

I hope you are right about Ukraine’s ability to resist militarily. But a circle jerk over their heroic struggle will mean nothing without material support.

On Feb 26, 2022, at 2:28 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

Keith, I think the publication of the intel was not conceived to deter the attack. It was for us and for the whole non-Russian world. The idea was to stop the spiral of right-wing disinformation, and to discredit it retrospectively. That matters because the mental destabilization that has been unleashed over the last ten years is profound and debilitating. It's epistemological warfare.

When you say "the Putin clique has so much well hidden wealth they can now only crave power and real estate," I hear you! And it sounds like you know from experience.

It does not look to me like the Ukrainians are going to fold. In fact I still don't understand the strategy. Can a country of 40 millions, with a large number of combat veterans, reservists and militias, be subdued by 200,000 foreign troops? As the generals say, tell me where this ends.

On Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 1:13 AM Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:
Making their intelligence public did nothing except possibly tip Putin off to its sources.

It was, in the technical register, actionable. And yet there was no action: don’t provoke him by bringing in troops. Bringing in troops might have been the very thing to deter him from acting though he wd have ratcheted up his rants. He likely planned on acting in any case. Forewarned is not prepared. The publication of the intel had no effect because he had decided in advance to attack no matter what. It might have even forced his hand, if he cared what the world or what his subjects thought of him.

So wd sending in troops or more sophisticated weapons have deterred him? Maybe not, but it wd have made his victory more costly. Making the victory Pyrrhic cd have hurt him at home worse than the moral shame: no one wants to see their children come home in body bags. But there are worse things. Living as a subaltern to Putin’s mafia is one of them. The Ukrainians know that. They have known that for a long time. It was Stalin who starved and murdered them and that’s where Putin gets his playbook.

There are already courageous protests inside Russia. Putin threatened to arrest the protesters and still they showed up. And he made good on the threat. Body bags from the front might have given fuel to that fire. That is a truth no one can gainsay. And Russian media is keeping their human losses not or under-reported. But Russians are very sophisticated readers of “news” and of the lack of it.

Putin is a player of the long game. As is Xi. And yes, it is a matter of east and west. During the time I spent in Russia, I was shocked to hear this dichotomy, which I thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history, was alive and well—at a very deep level and not only by authoritarian politicians. The west is enslaved to quarterly thinking. That’s the current state of socio-economics, call it feudal or some advanced form of capitalism. The East is dominated by history. But as in China, history determines the present as it is rewritten.

Cost for capitalists means outflow of economic resources. The Putin clique has so much well hidden wealth they can now only crave power and real estate. And they pay for it in other people’s blood. Putin tries to sell some bullshit neo-fascist mythology about Russian history. I don’t think it’s going to stick domestically. That is the only hope for the future. It means nothing to cut off an oligarch’s allowance.

On Feb 26, 2022, at 1:25 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone remember Vladislav Surkov, "managed democracy," "non-linear war"?

Sure, you must, he emerged into view in the West with the Ukraine war of 2014, with the disinformation and the little green men. He was an aesthete and "political technologist," a PR guy and a reality TV fan, able in his position as Putin's chief counselor to conjure up an entire induced political spectrum where multiple truths and decoy dissidence became tools in a strategic calculus of "democratic" (or demotic, or demonic) power.

Anyway, I sure remember him, because his transgressive postmodern cynicism frankly struck fear in my heart, and if memory serves it was a weirdly energizing affect for a whole lot of other people at the time. As Peter Pomerantsev wrote in Politico way back in 2014:

"If in the 20th century the Kremlin could only lobby through Soviet sympathizers on the left, it now uses a contradictory kaleidoscope of messages to build alliances with quite different groups. European right-nationalists such as Hungary’s Jobbik or France’s Front National are seduced by the anti-EU message; the far-left are brought in by tales of fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s stance against homosexuality. The result is an array of voices, all working away at Western audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support" (1).

Does any of this sound familiar? Maybe to the tenth power?

Some people say non-linear or hybrid warfare was a Russian response to US information-war tactics in the era of the "color revolutions" (2). But then the Russian twist became crude American reality in Trump's 2016 campaign. It was the Saint Petersburg troll factories, it was Facebook and the new media system, it was because Trump himself was a real-estate mogul, a conduit for Russian capital flight and a reality TV guy at heart. Surkov's name was never mentioned in the (pathetically faked) Steele Dossier, but as the Democrats tried to save the day with their trials and their Congressional morality plays, the post-truth pathology globalized.

That was then, this is now.

The amazing power of Surkovian social management was just on display: Despite the advance of hundreds of thousands of troops with all requisite equipment, most Ukrainians and Zelensky himself could not believe that war would be unleashed.

But the sudden obsolescence of the whole doctrine was also just on display: Because here was Putin reverting to a pure imperial power discourse, blood, soil and boots on the ground. Feint, contradiction and duplicity have evaporated. Conventional interstate warfare is back. Is this why Surkov was finally pulled from his post by Putin's order in 2020? Or???

In the run-up to this war both the US and Britain tried something entirely new for them, surely influenced by their knowledge of Surkov and associated military doctrines. What did they do? Instead of strategically managing the truth, they basically made their intelligence public as it came in. And the intelligence was spot on. What a weird feeling: trustable intelligence. Compare what happened before the Iraq War. It's nowhere near the same circumstances, but still, positive.

Through its entanglement with anti-vaxx groups, but also because of the political management of medical information during the pandemic, post-truth has become a full-on social pathology. Putin has abandoned it because he won that battle, he spread the disease for which authoritarianism and naked power are the supposed cure. Information might be the oil of the 21st century, but the truth, how to produce it and how to share it, how not to fall prey to its myriad spurious avatars, that's the personal and political question of our time.

Truth is a culture, but an almost dead one. I think it could be the basis of a new avant-garde.

Sources

(1) https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing-warfare/

(2) https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/195099/rp_121.pdf

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