When the corporate media tells you to reject "foreign disinformation" (which means any information the U.S. empire doesn't like), it's instructing you to act as a foot-soldier in the cognitive war. This could mean doing everything from acting as an edgy Sinophobic internet troll, to shaming your children for questioning the atrocity propaganda about the targeted countries, to getting paid to be a federal informant on activists. It could even mean joining a militia that terrorizes disfavored ethnic and political groups, or becoming some other type of violent reactionary vigilante. It's important to note that the NATO-sponsored report describes cognitive warfare's objective as to "make everyone into a weapon."
We can be so certain of this propaganda campaign's intelligence-engineered nature because since Washington reignited the Cold War during the early 2010s, the intelligence community has taken on a more insidious role within U.S. media than ever. In 2013, when the Obama administration had started its "pivot to Asia" of anti-Chinese military buildup, started a jihadist regime-change war in Syria to counter Russia, and was preparing a coup in Ukraine that would ignite a second great-power proxy war, the U.S. lifted the ban on covert governmental messaging directed towards the country's own citizens. This propaganda ban negation was claimed to be necessary for fighting terrorism, but what it became used for in the coming years would reveal its true function.
As Whitney Webb of MintPressnews has written about the consequences of this policy (while quoting the journalist Abby Martin):
Martin noted that U.S.-funded media, like Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe (RFE), were among the first to use a State Department-influenced narrative aimed at "inflaming hostilities with Russia before it soaked into mainstream reporting." Of course, now, this narrative with its origins in the U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence community has come to dominate headlines in the corporate media and even some "alternative" media outlets in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election. This is no coincidence. As Martin noted, "after the ban was lifted, things changed drastically here in the United States," resulting in what was tantamount to a "propaganda media coup" where the State Department, and other government agencies that had earlier shaped the narrative at the BBG, used their influence on mainstream media outlets to shape those narratives as well. A key example of this, as Martin pointed out, was the influence of the new think-tank "The Alliance for Securing Democracy," whose advisory council and staff are loaded with neocons, such as the National Review's Bill Kristol, and former U.S. intelligence and State Department officials like former CIA Director Michael Morell.
Policing the flow of information
This unprecedented level of CIA-crafted war propaganda in the U.S. media has also been used to distort Americans' perceptions of China, north Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and every other imperialist-target country, with Nicaragua currently being the main disinformation target. These internally directed cognitive-warfare operations extend not just to the news, but to social media and search algorithms, which have been heavily censored and manipulated by Big Tech in recent years. Anti-imperialist content has been the main target; after the Capitol Hill riot, censorship of Palestinians exploded.
These digital-warfare tools are evolving as technology continues to get more influential over our consciousness. Researchers, both from NATO's officially tied academic entities and from elsewhere, are figuring out how to make the micro-targeting more sophisticated, and how to better counteract the alleged cognitive-warfare maneuvers of Washington's adversaries. Which in practice means censoring legitimate political speech; when cold-war demagogues blamed January 6th on foreign interference, they were trying to justify the fact that Palestinians and anti-war voices were bearing the brunt of Big Tech's content crackdown.
By extension, this is also being used as the rationale for the censorship campaign against Nicaraguan Sandinista supporters, who've been falsely branded as bots and kicked off social media platforms in anticipation of Washington's propaganda campaign surrounding the Nicaraguan election. Actual journalism and truth-based analysis is being purged, while disinformation about "Chinese concentration camps," a "Wuhan lab leak," and other such nonsense is free to be proliferated. As are the aggressively ignorant and potentially violent behaviors that result from this reactionary disinformation.
These tactics are now being applied to Cuba, where a massive online right-wing propaganda campaign is getting coordinated so that further counterrevolutionary violence can be incited amid the pandemic embargo the country is being subjected to. The CIA is doing the same to Ethiopia by fabricating anti-government atrocity stories, which fuel the campaign of the U.S.-backed terrorist organization the TPLF to sabotage crops and food distribution. These covert interventions give sinister meaning to the NATO-sponsored report's assessment about how cognitive warfare can be used to disrupt societies.
If these are the impacts that the empire's cognitive-warfare efforts have abroad, what happens when they're used on the U.S. population? And what about when these propaganda tools, which are designed to destabilize countries, are used to try to mitigate the impacts of the empire's own destabilization? You get a cycle of social unraveling that the U.S. ruling class is simultaneously threatened by, and can't stop making worse.
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