Psychological warfare

US Government document from 2010 part of the Snowden leaks and sharing agreements with the UK. The Five Eyes program of the English speaking world (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) use social media for “propaganda,” “deception,” “mass messaging,” “pushing stories”, and "discrediting” the intelligence agencies' enemies with false information spread online.

In terms of conflicts, psychological warfare (PSYWAR) is used "to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people."

In military conflicts it is often also known as PSYOP, Psy Ops and "winning the hearts and minds". In military and political conflicts it is often referred to as propaganda.

Psychological warfare is used to influence a target audience's values, beliefs, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behavior. For example, it is often used to destroy/lower the morale of enemies. The Tokyo Rose broadcasts are an example of psychological warfare being used to lower the morale of American troops during WWII. In the 21st century, through corporatist intelligence sharing agreements with the US government and NATO allies that are not subject to congressional oversight and the Freedom of Information Act, Big Tech is deeply involved in surveillance activities and psychological warfare.

Ideological subversion

See also: Cultural Marxism

Former KGB officer and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov outlined the four steps of Marxist ideological subversion.

Demoralization

See also: Long march through the institutions and Fake news

The first step of ideological subversion that of demoralization which takes 15-20 years. During this phase, young people are influenced to question the integrity of a country and raise suspicions through media propaganda and academia. Perception takes the centre stage and facts become meaningless. Bezmenov attributes the demoralization phase to the lack of moral standards in a society.

For a population self-absorbed in a world of propaganda and the theories of Marxism and Leninism, truth loses its grip on the society. The older generation also loses control over the population due to consistent attacks on their moral fabric. Bezmenov described the process of demoralization in the United States thusly:

Volodoymr Zelensky's (second from left), transvestite dance, challenging traditional cultural mores.

"Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism and American patriotism. The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to a lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camps he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crashes him, then he will understand, but not before that. That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.

Psychological warfare to demoralize is not without risks, however. For example, during the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian officials ran thousands of facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of families in Russia for what may be "one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date," The Washington Post reported.

The country’s IT Army, a force of hackers and activists under the direction of the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the corpses. Some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers. Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London, said it is “classic psychological warfare” and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts. “If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s barbaric.’ And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?’ ”

Destabilization

See also: 2020 leftwing riots and Maidan coup

As buildings burned behind him, Ali Velshi of MSNBC reported with a straight face that leftist "protests" were "not generally speaking unruly."

Destabilisation of a country is the second step, altering the nation’s foreign relations, economy, and defence systems. The process typically takes 2-5 years to execute.

Crisis

See also: U.S. Color Revolution, 2020 Marxist insurrection, and Russia-Ukraine war

A country can be brought to a state of crisis, the third step, in as short of time as six weeks.

Normalization

See also: Biden junta

Coupled with a violent change in power structure and economy, the fourth phase of normalization kicks in and can last indefinitely. The word normalization is derived from Soviet propaganda that seeks to downplay a drastic change in a country as a being normal phenomenon. Bezmenov remarked, “This will happen in America if you allow the schumuks to bring the country to crisis, promise people all kinds of goodies and paradise on Earth, destabilize your economy, eliminate the principle of free-market competition, put a Big Brother government in Washington DC with benevolent things."

Patrick Byrne, founder and former CEO of Overstock, told Jenny Chang of NTD Television that this is what is happening in the United States in early 2020. “That’s what the left is trying to do here. They have a bill that they’re ready to pass as soon as they get in [Congress] that basically imposes a Chinese-style censorship state.” Byrne noted that questioning the reported irregularities of the 2020 election will count as “an act of domestic extremism.”

“What they’re going to try to do is take the FBI and Department of Homeland Security and CIA, and just completely unleash them as instruments of oppression against their domestic political opponents, all under the disguise of ‘We’re fighting domestic extremism." Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on January 8, 2020; Google and Apple removed Parler, a social media app, from their app stores. “This is a color revolution. And it was managed really to the T and executed,” Byrne said.

Byrne went on to explain that the color revolution had been implemented through four stages: demoralization through the COVID-19 pandemic, disorientation through Antifa’s burning of buildings with no state response; the crisis of the 2020 presidential election; and the normalization phase, which is the MSM and Big Tech's wiping out any opposing points of view.

Snowden revelations

One of the focal points of the Snowden documents is not so much the technical marvels of intelligence collectors, rather the existence of, and extent to which intelligence agencies worldwide share information through cooperative sharing agreements (also known as 'shell game eavesdropping' or 'third party relationships'). While the programs are billed as efforts to fight terrorism, international drug cartels, money laundering, and safeguard national security, they exist and function only on the basis of circumventing national laws in the respective countries whose agencies cooperate in the efforts.

"If your opponent is of choleric temperament, seek to irritate him." - Sun Tzu

Fort Meade, MD, for instance, home of the NSA which has the technical ability to monitor and spy on any American with an Obama phone or flat screen TV in their living room, cannot do so without probable cause or a warrant. So two employees of the UK's GCHQ in residence standby at the ready to man the helm and perform the operation legally under the guise of international intelligence sharing and national security.

While the United States possessed greater capacity and resources in surveillance technology, the United Kingdom was less scrupulous in violating privacy rights and civil rights, and more aggressive in cyber attacks and the use of fake news to discredit and harass their political enemies, including domestic opponents. Under Obama, the marriage of passive surveillance and active cyber warfare against political opponents accelerated, with both the UK and US extending cooperative agreements and technology to other third party agencies globally.

Quote

"If your opponent is of choleric temperament, seek to irritate him." - Sun Tzu

See also

• List of military strategies and concepts
• U.S. Color Revolution
• CCP propaganda war
• Ukrainian propaganda war