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France uncovers a vast Russian disinformation campaign in Europe
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Disinformation or more accurately, lying, is Russian doctrine. Everything that they say seems to be a lie and designed to delay appropriate action.
I think every literate soul in Afghanistan would agree that this isn't really limited to Russia.
Its true. The entire Russian language is just a series of elaborate lies with grammar and syntax. It is impossible to say three consecutive true statements in a Slavic tongue.
That sounds more racist than true
I think they are joking.
That said, правда ("truth" as something you believe to be true) and истина ("truth" as objective truth) are different words in Russian, but not having that distinction in a language doesn't prevent its speakers from making it.
In English, you'd just describe that as "objective" and "subjective". This isn't in any way uniquely Russian. But its nice to pretend it is, because it plays well with the process of demonization.
True versus verified, perhaps
I can do that in Russian too. I can't do the former in English.
There are plenty of things possible in one language and not (yet\anymore) in another. I don't see what does this have to do with any kind of demonization. Maybe for people knowing only one language, which, yes, is more common for English speakers than I'd like to think.
I suppose a speaker of Finnish would have something to enlighten us about some languages being in some regards inferior to his own, too. Or a speaker of Icelandic. Or maybe even Persian. There are languages having dozens of words to distinguish shades\textures of snow or sand, or not having future tense.
Pick a differential, declare that it is a unique good/bad indicator, and then work it into your propaganda. "In Chinese, the word for tragedy is the same as the word for opportunity" to imply Asian businessmen are naturally predatory. The "red heads have no souls" meme, used to denigrate the Irish. The entire field of Phrenology is based on picking differentials and trying to explain your way backwards into why it proves some racist theory.
Its a boilerplate technique for alienating, mystifying, and ultimately demonizing an outside group.,
This whole chain of thought may make sense to you if you don't speak any other languages that English.
It just never in the world would weigh more for me than the joy of noticing unique traits of any particular language\dialect I've been lucky to learn something about.
And as a Russian native speaker, I've given you an example which is factual in the very first my comment in this thread. What are you going to do, ignore the fact?
Or maybe it's just easier to find something to condemn in what others say when you yourself have nothing to say on subject because of being simply ignorant about other languages.
All sides are doing it in every war, be wary what you trust
Of course. That's been true since the dawn of humanity.
Russia has a certain flavor of lying that I don't see elsewhere. They make claims that are so utterly ridiculous that everyone knows it is complete bullshit. It's like some weird gaslighting / dominance thing. Lavrov and Putin are pros at this.
Purely by coincidence, you see a similar technique employed by one of the two major US presidential candidates. Only his approach is to repeat the ridiculous lie enough times that some people believe it.
Hitler described "große Lüge" in Mein Kampf in 1925.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Putin and Trump are both of course great admirers of this technique.
I like the bluntness of the name. BIG LIE
at this point I'm not even sure you'd have to try to disguise it. I think that Trump could admit that the whole stolen election thing was a lie and that people have ingrained it so deeply into who they feel themselves to be that they'd still believe it and still have the same sense of moral outrage that the election was "stolen".
Yeah, they would go down fighting, saying someone "got to" Trump and threatened him into saying it was a lie
And I have already seen some people advocating for Putin say that if you compare Putin with Hitler you've lost.
What this also implies is that the more one's actions resemble actions of Hitler the easier it would be to win over opponents in discussion because they will inevitably come up with this comparison
Once upon a time, in the early internet, invoking Hitler in an argument was always hyperbole and a sign you'd run out of arguments.
Those days are behind us.
There is one other place I do see this strategy replicated, which is from the IDF.
Turkey and Azerbaijan
China
half the African continent
...
seems to not be some innovation limited to specific countries really.
Missing the obvious.... Trump, The Brexit cronies, any number of populist movements in Europe.
Sure, but for Russia it's the actual doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception
How is it worse than, for example, the US military deception doctrine? Would, say, Romania, be somehow above using military deception? What about NATO deception doctrine?
How about instead of linking to documents you do the analysis yourself.
But to spare you the burden: Remember when Bush came clean and said that all those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a lie? And how that didn't go down well with the west, and how many western countries already called bullshit before the US even invaded? That kind of stuff is doctrine in Russia, not just in the military but also when it comes to securing regime power internally. It's how Putin won his first election, by blowing up apartment buildings and blaming it on Chechens. Another important thing is to tell so many lies and contradictory things that the very notion of truth gets demolished, that people throw up their hands and say "I'd rather be apolitical than try to figure out what's what".
Western military deception OTOH is more of the "blink right, turn left" kind, it's about anticipating the opponent's analysis of the situation and exploiting that, either by feint or because they have a blind spot. And even then you want to be careful because damaging trust is often worse than taking a hit you could've avoided with deception.
Yes, that is true, can confirm.
Now do the CIA